The California-based band Wonderlick is back with their second album “Topless at the Arco Arena”. We spoke with Wonderlick about the album and what is going on in their lives.
SM: Where did the name “Wonderlick” come from?
W: It’s a deliberate misspelling of Bucky Wunderlich’s last name. Bucky was the rock star protagonist in Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street. One of our favorite authors, though not one of his best books. But we liked the sound of it, and the way it hints vaguely at magic and intimacy. Also, it gives us a better answer to questions like this one than our last band did, because our old answer was “mushrooms.”
SM: What exactly is “Topless at the Arco Arena”?
W: It’s essentially the story of a girl named Jenny who strips at a concert, her stoner boyfriend, and the businessmen who turn their dreams against them.
SM: What motivated you to create this album?
W: It’s literally about the time I watched a woman yank off her shirt at an AC/DC concert at the Arco Arena in Sacramento. It bothered me for days afterward – I couldn’t figure out if it was a glorious moment of abandon, or if she and the rest of the audience were being manipulated by forces beyond their control. It happened right at the end of the dotcom boom and bust, so my angst felt connected to larger regrets about how crazy capitalism can make us. I had a straight job for the first time in my life, and was suddenly responsible for figuring out who got to stay and who got laid off, so I didn’t have the luxury of just railing against the evil corporation, because I *was* the evil corporation. So the album grew out of all that. Jay and I have pretty much been that girl, her boyfriend, and the businessman at various points in our lives, which made it possible to look at the event and its aftermath from each perspective.
SM: What message are you hoping to send to your fans?
W: If we had a simple answer to that we probably wouldn’t have spent the last seven years writing song after song about the same moment. In retrospect, a lot of the album seems to be groping for uncompromised ways to share private moments of joy, or maybe to acknowledge how compromised they can be without giving up what’s real and powerful and good about them. That’s kind of an obtuse message, I guess. Hopefully the songs themselves are more articulate – the last one is about making the devil horns un-ironically, and is shorter than this answer.
SM: What was the biggest challenge making this album?
W: Physics! Jay and I live 500 miles apart, but need to be in the same room for Wonderlick to work. But if we’re in the same room for too long, it stops working, So it took a while.
SM: What artist or artists influence you and your music the most?
W: I’m not sure you can hear them in the music itself, but I’d say anyone who grapples with the world without standing apart from that world. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen are both pretty inspiring that way – writing unsentimentally about sentimental things, and trying to get back to the deeper feelings the sentiment gradually became a substitute for. Musically, of course, neither Jay nor I would be doing this if it weren’t for the Clash, but in my dotage I’ve been more impressed with Joe Strummer’s later, more humble, solo records.
SM: What is your favorite track on the album?
W: It changes. “Fuck Yeah!” is the most recent one, so that’s winning today.
SM: Why did you decide to run a name your own price album pre-sale?
W: We’d done something similar several years ago for the debut, where we pre-sold the record before it actually existed in order to raise the money we needed to create it in the first place. This time round, the record was finished, but I’d been reading Dave Allen’s pampelmoose blog, where he’d been listing all these examples of musicians who stopped setting prices at their merch table and said, “pay whatever you want,” and wound up earning more than they had when they set their own prices. So it seemed like an experiment worth trying. Worst case scenario was that anyone who already knew the band and had supported us in the past would be getting our new record for nothing, which I felt they’d earned and would have happily licked the envelopes myself, you know? But if you make the connection to the band personal in that way, people are incredibly generous. No one paid less than cost. Multiple people paid more than $100. And the average price was $29.13. I never would have had the chutzpah to charge anything close to that. At the same time, a bunch of people who couldn’t afford more than $5 also got the album. Joe the Plumber would call us all socialists, but I bet there are records he’d pay that much for if Jon Bon Jovi asked him directly or something.
SM: How do you feel technology has affected music distribution and how fans hear music?
W: That’s like a ten thousand word answer. Here’s the Headline News version: labels are now an option, not a necessity, as everyone and his or her grandmother has access to worldwide distribution. That’s on the musician side – it also means you suddenly have 100,000 other musicians competing for the audience’s attention, but nobody who’s egotistical enough to be a musician in the first place should worry about that. For listeners, we’ve traded fidelity for convenience, and that’s a hell of a bargain. I used to stress about which 24 cassettes I could fit in my carryon on cross-country plane rides. Now I take all my records and a thousand others I never would have bought otherwise with me just on a walk to the corner store. Shuffle play rules.
SM: What is something surprising about Wonderlick that the fans don’t know?
W: How convivial it is? There’s no drama at all when we’re recording. If someone wants to try something, it gets tried. If it doesn’t work, that fact is noted, and no one takes it personally. It’s surprisingly adult. But with lots of dick jokes.
http://www.wonderlick.com
http://www.rockridgefree.com
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