LUCERO
Interview with guitarist Brian Venable
By Tyler Evans
If you didn’t know about LUCERO before 2009, the release the critically acclaimed 1372 Overton Park forced you to notice the band. LUCERO infuses all of your favorite things about punk rock, country, alternative and the south and compiles them into a distorted melody of heartbreak and horns, all of the while evading stereotypes and pigeonhole genre placement. The band just completed work on a new record, pleasing everyone who has been waiting two long years to see where they would go next. I recently got a chance to talk with Brian Venable, LUCERO’s longtime guitar player, to find out just what to expect from the new record, as well as some other enlightening insights into the band in general.
LUCERO just completed a new record, the first one since 1372 Overton Park in 2009. What can you tell us about it?
It’s been two years since 1372. We’re continuing… not necessarily a Memphis soul… but we’ve got the horns on there again, we’ve got the pedal steel, you know. It’s what we wanted to start with 1372, the obvious direction for us. We kind of joke about it being a “country soul” record, kind of like DELANEY AND BONNIE. There’s a lot of that like, FACES, BOB SEGER… You hear about those traveling road shows in the ‘70s where it would be ERIC CLAPTON, DELANEY AND BONNIE, JOHN LEE HOOKER, and KING CURTIS, you know, just complete mash ups. We’ve got some rockers, we’ve got a lot of mid-tempo stuff, but I feel like it’s a very mature record. We pretty much just wrote this record, there weren’t any extra songs really. We took two or three months off in the spring and just wrote a record. We have a practice space with a recording studio upstairs. We would spend a week downstairs working up stuff and then the next week we would move everything up stairs and put it all down on tape. We’d find out what needed to be changed, we’d go downstairs, work stuff out again, and then bring it back upstairs. Going into the actual studio, the record was fairly realized, which was awesome.
It seems like all of your previous records were building towards something that 1372 Overton Park fully realized, and just blew open the floodgates with. Was it clear where you wanted to go after that, or did it take some time to sit down and map it out?
I think it’s just a natural progression to some degree. There’s piano on Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers, for years we would sprinkle it on the record, maybe have somebody sit in, for the most part it was just the four of us. It’s like, you can’t un pour water. I don’t know it’s just a nice…it’s what we do. We have a lot of people that give us a lot of, “horns aren’t rock and roll, we hate the horns!” or “we want you back to being sad songs as a four piece!” and we’re like, “man, that was 10 years ago.” We’re progressing, I like to think. The songs are still sad, they just have horns on them, or, you know, they’re just more realized. I think our level of musicianship has risen, as well as having all of these other amazing musicians come in and do stuff with us has made it better, for lack of a better word.
At this point in your career, what are the easiest and hardest kinds of songs for you guys to write?
Ben is the primary songwriter with the words, we all come up with parts and working up stuff. I think at this point, for us, the hardest part seems to be getting it perfect. We can throw some words together, put some chords around it, and have a subpar song. I think you get to a certain point in your career where it’s like, “This is good, but it can be great.” I think that was one of the things that Ted Hutt, being our producer for the last two records, this new record that’s coming out and 1372, he was able to push us a little bit more, which not a lot of people had in the past. Tim would be like, “This is awesome, but we can make it this if you try a little harder.” I think that was something…we kind of got complacent, and it forced us to pay attention to what we were doing and get a little bit better at it. It’s not necessarily like hard to write a sad song or hard to write a fast song, I think it’s getting now to what’s hard is writing a great song.
I feel like at some point I should probably ask: What is the name of the new record going to be?
Right now, and it probably will stay that way, I think we’re calling it Women & Work. We’ve got a song called that on the new record, which fits the old school, “Let’s just name the record after that.” I think for us the women and work kind of sums up what we’re doing right now. Whether you’ve got wives, ex wives, girlfriends, women you met the other night…what we do, we do it for a living, its work. You’re playing rock and roll for a living, you’re playing music, you’re writing music, you’re creating art, but at the end of the day you want to go have a drink. Most of your life is based around women and work.
As a band, do you feel like you have made your big, band definingExile on Main St. record already, or do you feel like it’s still on the horizon?
I think you don’t ever realize that until way later. Also, for us, it depends on who you’re talking to. We made our second record, Tennessee, and I think 90% of the people now think that’s the best record we ever did, but if you talk to some other group of people, they think it’s That Much Further West. I think it’s what each record means to whoever. I think you try to make each record your best record and see what happens. It’s like putting out a greatest hits, you’re almost like, “oh, our career’s over.” I think if I started trying to figure out if our career defining record had been made yet or not… I’d be scared to think that we were at the end of our rope.
As you guys are a multi-genre band, an alt country band with punk roots, or at least something approaching that, what are some of the influences you would say you pull from both sides of the line?
I think we tried to shed the “alt country” pretty much as quickly as possible. I think the thing with us, what we’ve been trying to do, and what has been really sad, is that in this day and age you can’t have a band that hasn’t been micro-organized or turned into some genre that’s six months old. We’re a rock band from the south; we’re not a southern rock band, even though we have that tendency. For me, it’s like, R.E.M. and LYNRYD SKYNYRD are both bands from the south, but they’re completely different, ya know? We’re older, most everybody’s in our late thirties or mid forties by now, we grew up on things like, when you turn the radio on you’re going to hear TOM PETTY, you’re going to hear HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS and THE STRAY CATS all in a row, and that’s three different styles of music, but at the time it was just all rock and roll. You kind of wonder sometimes if BOB SEGER, THE REPLACEMENTS, or any of those bands came around today, what would they be called, besides just rock and roll? That’s one of the other elements where we’ve gotten more comfortable in our skin, and been able to draw more influences from. I love THE CLASH, I love BLACK FLAG. Nowadays it’s been more like anything I listen to can be an inspiration. I love modern country now, because of my kids. I love all of the southern metal, KYLESA and that kind of stuff. Roy loves booty rap and MOTLEY CRUE. You get comfortable enough to be like, “Look man, I’ll use that drum beat from a rap song, kind of twist it around, and it’s gonna sound awesome!” I don’t know if necessarily we draw from any kind of alt/country/punk type of situation, as much as we’re able to now draw from anything, whether it’s OTIS COOK, or anything, all the way to THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS. I think it’s just whatever we happen to be listening to that day or whatever inspires us. Whatever we hear or whatever we’re into.
When you were a kid, playing guitar on your bedroom floor, did you ever picture a situation where you would be playing sold out shows to people you really feel your music on an intimate level like this?
I think that’s what keeps us humble to some degree. It’s always still amazing. We came out of a punk rock kind of situation where there was a DIY space and bands played, mostly punk rock. We wanted to try something different, I think it was more like, “I hope I can finish this song,” it was more personal, it was like, how exciting is this, we’re making music, this is awesome, we’re loading up the truck and driving down town, playing with 12 other bands. Doing Warped Tour, we got to see the other side of it. You would see these young bands, 19/20 year old kids, who start these bands, thinking they’re going to be famous, and after six months they’re on a tour bus…not that they don’t have to work for it, but you’re just like, “man, are y’all in this for the long haul?” Our growth was so slow, everything was a surprise. The first time you play some city you’ve never been to and there’s 60 people in the crowd singing along it’s like, this is amazing. I looked over at Ben repeatedly in Australia and just be like, “we learned to play music and it got us to Australia, that’s nuts!” There’s always that fantasy that I think everyone has, whether they play music or not, of watching MTV and seeing 27,000 people and an upside down drum riser, pyrotechnics, and sticking your tongue out playing guitar. I think a lot of times, when you start playing, you have to think about the next day, or in the moment, and then one day you look around and realize “Shit, we’re playing 200 shows a year, this is paying for my mortgage, and people actually like it, people are getting tattoos.” That’s the weirdest thing; I’ve realized that, we’re people’s favorite band. I still can’t get over that. People will shows us tattoos and talk about how our music has gotten them through a death in the family or, hard times, or overseas. We never pictured that as much, but when it happened…it’s a pleasant surprise.
We’re in a time where music is starting to dwindle in quality, because of social networks, the oversaturation of bands, etc… What are some of the elements of music that you loved when you were starting out that you still see around today?
People give me their CDs all the time, I get people that ask me to check out their stuff on facebook, a lot of times it’s really terrible, but you’re like, “At least you’re trying.” It’s a weird thing, the record industry. I don’t care how far you go back, people have always thought that, at that given time…like if you look in the ‘70s, everybody is like, “music sucks today, it’s all disco and FLEETWOOD MAC, and it’s terrible” but 20 years later everybody is like “I love FLEETWOOD MAC, I love STEELY DAN.” I hate what’s playing, I hate this music, but 20 years from now people are going to be like “Oh I love CREED, they’re awesome.” I think there’s always going to be what’s playing on the radio, what’s mainstream to some degree, there’s always going to be a current of anything from 15-year-old kids in their basement to bands that tour 200 days a year and put out records to sell to their fans that maybe will never break into the next level. That’s what we’ve been doing forever. I think a lot of times you get older and you get more cynical, like, “It was so much better back in the day,” but really there’s some 15-year-old kid that’s like, “Man, back in the day sucked. Today is today. We’re making awesome music right now.” I think that element is still there. I think you hear about it quicker, or it passes by quicker because of social media, there is a deluge of it, but I think there was just as much back then, I think it’s just easier and more prevalent and you have to see a lot of it more. It used to be exciting to discover something and now somebody will record something and all of the sudden it’s on youtube or facebook and it’s got 22,000 hits, two days after its recorded. I think that some of the intimacy is missing, but I do enjoy the fact that people are still out there trying to create something.
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