Utter Trash--Midtown

Thinking Allowed

An Interview With Rob, the Drummer from Midtown

by Jennifer Adams

(l to r) Gabe, Tyler, Rob, Heath

Following a tortured, twisted path to the big time, Midtown is currently on the road supporting their Sony debut album, Forget What You Know. Utter Trash staff writer Jennifer Adams recently got a chance recently to sit down with drummer Rob and ask him about the band, touring, and life in the music business.

Utter Trash: What's your biggest dream or goal for you personally?
Rob: First and foremost, to do music the rest of my life and to live off of it. In other words, not having to worry about tomorrow. Just being able to get by and not having any worries or stresses. And the other thing I've always dreamed about is owning a house or a condo. I've never really had anything that I can hold onto and say, "This is mine." And go to a place that I can call home. Cause my mom moved away and I've been on my own since, just going from place to place. And if I had my own place it'd remind me of being younger when I could walk in the door and have that good feeling inside of home. Something about that. And having comfort.

UT: So, I guess you are kind of like a nomad?
Rob: Yea, especially with being a musician. We tour 8-10 months out of the year.

UT: What would be your label for success for the band?
Rob: If we can go to any place in America and sell out. A small club of just 500 and sell out and everybody's just singing a long. That's all we've ever really wanted, ya know? And that's not some huge goal. Of course, anybody in this world would love to have a gold record or a platinum record or make tons of money. But you know, at the end of the day you started to do music for a reason. That's cause you enjoyed it, you enjoyed sharing your music with other people. The part of that with interaction with them singing along. and you singing it right back in their face. That's why for us as a band we can go out and play to 500 people in any city we go to and have them singing along. There's not much more we can ask for and that's the gratification in itself. Playing music. Of course it'd be nice if other things happen but if that's the only reason we have for doing it. We wouldn't be doing it. That's silly. At the end of the day you have to just play music cause you love it. Otherwise, your band will have no lifespan. You'll be done tomorrow cause it's not something easy to do.

UT: there are some interesting themes in the lyrics of your CD. What do you think the listener is supposed to "get" from your album?
Rob: We've been through a lot the past few years. Going from label to label to label. Hopefully, i think we've found our home. A lot of the lyrics do deal with our experiences in terms of a label or a person appears to be one way and at the end of the day they're different. Like the album's "Forget What You Know" or we have songs like "Northing's Ever What It Seems." At the end of the day all you really have is yourself. You really have to have faith in yourself and believe in yourself to make it through.

UT: Your press kit said that your band "died" and now you are back. Tell me more about that and what happened with your labels in the past.
Rob: We were on the record label MCA and they went under. Which gives you a clue that they weren't doing the right things. Which is a shame because there were a lot of good people there, but at the top levels they weren't the smartest. Some bands on their label were successful and they had a cookie-cutter mold that they would put bands into. and part of that was them saying, "we need to get you into teen magazine and market you to little girls." and we said, "no, no, no, no." and we were butting heads the entire time. and we didn't have another choice for other labels. It was just a big fighting match. So, when we wrote this album, we did it before signed to a label. So, when we went to the label we said "this is who we are." it's our album. Take it or leave it. Cause this is who we are and we're not going to compromise anything whether its music or if we don't want to be in certain magazine or this or that. Obviously, we're only in the best magazines cause we're in this one.

UT: One of the articles I read about your band said that the "emo scene" was immature and you've grown out of it. Tell me more about that.
Rob: It's funny sometimes you think of "emo" as a dead word or one of those words that you don't want to say. It's like a bad word. We didn't change our music because of that. We just wanted to be 100% happy with the songs we had. We wanted to be able to look back 20 years down the line and say, "we love this album." When we were writing the songs we said, "We love this album." It's music that makes us happiest to play. And that's what we said along the way. We threw so many songs out the window. We had poppier songs we just didn't like. That's the writing process with the album. We just kept writing until we were happy.

UT: Anything else you'd like our readers to know?
Rob: We're going to try and come back in April. I don't know if it's too early to say this cause it's not definite, but we're going do a headlining show and do something special. We're going to try and relearn every single song we've ever written, ever. And we're going to have a special part of the set where we only going to play what the people at the show want to hear. So, it's going to be interesting relearning 20-30 songs on top of the songs we are playing now. So, that will be a lot of fun headlining a tour. And I, personally, would like to do it in a smaller venue, like the Grog Shop.