Stream This Interview

	Stream this entire interview for free! An Exclusive Interview with She Wants Revenge Stream: Windows Media Player Required.

She Wants Revenge

Chris: First of all, let's tell our readers who you are, where you're from.

Justin Warfield: My name is Justin Warfield from the group She Wants Revenge and I'm from Los Angeles, California.

Chris: And how did She Wants Revenge come to be, Justin?

Justin Warfield: The abbreviated version is that Adam [Bravin, aka DJ Adam 12] and myself had known each other for a number of years and had...sat down to play each other's music over the years in a kind of a stop-and-go fashion until, after years of doing work independently, we decided to try making music together. And after about a year to a year and a half of making music together [we] kind of realized that we had the makings of an album and a group. We've known each other...since probably 1987, when we were kids and we met because he was DJing a party a group of skateboard friends of mine had thrown and I showed up and I was hanging out and I heard this song and I ran up to the DJ to ask him what song it was and Adam was the DJ in question. And we've known each other the whole time...sometimes peripherally, sometimes hanging out in the same social scenes, through clubs or music people. And then we finally just came together and once we did, it turned into She Wants Revenge.

Chris: I'm curious--what was the song that led you to Adam?

Justin Warfield: The song was "Boys in the Hood" by Eazy-E.

Chris: Interesting! I've read, actually, that the two of you were pretty interested in hip-hop when you first met. Did you ever collaborate musically on hip-hop projects?

Justin Warfield: Yeah, we still do. I mean, I had kind of started making hip-hop, and Adam started making hip-hop back then, and I think we both had kept doing it to a certain degree. I mean, for me, I had stopped rapping a long time ago, but I continued to make beats--which was like, my first instrument, just drum machine--and it was also his, and we still make hip-hop beats and like, you know, things that could be considered hip-hop. It's just like, at this point in my life, there's really nothing that I need to express like through the outlet of rapping, [when] I can get the emotions and the thoughts across a lot more concise and clear and vivid through singing or doing other things with my voice rather than rapping. But we still make hip-hop beats. We just do it for other people. I mean we love making music and we make--you know, the music we make with She Wants Revenge is like--basically like the most honest representation of where we're both at musically and as people at this point in our lives taking into account our collective experience, musical and otherwise. But we still make hip-hop beats simply because we love to listen to them. We love to hear them in the clubs. We love to--there's certain hip-hop to this day that's absolutely incredible and so we still consider ourselves like hip-hop artists and/or [the] boys who make hip-hop for fun--for the love of it now.

Chris: How do you see it? Do you try and separate out that particular influence from what you're doing in She Wants Revenge?

Justin Warfield: No, I don't think you can. We're a musical influence that spans a lot of different stuff. I grew up on soul music and classic rock, and I think that Adam was the same thing, but with a little more classical thrown in. And we both had a certain amount of jazz around us--like, our parents played that stuff. But the first music that we could kind of claim as ours, in the way the Baby Boomers found the Beatles and the Stones... I mean the music that we--that our generation--had as our own was hip-hop, and for lack of a better word, new wave. And so we don't really separate out any influence, because if you took two guys of our age who decided to make dance music, it would sound a lot different if they didn't have the hip-hop experience. And so rather than shy away from that or try to separate out certain things that are part of us, we just kind of embrace it because it definitely informs the way we program beats and it informs the way we write songs and it informs the vocal delivery. So I think it's definitely still there in trace elements in She Wants Revenge.

Chris: Well, listening to the album, I obviously hear a lot of the influences that you mention, but they seem to be focused through a very specific era, that being late '70s and early '80s, sort of British Gothic and New York club music that was happening at the time.

Justin Warfield: Right.

Chris: I hear a bit of Simon Gallup's bass lines and Bernard Sumner's riffs, and the vocals call to mind the Psychedelic Furs...

Justin Warfield: Right. I mean, you nailed three serious influences on both of us. It's funny that people will say Joy Division, but to be honest, there's so much more New Order than Joy Division. That's just so funny, because Joy Division is a very important band and they're incredible. But the fact is that I'd be lying if I said that when I was 13 years old I was listening to Joy Division, because I didn't hear them until much later. But New Order was writing the songs that were really emotional, really powerful, and dance-floor classics that touched so many people when we were in our formative years. New Order and the Cure and the Smiths and the Psychedelic Furs were all really important bands, and the crossover between what the new wave and the hip-hop scenes were doing with punk rockers, [along with] the influx of disco from Studio 54 and what was happening in New York at that time, [as well as] collaborations like when Blondie did "Rapture" and when the Rolling Stones did ["Miss You"]...is also an influence on what we do. It's like, there was never a conscious effort to make it sound like an era. We knew--I mean, we're not deaf. We knew that it was reminiscent of an era. But the only thing that we used as a kind of reference along the way wasn't any of those groups. That's so embedded in both of our psyches from growing up listening to it at the most important formative points in our lives that we didn't need to sort of flex that muscle to make it sound like that. I learned my sense of melody from those artists that we're speaking of. Do you know what I mean? Like, we learned our ideas about songwriting as we were kids, hearing albums like Purple Rain or Disintegration or The Queen is Dead, you know, and all of the New Order songs and all of that stuff. But the only thing that we made a conscious decision to capture a sound and a feeling [of] was more like composers of that time, like the Giorgio Moroder soundtracks of that time, you know.

Chris: I agree. There's an immediate sense with your album that it is, of course, reminiscent of or calling this particular era in music, an era that was dominated by a lot of free experimentation between genre boundaries. I'm curious how you feel about the fact that there are a lot of acts out there today that are appropriating sounds from the Goth, punk, and synth-pop era that sounds incredibly manufactured.

Justin Warfield: You know, it doesn't really affect us one way or the other. It's funny, because like, for us, we were looking at, as a reference, Giorgio Moroder's soundtracks--you know, Cat People and Midnight Express and the collaborations with Donna Summer and David Bowie--and we were listening to Tangerine Dream's score for Risky Business and Vangelis' score for Blade Runner, and that was the feeling we wanted--that kind of feeling on a dance floor that was thought-provoking and intelligent, [with] very direct and honest lyrics. And we wanted to make a whole album that kind of felt cinematic in a way but that was from beginning to end a real listening experience. Like, when you're a kid, you would listen to side A of the album and then hurry and run over across the room and flip it to side B, you know. [There are] a lot of groups now that definitely sound like they're guitar bands that, had they been around five years ago, would sound like what was happening five years ago. And the fact that they're coming out right now, and they bought a synthesizer and they add that to the mix, definitely turns [them] into a new wave band. And there [are] definitely bands that are taking the style and form but don't have the substance. It doesn't bother me and I don't really look down on them, because I just think it's popular and populous music. So we don't really feel a part of that. We don't feel a part of any movement like that. If you would have asked Bauhaus if they felt any kindred spirit with Joy Division at the time, they would have probably said "no." Truth be told, Bauhaus was a group of art school students, and Peter Murphy, having had a pretty Catholic upbringing, was expressing his personal point of view over music that was very dark. And you could tell that David J was really into dub and Daniel Ash was really into, like, T. Rex and Bowie and Gary Glitter and all of this. But they were all art school students who are experimenting and combining things. So when you put those forces together, Kevin Haskins on drums and this amazing, incredible backbeat, then suddenly you have this sound and it gets termed "gothic." But like Joy Division, we're working-class guys who were not art school students, who are from another part of England. We're from a different cultural background, with a different set of influences and you had Ian Curtis, who wanted to sound like Jim Morrison, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop, while the rest of them wanted to make this sort of like dancey, dark punk rock.

Chris: Well, it is ironic that Ian Curtis was the one that always played Kraftwerk before they would record, and then when Joy Division came about, they decided to champion the sound that he was so interested in at the time.

Justin Warfield: Right. And it's like--that's the thing--there's no similarity between those two groups, and I think that if you were to take a group like the Killers or Bloc Party, just to name two that we know and we have played shows with, there's no thread between us and them other than we played shows together and we have fans that crossed over and like all three bands.

Chris: So, you can only hope that your audience is intelligent enough to actually differentiate between the two sounds?

Justin Warfield: I mean, there's definitely no similarity other than we're all people of a certain age making music that the same audience seems to appreciate. But I think it's as different--I think our stuff is completely different than a lot of bands because, like you mentioned, those are two bands that are very authentic and are doing something really heartfelt and they're really passionate about it. It translates on a record and live, and they're amazing and they're great people. And there are definitely like hordes of bands coming out, like, you know, every couple of months doing stuff that sounds like it was appropriated from the '80s. And it just doesn't faze us because it was the same then--there's a huge difference between the Psychedelic Furs and Dexy's Midnight Runners. They both came out in a similar time period, but there's no doubt that...clearly, there's no similarity between those two groups.

Chris: You touched earlier on your lyrical content being emotional. I've noticed that the album seems to be dominated by varying sexual themes, and I'm curious about your lyrical motivations.

Justin Warfield: We both write some music and I write the lyrics, and I think that the only guideline was that we knew we wanted to make songs that were about male/female interpersonal dynamics and the minutiae of relationships. I knew that I wanted to write love songs, but not necessarily about longing or the typical... Like, if you look at a relationship of any type between a man and a woman, there's like, a timeline, and most love songs focus on the same period and point in that timeline. And that doesn't interest me because it's been done for over 50 years ad nauseam. Like, what I wanted to do was explore that moment before, that moment of change, that moment of realization. I wanted to explore what happened in that moment when he saw her. What were the lights in the dance club doing? What song was playing? What was running through his head? You know, what was the girl in the corner doing that caught his eye that completely distracted him from what he was thinking?

It's the minutiae, and coming from a literary background, I think that's the interesting stuff. That's the stuff to me and it turns me on whether it's Dave Eggers, or whether it's Jerry Stahl or whether it's David Sedaris or whether it's James Ellroy or whether it's J.D. Salinger. When I'm reading, it's the minutiae and it's the attention to the details that makes me have a personal connection to the story. And so for me, all I wanted to do was explore male and female situations and interplay in a way that maybe wasn't done before. And all of the themes are familiar and easily relatable, but it's the details which personalize it to me and makes it something that maybe only a specific writer could have written. Because if you gave an assignment to a group of writers and said, "Write a story about meeting a girl in a dance club," everybody's going to write it slightly different. But I think that the truth comes out through the detail work.

Chris: I think a lot of what you're writing could easily translate to the potential for hit singles off the album. Are you prepared for the success that this particular album may afford you?

Justin Warfield: Well, I don't really know how to answer that, because when we started making this music and when we started collaborating on music together, it was just the two of us in a makeshift office in Adam's house in the San Fernando Valley. We would take songs from his computer to my computer, you know, a few miles away and record. And there was no record company and there was no thought of a record company. And we were just making music that we weren't hearing on the radio or in the dance club or finding in the record shop.

And if you would have said to us back then, "Your song is going to be played all over the country on the radio and you're going to tour the country and there are going to be kids who know the lyrics to these songs that you're writing," it would be really hard to believe. So, when you say, "are you prepared for the success that could come," I know that we had a purpose in making the record. We wanted to make a record that would make us feel like the seminal albums of our childhood made us feel. And we knew that in doing so, if we did so really earnestly and honestly, perhaps there would be others that would feel the same way. And we knew that we would have people that would identify [with] it. The only variable was the number of people, but we didn't really care because as long as we had a core audience of people, kids perhaps now could hear this album and it could be their Purple Rain or it could be their Disintegration or their Queen is Dead. That was the goal, whether it was 10 kids or 10,000 kids.

The fact that there are more people who already know about us is kind of astonishing. So I think we're as prepared as we can be for the possibility of a large number of people hearing us. And we would love for a large number of people to hear us because in the beginning, a kind of role model was Suicide, how they made really cool, progressive electronic music that was really emotional and intense and it was really artful and heartfelt. But then we realized that what spoke to us personally a bit more was Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode was a group that spoke to a great many people. So we said, "Look. Do we want to limit ourselves?" When people came to us and said, "We want to put out your record," we took a step back and said, "Do we in fact want to sign to a major label and have a lot of people be able to hear us and tour the world and be able to get our music out there?" And we just immediately said, "Look. Depeche Mode may have been on Mute in England, but they were on Warner Bros. or Siren America, and they fucking played stadiums and lots of people heard them. So, while we will probably never get to that level, we would rather have 100,000 kids know about us than the 10 coolest kids in every town who work behind the record-store counter.

Chris: Well, I think you can put stock in the fact that you will bypass the success of say, Minimal Man or Suicide, and probably rival that of Depeche Mode.

Justin Warfield: Well, that's crazy. I thank you. I mean, thank you very much, but like, I will say this. It's like, if I were 20 years old and Adam were 22, we would probably not be prepared for this. Because the fact is, we have--like, we don't like the word "fan," but the people who love our music and feel passionate about it and write us letters telling us just how important it is to them, that's kind of really--it sounds typical and clichéd, hokey--but that's really what it's all about. We feel like we're already successful because we listen to the record and we enjoy it, play it live, and reinterpret it and people seem to enjoy it as much as we do. And there's an audience of kids [that] grabs ahold of what we do in the same way that we grabbed ahold to those albums that I spoke of. So we're already successful. Like, it happened.

We have people--I have kids identifying with us and truly loving what we do, writing us letters and putting our song on their MySpace page and making their own bootleg T-shirts and coming to repeat shows and buying the T-shirts and asking for the lyrics and like, we have this amazing base of fans who really support us. And that's like, the most gratifying experience possible. So, if that grows exponentially, then that's wonderful. As long as we don't change what we do or the reasoning for doing it, I think that we're totally prepared; there's no end to the kind of music we can make with similar themes and feelings.

The lyrics are always going to explore the same things. If we were to do a follow-up album a year from now, it is not going to be the sophomore album about what it was like to be this little band from nowhere and, suddenly, explode overnight and have people appreciate your music and then the new trappings that come with that. We are not that band. There is a wealth of things that we can draw from about male/female interpersonal dynamics and continue to explore that over emotional dance music, and we'll continue to do so. So I feel like we're totally prepared for whatever comes at us--but every step of the way, our minds are completely blown. Like, we never thought that we would be the most requested song on our home station of KROQ. We never thought that we would be selling out shows in four days. You know, we never thought that these kinds of things would happen. That's crazy!

Chris: I'm assuming that, considering the relatively short life of the group, that you haven't, you know, hopped in a van and toured the US several times. How have you amassed your fan base?

Justin Warfield: To be honest, most of it had started through MySpace on the Internet. Before we even were signed to Geffen Records, we had a MySpace page. Adam, who runs our MySpace page, would just go [there] and look at our friends' pages. He would go on [the] MySpace pages of our friends and find their friends, who would take you to another friend, and he would find the girls and the guys who had the records and the books and the films [and] seemed like they were kindred spirits and he would say, "Check out this band." At the time, there were maybe 100 to 150 bands on MySpace. So it wasn't like everybody was bombarded with friend requests from new bands. So there were a couple of people that said, "Hey, this music is really different. We really like it." And it spread word-of-mouth, where friends passed it to friends. And then we did a music video with a friend and we posted it on MySpace on our Web site. And then we started playing shows in LA. And every time we'd play a show, we would say, "Hey, if you're not already our friend on MySpace, then we'd love to be friends with you." And we would do that all across the country. And MySpace on our Web site has been very beneficial: We only started out with 200 friends, [but] every day there are over 200 friend requests--new people who want to be on our MySpace page. And now it's over 14,000. And that's in the span of a year.

Chris: I was watching the video this morning for "These Things" and I couldn't help but notice the Richard Kern, New York Girls sort of aesthetic. I'm curious how that came to be.

Justin Warfield: I'm a huge fan of Richard Kern. I would've never drawn that connection but that's cool that you did. The video for "These Things" was like, we had a concept and we decided that we never wanted to go too literal with the video and we went through a million concepts with people and in the end, Adam and I looked at each other and said, "Let's just go really literal and let's take the chorus and put it--and make it come to life." And we collaborated with a friend of ours, Ryan Rickett, who's an amazing director out of Los Angeles. And we made this video that was like, you know, as sexy as we could go, almost to the point of tongue-in-cheek humor. [He] just stuck us in a white room and said, "This is [it]--like, the focus of the song is Adam on the piano and me on the microphone. And here is the story of the girls in the bathroom." And we just hired friends of ours--girls that we knew--and said, "You guys have got to be in this video." And they loved the song and they consented to it and they felt comfortable and we wanted to make a really sexy video. I'm like, I could tell you that our first video was shot in a cemetery like--

Chris: "Sister"--is that correct?

Justin Warfield: Yeah, with a Super 8 camera. The guy who shot our album cover, Michael Muller, did it with a friend and collaborator of his, and they took us to a cemetery and we found two girls who wanted to do the video and we put them in the cemetery and walked around with them and we had a boom box playing the song. And I [was] just singing along and it was really primitive and really beautiful. And I captured the spirit of like that song in a way that--you know, for less than $1,000, a way that we could never [have] with $100,000.

And then our new video that they're getting ready to edit right now--a friend of ours, Joaquin Phoenix, directed--is for "Tear You Apart" and it's a completely different video than the other two. If it comes out the way we expect, then it will be the kind of video that...like, when I was a kid and I saw the video for "When Doves Cry" and it was Prince being in a fucking bathtub with flowers, [alongside] clips from the film Purple Rain. And you felt like you were in on some secret, like when you watch the "Thriller" video. It's a video that--you know, obviously the scope and size of what we're doing is significantly smaller, but I don't think that the intention is any different. When Joaquin came to us with a concept, he wanted to make something that was universal and powerful about being different, about being disenfranchised and an outsider.

Then he came at us with a video treatment that was totally unlike any sexy, literal representation anybody else wanted to make of [a song called] "Tear You Apart." I think that if the video comes out the way we expect, based on what we shot and the way it looks, that it's going to be an incredible, incredible, incredible piece of art that just won't look like anything else. It's crazy. I mean, I couldn't even give you specifics, but it's like its own little movie. And if somebody is really, really--like, somebody who appreciates our music on a deep level and they see the video, it will speak to them one-on-one in a very powerful way. And that's exciting. Yeah.

Chris: Well, Justin, I'm pretty much out of questions.

Justin Warfield: Cool! Well, thank you for your time, Chris.

Chris: Okay, thank you for your time and I wish you continued success.

Justin Warfield: Thank you so much, man.

Chris: Absolutely! Take care.

free music

	Stream this interview for free! An Exclusive Interview with She Wants Revenge Stream: Windows Media Player Required.
	Stream the entire album for free! She Wants Revenge - She Wants Revenge Stream: Windows Media Player Required.

more: free music

videos

"She Wants Revenge - These Things" Windows Media Player Required

more: She Wants Revenge videos