Ahh, Sunday. The Day of Rest, Sunday Fun Day, Laundry Day, what have you. For many Nashvillians, this Sunday will be no different from those which came before: Expensive brunches will be shared, park grounds will be enjoyed, mimosas and bloody marys will flow freely, and church pews will be filled with supplicants trying to decide what Cosmos means for their belief in the Genesis narrative, or with those who are too hungover to consider such weighty matters. Also, the CMA Fest. For still others, a different sort of supplication will occur this evening, and that is at the Church of Failure.
Yes, indeed. It has been nearly two decades since the now-cult L.A. band played Nashville, or any other markets for that matter. As I write in this week’s dead-tree edition of the Scene, Failure’s unfortunate late-‘90s demise — brought about by major-label troubles, internal discord, drug addiction and the inability of critics and other industry actors to classify or understand the trio’s value — has in the years since been redeemed by an amorphous word-of-mouth campaign that has resulted in the band now being revered as much if not more than many of their grunge-era peers. Indeed, Failure’s spacy, heavily textured rock has conjured a mythology since the Alternative Nation era, impressing itself upon savvy record collectors and budding musicians alike.
Fortunately for us, Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards and Kellii Scott weathered the fallout and subsequent years relatively unscathed, enjoying moderate success in other musical endeavors, cleaning up and restoring their friendship and working relationship to a point where the re-forming of Failure was feasible — an event that, until recently, seemed as unlikely to the band as to their increasingly devout following. On Sunday, Failure will play Exit/In, where for two hours the trio will reportedly play huge chunks of their iconic Fantastic Planet album, as well as tracks from Magnified and Comfort and (praise be!) a forthcoming LP. In advance of the sold-out show — modestly billed “An Evening With Failure” — Andrews took time on a windy Montana evening to connect with the Scene via phone. Our full conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and length, is below. Enjoy it after the jump.
First things first, congrats on Failure’s return and the release of the band’s first song since the ‘90s, “Come Crashing.” After a few listens, it struck me as more hopeful than much of what came before in the band’s catalog. Is that fair?
I'm not so sure I agree with that. It's so subjective. If you think it sounds more hopeful than our other stuff, then I totally believe you, you know? I kind of hesitate to say anything like, "Well, our new direction is going to be this or that," because it's just too early to tell. We do have a few more songs that we're working up already, and I don't think I would characterize them broadly as being more up or more hopeful than our past stuff. But again, it's super hard for me to tell because I'm so close to the new ones — we’ve just started working on them.
I don't know. I don't know. It's hard for me to say. I know that our intent, if we have one, I guess our first intent is just to please ourselves. And the second intent is that we're definitely not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of the band's overall sound. We talked about that a bit at the beginning and we were just like, "Why over-think this? Let's just make the fourth Failure album." Whatever the natural progression is, that's what we're trying to make. But of course it's impossible to do it as if it was 1999 or whatever. And all of us have had a ton of musical experiences since then, so I don't know. It's hard for me to say whether or not it's hopeful. I don't think it is lyrically, although I didn't write much of the lyrics. Greg wrote most of the lyrics on that one.
Yeah, and I guess I should clarify that when I say "hopeful," I don't necessarily mean "happy." I think Fantastic Planet is just so drenched in what you guys were going through at the time — the drug narrative — that that's the sort of legend of the record. Perhaps I’m reading too far into it, like, "OK, this breathes of something a little lighter than Fantastic Planet."
Yeah, I totally hear what you're saying, and I think that's why ... I mean, eventually we'll release a whole album, but I think we might just be releasing songs leading up to the release of the album, just so people can ease into the idea of new Failure music. There's been such a long time for people to really absorb those records, especially Fantastic Planet, that it's like ... Even for us, we can just tell that record is very loved by our fans, so it's a bit of pressure actually, pressure we're putting on ourselves, and pressure from our listeners. Yeah, it's an interesting situation. I did not expect to be in this position 15 years after Failure broke up.
What else can you tell me about the new record?
We're working on it now. Any chance we get we're working on it, but we don't work super fast. Even when we are really focused, we jettison a lot of ideas. So I think that combined with the fact that we all have a bunch of other stuff going on, we're going to be a little conservative in our projections. We're kind of just saying we hope to finish the record this year, and hopefully put it out in the early part of next year.
All three of you guys kept working in music after Failure disbanded in the late ‘90s, but I imagine there had to be some unresolved feelings in the wake of making Fantastic Planet. What were those years like? And how did you get to this point, where the band is friendly and working creatively again?
There were all these different periods because it was such a long time. Immediately after, I got really into electronic music and did my ON project. Consciously and subconsciously I did that project to distance myself from the whole Failure thing. I didn't want the sound to be compared to Failure. I just wanted to try something completely different, and I was definitely still smarting from the break-up. So there was the ON phase, and then I had some record label issues, so it went from having all this potential to nothing really happening, and I got frustrated and said, "I'm not going to be an artist anymore." It was kind of easy for me to do that because a lot of people were wanting to hire me to work on their records, so it was just like, "Oh man I can't handle being an artist anymore. It's too stressful. I'm just going to work on other people's stuff." I'm guessing that was like 2002 to 2005.
And then my buddy Tim Dow from Shiner was like, "Man, you can't just walk away. You gotta come back and do something, and when you come back you should do a rock band and not do an electronic thing." And for some reason when he told me that it was just kind of appealing at that point in time. That's how Year of the Rabbit came about. And then the same thing kind of happened again. Completely different label, completely different circumstances, but basically just a few months into that record being released Elektra got folded into [lost Ken to Montana wind noise, but, if I’ve done my homework correctly, he would’ve said Atlantic Records Group], and they only kept like three or four artists. So it was like, "OK, I guess I didn't learn the first time" [laughs]. And then I thought, "If I ever do something artist-wise, it's going to be on my own terms on my own label," and that's how the Ken Andrews solo stuff happened.
I was pretty content to do that whenever I felt like it, and continue producing and mixing as my main thing. But in the margins Greg and I had started to become friends again. It was a very slow process. It took him a few years to get cleaned up after we broke up, and then it was slow going. But then we both got married — it was my second marriage — and we both ended up having kids around the same time, only about three or four months apart. That took our friendship, which was already on the upswing, up to another, higher place. We found ourselves hanging out a lot more and talking about music again. And I think it was maybe another year after that that we ended up in the studio. I have a studio on my property, so it's easy for me to go in there and noodle around a bit. We kind of did that for about a year, and we ended up with a couple of tunes that we thought were really cool, and after we had some distance from those we were like, "You know, this sounds like Failure." And we sort of started slowly talking to some of our close friends about what people thought about a Failure “reunion” or a Failure “reformed,” whatever you call it. And these people were like, "That would be amazing."
People kept telling us, “You have a new audience that you don't even know about that found out about you guys after you broke up.” There's no way to really measure that because we hadn't been on a label keeping track of stuff like that for over a decade. So we were like, "Why don't we just book one show and see what happens?" So we booked that El Rey show back in February and it sold out right away, which never would've happened in the '90s. And then when we played the show I was kind of freaking out looking at the audience because it seemed like there were a lot of younger people up front. I couldn't really tell — my eyesight's not so good anymore — so I asked the audience halfway through the show, "How many people saw us play live in the '90s?" And less than a third of the room raised their hands. And it was mostly the older people on the outside. Nobody on the floor was raising their hands. So that kind of sealed it for us, like, "OK, clearly with no promotion, with no label, with no nothing, these kids are finding our music and liking it and coming to our shows." So it kind of made sense for us to do a tour and actually really starting putting down some concrete plans to finish an album.
So did you have any sense through the years that Failure had taken on a cult status or did it only recently hit you over the head?
I heard it mentioned here and there, and it would always kind of surprise me. I'd be in a conversation with a bunch of other people in bands and they would say something like, "Well, you know, Failure's such a legend now." And I'm like, "What the fuck are you talking about? No one really cared that much when we were together." We had fans, but we were ... people were like, "Failure, they're kind of cool, but they're kind of weird and it's hard to classify them." We were not an easy sell back in the day, and now it feels like people get it. People understand what we were trying to do and what we're going to keep trying to do. I think the El Rey show for me was the hit over the head for sure. I talked to some of those younger people after the show and it was weird, but in a great way. Again it just feels so organic because there's no label, there's no promotional machine. I mean, sure, now that we're on tour, we've hired a publicist. But the whole thing just feels like music lovers kind of being like, "Hey, have you heard of this band?"
Yeah, I think it's a word-of-mouth thing. At least from my perspective, Failure maintains a relatively sizable fan base in Nashville, and most of my friends heard the band for the first time at a record store where the clerks were always playing Fantastic Planet. This was in the early 2000s, and I didn't realize at first that Failure existed in the decade before. So, yeah, it's just one of things where a friend hands you the record and you're on board.
Yep, it's a weird thing. Our booking agent, when I originally told him about the tour, I told him I don't want to play too many shows because I don't want to freak myself out going on the road for a long time. We've got families now, so I told him: “Keep the show numbers low. Let's just play the big cities." And then he sent me an initial routing and I saw it going to the South and it didn't have Nashville in there, and I was like, "Dude, what's up with no Nashville?" And he said, "Well, that's kind of a secondary market." And I told him, "Yeah, but we had some awesome shows back in the day there." So he put it back on, and we're totally looking forward to playing there.
I know you've collaborated with Matt Mahaffey and you mixed the most recent album by Paramore. Does your production work ever bring you to Nashville?
Matt Mahaffey brought me to Nashville because he did part of the Dreamworks record with Richard Dodd, and he wanted to revisit some of the songs, so he flew me down to Nashville … I pretty much just stayed at the studio, but I kind of feel a strong tie because I do know a bunch of people besides Matt, mostly his friends and acquaintances that have moved out to L.A. I think I was one of the most influential people in getting Matt to move to L.A. He was talking to me being like, "I don't know if I can handle it. It's so crazy out there." And I'm like, "It's not that crazy!" I moved to L.A. by myself when I was 18, and I didn't have one friend here. Or not here — I'm in Montana right now. But I didn't have one friend there. I told him he could do it and put some roots down and go for it. And he did and it was cool. But now he's back in Nashville.
Did you guys meet through Failure and Self?
You know what? That's a good question. I'm trying to remember the first time I met Matt. I think this girl Lisa Lacour, who's a friend of both of ours, brought Matt to a Failure show in Nashville. I'm pretty sure that's how we met.
Do you remember where you guys played in Nashville?
I know we played Exit/In. I don't remember where else we played. I know we played there at least one other time.
So, shifting gears, rock music is arguably less relevant than it was in the '90s, at least on a mainstream level. Do you think about whether it's important for Failure to be relevant this time around? Or are you able to approach the tour and the new record more causally than that?
I don't think we ever really concerned ourselves with any kind of scene or what was happening in music because the thought of mind is that ... if you're an artist, at least to me, it's a moving target anyway. The way the business works, if you were going to be calculating and say, well, "This is starting to happen, so we should shift the sound of our band towards this," by the time you actually came to market with your new sound it could be over, you know? So it just never made sense for us to really do that, and never really interested us artistically. The bands we were looking up to were Pink Floyd and bands that, when they were around, weren't really part of a scene either. They just did their own thing and people caught on and they started digging it.
You have a band like Tool that's not followed any business path that anybody ever recommend to them. Look where they are now. They just did what they wanted to do. If you stay out there and you stay together, and it's actually quality stuff, I think eventually your audience finds you. I don't know. It's hard to know. I get what you're saying for sure. Radio and record sales, it all points toward more pop stuff and hip-hop and all that stuff. That's totally cool. But for us it was always seeing ourselves more in terms of what our records sounded like. We battled against the labels sometimes because they'd be like, "Well, your stuff is kind of catchy, but couldn't it just be a little catchier? And do you really have to do that long bridge?" I think maybe one time we were like, "Fine, we'll shorten the outro for radio." But for the most part we just never really went along with that stuff because we weren't interested in it. I mean, don't get me wrong, we would love to be super successful, but, if can't do it on our own terms, then it's not going to happen.
On this tour, you guys opted to play film clips before your set in lieu of hosting an opening band. What was it about the film Fantastic Planet, in particular, that was an inspiration for your work?
It was just that attraction to things that kind of exist on their own — they just create a universe like nothing you've ever seen or heard and they just allow you to live for awhile and get absorbed in it. That movie was just so good at doing that. It was just like "What the hell," just the animation and the character design and the story. Even though what we were watching was the English-dubbed ... it's a French film, and we were watching the English-dubbed version, not even the subtitled version. And then the music was cool. We liked the music, but we really liked the use of sound design in that movie. And we copied it and we also just lifted directly from it. And we also lifted the title as well [laughs], and we watched it a lot while we were making the record. I think that's one thing we're going to end up having to do on this new record too — go for the immersion technique where you rent a property somewhere and just set-up and live there and really just live, eat, and breath it 24/7. That was definitely a huge factor in the way Fantastic Planet turned out.
