Foo Fighters Bassist and Lieutenant Singer Nate Mendel: The Cream Interview

In between his day job doing worldwide stadium jaunts as bassist for the Foo Fighters, Nate Mendel managed to record and release If I Kill This Thing We're all Going to Eat for a Week, a pretty sweet solo LP of bedroom-pop recordings under the Lieutenant moniker. Mendel and his backing band kicked off their first tour at SXSW last week, and tonight they play Exit/In. In advance of the show, Mendel took some time out to talk to the Cream about the new project, his time playing bass with emo legends Sunny Day Real Estate and what it's like to get in the van and take a new band on a club tour after getting used to creature comforts of leer jets and sold-out stadiums.

Yukon Blonde and Whisperer open tonight's show, which costs $12.50-$15 (tickets available here) and kicks off at 9 p.m. Check out the Q&A below, along with a pair of tracks from the album after the jump.

I know Foo Fighters have played SXSW before, but have you ever had the South by experience of having to hustle from gig to gig and all that?

Yeah [sighs], I was briefly in this band called The Fire Theft about 12 years ago [that played SXSW], and I always laugh about that show because — I guess it’s probably pretty typical for bands go play there — but we played and outdoor volleyball court outside of a bar. So we set up at one end of it and the audience is just standing in the sand in the middle of the day [laughs]. It’s the worst environment to play music in, honestly. But I guess that’s what makes it an interesting event — it’s done in these herky venues.

Being in a band that plays stadiums, do you look forward to going out with a new project and hustling on a club tour?

I do, yeah. I’ve been looking forward to it. I’m a little afraid, to be in a band for this long, only because it’s been so long since I’ve done it. A Fire Theft tour in Europe, that’s the last time I traveled in a Sprinter van like this. I don’t want to sound whine-y about it, because it’s a great way to travel, but it’s been a long time since I haven’t had very much elbowroom [laughs].

Yeah, I guess there’s creature comforts that come with being on busses and leer jets

Yeah, yeah, and we’re a brand new band, too, like we’ve only been playing together for a couple of weeks, really. So we’re all just getting to know each other, it’s not like when I was doing a lot of band traveling and in high school, where it’s, like, [with] people that I’ve grown up with and learned to played music with, and we were bringing our skateboards and we’d stop at truck stops at skate [laughs], you know? It’s going to be a very different thing.

Knowing what’s like to do it while being that hungry for it, being on the other side of success and getting back in the van, does it feel that much different when you get up on stage and have to sell it to an audience?

I haven’t done it yet, but I don’t anticipate that it’s going to be that much different. I mean, at this point in time I’m excited to take these new songs that I’ve written and get to the point with this band where I feel like we are killing it onstage. And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to get in the van and go play a bunch of shows. So right now I’ve got this sort of built-in restlessness about it, where I want to get from where we’re at — which is pretty, pretty good — to what I’m hearing in my head, which is the potential for how this could sound.

Listening to the record, it does have a sort of piecemeal bedroom-pop vibe; it’s sound like a live band. Is it going to sound different live, or are aiming to replicate the recordings?

It’s a mix of both. [We’ll] use the record as a starting point and then I’m talking to the band about, like, ‘Hey, if you want to change something; if this dynamic’s not working — which, often it isn’t when you’re actually playing together as a five-piece in a room — then let’s not be precious about trying to replicate the record. And, as you’d expect, it’s louder and faster, and rawer, which is perfectly great!

Are you nervous at all about singing live? Is that something you’ve gotten comfortable with yet?

Of course not, no. I don’t mind, you know? I don’t have it down; it’s not second nature. But that’s what I love about it. If you come to see a show, you’re going to see someone in the middle of figuring something out — that’s what’s happening. Every time I sing something it’s different right now. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t — there’s a lot of experimentation going on, which is fun.

How long has this project been in the works? How long have these songs been gestating?

Well, two or three years. The album was recorded a year-and-a-half ago; I took about a year and a half to put it together, write the song and demo them.

There’s a ‘Why this, why now?’ here. There have been periods when Foo Fighters were off the road, and now you’re doing two record cycles at the same time. Had you thought about doing a solo project and fronting a band years before?

Well, you know, I ran out of other distractions. A lot of the times it was iterations of Sunny Day Real Estate that would take up that space, whether it was Fire Theft in the early 2000s — I put a lot of time and effort into that — and of course, just playing bass, then a few years later, during a long Foo Fighters break, I did reunion shows with Sunny Day Real Estate, and we worked on a record. And that ran its course. During the tail end of working on that Sunny Day stuff I’d started writing my own songs. So during this break, this was the time to put out my own record.

You had a very distinctive, melodic playing style in Sunny Day, and I definitely notice the same melodic sense translating throughout this record. In your other bands, were you ever creatively frustrated or wanting to impose that sensibility on other instruments in the arrangement?

Well, yeah, I had to learn how to play bass in Foo Fighters, because when I first started in the band, I’d hear what Dave [Grohl] was working on, and in my head it was like, ‘Oh, it could go here if I play all these different notes on the bass, and it didn’t really jive with the songs that Dave was writing — there’s a more simple, less melodic, percussive style of bass playing that needs to be done in that band. So my outlet was doing Sunny Day-related stuff on the side and now this. I’m going to channel those weird melodic ideas I have into something productive.

This material isn’t abrasive rock, it has more of the melodic texture that defined the era of Sunny Day Real Estate that you didn’t play in. What was it like going back to the band and playing that stuff and playing with those guys after they’d matured into that style? Did it affect your playing style?

I think so. Maybe not the way I played so much, it was; those guys became a little less — through growing old and playing more — bombastic and a little bit more measured in their approach. But that’s just [from] getting more experience and getting a little bit older and losing that just raw, naïve, explosive approach to playing your instrument.

I’ve got to ask — what was your reaction, if you recall, the first time you heard How It Feels to Be Something On?

Well, you know, I was critical [laughs]. I liked it; I thought it was good. Part of my was like, “Ahh! Alright, I have to start paying for playing that style of music. Just exactly like you’d imagine, really. Backseat driving — like, “how it should have gone like this.” This was a success and I was being critical.

I remember you mentioning in the Foo Fighters documentary having a desire to leave the band and rejoin Sunny Day when they were reuniting that first time, making an analogy to pining for an ex-girlfriend or something like that …

Yeah.

When you actually did go back, did you feel like that itch was scratched?

Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m always kind of saddled with the memory of playing with those guys. It was a really formative time for me, and what music should sound like and what playing in a band should be, a lot of my ideas were formed during that time, [when] you’re impressionable and it’s hard for those feelings to change. So that experience has always kind of stuck with me, like, “this is how music should go” [laughs].

Are you still chasing that in a way? Is that why you’re doing Lieutenant?

I think yeah, sure. Absolutely. There’s a million different approaches to doing music and that was one of them, which is to get four nearly insane people in a room that just, for some reason, their various quirks work well together, and see what happens. I always feel like The Who was like that — not to compare Sunny Day Real Estate to The Who — but they clearly were a band that was stronger than the sum of their parts. Each one of them was quirky in their own way and may not be able to do anything outside of The Who, but you put them together and it was explosive. That’s one approach to doing a band. Another one is to find a bunch of great players and craft good songs and do it more cerebrally.

What’s been your approach to directing the recordings and being a bandleader? Was that informed by your experience of being a sideman in a band for so long?

Well because it was my first time, I didn’t have a lot of confidence about it, about anything to do with the process. Like, I was afraid to get in and start playing guitar with somebody else in the room and say, “Yeah, this is my song and this is how it’s going to go.” I didn’t know whether it would sound good, because I’d really only started doing demos in my little home studio. So what it would sound and feel like to be collaborating with somebody else during the recording process, I had no idea, and I know enough to be pretty shy about it, to not be over-confident and there’s a fair bit of trepidation there. I didn’t want to get into a situation of recording and dragging a bunch of people in there and not have the songs be worthwhile, or not have my contribution not be up to the task. I just had to work through that, you know?

Do you find a small irony in building a band around these mostly self-recorded songs written on the side while playing as a rhythm section guy in one of the biggest bands in the world, that just happens to be fronted by a guy who was a rhythm section guy writing songs while playing in another one of the biggest bands in the world?

[Laughs.] I don’t know. [Dave’s] musical history is so unique; really, it’s one of a kind. I don’t really see many parallels there, just because he’s so talented and has been so successful at it, like, what I’m doing here just feels like something happening out in the ether and a little bit more obscure, do you know what I mean? You just can’t make that comparison. His musical career has just been so exceptional.