Features

Cold War Kids’ Second First Record (Relix Revisited)

Given your band’s unique name, would you say Cold War Kids has a political slant?

It’s nothing political, our name—it’s more of a motif, a theme. Everyone in the last 50 years is a Cold War Kid. My dad is a Cold War kid. So Kids doesn’t mean “kids.” It’s a backdrop. We believe heavily in the character side of things—it’s an umbrella that any character can be found within.

I would say our lyrics are much more inspired by books and by film, but there are definitely some autobiographical ideas in our songs; our songs are just not weighted very heavily on that. I know that “We Used to Vacation” is about Nate’s grandpa or something, so it is autobiographical in that sense. It’s hard for me to answer because that’s Nate’s department. He’s the lyric writer, but I wouldn’t say it’s autobiographical.

What books and films personally inspire your music and art?

I read a lot of Vonnegut. I’m making a bold claim here, but the principles that Vonnegut writes with and the stuff that pops up in his books have really inspired me. There are a lot of small details about his life in his books and as a reader you kind of get sucked in like, “This is an autobiography on Vonnegut.” It isn’t that at all [but] are there small things about it? I think Nate does that at times; it kind of rings true at times.

Cold War Kids have also turned into quite the festival band. You’ve played pretty much all the major U.S. and European festivals by now. Does any festival stick out in particular?

Outside Lands in terms of just band lineup: Black Mountain, Radiohead, Beck, all those good guys. In terms of lineup, that was one of the better ones and in terms of location it doesn’t get any nicer than Golden Gate Park. It was a very unorganized festival, though.

We just played in St. Malo, France, which was great, this walled city. It was beautiful, kind of like playing in a castle. It was a massive crowd that really respected us and welcomed us warmly. The next day we played a festival in Belgium with probably 50,000 Metallica fans. I think it was us and Stereophonics and Metallica, and so we had 12-year-old kids and 50-year-old dads all wearing Metallica [shirts] in front of us. We’ve listened to Metallica our entire lives and it was actually a really good show. It was just a fun time playing in Belgium for all these Metallica fans who didn’t wanna hear us [laughter].

That was one thing that’s stuck out in recent days. There are always funny things about writing songs and joking that you’ll one day play in arenas and one year later you’re actually playing them. It’s like all of a sudden, wow, we’re here. We played Madison Square Garden with Muse. [The MSG show] was a really fun show. The guys in Elvis Perkins’ band are good friends of ours and came to play with us, and they really saved the day with that one. It was a good time with those guys.

It seems like Cold War Kids, Elvis Perkins, Bobby Bear Jr., Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Dr. Dog are part of a loose musical collective. You’ve all played with each other and shared big market bills.

We met Elvis and the Dearland guys in Chicago at the Metro one night. A friend of ours knew them and they were opening for some band. It was a super late show and they were like, “You gotta come see Elvis Perkins.” So we went and hung out with him that night and, a few weeks later, we booked some shows and, a few weeks later, we booked a five- or six-day tour up the coast with the Dog.

There’s also this guy Richard Swift we’re getting to know pretty well. We played a number of shows with him. He’s gonna be doing some shows with us in California. He actually just did a couple of remixes with us. He kind of dissed me with “Something Is Not Right With Me,” and put all of his own shit into it and kind of stomped on it and ruined it in a really good way [laughter]. We’re doing some 7-inches with remixes and stuff; they’re a free download on MySpace .

It sounds like you have a lot of leftover material. Do you plan to follow up this project with a b-side collection?

We were just working on the b-sides last night. We did vocals for a new song that we don’t have a title for yet, but that we wrote in Europe. I was hoping it would make the record but it didn’t. I’m pretty excited about that one.