Cold War Kids take their passports out of their pillowcases

PHOTO by MATT WIGNALL

It was the last show of the last full tour before the Cold War Kids’ first record came out and it would be the last of its kind: Cold War van parked in an alley behind a Clovis strip mall and Cold War Kids playing in one of those strip-mall churches with the name NEW SONG in decals on the door, and with a couple hundred kids pushed shins-to-the-stage to sing choruses to songs that had been released then only in the most modest ways. This was almost a year ago to the week, and I could tell as I watched hand-me-down sedans clatter home out of the parking lot with brand-new Cold War Kids songs on the stereo—something bigger beginning.

Two weeks after that they put out their first album on the same label as Gnarls Barkley, and after that, they played Madison Square Garden, same as Elvis and the Rolling Stones. (“Well, there was a little gap time there,” says guitarist Jonnie Russell.) Rolling Stone magazine gave them four stars and NME pestered them between festival sets and the Clash’s Paul Simonon busted them goofing off in front of his dressing room (“He thought we were like a bunch of junior high kids,” says bassist Matt Maust) and they shared hotel elevators with Ghostface Killah and got to give GZA a respectful good-luck-out-there pound. When they played Letterman as one of several TV appearances, Paul Shaffer was extra-remarkably extra-excited about them, and when Maust had a free four seconds on the Letterman mic, he said something like, “We’re Cold War Kids from Long Beach, California.”

By then they were—though they had gone to school at Biola (except drummer Matt Aveiro, pulled out of a little junior college after a single semester) and started above a pub in downtown Fullerton, they soon mostly relocated east with roommates. When I saw them just after that last guerrilla (Maust’s word) show, singer Nathan Willett was living up on a double-digit Long Beach street in just-moved disarray. When we went back this time, they were so settled in that the neighbor boys were sitting on parked Cold War cars. “Aw, you, get off his car!” said the neighbor girls; Cold War Kids were part of the landscape, and they’d felt at home ever since they played in-store at Fingerprints and got three free CDs each for the trouble: “I completed my Nick Cave collection that day,” says Maust.

Now they were about to leave for tour with the White Stripes—another new thing—except now they weren’t because the White Stripes canceled that whole tour 10 minutes before I showed up to meet them at Matt Wignall’s house, where they’d recorded the first versions of the songs that would make up their Robbers & Cowards album. The sun was pink behind the power lines and the Cold War Kids were poking at a piano with its hood up in Wignall’s driveway. They looked a little down and a little tired and a little leaner since I’d seen them last, and they were already looking for bright sides. Later, said Maust, he was thinking he might go play some board games.

“We were just talking about the White Stripes tour being cancelled—you immediately have to think of it as a job,” Willett was saying. “It used to be the opposite . . .”

Romance replaced by routine, I asked?

“The romance,” said Willett. “Everything about romance, you know—those aren’t easy accidents. You don’t just stumble on being a great anything—you have to really work on it.”

Tour cancelled for 10 minutes and Cold War Kids were readjusting—they had unexpected weeks they were going to use to finish up untested new songs, instead of slacking out into sandwiches at Olive’s every day (Maust is a regular) and waiting for replacement circumstance. They were good at working hard. Right there in Wignall’s driveway they’d received the first and maybe only shape-up speech of their career—Wignall telling them to tighten up, keep moving, make sure the momentum didn’t puddle and drain—and probably two years later they still remembered the moment with respect. (“The next day,” said Maust, “we played the Silverlake Lounge, and we felt so different.”)

Wignall had recorded their second EP in November 2005 (With Our Wallets Full, sequel to the original Mulberry Street EP, recorded in Fullerton on GarageBand with birds chirping somewhere in the background) in about half a day, he’d told me last year; he thought Cold War Kids were loose and green but he liked them, and he gave them hard advice pounded out from 12 practical years in his own band Havalina. Six months later they came back to do Up in Rags, the EP which would carry almost all their signature songs—three of their four eventual singles, one of which would chart twice in the U.K. They were like another band, Wignall said—they’d grown into their songs. He shot photos of them at a summer 2006 Troubadour show and grabbed them after they finished: “I was like, ‘Attaboy, man, there it is! Next time around, I’m coming to you guys for pointers!’ It was the shit—that would be a good direct quote—but it was! That was just the fucking shit—‘You guys are there!’”

Exactly what happened people couldn’t pinpoint—they all said “pinpoint,” too, and then they did slow circles with words like “honest” and “humble” and even “inspiring,” with adoration for the band that suggested something heroic. But Cold War Kids were humble, soft-spoken after show in a way shy fans must have remembered every time they listened to the songs. (“Aw, that was TIGHT!” one kid told Maust in Clovis; “Hey, thank you,” Maust said, and shook his hand.) And they were careful songwriters, too, aware and unafraid of their technical limitations—Willett bought a piano to learn how to play it; Russell had never played guitar before the band—and inspired and wise enough to find inspiration in generous genres.

They took the tropes of post-punk—bass and drums loud and low, vocals and guitar tending treble like Mekons and Minutemen—and the atmosphere of the American Folk Anthology and found wide-open room to write plus precedent to play out, too, clapping and stomping and banging bottles and shouting past the mics. Alec Bemis had called them an electrified version of a fife-and-drum band, writing with a clarity Cold War Kids wouldn’t often get a chance to enjoy. Willett weathered weak Jeff Buckley comparisons in every review but then one night I was listening to Bessie Smith and figured that part out—he’d even said she’d made one of his favorite records.

And their best songs had big simple choruses that climaxed the character sketches Willett used for lyrics, stories about damaged but not defeated people that would feel familiar to Raymond Carver readers, and at shows the front row had discovered enough autobiography to sing along as passionately and as practiced as the band. That first record had four or five songs that were fearlessly and constantly loved every time I saw them play, and if that sounds like cheap congratulation, Phil Spector—in primer times—used to be happy and satisfied with only two. If they weren’t there last summer, and if they weren’t there when the record came out, and when they toured and got on TV and walked the Madison backstage where Elvis once waddled—if they weren’t there, Cold War Kids were heading in the right direction.

PHOTO by MATT WIGNALL

“The first record makes the idea of who you are for people who haven’t seen you before—there’s nothing to gauge it against,” said Russell. “And the second one, now there’s something to compare it to. That’s why people love reviewing second records—they get a lot more firepower to say positive or negative things.”

Axed White Stripes tour now meant another month to settle tracks that will become the Cold War Kids’ second album. Those tracks stay guarded and unplayed now except for one song at August’s Leeds Festival in England—“Dreams Old Men Dream,” gently attached to a story of love, late life and death in Willett’s own family. The real-life subject doesn’t know—“No way!” says Willett. “It’s just about reflection in life, from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t really have a clear perspective.” There would have been new songs on the tour, Willett says, even though they wouldn’t really have been ready. He’s glad for the time to work: “We’re getting in the creative headspace of being not totally self-conscious and away from everything—it’s not just something you can switch on and off,” he says. “It takes writing a lot of stuff you know is dumb and pushing through it. It’s the self-doubt time.”

“I felt when we were constantly touring and not getting soundchecks, we weren’t having creative time,” says Aveiro. “Now we’re in that same headspace—we can express those ideas.”

It could be a very uncomfortable moment for a band—Cold War Kids take some time to remember respected second records in their own collection, with Maust suggesting This Year’s Model and More Specials (“Better than the firsts,” he says, “and I’ve always been a big Give ‘Em Enough Rope fan.”) and Russell smiling and saying, “I only listen to firsts.” Robbers & Cowards came in many ways out of Matt Wignall’s back yard, an accomplished and promising cap to the Cold War Kids’ first two years of learning how to be a band. And the second album will come out of just one new year, with no songs saved up, with writing time in slivers between band-job time, with the friends/family/steady place to sleep that let those first songs develop trimmed back to sometimes only a few days each month. (They promise no songs about what it’s like to be a band: “God help us—never!” said Willett. “That’s just about the worst thing you can do.” “That ain’t speaking to nobody but one percent of the population,” said Russell.)

“Every time [we finish a tour] I blow it,” says Willett. “I don’t go home for a few days and I realize I screwed up—I start being argumentative and confused about life, and I need to go home and stare at the wall for a few days.”

“It’s so hard to place what you feel,” says Russell. “Even in the first hour, if someone isn’t there, you’re like—‘Okay, what’s going on?’ You have that crash sensation—you’re immediately kind of alone.”

“I’ve had a few wake up at 4 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep nights,” says Aveiro.

“If you go in my bedroom,” says Maust, “there’s a sleeping bag ready right now.”

“And when someone turns on the light, you think you’re at the French border,” says Willett, “and you’re trying to find your passport in your pillowcase. There are adults that are married for years that don’t know how close you can possibly be with people in terms of proximity.”

“People get a lot more complex and a lot more simple,” says Russell. “When you actually do the raw creative process, there’s an element of wondering. You wonder about chemistry—it can be a very elusive thing. And more and more we’ve gotten in a place where we’re feeling that chemistry. That’s totally exciting—secure. We’re not thinking too much how it’s gonna be.”

“Almost everything we’ve done is kind of like that,” says Willett. “Throw it at the wall and hope it sticks. And it usually sticks with us. We got what we wanted most of the time.”

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Tags: cold war kids, Long Beach, matt wignall, white stripes