WILL ROAN
By Emily EasleyPhotos by Matthew Asti
Will is the singer for Amazing Baby, whose album Rewild comes out June 23rd on Shangri-La. I saw Amazing Baby's first-ever show, at Glasslands in the spring of 2008. They had about twelve people on stage and the venue was packed. The sound wasn't quite there, but the energy was – it was dark and heavy and sexy as hell. The band has since stripped down to five members, and I've caught them at Music Hall of Williamsburg, the Bell House, and again at Glasslands. The band is tight now, the vibe is still heavy, and whenever I see them I can't help but dance – especially during the chorus of "Pump Yr Brakes" when it sounds like Little Eva on Dilaudid.
I interviewed Will at "Alligator Lounge 2" (aka Lost 'n' Found) in Greenpoint. I was moved by his candid childhood memories, and completely won over by his hilarious way with words. We've been friends ever since.
EE: This is the first time I've interviewed someone who's really been interviewed before and has been doing press. I feel like it's different, like there's a loss of innocence or something.
WR: Kind of. I don't know. What I find is, the opportunities I've been given over the past year – I'm very surprised how really like, uninteresting quite a lot of the questions I'm being asked are.
Yeah, honestly I have trouble reading interviews sometimes. I heard the interview you did with Ted Shumaker on Viva Radio, so that's kind of the extent of my research.
Well, actually, Ted's a smart guy, and he's also a jokester. He asked the right questions. We had just played Roseland Ballroom the night before, and it was Simon's birthday. I had done quite a lot of uppers and downers, and we were all pretty much worn out. So conversing with him and adding humor to the conversation was the only way to possibly deal with it.
I thought it was great.
I can't even listen to it. I have a problem listening to myself talk because I have a stutter.
Tell me about the stutter. Have you always had it?
Yeah. Since I was like two years old. My mom senses it around the time my sister was born, but that's around the time you start speaking anyway, so I don't really know. It definitely is highly connected with confidence, and um, uh – comfortability. If I'm very uncomfortable, I tend to stutter more.
Was it hard?
Yeah. I did two years of kindergarten because I really didn't speak during my first year because I was so embarrassed, and I didn't really develop at all. It was hard for me because a lot of my friends moved on and I stayed behind, and it was very, you know, strange.
You moved around a lot as a kid, right?
Yeah, totally. My dad was a preacher, so I moved around. I was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. I moved to Long Island, then Pennsylvania, and then Western Massachusetts. I actually lived in the same town as Will Berman but we didn't know, cos he went to Hebrew School. We had mutual friends, but he was like, the Hebrew School friend and I was the soccer friend, you know what I mean?
Were you religious because your dad was a preacher?
Definitely not. My dad was a very laid back guy, like we went to seders or high holiday with our friends' families.
What kind of preacher was he?
Congregational. Very liberal. My dad – I don't really want to get too into it, cos I'll just say negative things about him and that's not really positive. I admire him deeply, but he is kind of a screwy human being.
I think a lot of people relate to their family that way.
But I mean, seriously,
both my parents are like, extreme alcoholics. And I was raised very
publically, so…
What do you mean?
Well, even though organized religion is on the wane, these really rich, small New England towns that we lived in had a huge, like, church-going thing. They belonged to the country clubs and stuff like that. And my parents – they were both raised by good families, so to speak – were both kind of underachievers and kind of like, found each other.
I think they're really awesome people, and incredible, and they both had a lot of potential, but you know how life is, man. It's really hard. And I think they really were wrong for each other, and things got really screwy, you know, publically. They like, broke up and got back together, and this was in a church. So it was really rough as a kid just dealing with that. But I have an outgoing personality, so I kind of made up for it. It wasn't that bad.
So you're timid and outgoing?
Well there's a lot of duplicity, I think, in personality. So it's not hard to believe. It wasn't very hard to do, it's more hard to look back upon.
How did you get into music?
I was really into my parents' CD collection when I was younger, cos it was kind of like, adult, and kind of strange. I just didn't really understand it. I mean, basically my parents listened to really bad music. They were not influential as far as style or whatever. The most outlandish things my dad listened to were like the Allman Brothers and Steely Dan, and the things he liked about those bands were not what made them good, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
So I would just think of the CDs as these kind of iconic statements – having like, a piece of something to look at. I remember just looking over big records when I was young and attributing this iconic thing to a sound having to be a – a kind of mood changing thing.
Well, if you grow up in kind of a lonely way it becomes like – the record becomes the thing you want to escape into.
It was totally weird. But my parents had really boring music tastes. They listened to Michael Bolton, they listened to Anita Baker and like, Natalie Cole. They listened to really like, adult contemporary shit. But they also listened to things I did like. They had some Elton John records I liked, and this guy Al Stewart.
Did your family come together to listen to music?
I wouldn't say we came together. I feel as though my parents pushed me away from music. I had a babysitter who was really into MTV, and I watched a bunch of MTV. I was also playing little league, and playing soccer. And I remember one day, I was probably nine years old, and I was watching something on MTV about Kurt Cobain, who I didn't really like his music – I was actually really scared of Nirvana.
What do you mean?
Just watching “Heart-Shaped Box” music video, I was like, quite nervous of fetuses and strange, really kind of ugly imagery. It just really scared me. But I also was just kind of dumb and young and I just liked visualizing on something. I liked a lot of music videos, like I really liked – Lenny Kravitz was around then, and Aerosmith.
The “Cryin'” trilogy…
Yeah, and I identified way more with the simpler idioms that were coming out around that time. But you also take in everything else that's happening, because – seriously, this was like, when a remote didn't exist and I was just sitting in front of the TV. Crazy. And I also was like, nine, so I could watch anything forever, it didn't matter.
But I remember watching something on Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, right when he overdosed, before he killed himself. And my dad comes in and watches me watching this. It was the first time I remember being maturely asked to stop doing what I was doing, without being told to not do it. He was like, “Hey, why don't we go outside and throw the ball around?” And I was like, “Well, I'm watching this.” He's like, “Well, why don't we just do this instead?” And I understood what he was saying. It was something more than just, “Stop watching that.”
What was it?
I think he was nervous that I was watching something about, you know, drug addicts. My dad definitely told me at certain times to not watch MTV because it was brainwashing, and my dad is not a “fire and brimstone” sort of preacher guy. He's married same-sex couples; he's like, very down to earth. I mean, he's a complete party animal.
But I think for his kid who was nine, I think he was nervous I was watching stuff that involved obviously high levels of debauchery. And I kind of gave up on music for a long time, pursued athletics. I was actually very good. I was very tall, when I was young.
So you were like a jock in high school?
Not when I was in high school, but when I was YOUNG young. When I was in high school, I got really into David Bowie. It's funny because I was really into Wayne's World and I loved like, “Bohemian Rhapsody” and I loved Queen, but I kind of fell out of it for a while and I wasn't like, pursuing any interest in music whatsoever. And then I heard David Bowie – I saw something on TV, “Changes” or something like that. And I was like, “Holy shit! That's like, like Queen, but better!” And strangely, that's kind of true.
Yeah. I mean, that's pretty right on.
I got really nervous, because I was taunted like anyone else is in high school, like called a fag or called gay. I consider myself a straight person, but when you're young, you don't even know what that really means, and being told that you're something else is very scary. And I really liked David Bowie's music, but I knew that my parents would think that that was weird.
I remember being very nervous about buying music – like spending money on things, like buying CDs. Any way I bought music came from my parents, cos they gave me allowance – this is like way pre-Internet. But eventually, I started smoking grass, stealing money from my parents, you know. I had a job – like I worked in a grocery store or a gas station.
What was the first time you got high?
I guess it must have been like 1998. I was probably a freshman in high school. I was president of my class, and I was like, one of the first people to really adopt, like, a stoner mentality. I don't really smoke much weed these days, I can't really take it. I pretty much do everything, I mean, I'll have a drink any time of day, but I can't smoke a joint any time of day. But I definitely smoked a lot of weed when I was like fourteen or fifteen.
I think the first time I got high, I got high in front of two of my friends, who were just watching to see what it was like.
So you were the one who sought it out?
I bought it. And the house I lived in, in Western Mass, I was able to live on the third floor by myself. So I had a certain amount of freedom. I just bought like, you know, way too much money for weed probably, and I just had two of my friends sleep over. It was when you had sleepovers, you know? And I got way stoned.
And they didn't smoke?
No, they just watched me. I remember feeling stoned, and obviously – like the closest I'd ever experienced was like, an orgasm, which is in no way really relative, but just a really extreme sensory emotion – to just be like, “OH my GOD.” I just remember just like, falling to my bed.
It's totally silly, but I remember having an internal dialogue with myself about how there's really no going back. “It's over, I'm high now. I'm doing everything that I at one point said I wasn't gonna do.” To this day, I continually think to myself about things I do that I told myself I'd never do. But that's the first real one that I remember.
Why did you tell yourself that you would never do it?
Because the way I was raised was very strange, with no money but with a very nice like, “family life” experience, and I think a sense of – you know, presentation or image or whatever. And doing drugs was definitely not any part of that at all.
But there was a lot of drinking.
Yeah – to be honest, though, it took me about a year or two after I smoked weed to really perceive it. You know, there's a lot of denial. For a long time I really did not even think that my parents were wasted, I just thought they were tired and stuff.
That's sad.
Yeah, I mean, it's really depressing shit. But there's a lot of happy stuff too. I just don't want this to be all about me talking about how crappy things are.
I was wondering how you started singing, or when you first wanted to sing.
When I was in third grade – my mom showed me this recently, that's the only reason why I know this – my ambitions of “jobs you wanna have in your future,” I had two of them: one was a lawyer, and one was being a singer. It's very funny.
Had you sang at that point?
I sang in choir, like at church, probably until high school, and then that was super gay to be involved in. But as far as I know the stutter never affected me. I acted in plays when I was younger, sang – never stuttered.
So you always like to perform.
I guess so. I mean, I'm obviously self-centered in some ways.
I didn't know it was that obvious.
Whatever! It is. I mean – girls I've been in love with and best friends of mine definitely criticized me for that. But what can you do? It's just how it is.
What was your first band?
Well. I don't know. I made a bunch of movies when I was really young, and within all those movies there are a few music videos that I made. I did a music video for “Another One Bites the Dust”. I had like, a cap gun, and I was in the woods, and my sister ran around looking like a pirate and I beat her up. It was pretty funny. I didn't really beat her up, I hit her with, you know, a fake stick. She bit the dust on that one.
I took piano lessons when I was younger. Was really bored with it, did not practice, but was really kind of enamored by music. We always had a piano in the house, and I played on it when no one was around. I was like, you know – white keys went together, black keys went together. I didn't really understand the whole thing.
And then I moved to Martha's Vineyard when I was a junior in high school. I had no friends. It's a very tight-knit community, and when I moved there, nobody wanted to talk to me. I was sixteen years old, getting into, you know, more “adult” kind of motifs, and I decided to try and teach myself piano a little bit, and I did.
Then I met a girl, and she was really cool, and as a Christmas present, she bought me ten piano lessons. So I just took piano lessons and I learned music theory. It wasn't like, learn to play “Hot Cross Buns” or something, cos that was not gonna be helpful to me whatsoever. It was more like, just figuring out what notes go together, what made chords, what chords would work.
I really like, wanted to do it. I started listening to a lot more interesting music. Like, when I was a senior in high school, I would listen to Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Velvet Underground, Wire, David Bowie, you know – all Britpop stuff like Pulp and Blur. I listened to Radiohead, Spiritualized, all that shit. I already had been there, so I had a good idea of what kind of music I liked. Like obviously white music, haha – very white.
Kind of glam.
And a little over the top. I think moving to Martha's Vineyard was a really super-important point of my life, because I met people that were “cool” in high school that were fucking weird, you know what I mean? Whereas previous to that, I lived in Western Mass, and it was very collegiate. It was very lacrosse, soccer, football, girls, you know – keg parties. Whereas, for some reason, Martha's Vineyard, there's just like a bunch of hippie-ass parents somehow – it's totally weird.
So – I got into music. I played with this guy Willie Mason on Martha's Vineyard, and Willie kicked me out of the first band I was ever in. We're friends now, man, we're like really close. I mean, I deserved it. I seriously had no talent. I was trying to be a front person, didn't really know how to play any music.
You just knew you wanted to be the guy in front?
I knew what I wanted to sound like. I just didn't know how to do it yet. Whereas he was way more adept at accomplishing, you know, a sound.
You know, if right now, I was like, “Hey, I wanna be in a fucking jazz band,” I could just find jazz people, and I could just be like, “Look, let's do this.” But when you're in high school, you can't just be like, “Yo, we're in a space-rock band.” You gotta be able to play space-rock to do it, you know what I mean?
So, what happened was, he wanted to sing, I wanted to sing, he could play, I couldn't. So I got kicked out, and I just started playing piano by myself. Then I eventually went to college, discovered like, Joy Division.
You decided to go to a super liberal, artsy school.
Bard's the only place I applied to.
How come?
I was lazy? I don't know. Like straight up, I applied there early, I got in, but if I had not gotten in early, I'd be pretty fucked, because I totally blanked on getting all my other recommendations in the pipeline before winter break. So, luckily I got in. I was really happy to go. I was extremely excited. I visited a bunch of other schools and they just didn't feel right. And Bard – by the end of Bard I was just so depressed and like, fucked up that, you know – I wished I had never been there.
What year did you graduate?
2006. I got a little ahead of myself, I think. I'm starting to catch up and be much more in touch with the person I am. I think I got an inflated ego, like pretty quickly. Seriously. And it's really not really attractive.
Did you get a lot of girls?
I got the right ones, I think. Like my girlfriend who I dated for a lot of college was probably the hottest girl in school. She was so beautiful. She still is, she's really cool, but um, you know – looking back upon it, I wasn't doing a lot of good work. I was pretty much blowing through classes. I don't have a good academic story from Bard.
It's really sad. It's really sad – this girl who I was in love with at that time – she and I were totally bonkers for each other, and I almost killed her in a car accident. She was in the hospital for like two weeks, like seriously – pelvis broken, all ribs broken, lung collapsed – like, punctured by ribs – face fucked up, like TOTALLY almost died, like I saw her get a tube punched into her chest, you know what I'm saying? Like BAD.
So, a lot of experience points. And I did a lot of bad things around that time, like doing a lot of drugs, like being, you know, a totally fucked up human being. Not really responsible whatsoever, you know? I don't know if this is the right line of conversation.
It seems like everything has happened so fast for you guys, and I was wondering what that's been like and how you think it happened.
It was immediately extremely satisfying. My old band I was in, it was very hard to even get my friends to come see us play, and we were together for a very long time. And with this band, for several reasons, it did happen to take off. Besides the fact that we had a lot of people involved that had previous bands with big fans, besides the fact that MGMT were so supportive of us, we also tried very hard and I think the music we made was good. I think that the aesthetical kind of thing we put out there was a little bit cheesy in hindsight, but at the time it was kind of cool. There was a picture of Leah, me, Will and Simon naked, and stuff…
That's what I was interested in, because I saw that picture before I ever heard your music, and I didn't even know you were a band, I just knew you were a bunch of people who were all hanging out and partying together. And I was like, “Oh, they must have been up all night and taken this picture.” So I had a sense of the image before the sound.
A lot of people did, and to be honest, only until recently have we been able to kind of shake that. Cos it's one of those things where the immediate comparisons with MGMT were really annoying. It's not as if I dislike their aesthetics, but you have to really be careful how much you borrow from other people or how much you can perceivably be ripping somebody off, you know?
And, the fact of the matter is that the music we ended up moving forward with – though it is kind of experimental rock-pop – it's definitely not as much like them. And our live show especially is really much more punk-y, louder, kind of like early My Bloody Valentine meets like, some louder Blur stuff.
So when Leah left the band, the “hot babe quotient” was gone. Which was good. She left because she wanted to, but a lot of people had mentioned to us that it looked a little heavy handed to have just a super babe not really doing very much, you know? So now it's like, five dudes just rocking out. It's so funny, when we first met people in Europe doing press, they're like, “So where's the babe?” And we're like, “Rob's as close as you're gonna get to that.”
Yeah, he can take his shirt off.
Yeah, I know. So, you know – I think we made a really good record, and we're trying to play as many good shows as possible, to just show that we got this opportunity and we're not gonna fuck it up. Only because I believe in what we're doing and I don't think it's a fluke; I don't think untalented people were given an opportunity. So, it's crazy, but we're trying to use it to the fullest and involve as many of the people that I'm impressed with in my life that are my friends.
Well I wasn't even thinking so much about possible illegitimacy but that you were just people hanging out and somehow decided to do these recordings.
Well, to be honest, me and Will Berman kind of started the group back in November of 2007. We were working together and I really wasn't friends with Simon that much, he actually kind of got on my nerves a lot, cos he's just like – you know, he can be very crass if you're not like, close with him.
Yeah. I've known him since I was like sixteen years old…
So – Will and I were really close, and we would stay up late and record together, cos both of our bands – Stylofone and Lions and Tigers, and Standing Nudes, were breaking up, and we kind of had fetishized over making music that none of those bands could really pull off. So we'd buy like, a bag of cocaine and get beer and go back to this little room at his loft and just like, write a verse and a chorus over six hours of being freaky-wasted.
Then, around the turn of 2008, Simon obviously wanted to be in a band immediately after Stylofone broke up, and I think he saw his friends becoming extremely popular and he saw Will Berman being taken and Matt being taken and I think Simon just felt a little bit left behind. So he became a huge motivating factor in getting things moving fast.
Yeah, he's not someone who's really gonna take being left behind.
Definitely not. But him and I became extremely close, and I definitely got to see sides of him that I don't think most people do. He's a very loving person, and he's very talented. And it's one of those things where we kind of forced ourselves to become friends, and do this, and it's really paid off, not just for the music but for our mutual respect and friendship.
What do you guys each bring to the table musically?
Him and I have a deal with each other that no matter what either of us do, in this band, we will share songwriting fifty-fifty. I can only play piano and sing and do percussion stuff, whereas he can do piano, play guitar, play bass, can't sing –
I've heard recordings from years ago where he sang that were really good, actually.
No, he's good – they are good, but they're very idiosyncratic. He writes his girlfriends love songs and they're really cool, you know what I mean? But we made that decision because I brought in a few songs, and he had this song that ended up becoming “Head Dress,” and it pretty much sounded like “Streets of Philadelphia.” But he wrote all the chords, all the riffs, all the lyrics. And I took it and kind of produced it and added all these keyboards, changed the rhythm, changed the style. And we were going over songwriting credits, and I was like, “I feel like the only way we're gonna to be able to do this as quick and as happily as possible is to share it.”
What we usually did is just go to his apartment, get a bottle of white wine or something like that, and I start with a progression and kind of a melody, and we just fill it in. Most lyrics, I am pretty much ninety-nine percent responsible for. But I'm more of an amateur musician, so a lot of my ideas clash with his more traditional ideas, and so it usually ends up evolving to something completely different by the end.
The first time you went to the UK to tour you guys were already known there, right? What was that like?
Yeah. The tour started in Ireland with MGMT, and then we did a lot of towns in the middle of England, and then they went off to mainland Europe, and we kept on going by ourselves. The shows we played by ourselves were a lot more receptive, because with MGMT we were playing before Violens at these huge venues where everyone was like seventeen years old, and they were sold out way before we were even on the bill. So even though we were known, the people who were at those shows were definitely not interested in us.
Do you have good stories?
I have some hilarious stories. I was single at the time so it was especially fun in that regard. And it was pretty mind-blowing because I had never been on tour before in my life, I had never been around the world at all.
Well, we went to Amsterdam once, and the NME were gonna do a day with us in Amsterdam cos they thought we were just hippie freaks and were gonna go crazy.
That's so weird.
It's so stupid! Anyway, I really don't like Amsterdam. I love the really quiet, beautiful parts, but the places you get forced to hang out in, it's like Disney Land on hell, you know? And they bought me these mushrooms, and I really wanted to take them, but I wish I hadn't because I got so depressed, because I was tripping in this hold out – kind of gross, Euro-trash everywhere. And these guys, these really cheesy journalists who are really like the most un-insightful people – and it was like, that was horrendous. I really wanted to die at some points during the whole day.
So you had journalists with you while you were tripping?
Yeah. The article that actually came out was really bad - it was like, written poorly. Nothing really embarrassing came out, except they never had any tape recorder going, so they paraphrased shit in the worst way, and it made us look way more immature than I think we actually are.
I mean, people on mushrooms act like little children.
I know. We played this place called the Barrowlands in Glasgow, and I lost my cell phone and my wallet and ID the first night we were there, so I couldn't take any money out of the ATM. I pretty much ate our rider, or ate some of MGMT's rider, and my tour manager gave me some money here and there.
So we are in Glasgow, and Don, who really likes kind of experimental techno music, he's like, “There's this place called Optimo, it's Sunday nights only, it's world famous, we need to go.” And we're like, “Yo” – to our tour manager – “Yo, do you know anyone in Glasgow?” He's like, “Oh yeah, I've got this great mate, he's kind of a drug dealer.” We're like, “Look, can you please get us ecstasy?” So he gets us so much ecstasy. And ecstasy in Europe is not as strong as it is here, so you end up taking four or five pills at a time. It's – it has a different sort of strength.
So we took it, I rolled into this place Optimo after we played, out of my mind on ecstasy, one pound in my pocket, and we're just hanging out - it's pretty intense techno, I was like, not loving it so much, but kind of enjoying it. And then this girl and her friends were like, “Oh, we just saw you play with MGMT, what's the name of your band again?” Like, blah blah blah.
I sit down with her and start talking. Next thing I know, NOBODY that I came with is there, everybody's gone – they thought I left with somebody. And our tour manager told us that the area we were in in Glasgow is extremely dangerous. And I actually heard somebody getting beat up outside the club that we were at, like through a window.
In fact – we were hanging out the night before with Andrew and Simon and these really nice Glaswegian types, and they were so nice the entire night, and then at the end of the night they were like, “We love you guys, you guys are so nice, we had this plan to shave Andrew's head.” They had these razors that they were actually charging in the other room, and they were like, “But we can't do it now, you guys are too nice.” And Andrew's like, “Well, it's pretty good you didn't shave my head, cos I have really bad psoriasis." So people are fucking tough.
So I ended up being left in this club, and I had no money, so while on ecstasy, kind of coming down, feeling crazy, I had to chat up all these people trying to find somebody who could help me out. I eventually met this girl and this guy, who were really nice. They bought me a drink, and let me go back to this house they were housesitting. It was a crazy place, they had an actual zebra skin rug. And this girl was really cool, and she let me kind of sleep there for a little while, and then at eight – our lobby call was 8:30 – she gave me five or six pounds to get back to the hotel. And I roll in to Simon and I's room at like 8:29, and he was like, “Oh my God, I thought you were dead.” But it ended up working out.
