With Trans Am about to hit Wellington and then Camp A Low Hum, we thought we’d send out a few questions hoping for answers. Nathan Means of Trans Am was kind enough to email back…
tks: Hello Trans Am! I don’t know anything about your backgrounds before Trans Am, or how you got together… are you from the streets or the college campus? Does it matter?
nm: We’re not from the streets. More like lanes, avenues and boulevards. We’re from Bethesda, Maryland. That’s outside of Washington, DC. We’ve been on streets, before, though. I once slipped on a street in Chicago in the middle of a winter night. Actually it was an iced-over puddle and the shock of breaking through the ice into the freezing water made me think I had broken my leg. I could hear my friends laughing three stories up. I was drunk, laying in the middle of the abandoned street. I thought I would die. But I actually just got up and went back upstairs.
tks: You seemed at one point to be the entity to adopt as a kind of shorthand for expressing to other people ‘yes, this is who I am’ – you were cool, the music concise and sophisticated. I’ve always thought ‘TA’ was a reaction to this, a direct challenge to the popularly-perceived Trans Am sensibility… have you ever purposefully fucked with your audiences’ expectations?
nm: Well, we have certainly fucked over our and our audiences’ expectations, whether we meant to or not. This is because we get bored easily and are incapable of staging each new direction as successfully as, say, David Bowie. Also, he can sing really well.
We have fun and like getting reactions out of people – dancing, yelling, disgust, pain, laughter – when we perform.
I don’t know that our music is a shorthand for anything now, as a result.
tks: A little Googlebird told me you’ve all been spread around the world for a few years now. What have you been getting up to? Was leaving the States a natural consequence of having made an album like Liberation?
nm: Such a rich bird life here in NZ. Yes, Liberation-type issues made it easier to leave the US – and its imperial capital of DC – but really I was the only one who left right after the album (for NZ). Phil moved to SF – which is sort of like a leftist mini-fiefdom outside of the US – and Seb took a few years to move to London. It’s probably better this way.
tks: I noticed that you have toured with Tool recently. Would you do it again?
nm: Absolutely. It was really positive for us to be the little guys on a bigger tour. We have mostly done our own tours – partially as a reaction to a negative experience opening for Soul Coughing early on – so this was really interesting. Plus no one threw anything at us on stage and there was so much free food!
tks: I remember reading that you were offered amazing money to do music for a Hummer ad… I can’t remember how much exactly but I know it was BIG. What happened there?
nm: Yeah. Hummer was apparently interested in the song “June” from Liberation. We would perhaps consider giving our songs to ads, but seeing as how Hummer is basically a re-tooled military vehicle and Liberation was, among other things, about the insanity of going to war just to test your new toys, we really couldn’t consider taking the money. Not that we don’t need it.
tks: Is home taping, uh… mp3 downloading killing record industry profits?
nm: Umm. Yes. We actually OWED money to our label for some of our back catalog recently because so many record stores have closed (and when they close, they can return albums to our label, even if they have been around in a warehouse for ten years). And artists get nothing even for paid downloads at present. So the album profits on the new album – despite good press – were a bit of a shit sandwich. But, you’ve just got to be smart about it and figure out what makes sense and what doesn’t, instead of going around whinging about lost profits. It’s not “killing music” it’s killing the music industry – which is totally different.
tks: I really wanted to see you at the Shellac-curated ATP in 2004 but everything conspired against me. Now you’re about to play Camp A Low Hum, the closest thing in New Zealand by about a billion miles to a genuinely thoughtful and carefully crafted situation for experiencing live music and performance. What does a perfect weekend at camp entail for you?
nm: Food? Beach? Sitting around? Kayaking? Lots of hugs? I think we’ll be OK in Levin. By the way, I think it was Mogwai who had us over. Shellac are sort of scared of us, I think.
tks: If Trans Am was a car, what kind of car would you be?
nm: Well, probably a Trans Am. But one up on blocks with someone constantly working on it and talking about how fast it will be when he gets it out on the road.
tks: Thanks for taking time to do this!
nm: Thank you!!
Trans Am plays the San Francisco Bathhouse, Saturday Feb 2, with support from Golden Axe. Tickets $23.50, available at Slow Boat Records. Move people, move.
http://profile.myspace.com/transbandspace
http://www.thrilljockey.com/artists/index.html?id=10050
