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By Cristina Carrazza-- Regional Head, Midwest
It’s been quite a few months for Anarbor. After supporting This Providence on their ‘Bout Damn Time Tour, the Arizona quartet released their highly anticipated full length album “The Words You Don’t Swallow.” Not to mention, their song “Always Dirty, Never Clean” was featured on the first episode of the new Jersey Shore season and the band endured some interesting challenges on MTV’s Silent Library. Currently on the Vans Warped Tour, Anarbor has been impressing their audiences on a daily basis. After playing on Main Stage for the second time at the Chicago date, I got the chance to talk to guitarist Mike.
Cristina: In the song “I Do What I Do” you have a dream about being on MTV. Now that you’re actually on MTV, how does it compare?
Mike: It’s funny you bring that up. Whenever go to MTV, they are always teasing us about that too. It’s kind of a metaphor. It’s the type of thing where we feel that a lot of bands out there are worrying more about their image and how their band looks to get on TV and what they have to do to get little girls to like them rather than the music. So we used that as a metaphor to explain what we’re about and how we’re doing things for the music.
CC: But it is awesome being on MTV…
MK: *laughs* Of course! It’s been amazing. It’s great for our band and any publicity is great. It’s been really helping us out.
CC: They’ve been really interested in you guys recently. I know they’ve been following you on Warped and you were featured on Silent Library.
MK: Exactly, I got my ass kicked in Silent Library. It sucked. We won a good amount of cash but it was cool. We’re doing these things with MTV where we feature behind the scenes band on bands interviews. We got to interview Andrew WK yesterday and Sierra from VersaEmerge. That has given us the opportunity to get to meet so many different artists so it’s been cool.
CC: So how is Warped Tour going so far?
MK: It is by far my favorite tour. Hands down. We can’t wait, and we hope to be on, next year’s. It is the coolest tour. It brings bands from every single different genre together into one little civilization and it forces us all to get along. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most punk rock dude or in the softest band ever, it forces you to get along. And that’s the spirit of music. Music is about community.
CC: Today you got the chance to play on Main Stage for the second time on the tour.
MK: Yes, it was awesome. It was quite the experience for Chicago. Chicago is such a great Warped Tour date. Tons of kids come out and for us to get the opportunity to play Main Stage Chicago really blew us away. And thank you so much to Kevin Lyman because he is the one making this happen.
CC: This is also Anarbor’s first time on the full Warped Tour. How has the reaction been so far?
MK: It’s been the best reaction we’ve had yet. We’ve never had this many kids at our crowds. It’s really cool we’re getting a lot of new fans. Kids just walk by and we draw them in. Like our set today at the Main Stage, we are playing for kids who have never heard of our band. Getting to play for them is just awesome. It’s everything we could want. Today at our signing a girl came up and told us “I’ve never heard of your band until today, but you guys are already my favorite band.” That is the coolest thing that has happened to me today. Things have been going well.
CC: Your first full-length album “The Words You Don’t Swallow” came out this past April. How has it been going so far?
MK: So far so good. The response has been great. This is our first US tour off of the record. We’re starting to see what songs fans know and what songs they don’t like as much. We’re throwing a lot of different songs on our set throughout the Warped Tour to get a feel of how our audience it’s responding. And it’s been awesome. We’ve seen good responses to our songs “Gypsy Woman,” “Mr. Bigshot,””Contagious.” So yeah, it’s been really cool to see what our fans in different areas like.
CC: Talking about “Gypsy Woman,” the video for that was recently released
MK: Yeah we’re really stoked on it. We really wanted a dirty vibe to go with it and keep it a very basic rock and roll video. If you noticed it’s pretty stop motion. We wanted a cool gypsy type vibe to it, you can see the gypsy’s hands on some shots. We just wanted to make a cool trippy video for kids to watch and something different. We worked with our director on it. We went back and forth for a while and had some great brainstorming sessions about the plot of it and that’s what we came up with. And we’re super excited with it.
CC: Going back to what you said earlier about a community of musicians on Warped, Anarbor has been very vocal and open about how the music scene should be, “Always Dirty, Never Clean” always comes to mind…
MK: I think that’s something that sets apart our band from other bands. We like to speak our minds. We like to give it to our fans straight. We will tell you exactly how we feel, and I think kids respect that and are starting to catch onto that. Kids don’t want to be lied to. They don’t want to have this false idea of who or what a band is. The people we’re on stage are who we are offstage. We just try to deliver the most honest music we can to our listeners. We know all kids are going through the same shit we went through. Whether it’s sex, drugs or alcohol. Everyone is going through it and we want to let kids know they’re not alone.
CC: And how have other bands been reacting to that honesty? Specially towards songs about the music business
MK: It’s been cool. We’ve been getting a lot of respect from bands who have either never heard of us before or have never met us before. It’s cool to spread our word, talk to other bands and get us all on the same page. Like I said, this is a community, not a competition. |
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