Interview With Alex O'nan Of Interstates, part two, including "Goldsmith French Fry" mp3

Alex (left) and Kyle Noltemeyer of the new band Interstates, recording for The Record Machine (photo courtesy Mickie Winters). 

Now we continue from yesterday’s interview with Alex, ready to hear all about the correlation between trains and drum technique, the development of Sojourn’s music ministry, the side-splitting rap project “Goldsmith French Fry,” complete with mp3 of “Cereal,” and more.

WK: I’ve seen those. I was wondering, did you have any inclination, any clue at all when you were shooting the first video that you would end up being a train conductor?

AO: I had absolutely no clue.

WK: That’s amazing!

AO: Looking back, I think most people can say this , but it’s very neat when you can apply it to yourself: I can really see God’s hand in all of that.  I met a conductor down there.  We were actually older than him.  He was nineteen. I was in my early twenties.  Brian may have been around his age.

He was a jazz musician. He had dropped out of UK’s jazz school to be a conductor. I actually still talk to him today. He lives in Cincinatti and takes a train from Cincinatti to Louisville. He was very influential on me back then.  He would take me to his office and show me things about the train business.

WK: What was his name?

AO: His name is Joe Williams. But anyway, we wanted a video so we went down to the train tracks and Joe was there, and befriended us…I mean, conductors aren’t the nicest people in the world.  But this guy just happened to be there, was nice, and he took me places that I normally wouldn’t have been able to go to get video footage.  That started to point me in the direction of wanting to become a conductor.

WK: So, I’ve always wondered this, is there a correlation between drumming and the sounds of trains?

AO: Yeah.

WK: Is that inspiration for you?

AO: If it is, it’s subconscious, but I would not be surprised because everything at the railroad is rhythmic.  The locomotives hum when they are idling.  Pistons are pumping in time, they’re tuned — I mean not in a note sense, but they’re all pumping at the same frequency.  There’s a certain amount of rotations a piston will travel, or a crankshaft will travel, or whatever the moving part is.  And when the rails are welded you have that cha-cha…cha-cha. And sometime I’ll just click out an odd rhythm to go with that.  Because, I guess it could be a measure, but it’s definitely not regular.

WK: The train.  I don’t want to get too far off on this tangent but the train has always been an important part of blues music.  That whole symbol has been part of Americana almost since the beginning.

AO: Oh yeah. Blues and country music. With Johnny Cash.  I got a DVD of his where basically he did the history of the railroads.  I think he’s got a box set that’s just railroad songs.

WK: Back to your composing and drumming.  Is there a difference between being a drummer in a band and composing, doing beats?

AO: Yes. A huge difference.

WK. Besides the obvious difference.

AO: Even besides the obvious difference. I’m glad that you brought that up because it’s such a fundamental thing in the way the band approached music. The way Of Asaph approached music pretty much was just to come in with empty minds and just let the music write itself.  Not have, for instance, Kyle say, “Hey, I wrote this part last night; let’s try to come up with something.”

And so, that’s how I approach electronic music.  Just sort of sitting in front of the computer and loading in some samplers and some modules and with a lot of reverb, a lot of delay, compression…super compressing something.  And with the drums, with Interstates especially, I try to mimic what the electronic drums are doing.  So it’s also sort of a way that I could challenge myself to play what I normally couldn’t play ‘cause I’ll have the electronic drums going and sometimes it takes a while to get a particular part down. But when you program drums electronically, it’s very tedious because you’re clicking each individual trigger of the high hat, the cymbal, the snare, the kick drum.  And sometimes there are multiple drum kits in a song,  so there’s just a lot of work doing that. 

You can also just loop a part over and over, and you can add a trigger of a snare here and if it doesn’t sound right you can move it somewhere else and can come up with some very interesting things.  It’s cool because I can just put on the headphones and play along to it.  I think it adds a meatier feel to the drums because a subwoofer can produce a lot more bass than a kick drum can. It’s a more synthesized bass, but you can feel it a lot more, and so it’s nice to have that underneath with the higher-end sounding of the drums.

It’s a neat thing to be able to feel the drums you are playing because normally when you sit down to play, you are getting mostly high end because the kick drum is on the floor and the beater is hitting away from you, so you don’t get the low-end feel and then the cymbals:  that’s all high end, wash and then the snare.  It’s just a very sharp thing and then to have the electronic drums playing with you – it’s hard to describe.

WK: Like playing with a robot.

AO: Yeah, ‘cause you have to stay on time. ‘Cause he’s not gonna deviate.

WK: You can’t go, “you need to keep on time, man!”

AO: That’s what he’s saying to me.

WK: Alright, another question here. “Goldsmith French Fry.”  What is that?

AO: “Goldsmith French Fry.” It started New Year’s Eve about 2004.  We were just exposed to Garage Band for Mac OS X. And by this time it was New Year’s Day, it was past midnight and you know how people get when they’re up really late, they’re really tired but they don’t necessarily want to leave a party? They get very silly, and so Ricky Irvine, Kyle, and I started messin’ around with Garage Band. 

Kyle had an acoustic guitar and we started recording a song and it was extremely silly. And right at the beginning, I don’t know where he said this, but Kyle said, ” This is called Goldsmith French Fry,” And it wasn’t really “naming” anything because we didn’t really plan on doing this multiple times, it was just going to be this one thing.

But going back and listening to it, we really cracked up over it, so the following New Year’s, this will be New Year’s of 2005, we were at that same place, and for some reason Kyle decided to make some turkey bacon and some grape Kool-Aid, so we all started eating some turkey bacon and we all started saying, “Turkey bacon, bacon cravin’.”  We all started being really silly because here it is, one o’clock in the morning, and you are just delirious and so we decided, well heck, we’ll write a rap song about turkey bacon.

So we write this rap song about turkey bacon and it’s hilarious and we show it to friends and they love it and so that’s when it just sort of took off…and we wrote a song about pumpkin bread, we wrote a song about oatmeal, we wrote a song about cereal, pancakes – and then later we got into playing around with it, and the songs started to get really good. I mean we’d have four or five people rapping about cereal and towards the end we had about eight or nine people: a few on the “breakfast lovers” side and a few on “breakfast haters” side and we were going to do a battle rap about breakfast. And Jason Hammil played on it, rapped. And Mick played on it, rapped. And Jolie and Brian Holton and me and Laura Beth (Alex’s wife, Sojourn worship leader Laura Beth O’nan) and Kyle. And so it was definitely just something silly to do on New Year’s but it turned into something.

Hear the rappers Goldsmith French Fry perform “Cereal�

WK: We’re expecting an EP soon.

AO: We’ve got enough material.

WK: How long have you been at Sojourn and how long have you played as part of the worship team? How have things changed over the course of that – as far as the service, the practices?

AO: It’s funny that you asked that question because my first time to visit Sojourn, I played the drums. I was very nervous because I had literally never been to another church, because I was such a part of my parents’ church and I played drums there every Sunday morning and night and Wednesday night.  So to tell the worship leader there that I wasn’t going to be there Sunday night was like a huge slap in the face, and I remember him calling me and asking me, “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”

And I think he was genuinely concerned but he was also losing one of the only drummers he had to play consistently, and I said, “Well my good friends are going there,” ‘cause Kyle and Brian had been going there. That’s how (Sojourn Worship Arts Pastor) Mike Cosper asked me to play: he went to an “Of Asaph” show and Kyle and Brian were going to play that Sunday for Sojourn.  They said, “Heck, let’s just ask Alex to play,” because they didn’t have a drummer.

So here I am, my first time visiting Sojourn.  I had no idea what it was like; I just knew that Kyle and Brian were going to be there so I was going to feel pretty comfortable.  And I’ve been there since then — which was about two months after their first service.

Sojourn was renting space for worship from Highland Baptist, on the corner of Grinstead and Highland.  We’d come together, I think about three hours before the service was to start, and we would practice and back then, Mike was very young – we were all very young.  We’d just play as loud as we could.  And if it was a slow song – we just couldn’t handle it, we’d end up just speeding it up and rocking it out. 

A major difference between Sojourn then and Sojourn now is that the sound is a lot more mature, it’s a lot more controlled…when we first started the idea was get as many people as you can.  Some nights we’d have two or three guitarists and all you would hear were guitar and cymbals and you couldn’t hear the singing, and in that place, the natural reverb in there was just huge.

WK: How else has the music changed between then and now?

continued tomorrow, with more mp3s as well