Considering the high sap factor of most of Lifehouse’s hits, getting the band’s frontman Jason Wade on the phone is like getting your most sentimentally inebriated buddy—the guy who’d just gotten his heart puréed by means of a “let’s just be friends” talk or pumped-up via steroids of infatuation—on the phone. You’d expect this of a guy who’s penned lyrics bordering on EQ genius and delivered with gravelly vocals of catharsis, bottling yearning and self-realization as bassist Bryce Soderberg and drummer Rick Woolstenhulme supply the amp-thundering sauce to each track.
With a little more dirt and motor fuel in their new album “Who We Are”, Lifehouse proves they can grind those guitars harder and talk about other things (try suicide and kidney transplants) apart from, you know, being “whipped.” Still, the record’s also got its share of ultra-introspective, emo-solemn ballads; the stuff that’ll get all the girls flinging their panties at the stage when the band comes to the Philippines “for the first time”, rocking the Araneta Coliseum on July 26. And hey, all those girls’ boyfriends might just be as enthusiastic as well.
You guys have been touring the US cities lately so it’s quite a trip you’re going all the way here.
I’ve been to the Philippines before but I was really young. I lived in Hong Kong for three years when I was seven, passing through the Philippines with my family, but this is definitely the first time the band is playing here and we’re really looking forward to it. Seems like we’ve got a pretty good following over there.
Yeah and people here know Lifehouse as a sort of flagship band for softies, which is a bit different from what you guys are now via Who We Are, your latest album, which packs-in harder rock with a little more grit. There’s even a song about some dude’s suicide…
I feel like we’re really comfortable with both at this point. You know, when “You and Me” came out, I think a lot of people wanted to pigeonhole us as just kind of like an acoustic rock band, but our roots from No Name Face on have always been more electric guitar-driven. But I kind of like the balance between both.
The third record really dealt with the falling-out that I had with my father that a lot of people perceived to be about a girl or whatever. And I kind of dealt with that and kind of moved on and didn’t really wanna write about that on this record. I feel like I’ve always written what I know—whatever’s going on in my life—and I feel like I’m in a really comfortable place in my life right now with my relationships. But it’s almost like when you’re happy, these songs are kind of harder to write. You can write better songs when you’re falling apart and when you’re in a lot of pain, but, I don’t know, I’m starting to use other people’s lives as inspiration and you almost become an actor and start role-playing and trying to put yourself in different scenarios outside of your own life.
The song that talks about suicide is “The Joke,” which deals with the issue of kids getting bullied today and people not realizing how many commit suicide because of it. So I wanted to tackle something that I’ve never really written about and I had to write the song three different times, putting myself in the kid’s shoes and write it from his perspective before I really connected to it.
At least there’s an effort to stray from just being that band girlfriends listened to while their boyfriends approached your music with pitchforks and shovels—were you ever bothered by that?
(Laughs heartily) Our first single “Hanging by a Moment,” a lot of people didn’t realize it was a rock song first—that it was number one in alternative radio for, like, eight weeks. And then it crossed over to Top 40 and I think all the little girls got really excited about it, which turned off the guys. But over the years, we’ve never changed our sound to appeal to anybody. We’ve just kind of written our songs and got the crowd wanting to come to our shows and it feels like guys now aren’t so much ashamed to say that they really like Lifehouse.
And if it wasn’t for “Hanging by a Moment,” we probably wouldn’t have a record deal right now and I’d probably be working at Dunkin Donuts (laughs). I feel like it was a blessing and a curse. It took us eight years to kind of get beyond “the band that sings ‘Hanging by a Moment’” and it’s been a long, uphill climb, but I feel like I gotta have respect for that song ‘cause it definitely got us out of being a bar band or whatever. But at the same time, it was kind of hard ‘cause people didn’t even know the name Lifehouse. But if you’d sing “Hanging by a Moment,” they’d know the song.
Was slapping on the guy-liner a conscious effort at changing your image a bit?
(Laughs) That was just for that one video! (the vid for “Blind”) Kind of like an art piece or whatever. You won’t be seeing me in guy-liner at the show!
Is there some ritual that gets you so damn in touch with your emotions? I have this image of you looking wistfully across a lake when you write these songs.
(Laughs) Well if I did have a ritual, I feel like it wouldn’t really work. I have a songwriting style that’s so random, like, a lot of the time, I don’t really sleep a lot during the night—I just get woken up by a thought or an idea and I write a lot of my songs at three or four in the morning. I’m always listening to the older ‘60s stuff like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The Beatles are my all-time favorite band. I feel like they wrote some of the best songs that can never be duplicated. That time so much inspired me—so I’m always listening to that.
Then again, Zeppelin was the sort of band you knew trashed their hotel rooms and diddled their groupies. I have a feeling that with Lifehouse—not so much. How do you guys not live that sort of rock star high life?
Well, a lot of us are family men, you know. I’ve been married for eight years and Rick has been with his girl for, like, seven years. And Bryce and Ben are single so they kind of do their thing. So I feel like we’ve got a good balance since [Rick and I] are like the anchors of the band, keeping this thing going for a little over 10 years now. I feel like we’re the responsible leaders and it makes room for everyone to have a good, healthy time.
Our band is really tight-knit so on days off or whatever on the road, we always end up at restaurants getting Mexican food and margaritas together or going to see movies. We’re all really good friends and we try to keep each other grounded and never become those unapproachable rock stars that feel like they’re better than everyone else.
Apart from settling in as responsible rock stars, your latest album is your first self-produced album. So now, you guys can pretty much play whatever the hell you want to play.
Absolutely. We wanted to cut the cord with preconceived notions with what kind of record Lifehouse should make on this one. And we wanted to make a record that was fun to play live, ‘cause we’re a band that lives out on the road, so writing just ballads isn’t really fun to play live. So that’s another reason why this record is a little more uptempo ‘cause we wanted it to be exciting in an energetic live show.
I feel like we’ve always been a band where we don’t wanna recreate the same record twice just ‘cause it was successful. We kind of took a risk on Stanley Climbfall, our second record, and that was a little heavier than the first one. It didn’t really do very well but I’m still proud of the fact that we tried something new and didn’t just write another Hanging by a Moment just to be successful. So when we get back in the studio, I wanna continue to grow and change and even lyrically, come up with new concepts.
You also mentioned in an interview that these days, you “don’t give a damn” so much. Were you referring to how Hanging by a Moment, with all its lash-batting introspection and being the most overplayed song of ’01, turned you guys into the poster babies of soft pop rock and how you don’t give a damn about that anymore?
I mean, as an artist I feel like, whenever you’re gonna write a song and put it out there for the world to criticize, you’re opening yourself up to becoming more vulnerable. And to be honest, when I started writing songs when I was 15, my ultimate goal wasn’t to get a record deal or get famous and make a lot of money. I needed to write these songs just ‘cause I was going through a hard time. And for me, making music and writing lyrics kind of gave me an outlet—almost like therapy, so when all this stuff started happening, it took me years to kind of get comfortable with it. I think I’m finally at a place in my life now where I’m comfortable performing live. I would get stage fright in the early days and feel really uncomfortable in front of the cameras and all that stuff. So it’s been one of those things where it’s been an eight-year transition for me to actually feel comfortable in my own skin. And I feel like, as a band, we’re getting to that place where we can just be ourselves and not really care what people think.
And also, getting successful is being able to go to places like the Philippines for five days or so, and places that we would never get to go to if we had a nine-to-five job. And I know the guys really feel the same way, so we’re looking to enjoy the culture over there and have a good life experience.
Lifehouse in Manila by Concertus Productions, brought to you by MCA Music, MTC Phils, NoCurfew, Gant Time. Co-presented by Tanduay rum, Clear for Men, SM Mall of Asia, Discovery Suites, Chrysler, Global Destiny Cable, Azta Urban Salon, Figaro, ETC., Jack TV, 2nd Avenue and Crime and Suspense.
Source: www.lifehouse.com
By: Gracey 99.5
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