AWOLNATION: Mastering Impulses
When it comes to creating innovative sounds, the most creative artists will look back at what they’ve done over the years and consider what they already know works. There are several questions to consider like: did it feel right for them? Did they enjoy creating it, recording it, performing it? Did others connect with it? If the following questions result in a resounding yes, then artists will take that previous material, work and improve on it, and time and time again they’ll create something wonderful. For AWOLNATION, this is what their latest album, The Phantom Five represents.
In the words of founder and frontman, Aaron Bruno, it’s “a collection of ten songs that highlight every impulse and urge” that he’s learnt to master whilst in AWOLNATION and other music projects. We sat down with Bruno, a month following the release of the record, to speak about the ways he approaches writing music.
It’s a process that has remained relatively the same throughout his music career, outside of growing and maturing as a person that is bound to come as the years go by. He says, “at this point in my career, and certainly at this point in AWOLNATION’s journey, with it being the fifth record I think it’s only natural that it’ll be sort of a collection of different sounds, different feelings, of all the other records before that I’ve made, and hopefully a collection of parts and lyrics that will resonate with all of us in the long term. I’ve matured a bit, and I know when to throw a song in the trash and when to keep it on the record.”
Another way that The Phantom Five has been described is as an almost “greatest hits record”, a phrase that came from a personal hero that Aaron was fortunate enough to meet during the early years of being a musician. “I had met the late great Ric Ocasek from the band the CARS, one of my favourite bands. I had met him around 2000, 2001, sometime around then, when I was in a different band. We were making this demo in the studio, and I saw him walking by, and I knew he was working on the WEEZER Green Album which, if anyone doesn’t know, was their big return album after Pinkerton, that band dismantling and Rivers going into a bit of a dark hole for a little bit. They came back with the Green Album which was highly successful and really good. I remember asking Ric, ‘hey, what does the Green Album sound like?’ I was excited and nervous to talk to him, but I said, ‘hey, I’m a huge CARS fan, you’re working on the new WEEZER album, what does it sound like?’ He said to me, ‘it sounds like a greatest hits album, man’” just very calmly. And that stuck with me.”
“So, I guess this was my attempt at creating something like that,” Bruno continues. “If you were to discover a new band that maybe had multiple records and then they have that old black and white greatest hits album with, not only some of the songs that were the most popular, but maybe songs that the band themselves selected to be with that group. I wanted it to feel something like that.”
Earlier this year, AWOLNATION celebrated the 13th anniversary of their debut record Megalithic Symphony, an album that included the smash hit and breakthrough single Sail, a song that even those unfamiliar with the band will have heard through its constant use in film, TV and social media content. In a simple answer to the question of whether Bruno had expected such success with Sail, one word would be: “No.” In a longer answer he adds, “I didn’t even think that it would be a single or on the radio ever. It was just a song that I had thought was good. At best, I thought it was great, but I didn’t know it would go on to reach historical heights and influence other musicians and alternative music in general. I had no idea, because at that point in my career things weren’t looking great, so I had this new chance to release something I was proud of and I think at that point I just wanted to be able to have a cult following, or maybe have a couple hundred people come to a show across the country. And it surpassed my wildest expectations.”
In those thirteen years, it would be fair to state much has changed in the world, the main question would be what have been the main challenges and changes that Bruno has experienced both through AWOLNATION and on a personal level. He gives a very profound answer. “I would say that I’m still the same person, of course, but I think there’s been a lot of self-reflection and chipping away at other parts of my personality that I think could improve. It’s weird, this kind of success comes great responsibility, I want to be a better family person, singer-songwriter, and not let the people down who helped create this platform for me to thrive in. That’s important to me.”
“And I think I’m a little more of an optimistic person than I once was because I’ve seen so many different doors open when I least expected it, and if I look back to some of the lowest points leading up to this launch, it feels like there was always a guiding light of sorts steering me one way or the other. Whether maybe a fork in the road, and it may have been more tempting to take a left turn, and I had veered a little right, or veered a little left when right looked better. I can’t really explain that other than it was instinctual, and it got me to this place. I think the moral of my story is to never give up hope if you feel like it’s something you truly understand and have given your life to, and that’s what music was to me.”
The Phantom Five is out now via Better Noise Music. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS115 here:
For more information on AWOLNATION like their official page on Facebook.