Interviewer: Natalie Richard
MuchMusic
August 29, 1995
(sitting in open window at street level with small crowd looking on)
Nat: We have the pleasure of having Kevin and Jeff from Moist with us today. How're you doing, guys?
K & J: Fine, really good.
Nat: You've been on the road for a long time, long, long time.
Kevin: Essentially two and a half years with very few breaks.
Nat: Do you have a life still? (laughs)
Jeff: We're going to find out, actually; we're going back to Vancouver in about two weeks, and we'll find out if anything that we had then when we left is still around now.
Nat: So you had an amazing success with your first record; every- thing happened really fast for you guys; do you feel like you have changed a lot in the last two years?
Kevin: We changed over the course of time just having travelled so much, and you lose a sense of who you are as an individual, and you start to think of yourself as being just part of the band, part of this group of people. It's "we" all the time, never "I"; there's no privacy. So we've changed.
Nat: You don't hate each other yet?
Jeff: No, not yet. We're still working on that still.
Nat: What about you, do you feel like--do you agree with what he's saying?
Jeff: Yeah, I think it's, uh, I mean, essentially we're pretty much the same people we were when we started out. It happened pretty quickly for us, but it was very gradual at the same time.
Nat: And you've been touring (?) for years.
Jeff: Yeah. And we were there every day; we saw everything happen one day at a time, and uh, so you don't really notice the changes so much. It's just when you kind of step back and take a look at your life now as opposed to your life two years ago that you realize there's been some marked improvement, so--or some changes anyway.
Nat: So you're working on your second record for a while now. So I guess we'll feel a little bit of that, these two years, in there.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure. Hopefully it's not going to be a record about the road. We hope that we're not just gonna be rewriting "Running on Empty" or something like that.
Nat: Well, you've been through a lot of experience.
Kevin: I'm sure a lot of that will get in there, but it won't be specifically about the road.
Nat: How do you feel the road has influenced you, this record or what you've expreienced; do you find that you have time to start writing about stuff like that?
Jeff: Yeah, I think the main thing is that you kind of realize when you travel around the world, you see a lot of people and you spend a lot of time in different cultures and that kind of thing. We've spent a lot of time in England; we spent about four months there this year. And you sort of, you come to this different sort of understanding about, about just how small the world is really and about how, no matter where you go, people are basically the same type of people everywhere, and places are basically the same type of places everywhere, just in a different kind of spot than you're used to, so...It makes the whole thing seem a bit smaller.
Nat: Is it going to have, like, an international flavour?
Kevin: We've, we've heard a lot of music, from tapes that people fire at us from the audience when we're playing a show to, you know, music that you just luck into in a club somewhere wherever you happen to be. In Britain, we'd go off to a club, hear a band, see what's going on. So there will be a lot of new influences in there because we're always collecting those influences, cataloguing them, seeing what happens and everything. It'll be interesting to see how it comes out in the writing process and the studio.
Jeff: We also had a songwriting break in Thailand as well, so there'll be a lot, a little bit of Thai music happening in there.
Kevin: Very laid back music.
Nat: There must be so much pressure for you now since like the first record was so popular and happened so fast. Do you feel, do you get pressure or something?
Jeff: I don't think we really, we're not really giving ourselves time to think about that. People are always talking about how the second record is, you know, the hardest to make and that you have your entire lives to make the first record and then only six months to make the second one, or whatever. But, you know, we're just doing, we're doing what we do and we're doing what we do every day. We write songs and writing songs was never really a chore for us at all. So I don't think--we just want to make a good record. We're not really too concerned about the hows and the whys of it.
Kevin: I think everybody's pretty much focused right now on getting off the road. We have one week left. We have three shows. We're counting down. We're looking forward to some down time and some time off, getting back to writing, making some new material to play live.
Jeff: We're looking forward to playing today, too; we haven't played Toronto in a while, so...
Nat: You're playing, they're playing tonight at the CNE. (to the crowd) Are you guys gonna be there?
Crowd: Yeah!
Nat: And tomorrow night in Montreal.
(David and Mark come up behind Jeff and Kevin; David licks Jeff's ear)
Nat: Oh, I was just gonna ask, where are the other guys? How are ya?
Mark: Good.
Nat: Yeah, good, so welcome. Yeah, so everybody's here, everybody's happy and three more days to go on the road.
David: Are you coming tonight?
Nat: Uh...sure!
Kevin?: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nat: How many shows of you guys did I see?
Jeff: A lot.
Nat: You know what, you're nominated for a People's Choice award, too.
Kevin?: Yeah. So we'll be back ________ .
Nat: Are you gonna be in Paris?
David: Yeah, you wanna come?
Nat: (laughing) Oh, anyways, what else did I want to say? Okay, so you guys are nominated for the People's Choice award for the Much Music Video Awards that are happening September 28th in, uh, on Much Music. And you're playing Montreal tomorrow night at the Metropolis? And what's the third date?
K & J: Tuktoyaktuk.
Nat: Oh yeah! Have you ever been up there?
Kevin: No. It's not on the usual touring _____ .
Nat: And you're playing with Hole...
K & J: Metallica
Jeff: And Veruca Salt.
Nat: So is that cool, did you meet these bands before?
Kevin: Not yet.
Jeff: We actually, we met Metallica a couple of days ago in Birmingham in England. No one spoke to them except our stage manager who went and had some words with James Sutfield (?) but, you know, they seem like pretty regular people as well.
Nat: Alright, I wish you all the best, and come back with your second record. When do you think, are like you almost done, when do you think this is gonna be ready?
Jeff: Sometime early in the new year, probably February.
Nat: That fast, yeah. Good luck and have a good time. Thanks for dropping by. Oh, you had a request video.
Jeff: Oh yeah, we wanted to year, or we want to see, "red" by treble charger. They're playing with us tonight.