A Gentleman's Agreement: Mute Math

| Print Post This | Like (5) | Comments (0)

THE RECORDING PROCESS behind Mute Math's "Armistice" was an arduous one, but there was one moment where everything clicked.

Singer and keyboardist Paul Meany was sitting out on the porch of the band's New Orleans home studio talking to two Jehovah's Witnesses while the rest of the group jammed inside.

"All of a sudden I'm listening to the guy talking, and stopped paying attention," Meany recalled. "I do remember hearing this sort of Nickelodeon-on-crack guitar coming through the windows, and the bass and the drums and the whole house was shaking. That was it for me. I'm looking at the girl and I said, 'Man, do you feel that?' And she goes, 'That is a jam.'"

He cut off the Witnesses and went inside to write lyrics to the song.

"I didn't get my soul saved that day, but we definitely made a fan and a great song," he added.

Lyrically, "Backfire" ended up being indicative not of that period in the recording, but of the process leading up to that moment, which had the band at its breaking point.

"Please tell me, why are we trying so hard? / Why worry, it's over / We always fall right back to where we start," Meany sings. "There goes another one of our sure fire plans / It backfired again. / We try to feed through the best that we can / I bet it's gonna backfire again."

He couldn't have summed things up much better. Prior to recording "Backfire," the group had been struggling with the record, which they were self-producing. The foursome found themselves unhappy with the 16 or so songs they'd written during three years of near constant touring.

"We had [road-]tested them, which was even more of a head-trip," he said. "I knew there were songs you could record and wouldn't translate live, and that's fine. For the first time, I realized there are songs I could play live and couldn't translate to a record.

"Drummer Darren King even threw out the idea of breaking up.

"It paralyzed us," Meany said. "It wore us out. It got the point where we thought, 'If we don't like what we're doing, we shouldn't do this anymore.'"

So, after countless frustrations, the group deciding to bring in producer Dennis Herring who came up with a simple suggestion: start over.

Finally, an approach worked. The band focused on writing, Herring on producing. Only two songs from the previous sessions, "Lost Year" and "Pins and Needles" made the final cut.

"That was an extremely freeing time, that was at the peak of the roller coaster ride for us," Meany said of when the band recorded "Backfire." "That was a great time. We did about a four-week stretch of writing a song every other day."

As a result, the album certainly bears a sense of the frustration the band felt in recording. The title itself, "Armistice," implies a sort of gentleman's agreement after a long battle.

"Someone asked me if this was a political record at all and I don't think it is in the sense of world politics, but I think it is in the sense of inter-relation politics," Meany said. In the sense of people — you know of when to move forward and when to call it quits."

Meany knows those themes show up on the record, but he thinks of things more loosely.

"I don't think there was any way to describe that or pretend that it wasn't going on," he said. "It definitely crept in here and there. Some of the songs themselves served as the very means of therapy for getting us through this record.

"There's definitely frustrations, questions, uncertainty," he added. "There's definitely some playfulness too, some moments of not worrying about it at all. I like that balance and it seemed to be definitely true to the experience. That's what we wanted we wanted to do: make a record that's true to now."

» Sixth & I Synagogue, 600 I Street NW; with As Tall as Lions, Wed., Nov. 11, 8 p.m.; $20 in advance, $23 day-of-show; (202) 408-3100. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)>

Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Records