Near the end of last month, I had the opportunity to catch up with Jesse Smith, founder of the Atlanta-based band Gentleman Jesse and His Men.
Check out the interview below! For more on the band, visit
http://www.myspace.com/gentlemanjesse.
Max Blau: Since you’re obviously the frontman for Gentleman Jesse and His Men, how does the creative process within the band work? Do you do most of the writing for all the parts, or is it more collaborative?
Jesse Smith: Basically I come up with the songs, and then try and let the band do what they think is right...and if it’s not going right, then I go ‘let’s try it this way.’ With the new members of this band, it’s been a little more [collaborative], as opposed to me going to the 4-track and recording everything by myself, before being like ‘ok guys, here’s the song’
MB: So you started it initially as your own project, and then brought in a backing band behind you?
JS: Sort of, it was never going to be a solo thing, but I just write all the songs. But more and more, instead of doing the 4-track thing, it’s been a little bit more organic, where I’ll play through a song…and here’s the general idea of it, and then we work on it a little more as a group, so that’s been cool.
MB: Without using genre labels, how do you describe your music to people that haven’t heard of your music?
JS: I usually say that it’s kind of got a British-invasion vibe filtered through Punk Rock. If The
Ramones were trying to play The Beatles.
MB: How did you get together the people who make up “His Men”? How did the lineup form?
JS: Me and Dave, the drummer, have been playing together for years. We were in Carbonas together. And I was like “I’m going to start another thing, but I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And he said “well I’ll play the drums.” And then, my old bass player moved to New York, and my old guitar player moved to Australia. So I knew Adrian, my guitar player now, for a long time. He played in The Hiss, and I knew he could sing and play guitar. Warren, my new bass player…we toured together and stuff like that—so I’ve known Warren for a long time too. And he never played bass in a band before, and was like “Hey man I’ll do it.” I knew he could sing and play too.
MB: At this point of time, are you still playing in Carbonas?
JS: No. I won’t say that we’ll never play again. But we’re just not doing it. We played our last show in July, I think. No, August.
MB: Describe your experience between the two.
JS: Carbonas were pretty wild, we were known for being pretty wild. So I’ll say that when Carbonas would come to town to play shows, that people weren’t as eager to give us a place to stay, and with Gentleman Jesse, people think that we are nice houseguests.
MB: The name helps, how did you decide on that name? Is it as simple as it seems, or is there a story behind the name?
JS: There’s a Carbonas 7” where our singer Greg came up names for everybody. Like our guitar Clay was ‘Claydolph Hipster’, and Greg was ‘Atilla the Hump’, and he put me as ‘Gentleman Jesse Gentile.’ And I couldn’t think of a better band name.
MB: As you’ve started to play larger shows, with The Black Lips or SXSW, has there been a moment in time, and thought to yourself that this is getting bigger than you ever expected it to be?
JS: Every time people watch us, it’s bigger than I expected it to be. It’s been constantly that, but evolving.
MB: What’s been the most memorable part since you have been starting to get press and touring with larger bands?
JS: Well even before we were getting press, necessarily, like we went on our first tour when our first 7” came out, and people were singing along to the couple of songs off that 7,” which was pretty remarkable to me. Press—I take it or leave it—I don’t give a shit as long as people are listening, you know what I mean? I guess there has been a couple of key things that brought us to another group…I always look at people who ask us to be friends on MySpace, and it used to be that [these] people used to be ‘we like The Oblivions…, and Carbonas,’ and stuff I expected from people who sit in the same genre, and now it’s like ‘we like Wilco’ and stuff like that.
MB: People like Pitchfork?
JS: Yeah exactly…it’s the Pitchfork thing…which, Elvis [Costello] sold some mp3s.
MB: With your debut and only album so far, and the obvious homage to Elvis Costello, beyond him a particular influence on you, why did you choose that as opposed to another album cover?
JS: Well when we did that, we did a photo shoot. We just brought a bunch of different background colors, and I knew I wanted it to be just a picture of me and the band, with a background color, and for it not to say anything on the front. And there a bunch of different things I had thought of like the Nick Lowe –
Jesus of Cool record, Dave Edmunds -
Repeat When Necessary, and that one [Costello’s
This Year’s Model] all came out around the same time, and all had a similar look to it, and the Wreckless Eric LP (the first one). So we took all different pictures of me with a guitar…and that one came out the best. In hindsight, I like Elvis Costello just fine, but I don’t consider him one of the biggest influences for the band, it’s almost inappropriate to a certain degree. If I was going to have someone, I’d much rather pay homage to Wreckless Eric.
MB: So you would consider Wreckless Eric to be the primary influence for the band’s sound?
JS: No, there’s tons, the list goes on. I’m a huge record collector, I listen to all kinds of stuff. The basic idea for the band is just to have a hook. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s fast or slow or aggressive. Just as long as it has a hook
MB: Since you’re such a big collector, give me an artist from the past year that you have constantly had on repeat.
JS: White Wires, from Canada. We played a show in Toronto, and this girl came up to us and said ‘Hey my sister is in this band, she’s coming to see you tomorrow in Montreal, you’d probably like them.’ And you know you take that with a grain of salt when you’re on tour. I asked ‘well, do they have records? Have them bring us a record.” We got back from tour, and I listened to the record, and it was amazing. Plus they had only pressed 300 copies of it…they’re amazing, it’s like general melodic punk stuff but it has a 60’s songwriting vibe to it.
MB: Switching back, to before, and how you were commenting on people finding you from being fans like-minded punk rock from Atlanta and around here, do you consider yourself a big part of the collective of bands in the East Atlanta Village scene.
JS: Yeah.
MB: How do you think that has influenced your music, if at all? Being a part of the scene, as opposed to doing your own thing?
JS: I have a bigger pool of musicians around me. Well it’s not actually that big of a pool. I know that there it’s always different people I could play with for certain projects. I always wish there were more bands, it’s always exciting to have more bands, because it seems like every time that a band comes along from out of town, they don’t have as many options of bands to play with so a lot of bands have to overplay. We try to play once a month and we’re breaking that rule severely this month. Everyone else plays once a week, so it seems—GG King, and The Barreracudas, and Predator—they play every week. I hope it doesn’t kill the buzz.
MB: So you do see Gentleman Jesse touring full time in the future?
JS: I would love to quit working. But I’m not going to quit my life to tour. I’ll tour as much as can or need to, but I can’t be on the road ten months out of the year.
MB: Do you have any plans for Gentleman Jesse in terms of expanding your sound or repertoire? Other than musicians coming and going, do you see the band’s style changing in any way, shape, or form?
JS: There’s talk about adding some stuff, yeah. But it’s in the beginnings right now… Keyboards and what not, Piano and Organ... We’re trying to branch out a little bit. We’re working on our next LP, and the songwriting has evolved. It’s definitely the same thing, but it has evolved a little bit.
MB: Tell me about the next LP, when is that scheduled to be released?
JS: Everybody’s so busy all the time, and all the band members have different schedules, so it’s hard to get everybody together. The plan is to record twenty songs or so, and release another LP and a couple of singles, all at the same time.
MB: Have you started to record at all?
JS: Haven’t started recording, we did a couple of 4-track songs just to see how they came out. We have about ten songs that we have been playing live that we can bust out. But I have to teach them another ten.
MB: What’s your favorite song to perform live, or favorite song you have written, if any?
JS: On an energy level, the first song [“Highland Crawler”] on our LP is fun song to play. It’s got that slashing The Who guitar thing, it’s a good ‘get people pumped’ song. There’s also one’s I don’t thing translate well live, but I like playing them all pretty much. And you go through phases, too…”All I Need Tonight” and I got a song called “Careful What You Wish For” that’s fun to play.
MB: Do have any notable covers that you like to play in your live shows?
JS: We don’t usually have a ‘go-to’ cover. We learn stuff and forget it, you know. When we first started we did “Government Center” by The Modern Lovers quite a bit, and that was fun. We learned two songs for Halloween, we learned “Deanna” by Nick Cave and “I Walked with a Zombie” by Roky Erickson, and those were fun as well. So it’s in the time and place, but we usually don’t do covers that much.
Earlier today, NPR posted an exclusive stream of Spoon's upcoming album Transference, scheduled to be released on January 19th. With this album, Spoon's seventh studio album, the band continues to build a reputation as one of indie-rock's most consistent veterans. Transference is no exception--check it out in its entirety here.
