Darren King Bares His Odd Soul: An Interview by Craig Zirpolo

After a lively game of phone tag with Warner Bros. Records, I was lucky enough to catch up with Darren King, drummer for Grammy-nominated act Mutemath. Once we had exchanged greetings and discussed the nuances of touring in the South, Darren and I got down to business, discussing Mutemath’s new album, Odd Soul, out October 4th, as well as their “reintroduction” tour, lineup changes, and new additions to the family…

Craig Zirpolo: How have the early dates on the Odd Soul Introduction tour treated you thus far?

Darren King: I’m in heaven to be honest with you. This is what I love to do.

That’s great to hear! With the fresh face of Odd Soul and Greg Hill (former Mutemath guitarist) departing last year, has your approach to touring and recording changed at all?

Paul (Meany, vocalist/keyboardist) and I both sat down at the beginning of recording and had a couple of serious conversations. One of them was about how everything was feeling old and it was time to change in some way. We really wanted to retain the things that we love about what we did. We’ve always been proud of our live show; we don’t always have great shows but we do work hard to have a good show. That is the pinnacle of what we do; everything we do is centered on what we do live. We wanted to make a record that reminded us of our live show. On albums what’s happening now is that our song writing is catching up with our live show, and we’re writing our songs for the live show.

There aren’t many groups today who put so much effort into their live performance, so it is always great to see true performers at work. Do you feel that being centered in New Orleans has had any effect on your emphasis on live music, versus many other large groups focusing on increased production and treatment in-studio?

New Orleans has affected each of us differently because we came into there at different times. Paul was raised there and he got to go to NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) which is just ridiculous…he also grew up resenting tourist side of it. Roy (Mitchel-Cárdenas, bassist) moved down to New Orleans to go to (Loyola University New Orleans) to study music. That was a really great place for Roy; he got to hear a lot of great music for the first time. Paul and Roy met playing music in the French Quarter, so New Orleans brought us all together.

After moving to New Orleans, did your approach to music change at all?

I’ve loved music all my life, but meeting Paul and Roy gave me a whole world of music that I hadn’t heard before. They were the ones who got me into sampling and programming and all that stuff. In terms of New Orleans, when I discovered The Meters what I felt like I found was the starting place of why rhythm got so good. American music owes The Meters really big!

Before Mutemath what were your roots in music? Was there any particular source of inspiration or was it more of a general appreciation?

Where I learned to play music and where live, music [that] became so meaningful to me came through revival services in churches that would go on for three or four hours. I was actually a part of a revival at my church where we would have church ten weeks straight, six nights a week, and then twice on Sundays with only Saturday off. Church was about a 45 mile drive for my mom and I and we went every day. I look back on that and that was one of the most meaningful times in my life, and that was when they started to let me play drums. The louder I played, the faster I played, the longer I played, the more people appreciated it. And they cheered me on because there was this emotional thing with all of us getting hyped up and sweating and shouting and dancing and I look back on it now and that’s where church helped me. I learned how to feel it. I learned how to listen to other musicians and the audience.

Your portrayal of religion and its role in your lives has always been very honest, so honestly speaking, what were the negative sides of your upbringing in the church?

[The negative side] has a lot to do with growing up in this scene that is really prevalent in Middle America where church is everything. Kids often grow up being hyper religious and they can’t get really far. The documentary Jesus Camp, that was us. That’s our story and that’s what we have to talk about, what happens to those kids when they grow up. There is good to it and there is bad to it, and you wouldn’t know that unless you were there in that scene. That’s where Odd Soul comes in, because we feel like we’re so weird and we have the weirdest stories and weirdest experiences.

On the note of Odd Soul, tell me a little bit about how it was working without Greg Hill in the studio. Are there any definite shifts in the lyrics or music without his input?

I think that there’s a big change both in the style and especially in the lyrics. Our new member, Todd (Gummerman, guitarist), didn’t come around until after recording, so he didn’t have anything to do with the song writing. But Greg leaving certainly had everything to do with the approach to the new music, mainly in that it made us grateful. I woke up that day not having a clue that all of it and I thought that things were going pretty well. I thought things were going better than ever but what happened was that he was just resigned and worn out. And when he left I realized that at any moment I would not get to play with this band any more. It is an honor to do this, and I didn’t feel anywhere close to being done with this. I didn’t feel like I had said it all or said enough. It made us grateful and we learned not to beat each other up. Sometimes we would get too worried or too uptight about certain things trying to make it better and we learned how to stop doing that.

In terms of a general theme for the album, what does Odd Soul mean to you? Where would you place it in the Mutemath catalogue?

On Odd Soul we learned how to write songs from a different perspective. The first album was very optimistic and very naive in a way, and I like it. The second album is very pessimistic and jaded…angry at God, angry at the world, all about break-up. And then this third one means more to me because of those first two. I feel like it’s coming from a perspective that has gone through both naivety and being jaded and now there is a balance. Lyrically we talk a lot about our personal struggles with faith, trying really hard not to cop out. We try not to resign to easy answers that don’t really work. We’re trying to talk about our faith and hope as well as the need for those things, while wrestling these things that we really frustrate us about our church and ourselves.

Holding yourselves to higher standards than most in terms of living up to your live show, how does the recording process reflect the sweat and energy of the stage performance? Is it a much easier process or does it bring with it its own set of hurdles?

Recording a record and making twelve or thirteen songs that you’re proud of and that are a revelation, are unique, and contribute something to a genre of music where the bar has been set pretty high is tough enough on its own, and that’s the right level of difficulty. There’s no need to add any unnecessary pressure from anyone else or money pressure or to try to impress a certain person or anything like that. We just about killed ourselves making the second record. When I listen to the second record I’m proud of it. The more that I hear it, the more I hear us freaking out. I hear us trying too hard and worrying. I’m glad that that all got put into the record but when I look at it and I listen to how much time, money, and concern went into it I feel a little bit ripped off. We pushed ourselves too hard.

Has Odd Soul been the same uphill battle for you?

This was, despite all that [general recording issues], the least depressed I’ve gotten during recording. The idea is that you’re making your life inconvenient to make something good for people to hear. There is suffering for it for sure. It gets lonely, but it was manageable this time. I didn’t feel like we were gonna fall off the deep end … a big part of it is that two of our band members have babies. We can’t afford to waste time and whatever we’re working on we have to make it matter. This time we did it a better way. We isolated ourselves and we didn’t have a producer. Even the guy that produced our second record got so worn out that he told us we had to start producing ourselves. We shouldn’t be paying somebody to dilute what we do.

Self-production certainly cuts out the middle man, but sometimes artists inflate their ego when all of the power is in their hands. What keeps you guys in check when stress sets in and emotions are running high?

Paul has an amazing capacity for self-honesty. We’ve gotten really good at a project where we switch roles. The idea is that one person is the one who is doing most of the grunt work and the other person is out so they don’t get worn out. And then towards the end of the project the person who is not worn out has to be really careful to say ‘hey, that verse is a little boring still’ or the general ‘I hate to be that guy but…’ then five minutes later we accept it. We did that for our video for “Blood Pressure” and I was the one who was working on it for hours a day and the last two days were spent with me playing the video for Paul and Roy… and every time they were right.

As well as producing your own music you guys also are very adamant about interaction with your fan base. Has social networking been a blessing for you for that fact or is there a hidden evil within?

I’m a very sociable guy and for me the joy of all the digital interaction is getting to see the face of people who like our music. And I love getting their feedback and their opinions. I also like it for the entertainment. I have started using Instagram and uploading photos on tour and it’s a nice hobby. It’s nice to share what our experience is like. The thing I hate … is people treating what they say online as not being real. I think that words are words and they don’t lose their power just because they are digitized. I don’t know how that’s ever going to be remedied. I got picked on a lot as a kid. I got set on fire in school and got kneed in the gut all the time because I’m a weird kid. I’m really worried about kids now and I’m really glad I didn’t grow up in that time.

End Transmission

Mutemath’s Odd Soul is out Oct. 4th on Teleprompt Records/Warner Bros. Records
Above photo courtesy of MTV.com