Marcus Kagler: I’m going to ask you some questions you’ve probably been asked a thousand times before but we’ve got to get it on record.

Judah Nagler: No, I haven’t had sex with Michael Douglas.

Josh Staples: I have. [all laugh] And with Kirk Douglas...and their wives.

Judah Nagler: He’s a playa-playa!

Marcus Kagler: So I guess the first question is: you can’t have a shiner [Nagler has an awesome black eye] without saying how you got it. Where did that come from?

Judah Nagler: This is actually my first shiner.

Marcus Kagler: Oh yeah? Congratulations

Judah Nagler: Yeah.

Marcus Kagler: You look like a guy who gets into a lot of fights.

Judah Nagler: Sweet!

Marcus Kagler: Did you go to the hospital?

Judah Nagler: No, we just kept playing. It was our last song. If they [the audience] had caught me we would have kept playing but oh well.

Logan Whitehurst: The song just kept building and building then I saw Judah fly into the audience and disappear. The guitar just suddenly stopped but we finished the song and I had to ask the audience if he was dead because he didn’t stand up.

Marcus Kagler: Where were you playing at?

Judah Nagler: We were at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. Kind of a home area show, but it was so loud. The place was packed. I figured I might as well try to jump out onto the people but they all parted.

Beginnings and Other Bands
Marcus Kagler: So how did you meet and where did you form and all that jazz?

Judah Nagler: Logan and I started the thing out on our own while we were in another band. Basically the story goes we started recording stuff on our own without the rest of the other band because we weren’t having as much input as we would have liked or whatever. We wrote some songs and uhhh....I guess the important part is when Josh joined and we became a three piece. But we had all known each other through playing with previous bands.

Marcus Kagler: Where was this at?

Judah Nagler: In Senoma County. In the Santa Rosa area.

Marcus Kagler: So what were some of the bands you guys were in before? What kind of music were you playing?

Logan Whitehurst: Oh it was basically a pop band with lots of effects pedals and things.

Marcus Kagler: It just wasn’t really your cup of tea?

Judah Nagler: It was for awhile.

Logan Whitehurst: They were a pretty good band so it wasn’t that bad....Musical FamiliesMarcus Kagler: Did you guys grow up with musical influences in your families? Or did music sort of grab you at some point and time?

Judah Nagler: My dad listened to The Police a bit and stuff like that when I was growing up. That and like the 1812 Overture. He bought a CD player when they first came out and it was like a huge stereo that rattled the windows, but I didn’t start getting into rock n’roll until my best friend at the time showed me Nirvana and stuff like that.

Logan Whitehurst: Pretty much everybody in my family plays music. I grew up around a piano and pretty much all of my sibling's right now are doing something musical. My parents...my dad plays the guitar and my aunt is a performing musician and artist. My family has always been really supportive of doing things creatively and artistically and just doing what you want to do.

Marcus Kagler: What about you?

Josh Staples: When I grew up my parents had a piano and they used to play music together. I just learned from playing along as I listened to records. I kind of started by playing in a couple of cover bands for a long time. Making A Living

Marcus Kagler: So are you guys making a living at being in the band yet? Judah Nagler: Not really a living. These two guys have day jobs. I have a girlfriend. [everybody laughs] I’m sure as the momentum picks up the band will start sustaining itself you know. I guess as far as financing goes that’s the goal there. It’s a long haul before that happens. It’s a lot of waiting and working. Studio Time Judah Nagler: We tried to keep it pretty true to the live performance on the record just for expediency’s sake because we didn’t have much time in the studio. We had a week. We tracked over six days. Josh Staples: Did all the vocals in three days. Judah Nagler: Yeah, all the vocals in three days. Mixed for two days and that was it. It was roughly a week and then it was out of our hands. That’s why I’m especially proud to hear people say it sounds like there are more people playing on it than there actually were. Logan Whitehurst: At the same time we tried to remain loyal to how we played it, but still have some over dubs to fill out the sound.

Chris Walla
Marcus Kagler: So how was Chris Walla as a producer? What did he add to your sound in the studio?

Judah Nagler: Well, a lot of mic-ings. He especially added a lot in the mixes. We tracked it like we normally would and then he would do his magic.

Marcus Kagler: Did you record it live?

Josh Staples: Well, you can’t because the studio is just one room.

Judah Nagler: Chris definitely has his own sound too when it comes to recording. I used Chris’s guitar for the recording because my guitar uses a digital amp and we were recording on analogue equipment.

Writing Songs
Marcus Kagler: What’s your songwriting process like? Do you guys just jam out and see what becomes of it or does someone bring in whole songs? How does it work?

Logan Whitehurst: It seems to be a mix of song writing techniques. Sometimes we’ll all sit in our practice space and play some music and figure things out as far as parts. Then usually Judah will take it away and add a melody and slap some lyrics on it. Sometimes he’ll write a whole song and he’ll come to the band with it almost completed or sometimes totally completed.

Judah Nagler: I’m not the only one who does that though. Logan wrote the first song on the album.

Marcus Kagler: Are you [Judah] pretty much the lyric writer?

Judah Nagler: Except for the first one.

Marcus Kagler: How do you usually go about writing your lyrics? Do you keep notebooks full of stuff or...?

Judah Nagler: Not really. I go through about six different versions of lyrics for a song normally. Sometimes there’s just words right away and it’s great, but I usually sing gibberish to whatever we’re working on and then try and take those syllables phonetically and try and flesh them out. See whatever my subconscious is trying to get out. That’s something Logan suggested I do when we first started out. But usually I’m not happy until I’ve rewritten it and rewritten it and rewritten it. Yeah, that’s usually the process. It’s a painstakingly long process and I’m really self critical so I’ll work on something until I’m happy with it.

Marcus Kagler: Did you write this album pretty quickly? This full length?

Judah Nagler: Portions of it were written pretty fast. Some songs are very old. Like “Prize Fighter” is about three years old by now, but the lyrics were changed right before we recorded it. I actually didn’t really want to record that song but Josh and Logan were pushing for it so I was like, “Well, O.K. Let me re-write the lyrics for it.” Other songs like “Caspian Can Wait” were written in like a day, not the lyrics but the music. Sometimes it goes quickly. Sometimes it’s painstakingly long. Sometimes its months.

Influences
Marcus Kagler: So what were some of your guys’ early influences?

Judah Nagler: They’ve really changed for me over the years. My tastes changed more when I started writing music. I started out listening to like at the earliest The Police like I said. But later on it was like Nirvana and Primus and ska bands when I was 16 or 17. I got more into Bjork a lot and now I listen to more things like Squarepusher and Talk Talk. They’re my favorite band ever. But I haven’t really been enjoying listening to bands a lot these days. I mean, I do especially when we are playing with them cause that’s the best time to listen to bands. But do I really look for new bands? No, not really.

Josh Staples: When I was growing up it was all Prince, and the Cure, New Order and things like that. Then more punk bands as I got into High School like No Means No and more darker kinds of punk bands. Now I pretty much listen to everything.

Marcus Kagler: Is there a favorite band you’re listening to now? Josh Staples: Yeah, Party of Helicopters from Kent, Ohio are probably my favorite band. Marcus Kagler: What about you? Logan Whitehurst: I’m really into a lot of weird underground stuff like The Beatles and Tom Waits. [all laugh] I’ve kind of got the standard list of influences for a musician, but it’s really hard to say. I mean, right now I listen to what I consider to be weird almost mainstream stuff. Most are bands people have already heard of like They Might Be Giants, Stereolab, and Tom Waits and all that stuff. Not as many people actually listen to them though. I don’t know what kind of credibility that gives me. Judah Nagler: I really like what these guys bring on tour. I’ve kind of just...I always forget to bring CD’s along.

Songs
Marcus Kagler: I wanted to ask about some of the songs. I would like to ask about all of them, but that would obviously be ridiculous. So let’s start with “A Special Gift to You”. How did that song come about? What’s it’s story?

Logan Whitehurst: I wrote that song about a girl I knew who lived in London. She was pretty far away and we had this sort of failed stop and start relationship. I played that song for Judah, or my recording of it, and I figured that’s about as far as it was going to go...just that recording I did on my own. But Judah really liked it so he adapted it to play.

Marcus Kagler: So how did the song “Radiapathy” come about?

Judah Nagler: That was one we actually wrote in practice. It was after we played “Into the Open” and Logan just sort of kept that beat and we played that song pretty much the whole we through in that one take. You know that one riff, [sings the catchy riff]. We pretty much played it really roughly the first time through and it took a little while to write the lyrics. But that song just kind of appeared.

Marcus Kagler: Now you guys have a lot of vocal parts within the songs. Is that something that is delegated or is it something that just comes together?

Judah Nagler: If we get ideas for it we put it in and if not we don’t. [they laugh]

Marcus Kagler: Probably my favorite song on the record is the last song, “Death”. I don’t know why it’s just very pretty and epic and inspiring. How did that one come about?

Judah Nagler: That one I pretty much wrote by myself at home. I was kind of hesitant about it at first because I thought it sounded too much like that one Depeche Mode “Somebody” song on 101. You know the one where Martin Gore sings, “I want somebody to share/share the rest of my life...” [all laugh]

Marcus Kagler: You know I never would have thought of that until you said it.

Judah Nagler: Yeah. Just because it has that piano melody.

Logan Whitehurst: I liked that song right when I heard it. It’s really great.

Josh Staples: I knew that was a Velvet Teen song as soon as I heard it.

New Material
Marcus Kagler: So have you been working on new material or are you just concentrating on touring behind the new record?

Judah Nagler: We’ve got two new songs that we’ll be playing tonight. They’re both piano songs. We’ll have more guitar-orientated songs for the new album but right now we’re just kind of taking a rest from writing for now. We’re kind of working on different things. I’m personally doing this solo electronic sort of thing so I’m working on finishing that before we start recording new material.

The First EP
Marcus Kagler: Now I just wanted to touch on the EP you guys put out. Were the tracks on there just early demos or something?

Judah Nagler: The first three were the first recordings we had done as a group. The one’s, like tracks four onto the end were things I had recorded. The electronic things were stuff I had recorded on a sequencer. Others were stuff Logan had recorded. It was kind of an in-between point where Logan and I were still recording things on four track before we built it into an actual band. It was kind of a gestation point before we had figured out what we really wanted to do.

Marcus Kagler: Yeah, I’ve heard it a few times but when I first heard it I thought, “O.K. This thing is all over the place.” Then I heard the album and I thought, “O.K. They obviously found what they were looking for by this point.”

Judah Nagler: Yeah that’s pretty much true. I’m still pretty proud of the first three songs on there. I can appreciate the rest of it but not really.

Marcus Kagler: Do you still play any of those songs live or do you just concentrate on the Fierce Parade material?

Judah Nagler: We play the first three every now and then. Actually the first and the second one, but not really the other ones.

The Band Name
Marcus Kagler: How did you get the name, The Velvet Teen?...Not plural.

Judah Nagler: I just thought it was...

Josh Staples: Clever?

Judah Nagler: I don’t know if it’s that clever. [all laugh] But it’s just a play on words I was fond of. It’s kind of based on the Velveteen Rabbit story. The children’s story where it had to be burned before it could become real. I don’t know. People can read and take whatever they want from what we’re doing.

Comments on Comparisons
Marcus Kagler: So I’ve played your record for some friends of mine and they’ve compared you guys to Jeff Buckley, Sigur Ros, Radiohead and stuff like that.

Judah Nagler: I was definitely influenced by Radiohead. Probably early Television too. Jeff Buckley I actually found out about after we started playing out. I remember a friend of mine coming up to me once and saying, “I guess you’re going to get married to Jeff Buckley now.” You know, just joking around. And I was like, “Jeff Buckley?” She was like, “You’ve haven’t heard him?” and I said, “No.” Real interesting story. [we all laugh] So then I went out and heard him and that was that.

Marcus Kagler: On some tracks your voice is eerily similar to his. It can be uncanny.

Judah Nagler: Well, we have similar voices.

Marcus Kagler: Yeah, you guys have the same register really.
Judah Nagler: Yeah, and that’s why the comparisons are happening. We’ve gotten Muse a couple of times but that’s just because....actually, I don’t even know. Whatever. I’m surprised we haven’t gotten Sigur Ros more often. There’s only a certain amount of people who sing in falsetto these days. Jeff Buckley had a great voice, you know. I actually had a weird thing with one of his songs because I was working on a guitar part and it turned out to be exactly like one of his songs but I’d never heard it before. It was a little creepy.

Silly Questions
Marcus Kagler: Any of you guys have dreams or recurring nightmares?

Logan Whitehurst: I have weird dreams about tornadoes. You know, tornadoes outside the house or destroying the house. Sometimes they’re huge and menacing and sometimes they’re tiny little things. I was having a nightmare the night before we left for Seattle to start the tour, but I can’t remember what it was because I was woken up in the middle of it. A string on my guitar, which was just sitting against the wall, broke in the middle of the night at like 4 o’clock in the morning. I mean, it’s hanging on the wall next to my bed and I’m having this nightmare then all of a sudden, PANG! It woke me up. It was weird.

Josh Staples: I have dreams about CD manufacturing. I don’t know why. I also have dreams about computers. I hate computers. My wife and I work on computers all day long.

Judah Nagler: I have a recurring dream about getting shot in the face. Marcus Kagler: Really? Because I have a recurring dream about getting shot in the head actually. It’s from my own perspective and I’m in the process of dying. It’s really strange but I always wake up before I die. Judah Nagler: I had a dream that my girlfriend died because one of my best friends had killed her. Then in my dream she came to me in a dream and showed me the incision mark where the guy had cut her on her head and it was all puffed up and scarred and she didn’t have hair in that area. She was telling me how it happened. Then I’m in my house and a bunch of people are asking me to say some final words about her and I just kind of broke down crying. Then I woke up with tears in my eyes and immediately called my girlfriend. That’s a little bit depressing.

Check out the band’s record label at: www.slowdance.com
Check out the band’s own site at: www.thevelvetteen.com

Coming Soon: MP3’s of “A Special Gift To You” and “Radiapathy.” Watch this space!