Web Exclusive: A conversation with Plain White T's' Tom Higgenson

Posted by Scott Heisel on 24-Sep-08 @ 09:26 AM

You don't need to be familiar with anything remotely "alternative" to know PLAIN WHITE T'S by now--unless the roof of your house is the cozy underside of a boulder. Last year, the Chicago-based band went beyond TRL success and became radio staples with their Grammy-nominated acoustic hit, "Hey There Delilah." You couldn't go grocery shopping without hearing frontman Tom Higgenson's earnest voice ringing out over aisles of Pringles and Easy Mac. Earlier this week, the band released Big Bad World, their new album on Hollywood Records--though it should be noted that the album it follows, 2006's Every Second Counts, only included "Hey There Delilah" as a bonus track on the reissue that was released after the song's success. Whether or not Big Bad World will help the T's escape the shadow cast over them by "Delilah" remains to be seen, but as Brian Shultz's conversation with Higgenson reveals, the band are hopeful and ambitious enough to push forward in more ways than one.

How tremendous was the pressure from the label to turn out a single as big as "Hey There Delilah"?
You know what? There wasn't any, to be honest with you. I'm sure there was internally at the label, but I didn't really feel it. Writing songs on the road, on tour--I would always write songs. Usually, I'd sit at home in my basement writing songs or something. But this time around I knew we were gonna go pretty much straight in the studio after touring on [Every Second Counts]. So I tried to push myself to write on the road, on airplanes, on the back of the tour bus, in hotel rooms... So I pretty much had the whole record written before going into the studio. We didn't really deal [with advice from] anyone at the label too hardcore [in regards to the songs] musically, or artistically, except for our A&R guy. He's a big fan of the band; he's a great friend of ours. Working with him, he kind of put his say into the songs--gave his opinion on which [parts] he liked, or things like that. But for the most part, as a band, we made the album that we wanted to make and that we all believed in. We got the A&R guy to definitely believe in it as well, and our producer, Johnny K, to believe in it. The more and more we were recording it, everything we put into it, everybody would be even more excited about it and believe in it that much more.

So I guess to answer your question, there was no real pressure from the label. At least not that we felt. I think the pressure was more from us, to be honest with you, because we've been a band for 10 years. For us, having this huge success with "Delilah," that was a big deal for us. We worked our asses off to actually have anybody know who we were, so now that they did, you wanna let that go. We want to carry that through with an album with more songs that people love, and can [sustain] our career and just keep building the band. So for us, it was definitely important. [The people at the label] just want to sell records. We as a band want to be doing this for 20 years. If they fail, it's just a bunch of numbers for them. But if we fail, it's our lives. We really knew that we had to make the best record we could make.

Did you intentionally avoid coming up with anything that was acoustic-based, in the same vein as "Delilah"?
There's a few songs on the album that are pretty heavy on the acoustics. There's an acoustic song called "1, 2, 3, 4"; [it's] mostly acoustic guitar. We didn't really try to write songs we could do acoustic or go, "Ooh, we need to have another 'Hey There Delilah.'" It wasn't like that. I was just writing songs. I wrote about 30 songs for the album, and we picked the ones that we thought were the best. That's kind of how we did it. It's the only way you can do it. If I was sitting there writing, trying to think, "Okay, what's gonna be the next 'Hey There Delilah,'" I'm sure I probably wouldn't have written a single song for the album because I would have gone crazy. What you're feeling and what you think is good. That's what I did.

Do you think the retroactivity of its release tainted the song's success at all? Like if Hollywood were to re-release "Hate" [the first single off Every Second Counts] in the next few months and that were to suddenly explode.
[Laughs.] I don't know. That's kind of a funny way to think about it. I don't know if it helped make "Delilah" be a hit, but I think it definitely helped get it out there. I'm sure we wouldn't have thought--let's say "Delilah" wasn't out before and we put it on the last album. It probably wouldn't have been like, "Oh, this little acoustic song. That should be the single." It was like, because we had put it on MySpace, the fans just went crazy for it. People were singing it at every show. It made it obvious--like, "Okay, this is the song that people love. This is the song that should be a single." I almost wish that we could do that, that we could put out our whole album online or on MySpace--which actually we did this week--but I wish we could keep it up there for about six months and then let the fans decide again what should be the single. Or just kind of get a feel from them, what's gonna be the best song--the song they want to hear the most, and make that the single. In a way, hopefully we can do that with our future single, but for right now we just have to go with what we thought.

How was your experience at the Grammy ceremony earlier this year?
We were nominated for two of them and we thought we had a pretty good shot, but we didn't win. We got beat by Maroon 5 and by Amy Winehouse, so... kinda bummed out. But just to go there... it's crazy. It's all very surreal, and to be honest, when they were calling the award for Song Of The Year, which is huge--one of the last awards of the night.--when they were calling out the nominees, seriously...[we were] so nervous. I was almost relieved for a split second when they didn't call "Hey There Delilah" because thinking about going up there at that time and giving a speech or something... I probably would have freaked out. But it's okay. Now we just wanna get back there, hopefully write a song that will take one home. Now that we've tasted it, we want it.

I was going to ask whether you had expectations for anything beyond that, or if you think that could be the band's pinnacle.
I hope it's not the band's pinnacle. Like I said, I hope we could get back there and win one. I mean, look at Green Day. They put out what, four records, five records [before] American Idiot [It was actually six. -Ed.]--[but] that was the one that finally got them to the Grammys [The band actually won for Best Alternative Music Performance in 1995 for Dookie. -Ed.]. They won like five or something. [The band were nominated for seven Grammys and won two. -Ed.] You can never really say what's gonna happen. All we can do is just keep doing it and keep being the band that we are and doing our best and eventually if it happens, it happens. Hopefully it does.

Big Bad World is the first time you've experimented with horns, isn't it?
We've done horns on some B-side stuff--like we did this Christmas song a couple years ago on [the Taste Of Christmas compilation] called "Season Of A Lifetime," and it had this trumpet solo--[it] was my favorite part of the song. I loved it. We also did this song for an Oingo Boingo tribute album--[Laughs.]--a song called "Better Luck Next Time" that had a sax in it. I've always loved that stuff. Mike [Retondo], our bass player, actually was in a band that was kind of a ska band... They were called Tone Deaf George. [They were] a little local Chicago band. They never got known or anything, but they were a really cool band and they had horns. It was always something we'd been around, and the band has kinda dabbled in, but we took to it with this album because we didn't want to limit ourselves. If we thought of a cool part for a song, we'd say, "Okay, let's not do this on guitar right away, let's just think what instrument this would sound cool on," or "What should this be?" or "What would work best for the song?" That's what we did.

Do you think that was sort of a statement, to put horns on the opening track?
I don't think of it as a statement. I just think that part sounded like a cool horn part, so we put it in there. We wanted to make the song as good as it could [be]. It's not about, "Ooh, look at us, we have horns." It's, "You know what, this song, this section sounds like it could have a horn part," so that's what we did with it. If we would've thought of a frickin' xylophone solo, we'd put it in there. But we didn't. I wanted a harpsichord in there, but nobody really knew how to play it. We couldn't fit it in.

What else were you looking to do on this album that you hadn't on past efforts?
We wanted to go in and make a more classic-sounding album. We'd play shows, and kids would come up to us and say, "Oh, you guys sound so good live. You sound better live than you do on CD." And that's a compliment, I guess, but it's also like an insult at the same time. The CDs are supposed to be the best representation of the song, and if we sound better live, then I think we're doing something wrong in the studio. So we wanted to take a more classic approach, and we recorded all the basic tracks of this album live as a band--all in the same room, all singing, everything--playing together. We went back and overdubbed certain things, re-sang the vocals, things like that, but it really sounds like more real and more organic and hopefully more [like] we do live. And hopefully more classic.

I've always written songs that were more classic--I don't want to say classic--more like, '50s- and '60s-inspired: Good melodies, lots of harmonies, very straightforward arrangements, verse/chorus/verse/chorus kinda things. We've been a pop-punk band. We grew up in high school listening to the Ramones and Screeching Weasel--stuff like that. So our normal reaction or normal instinct as a band was to go in and make power chords and that's a song. When we put a song together, it's like we thought a lot about music but it was more chords and punk setting. For this album, we thought about it like, "You know what, the songs that I write are more like oldies. Let's try to give them a treatment that's more like what they should sound like." A song like "Meet Me In California"--just the name alone makes you think of the Beach Boys and an acoustic guitar sitting on the beach or something. That song, we have a lot of guitars in [it], and a lot of really nice harmonies--like "oooo"s, things like that, a Beach Boys kind of vibe. That's kind of what the song should feel like. So that's how we approached every song. Like you said with the horns--there's a song called "Serious Mistake" that is very production-heavy-[with] a lot of horns, there's a trumpet section, a bass clarinet Mike played throughout the song. But that song, it's all about me going to church and basically saying to the priest that I screwed up and I'm really hurting someone--that I made a serious mistake, and I can't even forgive myself so I need someone else to forgive me. So the song is very heavy, so we kind of went there with the production. There's like this musical breakdown in the middle of the song that almost sounds--strings come in--it almost sounds like something you would hear at church, or something pretty in the middle of this dark song. It went along with the theme of the song and the things that I'm saying in the song.

What exactly is the "big bad world"?
There's a lot of shit going on in the world right now that's not the greatest thing, but the album... We're not trying to be all political--it's just kind of a statement as far as people are concerned. It's like, yeah, there's shit going on and it sucks, but let's just try to be the best we can be. Let's just try to worry about our own mistakes. If everybody was accountable for themselves, then I think overall the world might be a better place. We all make mistakes and I'm sure--like I sing in [the title track], we'll do it again. But eventually we'll change the way it's always been. All you can do is keep trying and keep learning from your mistakes and eventually things will get better.

Do you feel as though "Natural Disaster"--or any of the songs on the album, for that matter--will break the potentiality of the band being a one-hit wonder?
Nope! I think we're done and we're quitting after this album. [Pauses.]

No, I'm just kidding, man. I mean, shit, I hope so. That's the idea. We don't want to be a one-hit wonder. Like I said, we've been a band for 10 years and finally broke with that song, "Hey There Delilah," and it's almost like a double-edged sword because yeah, we finally broke but the song was so massive that it's almost like, "Shit, how the hell do you come back and compete with a song that was that big?" But we did the best we could, and we made a great record. It's a record that the band all believe in. There are songs in it that are definitely as good as "Delilah," so we believe that. Hopefully some other people will believe that [and] the fans will love it as much as we do. That's all we can hope for. We can only do so much, but we definitely worked our ass off and did the best we could, so we'll see what happens. alt

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