THE USED

IN­SIDE THE STU­DIO WITH BERT MCCRACKEN – AND SOME FRIENDS...

It’s Thanks­giv­ing morn­ing and Bert Mccracken has wo­ken up sev­eral thou­sand miles from his usual bed in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia. In­stead, the vo­cal­ist of The Used finds him­self in Los Angeles, where he has been work­ing on the band’s eighth stu­dio record – which was fin­ished less than 24 hours ago. To­day there will be a place for him at the ta­ble of his man­ager’s fam­ily home, but the 37-year-old hasn’t cel­e­brated the hol­i­day much since mov­ing away from the land of the free six years ago. “Other than [be­ing a] typical Amer­i­can and send­ing ev­ery­one a use­less text say­ing how thank­ful you are,” he laughs.

One per­son that’s al­ready re­ceived a (sin­cere) mes­sage of thanks from the singer is John Feld­mann. The pro­ducer re­spon­si­ble for more than half of The Used’s cat­a­logue has re­united with the band on this new al­bum, hav­ing not been in­volved with 2017’s The Canyon. Bert is quick to draw a line un­der that 80-minute, live­tracked, ex­per­i­men­tal last record, promis­ing some­thing more in line with the en­ergy of the band’s ear­lier sound with these new songs. Blow Me, the first sin­gle from this era, cer­tainly fits that de­scrip­tion. An an­guished sledge­ham­mer of a song, it fea­tures FEVER 333’s Ja­son Aalon But­ler, and rages against the United States’ lack of gun con­trol. We asked Bert to talk us through it…

What is Blow Me about, Bert?

“All of the songs on this record have double, or even triple, mean­ings, so it’s re­ally go­ing to be dif­fi­cult for me to go into what it specif­i­cally means. Is it about my friend’s sui­cide? Is it about Kurt Cobain? Is it about the power of the ex­pres­sion of words ver­sus vi­o­lence? Maybe it’s about what you think it’s about.

“But I think the imagery is over­pow­er­ing: in the world we live in, es­pe­cially in Amer­ica, gun vi­o­lence has gone be­yond what is ra­tio­nally ac­cept­able. Well, what kind of gun vi­o­lence is ra­tio­nally ac­cept­able? We all have sin­cere feel­ings about what’s hap­pen­ing to the world and guns and peo­ple’s abil­ity to walk into a pub­lic place and shoot the whole place up. But we are also very aware of how im­pact­ful small state­ments can be, and in this world where ev­ery­one feels like they are al­most the cen­tre of at­ten­tion with social media, I think that it’s im­por­tant to ac­cept how pow­er­ful words are.”

Will we be see­ing more of a po­lit­i­cal steer with this new al­bum, then?

“No, this record is re­ally a cor­nu­copia of dif­fer­ent mes­sages. A lot like the first record [2002’s The Used], we wanted to just go in with John Feld­mann and write a huge, large stack of great songs that are catchy. We never re­ally tried to push a con­cept or nar­row things down into any­thing di­gestible that’s co­he­sive. The songs have a ba­sic un­der­ly­ing theme, and that theme is very preva­lent in the world we live in – I think there’s so much bore­dom and so much com­pla­cency and so much en­ti­tle­ment. Just those three words alone you could write 10 records about.”

Why did you choose Blow Me to lead this new chap­ter?

“I think it’s a cool state­ment. And maybe we should all be hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion about what’s im­por­tant to us and how crazy the world has got­ten as far as gun vi­o­lence [is con­cerned]. I also think that it’s some­thing re­ally, re­ally spe­cial for the old school Used fans. It sounds like a cool mix of some­thing from our first record that’s heavy, and it still has a re­ally catchy cho­rus.”

It does sound like some of your ear­li­est stuff. Was that in­ten­tional? “Def­i­nitely not. But a lot of this stuff sounds like the first record in a way that it’s speak­ing out to the empti­ness, to the bored­ness, and the en­ti­tle­ment of the mo­ment. It’s a feel­ing of be­ing stuck but not stuck. I think that this mu­sic is hav­ing a bit of a resur­gence be­cause it had such a feel­ing to it, and peo­ple just want to feel things and feel like they be­long.”

Blow Me fea­tures FEVER 333’s Ja­son Aalon But­ler. How did he get in­volved?

“I’ve known Ja­son since the early letlive. days. What an in­cred­i­ble ma­chine! He’s barely hu­man. Hon­estly, he’s one of the most in­tel­li­gent and ex­pres­sive peo­ple you could ever talk to. He’s a true

“WE RECORDED 26 OR 27 SONGS THAT WE LOVE” BERT MCCRACKEN

in­spi­ra­tion to me, he’s a hero of punk rock, and I al­ways wanted to work with him. Luck­ily he was avail­able to come thrash.

“When we work with other artists, we like to leave it wide open, be­cause other artists are spe­cial for their own rea­sons. We want you to be in our band for a lit­tle bit, use your own cre­ative ex­pres­sions in the way that you would with­out us. So Ja­son came in and we had all the parts recorded that he didn’t sing on, and I gave him the lyrics, and he sat in the booth for maybe three min­utes and then recorded his parts and just nailed it. He’s like a re­ally sick hip-hop artist in that way. He’s got this crazy flow. He moves quick.”

Is Blow Me a good in­di­ca­tion of what the rest of the record sounds like? “If we picked out any one song, it would be a bad in­di­ca­tion. A lit­tle bit like [2007’s] Lies For The Liars, this record is a force of many colours. It’s got so many dif­fer­ent sounds you’d be re­ally sur­prised from one song to the next, how dif­fer­ent it is. But it still co­he­sively sounds and feels like The Used.”

What other themes will these new songs be ex­plor­ing? “I think we’re talk­ing about the same things that kept The Used rel­e­vant for this long. We’re talk­ing about love in life and heartache and mor­tal­ity. We’re talk­ing about the state of the world and com­mu­ni­ca­tion and media. We’re talk­ing about ig­no­rance, and erad­i­ca­tion from ig­no­rance. We’re talk­ing about friend­ships and cages. I think we recorded 26 or 27 songs that we love, so we’re go­ing to have a re­ally awe­some B-sides record, too.”

You’ve got John Feld­mann pro­duc­ing again. What drove that de­ci­sion? “He is on fire. He’s one of the most tal­ented song­writ­ers on the planet, and I’ve said it in in­ter­views be­fore, but no­body works harder than John Feld­mann. He will be up be­fore you and have two songs writ­ten be­fore you even get up, and then he’ll work all day long un­til you’re way too tired. He’s a force of na­ture that I’ve not come across on this planet be­fore. I’m so glad we stayed friends; we had a re­ally rough cou­ple of records to­gether, and I can be such an ab­so­lute fuck­ing dick­head some­times. I’m just so grate­ful that we’re still able to make mu­sic to­gether.”

You recorded pre­vi­ous al­bum The Canyon live to tape. Is that some­thing you’ve moved com­pletely away from now? “It’s just so time con­sum­ing and ex­pen­sive. It takes so much fuck­ing time and ef­fort, and it’s re­ally try­ing on the band. I mean, we learned a lot, and, for any band out there think­ing about record­ing: if you at­tempt to record those songs live, it’s go­ing to be some of the most bru­tal and worth­while re­hearsals you’ve ever had. Jeph [Howard, bass] and Dan [White­sides, drums] got so much tighter as a rhythm sec­tion. It’s in­cred­i­ble. But it’s just so tough. And I like play­ing around in the stu­dio with ideas and be­ing able to go in and re­place some­thing. If I want to change a lyric or a melody real quick, I can just do it on that one part.”

How did it feel mak­ing the record in the stu­dio this time? “The last record was so try­ing, and to­wards the end it al­most felt like, ‘This is not fun. This is ac­tual work.’ With this record, ev­ery day just felt like a short lit­tle ad­ven­ture. Feld­mann’s so pos­i­tive and the band is in such a good place. Ev­ery­one was so in the mo­ment and so present. I never had any home­work – all the lyrics were fin­ished right there and then, and if they weren’t, we stayed ’til they were. It’s crazy to say I’ve never worked harder on a record be­cause of the last record, but I feel like this was more ful­fill­ing work. It wasn’t like try­ing to drag some­thing out of my­self.”

You’ve men­tioned these new tracks be­ing shorter. Ob­vi­ously The Canyon was quite a lengthy record – was that change de­lib­er­ate, or did it come nat­u­rally? “None of us re­ally liked the length. I mean, none of us re­ally like The Canyon all that much. It was re­ally an ex­per­i­ment in art – see how deep I could get. I’m re­ally grate­ful that the band al­lowed me to go there and re­ally do some­thing that was, I feel, se­vere: a record about a sui­cide. All the songs were recorded in a way that they don’t re­ally sound on par with the moder­nity of to­day’s sound be­cause of the tape record­ings. We’ve al­ways wanted to do a record like that, but it ended up be­ing this long-winded ex­pres­sion. Which I’m fine with – most of the art that I en­joy is very chal­leng­ing; I feel like the more I’m pushed to un­der­stand the artists the deeper I can get with the art.

“But with this [new] record it just felt like these songs were mak­ing the points very quickly. There’s also not a lot of points to be made, noth­ing press­ing that I need to get off my chest. I’m in a re­ally great place in my life right now, I’m very healthy and ac­tive and ev­ery­thing’s good at home. So it wasn’t like I needed to pour these feel­ings out in or­der to save my­self.”

Is there any pres­sure when you make new mu­sic now, or is that long gone? “I think at this point, be­ing a band for this long, there are a lot of plusses and a lot of mi­nuses. Like, we know we’re go­ing to be able to go out and play a tour – there’s not go­ing to be zero peo­ple there. But it’s also neg­a­tive in a lot of ways that peo­ple al­ready have their minds made up. They’ve heard of The Used, like, ‘Yeah, I heard The Used back in the day, that shit’s not for me.’ So there’s a bit of pres­sure to go out­side the box and try to un­der­stand where mu­sic is headed – I think there’s a lot of new mu­sic with a lot of el­e­ments that are won­der­ful and ex­cit­ing.”

You’ll be re­turn­ing to the UK for Slam Dunk Fes­ti­val in May. Is it too early to ask what we can ex­pect from your set? “I’m very ex­cited. We’re good friends with a lot of the bands on the bill, and those UK fes­ti­vals are al­ways some of the – if not the – best shows in the world. They’re just wild and crazy. I think that you can al­ways ex­pect The Used to put on an im­pas­sioned and ex­cit­ing and lively per­for­mance. We’ve never been in bet­ter places men­tally. I’ve never been in a bet­ter place phys­i­cally. I go hard al­most ev­ery day, so the en­ergy level is off the chain.”

THE USED’S NEW SIN­GLE BLOW ME FEA­TUR­ING JA­SON AALON BUT­LER IS OUT DE­CEM­BER 6. THE BAND RE­TURN TO THE UK NEXT MAY FOR SLAM DUNK FES­TI­VAL – SEE THE GIG GUIDE FOR IN­FOR­MA­TION

Bert Mccracken: “This al­bum was more ful­fill­ing. It wasn’t like try­ing to drag some­thing out of my­self…”

The Used in the stu­dio: “This record is a force of many colours…”