The Smoking Popes are one of Chicago’s most influential bands. They got their start in 1991, achieved widespread success with two albums on Capitol Records and this March released their latest full-length, This Is Only a Test. We spoke with singer/guitarist Josh Caterer about the new record’s concept, what it was like recording at Atlas Studios, the band’s relationship with Asian Man Records and more. Be sure to check out the Popes on tour this summer with Alkaline Trio and look for their classic album Born to Quit to be reissued later this year.

Bill – Your new record, This Is Only a Test, is a concept album that’s told from the perspective of a teenager. Where did you get the idea to do something like this and are you pleased with the end result?

Josh – Yeah, I am pleased with the end result. It was a lot of fun to write these songs and we all got excited about it and brought a lot of energy to the process of making the record. I feel like that energy is evident when you listen to it. At least when we hear it we can hear the fun we had making it. We really love the record in that sense. I was out somewhere and I heard over the Muzak system a song by some teenage band. I don’t recall the artist, but it was obviously a song that was written for young people. I was just sort of thinking about the whole idea of writing songs specifically for young people. It was something I’d never done when I was a teenager. I was always listening to Frank Sinatra and trying to take on this more sophisticated tone in my lyrics and trying to emulate that. I never sort of let myself be a kid when I was a kid. Then I thought, “Well, it would be sort of funny now, in my thirties, if I tried to write songs from a teenage point of view”. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I started getting these ideas for specific songs and almost instantly the idea for the first song on the album, “Wish We Were”, just sort of came into my head. I started working on it and within 20 minutes I had all the lyrics written in my head. Then I wrote a song a day for five days. Songs just sort of started bubbling up. I tried not to over-think them or anything, I just let them happen. Usually the songwriting process takes a while. I’ll be working on a song for weeks, or I’ll work on it for a while, put it away and then come back to it a month later and sort of tweak it a little bit. I decided not to do that this time, just keep the urgency of it and let it happen quickly. Therefore, I think it has a bit of a different energy than some of the stuff we’ve done in the past. It’s a lot of fun to do it that way.

Bill – This is the first time you’ve released a new album on Asian Man Records. What do you like best about working with label owner Mike Park?

Josh – Out of all the labels that we’ve ever been on, Mike Park is the only guy that’s ever actually paid me. So that’s probably my favorite thing about him. He’s a trustworthy guy, he’s a straight up guy and he has a great reputation within the industry for being a person of integrity. He’s just easy to deal with and you know where you stand. He’s honest with you about what he’s going to do and not do, so it makes it easy for you to know what you need to do in order to make it work. We just love it.

Bill – Neil Hennessy has been playing with you guys since 2008, but makes his recorded debut with the Popes on This Is Only a Test. What sort of positives does he bring to the group?

Josh – I think his drumming style is absolutely perfect for us. We’ve played with some great drummers over the years and everybody kind of brings something really cool to the table, but I think there’s a way in which Neal’s style kind of incorporates the best of the styles of the other drummers that we’ve had. He has the ability to bring texture to it and he’s really creative, but he also just has that straightforward, punk energy that really lifts the songs. He’s really fun to play with. On a personal level, he’s also extremely easy to get along with and a really great fit. I think it can be weird sometimes for a person to be in a band with three brothers, because we can have a tendency to accentuate each other’s shortcomings socially. While we’re all individual personalities, we also share some of the same traits. We all can kind of lean in a certain direction and sort of create a particular vibe that might be difficult for somebody to exist in. Neil is just the perfect complement. It really feels like he’s in the band.

Bill – This Is Only a Test was produced by Matt Allison at Atlas Studios. What did you enjoy most about recording with Matt?

Josh – Matt is also a pretty easygoing guy. He has a great way of finding this balance between directing you a little bit, making suggestions about where a song should go or what you should add, but at the same time staying out of your way and not being overbearing about it. He creates a good environment in there that encourages creativity. There were definitely times where I felt like I was able to try some different things that were outside of my creative comfort zone and I was encouraged to do that because I felt safe with him. He was a part of sort of helping me in that direction. I really appreciated his input. On top of it all, he just has this ear. You know that the end product with him is going to sound amazing. He just has the touch.

Bill – We talked about this a little before, but “Wish We Were” is one of my favorite songs on the new record. What were some of your specific songwriting motivations with its lyrics?

Josh – As I mentioned, that was the first song for this album that I wrote. When I originally had the concept of writing from a teenage point of view, the absolute first idea that came to my mind that sort of embodied that was an unrequited crush. That sort of typified not only my high school experience, but a lot of people’s, like being sort of obsessed with someone who doesn’t know you exist or care that you exist. That’s pretty simply what the song is about.

Bill – Tell me about the video you guys shot for “Punk Band” and why you chose it to be the album’s first single.

Josh – That song is sort of special to us. It feels like a personal anthem to us as a band. The album as a whole is not strictly autobiographical, it’s definitely a character that I created, which is only loosely inspired by the kid that I was when I was in high school. That particular song just feels a little more like our own personal statement and we can really relate to it. It communicates our excitement about being in a band and kind of encapsulates our philosophy that drove us to want to be in a punk band in the first place. It’s just sort of special to us. We thought there would be potential there in making a video to do it in a really fun way. There could be a lot of energy to a video for that song, particularly once we got hooked up with Mike Venezia, the director, and saw his work that he had done with other bands. We saw that he could bring a lot to the table and really make it fun, exciting and cool-looking. He did and I am so, so happy with the way that video turned out. We had a blast making it. We had all these extras come in, a lot of whom I knew because this friend of mine Landon, who’s one of the people in the video, Landon MacDonald. I can’t remember which prop they gave him, but he’s one of the guys who is just sort of freaking out. He’s a friend of mine who goes to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. I asked him, he’s a popular guy who’s got a lot of friends, so I asked him if he would just pool some of his friends together and bring them all in. He did and I knew about half of them already just from knowing him. We shot it all in one day and we just did a million takes. Everybody was pretty pumped about it.

Bill – “Letter to Emily” is a song that deals with suicide and the sorrow it causes those close to the victim. What inspired this song?

Josh – There wasn’t one specific person that the song was written about, although there were a couple of kids from my school who committed suicide, one while we were in school and then one a couple years after we graduated. So, I do know what it feels like to deal with that when you’re in school, but I was just as equally inspired by things I’ve seen in the news lately. There have been a lot of stories about young people committing suicide and it’s just devastating. It just breaks my heart. I wanted to address it a little bit and try to express the feelings of somebody who is left behind. I couldn’t really get inside the pain of someone who is very close, like a best friend or a family member, but I could definitely relate to the larger multitude of people who don’t know the person really well, but have had some contact with them. Enough to feel that sense of guilt like, “What could I have done? Could I have reached out to this person and helped them in some way?”. I just wanted to capture that in a song. With that song and with the album as a whole, I do have this hope that it kind of provides some encouragement to young people who hear it, because when you’re in school your world is kind of small. The problems that you have seem disproportionately big. I think one of the advantages of writing about it when I’ve made it to my thirties is that I can see those problems aren’t as big as they seemed, or they at least didn’t stick around as long as you thought they were going to. Things change when you get out into the world and things sort of settle-in to a different perspective. Life sort of makes more sense to you when you get older. I kind of wanted to express that to the young people and tell them that they should hang on.

Bill – On a much lighter note, what was the best part about your recent East Coast tour?

Josh – We got to play a bunch of shows with Girl in a Coma. They’re a fantastic band. We really enjoyed seeing them play every night. I would do a duet with Nina from Girl in a Coma and it was a lot of fun singing with her. We did a version of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths. It’s on YouTube. I think it came together pretty nicely, her voice is fantastic. We’ve toured with other bands, but we haven’t really done that where we collaborate on something and perform together. It was a lot of fun. I want to do more of that in the future. Bob Dylan does it, why can’t we?

Bill – The Smoking Popes are known for frequently playing throughout Chicagoland. What are some of your favorite local venues and why?

Josh – I used to like the Lounge Axe a lot. It was kind of a good-sized room, it was cozy, but you could still fit a decent-sized crowd in there. There was something about the onstage sound that was just fantastic. It must have been sort of the way the acoustics of the room worked. I played there a few times and I always came away from it thinking that it sounded perfect up there. I miss that place. Other than that, the Metro is obviously very special for us. We’ve had some great moments there for our band and I’ve seen some of my favorite shows ever at the Metro. The first time I ever saw Iggy Pop was at the Metro and it changed my life. We’ve also recently had a couple of great shows at Double Door, that’s a pretty special club. As far as newer clubs, we played at Lincoln Hall not too long ago. It was a really cool room and I’m looking forward to playing there more often.

Bill – Since reuniting in 2005, what aspects of having the band back together have been most rewarding for you?

Josh – We always enjoy working on new material and if we can come up with something that people like it’s very gratifying. I would have to say though that one of the coolest things ever, and it’s part of getting older and being around for a while, is that our older material has had a chance to live with people for a while. People have been able to kind of develop a relationship with some of those older songs. We can see that when we play and we launch into a song like “Megan” or “Pretty Pathetic” or “On the Shoulder”, “Rubella”, “Let’s Hear It for Love”. You start the song and there’s this recognition on people’s faces and they’re excited. They’re like, “Oh, I love this song”. You can tell that it means something to them and they’re singing along. That’s something that you can’t fabricate, it just takes time. It’s pretty cool to have been around long enough to start to see that happening.

Bill – What can you tell me regarding Asian Man’s plans to reissue more of the Popes’ back catalog?

Josh – We kind of want to move our entire catalog over to Asian Man. It’s just such a great arrangement. We want everything to be on Asian Man. We’re doing that one piece at a time. Some of the stuff is out of print and some of it needs to be switched from one label to another. Plus you want to release something and then sort of focus on that and support it before you release the next thing. We’re going do Born to Quit I think later this year. We’ll do some touring where we play Born to Quit start to finish, in addition to some of our other stuff. I think Born to Quit is only a half-hour long, so we’d have to play it twice in order to constitute a full set. We’re excited about that, playing that entire album on tour. We’ll do something like that with Destination Failure maybe the following year, but then there’s also Stay Down, we want to rerelease that. Eventually we’ll want to rerelease The Party’s Over, which sort of barely came out. It was so under the radar that you can’t really even say that it got released in the first place. I don’t know, there’s the next five years of our band right there, but I guess I’d also like to make a new record somewhere in there. I don’t know how we’re going to accomplish that. We’ve got the next however many years already outlined.

Bill – What else do you guys have planned for the remainder of 2011?

Josh – We’re doing this Alkaline Trio tour in July and the beginning of August. We’re so excited about that. It’s just perfect. We’ve played with those guys a bunch of times, but we’ve never been on the road with them. I can’t tell you how many Alkaline Trio tattoos we see at our shows when we’re out on the road. There’s a lot of crossover between the two bands, so I think that’s going to be great. Beyond that we’re playing a few festivals here and there, but at this point I don’t know that there will be anymore actual touring for the rest of the calendar year unless another opportunity arises for us to go out opening for the right band. As far as scheduling another headlining tour, that’s not going to be until after Born to Quit gets rereleased, so that tour would probably happen early next year. Personally I’ve been working on a Christmas album, which would just be a solo thing and I might do a few shows around the Midwest in December to support that. That’s what I’ve got going.