The Lawrence Arms recently released their first album in nearly eight years, entitled Metropole. It marks their debut for Epitaph Records and maintains the standard that they’ve set with previous full-lengths in that it’s considerably different from its predecessor. Longtime fans can rest assured though, as this record delivers an abundance of memorable moments, along with meticulous songwriting from start to finish. We spoke with singer/bassist Brendan Kelly and talked about how the album came together, as well as what inspired some of its central themes. We also discussed how it was recorded, the band’s upcoming tour and more.

Bill – It’s been almost eight years since the release of your last album and you’ve said that’s because you guys wanted to wait until you had something to say before putting out a new record. What was the catalyst for the band feeling that the time was right to start making new Lawrence Arms songs?

Brendan – The catalyst to putting out the record was the fact that the songs starting coming out. It was a real natural thing. I didn’t sit down and go, “Alright, it’s been enough time, now I’m ready.” I believe the first song that was written for this record was “These Pigs Seem to be Getting the Best of Me.” I wrote that and was like, “That sounds like a Lawrence Arms song.” I showed it to Chris and he shot back with “Bonfire Park” and then “You Are Here” right after that. We all of a sudden had three or four songs and were getting close to having an EP. All of a sudden things started really taking off and then we had a ton of songs. From there it was just a matter of sort of hammering them into shape to make sure that we had a nice, cohesive statement.

Bill – The album opens and closes with the line “I was born and I died, and just a moment went by.” How are those words representative of the record’s overall theme?

Brendan – There’s a lot of thematic threads that run through this album. One of them is definitely this sort of feeling of being lost or being swept up in a current of an urban environment, or in a current of time, or swept up in your own life. Like one second you’re young and the next second you’re old, and nothing has happened and nobody knows who the fuck you are. You’re almost caught in a fast moving stream and it’s all these different fast moving streams, but at the core of it is really time, right? Age is time and the loss of self in an urban environment. Obviously there’s no mathematical equation for armchair philosophy, but it’s not hard to see that it’s the passage of time while living in that city that makes you feel small and trivial. That line also happens to be paraphrased from the movie Vertigo, which Chris and I both, without talking to each other, started writing songs based on that very scene. It’s the scene where they’re examining the cross-section of the redwood and that became sort of a reoccurring theme as well. That line is “Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice.” The idea of that line is that everything happens so fast. The entire album is sort of supposed to take place within the time it takes to say that line. You extrapolate that out to our lives, to our existence, to this entire city. It’s just like it’s born and it dies, and at the end of it it’s just the same and shit keeps moving on.

Bill – You’ve also described Metropole as having an alone-in-a-crowd sort of feeling, or feelings of solitude. I was curious where those inspirations came from, given that you’re married and have a family.

Brendan – Nothing will separate you from things like being married and having a family, and obviously if you have a family that you like, which I do, it’s very, very lovely to have all these people around you. At the same time, I’m not nearly the social creature that I once was. I don’t feel connected to the city like I used to. I don’t feel connected to even my friends in the same way that way I used to, which isn’t to say it’s through any fault of theirs or anything like that. It’s just that life has changed and I’ve been extracted from one situation and put into another. I’ve also been working a day job and being on that train man, in the morning, (sigh). There’s nothing to make you feel like, it’s like you are packed against motherfuckers, just right up on you, but you’re so alone. You could never be so alone. People will just shove past you; shove you out the door to get on themselves. I mean, there’s a reason it’s called the rat race. It’s like roaches scrambling through a hole and it can be very isolating.

Bill – The songwriting on Metropole is both detailed and direct, and it seems like you guys worked really hard on these songs. Would you describe the writing process as a difficult one?

Brendan – Not at all, I mean I think you kind of hit on something, which is that it is pretty detailed and pretty direct, but the reason that we were able to sort of split that difference is because the songs just seemed to get born. It was pretty effortless to construct these things the way we wanted to do it. By the end, I think we were all feeling pretty confident. Some of the last songs that were written for the record were the first song, “Chilean District” and then “Metropole.” Chris wrote “Metropole” originally with some lyrics that I felt I couldn’t turn into anything. He took them and he completely stripped away almost everything, except for like one line and shot back with the song. It was this real simple progression. He was like, “There you go. I thought that we’d do something with just a couple chords and minimal instrumentation.” We talked through it and I was like, “I hear this ‘Boys of Summer’ situation going on here. We can just drive this beat through it and it would just be great.” We just had so much freedom to experiment with these ideas. With “Chilean District,” I couldn’t figure out what song to be first on the record. So I’m like, “Let’s just write a first song for the record.” That’s kind of a cocky thing to even consider doing, because you can never tell what you’re going to write and what’s going to come out of you. Something like a first song on a record is an important track, obviously, but I think we were feeling really good about everything. Once Chris came in with “October Blood,” that was when we knew we had a record on our hands. That sort of upped the ante for everything and laid the foundation for the whole way that the record was going to flow.

Bill – What aspects of Chris and Neil’s contributions on the record were you most surprised by or pleased with?

Brendan – Well, Chris really played the shit out of his guitar on this record. He’s always been a great guitar player, but this particular time he sort of took a very different approach and really just came with it and kicked ass. I’m not surprised by that because he’s a great player, but it was definitely pleasing. Neil is just the most solid drummer. I mean, I count on Neil to bring an excellent game every time and I expect it. Both of those guys, the songwriting was just kind of effortless like I said, but it was really the playing that was like, “Oh, damn.” I feel like we’ve been writing songs up to a certain level of our own standards. We set high standards for ourselves. Whether or not people like the songs is one way or the other. That’s no exception on this record, we had the same sort of standards, but the playing is really impressive to me.

Bill – Dating back to 2002’s Apathy and Exhaustion, The Lawrence Arms have recorded their last four albums with Matt Allison at Atlas Studios. What was different about working with Matt this time around?

Brendan – The main different thing was that Chris lives in Portland now, so he had to come in for a really finite amount of time. We had to be a lot more focused. I was working a day job, so we were on a pretty grueling schedule. I’d wake up at 6:00 in the morning with my kids, go to work and be there by 9:00 AM. I’d work till 5:00 PM, take the train straight to the studio and we’d work there till about 2:30 in the morning. I’d be home by 3:00 AM, sleep for three hours and then do the whole thing again. Throughout that process I was just eating vegetables and only drinking water. In the past, not to say that we’ve gone in and fucked off in the studio, but we’ve definitely had a few beers and hung out all day, maybe decided not to record the next day. It wasn’t like that at all. This was a very focused and determined recording process.

Bill – How did the concept for the “Seventeener” video come about?

Brendan – We were trying to do a video and Chris and I had been talking, we always wanted to do something that involved a sitcom intro kind of thing. We were a little hesitant about that because it is sort of similar to the “Porno and Snuff Films” video that we did a few years ago. Chris had this idea to recreate the Perfect Strangers intro. I thought it was a great idea and thought it would be really fun. We started looking into doing that and it just became clear real quick that it was going to be an impossible task. We had our friend Ben, who really wanted to direct it, and I was talking to him on the phone. I’m realizing that logistically there’s no way that we can get this video done unless we do it in L.A. and we count on Epitaph having some crew people that they can tap for this, producers and production teams and stuff like that. All of a sudden we’re doing it in L.A. and we realized that we need to do one of those videos where we get off the bus and we’re in L.A. trying to make it, like the “Welcome to the Jungle” video. That Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction album is about as close thematically to what I think maybe we were trying to achieve in terms of this notion of being this stranger in this city. That album really conveys that as well. That was just a natural place for us to leap and from there we just tried to make it as funny as we could. We had 10 to 15 ideas of different bands that we could try to be, but we just picked the funniest ones. We went out there for a few days and just knocked it out and it was a great time.

Bill – If I had to choose a season to associate the Lawrence Arms with, I’d definitely pick winter. Do you find it fitting that Metropole was released in January?

Brendan – It’s funny, because when we were doing the record, we did it over the summer. Matt Allison was like, “This record has to come out in the fall. This is such a fall record.” It seemed totally accurate at the time, but listening to it in the winter I think it makes a little more sense. It’s hard from the inside to know things like that. These are just the songs that we make and I think our perspective on them is probably different than everybody else’s, but it feels good that it came out when it did.

Bill – What were some of the highlights from your recent New Year’s Eve show in Chicago?

Brendan – The whole thing was just great from beginning to end. It was awesome to play some new songs and have people know them. We have a pretty extensive catalog and we’ve got a lot of songs that people definitely would be bummed if we didn’t play, so it’s nice to put some new blood into the set and have people respond positively. That’s a great feeling. It’s always an amazing time to play in Chicago. We have so many friends there and everybody has an awesome time. The whole night was a highlight really. I’m just glad so many people showed up because it was a blizzard out there.

Bill – You guys are about to go on tour with some pretty great bands, like The Copyrights, Nothington and Great Apes. How did everything come together with those shows?

Brendan – We knew we had to do some shows, obviously, because we just put out a record. We just hit up our booking agent and the way we like to do things is we like to go smart rather than go hard these days. We’ve done our time doing nine-week tours and it sucks. Especially now, we’re older guys and I don’t think any of us want to be away from our situations that long. So, we negotiated these dates and then we were looking for support and our tour manager is Toby, who runs Red Scare, so he had a lot to say with regards to some of these bands. Chris requested Great Apes be put on because they’re an awesome band. It just sort of turned out. These bands, they’re all buddies. We love The Copyrights, we love Elway, we love all these guys. That’s the main thing, if we can find bands that we like to hang out with, that are also cool bands, then it’s easy.

Bill – What are you most looking forward to about taking these new songs on the road and playing them in front of people?

Brendan – That’s what I’m looking forward to, playing some new songs and kind of seeing how it all goes. I remember seeing a tweet from the Jaded Punk Hulk that said something about, and this is with no disrespect to Hot Water Music because I think they’re an amazing band, one of my favorite, most inspirational bands of my life. The tweet was something about Chuck Ragan saying that they’re playing a new song off Exister and 400 guys go outside to smoke. I was like, “Oh, that sucks.” I think about that tweet now and now it’s our dicks on the line. We are like an old band that people have really strong feelings about, which is awesome. But at the same time, it’s almost like bringing a new girlfriend to the family reunion, to bring this record on the road. It’s like maybe everybody is going to like her, but maybe people are going to be bummed. I like being challenged and I like the challenge of going out there and being like, “Okay motherfuckers, here’s some new songs.” At the same time, we’re like one of those bands that people have tattoos of and shit. I don’t want to alienate anybody, but there are some people out there that just don’t like new things.

Bill – Once the tour wraps up, do The Lawrence Arms have anything concrete planned for the rest of the year?

Brendan – No, we’re going to do the West Coast, we’re going to do the East Coast and we’re going to announce some Midwest dates before too long here. We’re doing a little bit of Europe and we’re just going to try to go everywhere we can where people like us, because that’s what we’re here for. It’s pretty cool. I’m excited to be back. I’m excited to be doing this again. It’s fun.