Photo credit: Sari Murray
Brooklyn’s beloved indie rock mainstays We Are Scientists are heading out this fall on a North American tour in support of their upcoming ninth studio album Qualifying Miles, out July 18 via Grönland Records. The run begins September 4th in Philadelphia, PA and sees the band traveling over the east coast for seven dates, ending September 13th in Toronto, ON. Check out the full list of dates below.
The upcoming tour will feature songs from Qualifying Miles – a raw and reflective return to the band’s ‘90s guitar rock roots – alongside fan favorites from their beloved catalogue, including Huffy (2021), Lobes
You mentioned how your early songs celebrated passivity and that you’ve since come to see things differently. Was there a particular moment or experience that made you reassess that worldview? How did that shift in perspective influence your songwriting process for this track compared to your early material?
I don’t think there was any particular moment of revelation for me, no. It seemed like it was probably more a slow accretion of, well, “wisdom” is probably an idiotic word to use for it — I certainly would not describe myself as a person who has gained anything approximating true wisdom — but I guess just the sort of knowledge that comes with experience has slowly crept up on me and prompted me to reassess my younger even and possibly dumber self. I mean, look, I’m still a relatively passive guy, but you know all of the good things in my life (my band, my job as a musician, my marriage, etc.) came to be through some sort of leap of faith. Like I definitely didn’t get to be a touring musician and songwriter for 20 years by sitting around in the sort of emotional paralysis that I like to describe myself indulging, in song. So maybe the real revelation was that I could maybe stop fixating on that part of myself, in my lyrics?
Do you think this song [“What You Want Is Gone”] is a kind of “antidote” or response to your earlier work? Or does it still carry some of that same tension you used to celebrate?
Yeah, I mean the verses are definitely almost explicitly addressed to that facet of my personality — the one that kinda says “hang back and let’s see what happens.” The song pointedly kicks off from the perspective of someone who’s not actively been engaged (“That looked like fun“) and who is kind of just fatalistically accepting whatever is gonna happen next. Whether that guy has suddenly had some epiphany in the chorus or whether it’s from the POV of some third-party observer who (I guess?) is twice removed from the original subject of the song is something I hadn’t really considered until just now. I mean, by the end of the second verse the guy is coming around to the idea that he’s gonna have to take some steps to land at the results he wants, so yeah I guess there is a kind of narrative arc to this chump’s education, after all.
You described wanting to create a “road movie vibe” for the video. What about that imagery felt like a good fit for the song’s themes?
We ordinarily tend to play off the lyrics of a song when we’re trying to concept a video for it, although we almost never deliver a literal reflection of what’s being examined in the songs. I think our general practice is to try to imagine some other, more ridiculous relevance that the title might have and then explore that (i.e. the video for “The Great Escape” depicting a guy who’s trapped in some psychotically, codependent, tripartite friendship, or “It’s A Hit” involving a fatal boxing match, etc.), but I think there’s something so genuinely yearning in the sound of this song that an the lyrics didn’t really need to play as large a part in our vision for the video. The song sort of has a bittersweet flavor that’s also tinged with something, uh, achingly sublime? I guess that’s just another way of saying bittersweet. I don’t know. But anyway, there’s something about that fantasy of a road trip — that sort fleeting rootlessness and freedom. Like, on a long road trip, any ending is possible, but that also means that you also find yourself perhaps with frighteningly little agency. I don’t know — we were mainly just about to go on a tour with our four best friends, so it seemed like, if nothing else, it would be a fun and romantic thing to document.
The Thelma & Louise reference is hilarious – if you had gotten that €35 million budget, what would your dream version of the video have looked like?
Well, we’ve always wanted MIchael Bay to direct a video of ours and to bring his best pyrotechnics man, so that would probably be a big part of where the budget went. I mean, imagine if this road trip involved each of us in our own 1980s Porsche 911, careering off of overpasses, leaping from the vehicle at the very last second before it explodes against the parapet, and then we land on the top of a semi truck that’s speeding below it and swing into the driver‘s compartment, knocking the (presumably?) villainous driver unconscious, and like throw him out onto the highway, and then I don’t know probably that’s semi later explodes, too.
Looking back at your early days playing shows in Manhattan, how does it feel to contrast those memories with where you are creatively now?
I certainly think we’d be impressed at how much more confident the songwriting is, now. Back in those days, we were just writing songs to be played live at whatever empty Williamsburg warehouse was hosting a party we happened to be invited to, so all of our songs felt frantic, not mention deeply in debt to the prevailing style of the time. I think we’ve gotten to a point where our idiosyncrasy is in the songwriting itself, rather than in the stylistic affectations we were adopting. I mean, those songs still bang, though.
If you could time travel back to the Lit Lounge nights with a rough cut of this video, how do you think your younger selves would have reacted?
I would have been fairly alarmed to realize that we’d become successful enough to warrant a show in Hanover, Germany, that’s for sure.
