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Sparta: It's hard as shit to sing in key, man!

First, At The Drive-In exploded to world fame with Relationship of Command. And then they exploded altogether. One of the fragments became Sparta, who released The Wiretap Scars album earlier this year. Rail-thin singer/guitarist Jim Ward explains what happened, what it is like to be promoted to frontman, and how Billy Joel influenced the sound of his new band.

Tekst: Martÿn ter Haar

Publicatiedatum: 23 november 2002

After the break up of At The Drive-In, Ward formed Sparta with At The Drive-In colleagues Tony Hajjar, Paul Hinojos, and newly recruited bass player Matt Miller. Ward became the singer and frontman of the band, which was not something that came easy: "It's hard as shit to sing in key, man!" When I reply that most emo bands don't seem to care about singing in key, Ward responds vehemently, "It's a fucking excuse to be lazy. That's what I think it is."

"I want to make a record that I can show my kids and not to have to explain that it was cool at the time not to sing in key. I want to make a record that stands the test of time for me. I don't care about the rest of the world; it's for me."

Besides the singing, the frontmanship was another new thing for Ward: "There's days. Last night I couldn't say anything right. That's the shitty part about being a frontman."

"You [have] to make some sort of conversation, some sort of like. And last night, I just didn't give a fuck, I didn't want to talk. I didn't have any interest in talking to anybody. I just wanted to play and not say anything on the mic; and when you do [that], the crowd doesn't get involved as much. So I'm learning how to do both. It was just one of those nights where I was, like, 'Fuck it!' I just wanted to play."

"I don't know when they like it and when they don't; and then there's also a part of me that doesn't really care. I'm like, 'Man, they're really quiet!' but I don't really care. But at the same time, it's bumming me out that they're quiet. It's like going on a date, trying to figure out if the girl likes you. It's weird. How do you know if your gelling, if there's chemistry between you? So there's some nights where nothing can go wrong, and it's fucking great. And then you read a review, and it's like, 'they were terrible,' and it's like, 'What! It was such a great night! The crowd [was] into it, we were into it!' It happened in L.A. I thought we had an amazing show, one of my favorite shows I've ever played in my life."

Not that a bad review is that important to Ward: "I trust the media. In the long run, one bad review or one bad interview or one bad whatever is not going to stop me doing what I do. And then, eventually, there's people that like the band and want to do the review, and want to see it the review it deserves. But it goes both ways. There's people that said, 'Limp Bizkit is the greatest band in the world.' And then five years later, people are saying, 'They're shit. I don't know why I ever liked them.' So it goes both ways, you know what I mean? There's going to be a huge backlash to the Strokes next year."

Sparta got off to a good start, being signed almost immediately by Dreamworks, who released the Austere EP. Ward: "We started the band, and we didn't do anything for a month. We just decided: We're gonna be in a band. And then, a month later, we got around to playing, and we wrote nine songs in seven days. We recorded them, somebody gave it to Dreamworks; they liked it, so they offered us a deal, and we signed it. It was a really good deal, so we took it."

So when Sparta started, there was a sort of explosion of repressed creativity? "I think for sure. Especially I had locked myself in my house and not really done anything. I just sort of shut myself out from everybody else. So when I was around people and playing music — it's emotional, and it comes out in a swell of fury. It was cool. It was one of the greatest weeks in my life; one of the most creative, spending ten hours a day writing songs. It's a blessing to be able to do that."

When talking about the recording of Sparta's first full length album, The Wiretap Scars, two major sources of inspiration turn up: Radiohead's Kid A, and, more surprisingly, Billy Joel. "It's what I grew up listening to, man. It taught me melodies. Billy Joel taught me songwriting and storytelling. 'Scenes From An Italian Restaurant' of The Stranger, is one the best fucking songs ever written.

"Go buy The Stranger and go buy Piano Man. You have to buy both albums and listen to them back-to-back. Piano Man first, and then The Stranger. There's a song, 'She's Always A Woman,' and it's the best love song ever written. Because it's not 'I'm so in love with you, we're going to be together forever,' but it's about somebody who fucked him over and he's saying, 'No matter what she did, no matter how badly she fucked me over, she's always going to be that woman to me.' And that's such an amazing perspective. Instead of singing from 'the moment,' he's singing from after 'the moment' and saying, like, 'Fuck!' It's so much more human to me. Everybody loves, but everybody loses. And to finally have somebody singing songs about somebody he loses — especially, when he wrote them is late '70s, early '80s. I was two years old when that record came out. I listen to it 23 years later, and it finally makes sense to me. I never understood that song until I fell in love with somebody and she left me. That's fucking music, man."

Because of his love for Joel and the sound of the piano in general, Ward started writing songs on that instrument, although he never had lessons. "I do not properly know how to play it. I don't know how to read notes. Everything I play, I have to remember how to play it, and then I forget. We have a guy onstage that plays all my keyboard parts live. I play guitar and keyboards on the record, but I can't do both live. So we hired somebody to come with us, and I have to show him the parts. And sometimes I forget, and I don't even know how to play them."

Kid A was important to Ward, because, to him, it shows Radiohead to be a band that keeps pushing itself and keeps expanding — something he strives for, with Sparta, as well. "Fuck the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. I fall into it, we all fall into it, but: We have songs where there is no strategy to the song, it's a fucking mindfuck. But it's got the hooks into it. It makes you want to listen to it. That's what I thought is great about Kid A, is that it... There's songs where there is one guitar part that does the entire song, but the rest of the song is changing it."

The Wiretap Scars is by no means an album that was made on the computer though. "The EP has, per capita, more electronics than the record. We did a little bit, but more like: There would be a song, and it would be shit. And then we'd put it in a computer and change everything. Then we would listen to the way it was on the computer, and then we'd take it back to the live room to play it on live instruments and say, 'Alright, that sounds cool; but instead of playing live drums here, let's pre-record the drums and make 'em distorted for this four-second bit.' So I'm sure there's going to be a record that sounds weird to people, but not too much. I think it's easy to swallow."

And what does that mean for the live situation? "You push yourself to do it live. Everything on the record we do live, except for one song right now, because we need to buy another instrument. And I have to overcome my fear of singing and playing piano, which is my own shit."

http://www.kindamuzik.net/interview/sparta/sparta-it-s-hard-as-shit-to-sing-in-key-man/2079/
Meer Sparta op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/sparta