First off, how has the tour been going?
Tour has been fantastic, Zebrahead have been joining us every night for a good part of the set, crowd's been great, we've had some sell out shows, everyone's been awesome and I've loved this tour.
So Zebrahead have been treating you well?
Very nice! They're like our big brothers already!
So have you got any pre-show rituals that you like to go through before you perform, or perhaps a band mascot?
Basically with this tour we're running everything from the laptop, so there's a lot of video prep. That's always last minute! We have to make sure we have all the right versions of the songs, and there's a lot of video stuff that goes along with the songs too so we have to make sure we got that covered too.
We know 'what happens on tour, stays on tour' but have you got any stories to tell us from this tour?
The guitar tech for Zebrahead had sex at a club! That was great. He's a pretty shy guy, so that was a victory and then DJ hit this boxing thing really hard and beat everyone.
We've noticed this tour in particular has been getting a lot of press, are you enjoying all this attention?
It's cool people care, I mean cause this tour we don't have any large record labels paying thousands of dollars for anyhting, it's very DIY punk rock in that way, so it's cool how strong the shows have been despite that.
Your style of music based heavily on older styles of hip-hop, what're your views on the newer material coming out these days?
Well hip-hop has always had interesting history cause there's always been this line between mainstream hip-hop and underground hip-hop. Hip-hop has always been really political and could always say these things that people couldn't really say in other ways. So I think that mainstream hip-hop is really well produced, but I don't think with the music industry in such crisis, nobody wants to buy records. There's this weird thing whereby 20 years ago public enemy could say 'fight the power' and people would buy that album, now it's like if you're political it's kinda hard for people to buy your records cause the culture has changed so much. So I definitely think mainstream hip-hop is very well produced but my favourite stuff is the underground hip-hop.
So what would you call you're style of hip-hop then?
The tag we've come up with for it is 'post-punk laptop rap'. Post punk in that we take the DIY ethics of punk, but it's post-punk in that we flip it just like Public Image ltd and all the post punk bands did where it's got a different kind of aesthetic and different kinda vibe, and 'laptop rap' because we make most of our beats on the computer. We still basically perform a punk show, but we've got our own twist to it.
Tell us a bit about your newest record 'This Giant Robot Kills'.
That's my newest record that came out on 'Crappy Records' which is Jaret from Bowling For Soup's record label. We spent about 3 years on it, and it's different from 'The Graduate' in the way that 'The Graduate' had a lot of samples, where as 'This Giant Robot Kills' has a lot of live musicians. We had a lot of guests come to play like the guy from Cobra Starship, Weird Al, our friend Perry from Nerf Herder, Paul Gilbert who's an awesome technical guitarist, Suburban Legends, the guy from the Aquabats, a lot of cool rappers too like MC frontalot, Jesse Dangerously, YT Cracker, K.Flay who's this really cool rapper who went to college with us. She's actually coming out on tour with us for our headline dates and she's fantastic. She's gonna take the world by storm next year. Next we're doing a video for our latest song 'Twenty-Three' which is about my friend who took his life, so that's pretty powerful. We had fans submit pictures of friends who had taken their lives, so the theme is i'm in this classroom by myself and there's all these pictures of people who have died because of suicide, so that's a pretty big deal because it's hopefully gonna help people talk about their problems.
You've had some cool people like Weird Al Yankovic work with you on this latest album, what was that like?
Weird Al's always been a big hero of mine, he found out about me in 2006 after I talked about him at an MTV interview and he read that and got in touch with me. So we arranged an accordion part and he's such a nice guy. It's so cool to have one of your heros be someone who sends you christmas cards and you can talk to about stuff. He's awesome!
So, if you could work with any artist at all, dead or alive to work with in your music, who would it be?
Wow, well erm I think Kurt Cobain would be my first choice.
So tell us a bit about 22nd Street.
That's my comic stip. I try to write every day I can, it's on my website at www.comics.mclars.com and I've been doing it since 2002 so it's a pretty long time.
