I discovered Mutemath at Creation Fest in 2005. They’ve been one of my favourite bands ever since. I’ve followed their progression closely since they started out on a Christian label playing youth conferences. They’ve now jumped ship from the church scene and are forging their own path through heavy touring, developing an original style in their music, videos, and energetic live shows. They’re one of those bands who break down walls between secular and contemporary Christian music. Artists who practice faith while still marketing to non-believers. I caught up with them at the Keloha Music and Arts Festival in July. I was curious about the challenges they’ve faced, and what advice they have for creatives like me who struggle to find their place between the Christian and the secular.
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Q&A with Mutemath
Is the term “Christian artist,” a relevant term anymore?
Darren King (drummer): Well, it’s an unnecessary descriptor. If you look through the years, you’ve got times when the Sistine Chapel and Sam Cooke came out of church environments. And then you’ve got the book burnings and horrible ways that art has been stunted by religion. It’s too complicated to boil it down to a two-word descriptor.
When I think of a Christian band at least from a few years ago, I think of a band like POD who goes into a secular environment to evangelize and play songs about God.
Roy Mitchell-Cardenas (bassist): I think you’re assuming that [about them]. I think they were getting into a secular market to make money, and to expose their music, and to play to a bigger audience. I don’t think they really cared. They are pretty authentic as people, that’s who they were and what they believed. I don’t know if they had an evangelistic agenda.
King: There’s this great YouTube video of Dick Clarke interviewing Sam Cooke, and one of the first questions Clarke asks is, “Why did you leave Gospel music for this?” And [Cooke] replied, “Well, if I’m honest, I needed to put food on my plate. It didn’t pay the bills.” I appreciated the candor of that. When you limit your audience to only the people who agree with you about your religion, that’s a whole lot of people you ostracize unnecessarily. And then there’s so much that you can’t say that you might want to. It’s silly.
Paul Meaney (lead singer and keyboard player): I think every artist, everyone struggles with, “Where do I fit in? What is coming out of me genuinely, where does it go?” And I think there are a lot of people who grew up in church circles just like myself, who came to the realization that within that world, once you start operating and expressing yourself, it isn’t a fit. For us it became apparent when we started Mutemath that things worked better when we took it out of the bumper guards of the church scene, which I grew up in.
Is it possible to be successful artistically and financially?
King: We don’t know yet. We’re staying afloat. I recommend Questlove’s new book. He’s very open and honest about his own band’s struggle to find success, and the frustrations they had with artists they were helping, passing them. A lot of it in the music industry is chance, risks, timing. You feel like you’re in the ocean, and at the mercy of many circumstances beyond your control.
Meaney: It’s always unexpected. You’re always trying to create something that moves you … and not projecting on what you think people may like. It’s lightning in a bottle if it happens …. The most practical advice I can give is to make yourself deadlines. Have deadlines, run out of time, money, or whatever, but at least you finish something.
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How do you deal with criticism?
Meaney: There’s always criticism, no matter what you do, and no matter how great it’s perceived. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it. And that was a great lesson even with our first record. The realization that, “Wow, we suck, to a lot of people. Some people really think we suck.” And for the first time, having to deal with that. My favourite review on our first record was, “The lead singer poses the question in the first song: ‘Can he break the spell of the Typical.’ And then he goes on to sing 10 more songs to prove that he cannot.” I thought that was pretty clever.
Would you encourage people to become musicians, or tell them to do something else?
King: Well I always liked that Carl Sagan quote, “I was always going to be either a writer or a bum.” I do believe it’s that no-net approach. I mean, how many bands do you think there are? That means there are that many people wanting to do what you want to do. So it’s going to be tougher, you’re going to have to make sacrifices. But yeah, I like the idea that, at a certain age, if you’re young and don’t have a wife and kids, then think, “I’ll either do this or be a bum.”
Meaney: I remember at six years old I took drum lessons, and the instructor was like, “What beat do you want to play?” And I didn’t know any, and he asked, “What bands do you like?” But I didn’t know any bands. There was a poster in his room of The Police, and I liked the poster. And for whatever reason that poster stayed in my mind years later, and I found out what they actually sounded like. And then I saw U2 on a Time magazine cover, and decided that’s what I wanted to do. I chased my dreams recklessly. I played everywhere and anywhere I could. I remember I got my first record deal with my first band (Earthsuit) because the Artists and Repitoire guy who saw us didn’t quite like us, so I begged him. I told him I’d come to Nashville, asked to play in his garage. So we drove to Nashville, he came and saw us in a garage, and he liked it. He set up another show for the label. I was determined because ever since I could remember I wanted to be in a band.
Photo by Colin Gray
