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On Sept. 28, hours before the front of the Mason Hall was filled with students jumping up and down to the music, I sat in the front row enjoying being the only member of the audience. Keith Murray, the lead singer of We Are Scientists (W.A.S.), liad down on the stage and continued to strum the guitar. As they launched into a song a few minutes later, I could not help but feel the rush of the excitement. It's a wrap. Sound check was over. The band members, four of them now - Murray, Chris Cain, Michael Tapper and the new addition of Max Hart, were eager to disperse and enjoy the break before the show. "We don't have to wait for them," said Murray, agreeing to do an interview on his own. As we walked up to one of the stairs in search of some solitude, Murray jokes about being back in school, "After four years of being the teacher, I am ready to learn again." Silently praying under my breath for him not to expect me to teach him anything, I followed him into an empty classroom. As the sound of our voices echoed in the emptiness of the room, I dove into the questions.
Jana Kasperkevic: Are you excited about tonight's show? Keith Murray: Absolutely not. We couldn't be less excited.
So, who is the new addition to the band? Max Hart. He might be in for a while. A lot of our new stuff requires a fourth person. Has he been with W.A.S. long? Four weeks; you can call it an even month.
Do you guys have anything crazy planned for tonight's show? We consider ourselves like an antenna for insanity. We just always like to be open to it, and when we see that the seed of something crazy is presenting itself, we just try to channel it.
You mentioned your "new stuff." I heard you have been working on a new album. Can you tell us anything about it? Yea, I sort of can …
Is it a top secret? It's not a top secret. It's all just incredibly nebulous right now. We don't know exactly when it's coming out. We know it's coming out beginning 2008. We don't know what's it going to be called yet.
There is some talk of titles that you are mulling over on your Web site. We definitely have been putting out a lot of titles, none of which are the actual potential titles. But yeah, we are really bad at making decisions until the last minute. So, we have a couple of titles.
Have you compiled the songs that will be on this new record? We have a bunch of songs recorded, we don't know which ones will actually be on it yet. We know for the most part, but we haven't decided how many songs we want to be on the record. Will this record be similar to the old one? Or should we expect something new? It's pretty different for the most part. I don't think there is anything that sounds like it could have been on the last one. There is some stuff that is not wildly different, you can tell that it's us. It's still pretty dance-y, but less like dance punk.
Is there a reason for this change? I mean, you know, after three years of touring on that album we got a little tired. And especially since there are a lot of bands, even now, still coming out that sound like our record three years ago. So, why even bother? And, you know, we all got into different things since our last [album].
You guys have a tour coming up with Kaiser Chiefs. We are going over to the UK on our own in November and I think the tour with them starts in early December.
Is there any possibility that you will play any of your new songs? Probably it would mostly be the old stuff because nobody has access to the new stuff yet. Although, at that point, it would probably be online, so people might already know the songs. It might leak by that point.
Really? Is that good or bad? I definitely have no problem with album leaks. At this point we don't make most of our money through album sales. We make it through touring and selling merchandise. I personally don't care.
Should we be checking the Web site? I guess we probably wouldn't put it on our Web site that would be pretty incriminating …
Speaking of your Web site, it is not like a typical band site. One of the more interesting characteristics is the advice column. I don't think we have seen anything like this on other band sites. Good advice, though. That's public service. We feel like we got to give something back to the community. So we thought the least we could do is provide illumination and insight.
Is there any advice you would like to give Baruch students? Learn to read. Honestly, I know it sounds ridiculous and outdated, but it comes in handy in the most unusual situations.
What inspired this public service? We just found that everywhere we went people seemed to recognize that we were valuable resource. We just seemed very wise. And we are also always objective, every issue. It got to the point where we were considering just doing tours in United States and Europe just giving people advice, just having seminars in which we advise people. Then we thought we would just rather stay at home, do it online.
Yeah, provide access to everybody, unlike at a seminar. We could have made a pretty penny at an actual tour of advice …but I feel that would be corrupting the purity of the effort. [Laughs]
W.A.S. had been touring for three years. Are you sick of each other yet? We were definitely sick of each other by the time we were done touring. We stopped touring in December to work on the record. We stopped seeing each other every day. So now we are just sort of warming up to each other again.
How does it feel to be back in Brooklyn? It feels good. I wish I were not actually working. I wish we were done with the record and I was just hanging out in the Brooklyn, doing nothing. Isn't that the best way to be in Brooklyn? Just to be idle.
It's changing a lot. It is changing and sometimes you just want to sit back and soak in all the changes rather than to be part of the effort to change it.
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