Interview with Clint Baker of Riddlin Kids

Masquerade -- Atlanta, Georgia

December 1, 2004

Leah Weinberg: How has this tour been going so far?
Clint Baker: This tour’s been going fantastic. It’s been going really good. On the first half we were on with Denver Harbor and Lit. Denver Harbor just dropped off and now The Matches are on it. All of the bands have been awesome and it’s been a lot of fun. So, it’s been really cool.

L.W.: Being on tour with the Matches, have you felt pressure to do something crazy to your hair yet?
C.B.: My hair pretty much only does one thing. Sometimes I can try and do other stuff, but I wake up and it’s like this. I have the permanent Bob’s Big Boy haircut. [Sound check starts getting too loud in the background.] Hey, do you want to move to another room where it’s quieter? [Clint picks up the recorder and talks into it.] Okay, we’re gonna move now.

L.W.: So now that we’ve moved. Your album came out about a month and a half ago. How has the response been so far?
C.B.: The response so far has been really good. Everybody who listens to it seems to love it. There’s some places where kids haven’t even known that it’s come out, which is kinda weird, but I think it’s because we took so long off from touring. When our last record came out, we toured for nearly a year before it came out and then we toured for another year and a half. So we worked really hard on pushing that one. This time, we just put the record out and just started touring. So the word is spreading slowly, but all the reviews have been pretty good. Every review has been solid. Everybody seems to like it. Kids, they like the record too, so that’s cool. It makes us happy and them happy because we’re really stoked on this record.

L.W.: What was the recording and writing process like?
C.B.: It was cool because the last record, we pretty much had all of our songs written and we had all of the groundwork laid out for exactly how the songs were gonna go. A lot of the songs we had been playing for years already. This time we went in there and we had taken a month or two to work on demos and come up with ideas. Basically we went in there with rough ideas for songs and just worked on them. We started out with skeletons and filled in the blanks and really got to be creative in the studio instead of just recording everything. And that’s a lot more fun. It can be stressful when you’ve got time restrictions. And we were also playing shows on the weekend and stuff. We wanted our fans to like the record. We wanted the label to be stoked on the record because there’s a lot of competition at our label with so many bands on there. And, you know, we wanted to like the record. We didn’t try and go in and say, ‘What do we want to sound like?’ or ‘What’s cool now? Should we go emo? Should we go screamo? Should we get harder or softer or poppier?’ “I Feel Fine” was kind of a poppier one of our songs and that was really successful as a single. ‘Should we try and be more commercial and go that route?’, which were questions our management or our label would ask. But we just all talked and we said we shouldn’t really be looking to sound like anything. We should just be as creative as possible and work really hard to write the best songs we can. And we’ll make our own sound, so that’s what we did. We concentrated on writing good songs rather than sounding like somebody.
L.W.: Yeah, I was going to ask what kind of input the label had in the whole process.
C.B.: They had influence in the way of putting pressure on us but not in how we sound. We don’t cater to what they want us to sound like. Especially the people we work with, with Aware/Columbia, they’re not trying as much to crank out a product. They look for quality and that’s why they signed us in the first place, because they thought we were good songwriters. And they even kind of went out on a limb because there’s no other bands that are like us on Aware. It’s mostly John Mayer and Five for Fighting, and everything they do is really good musicians. I’m really glad that we’re on Aware because they’re just looking for good music, they’re not really looking at a certain style. And they’ve definitely raised the bar for us as songwriters.
L.W.: You said they put some pressure on you guys...what kind of pressure?
C.B.:Pressure in that we were concerned, since this was our second record, we sold a good amount of records if we were on Vagrant or Nitro or some other label, they would be stoked because we sold over 100,000 records and a lot of bands don’t do that. But for Columbia, even Aware, John Mayer sells millions of records. Beyonce sells jillions of records. So to impress them is tough. And also there’s Coheed and Cambria, there’s Midtown, there’s the Ataris, there’s all these bands that got signed to Columbia that are more in our genre than ever before. So we really had to impress them because selling the amount of records that we did on a major label, a lot of times, especially with the way the music business is right now, it’s really easy to get dropped. Our thought was, and especially going into this record, we had just split ways with our manager, so we didn’t have the figure that goes into the label and talks to them business-wise and can come back and break it down. We didn’t have that. It was just us and the label, and that’s a weird situation to be in. Long story short, we didn’t know what was going to happen. For all we knew, we were gonna turn in a bunch of demos and they were gonna say, ‘This is crap; you guys are dropped.’ Or we’d start recording and then halfway through the recording process they’d say, ‘We’re gonna cut our losses and just write this one off.’ We didn’t know what was gonna happen, so we were working really hard to write the best quality stuff to impress them.

L.W.: How do you think it compares with “Hurry Up and Wait”?
C.B.: I think it’s a lot better. I like it a lot better. There’s songs like “I Feel Fine” on our last record that just have a life of their own. That song just fell together and it was a lucky thing and it did well in radio. There’s bands that write a song like that and then never write a song that clicks with everybody for the rest of their careers. And this record, I think, as a whole, is way better than the last record. The only song I was competing with on the last record was “I Feel Fine.” Everything else is way better.

L.W.: A few of the songs are about the split with your manager and crew...what happened with that?
C.B.: That’s a tough one. There is one song in particular that’s written about that called “Ship Jumper.” Basically, that’s a time in our career when we were really stressing out. Our first record, we thought that it was still alive, that we could keep touring and we thought it would click. Example, Linkin Park. Their record was out for, I think, eight months and then, bam!, all of a sudden it clicked and it exploded. And we thought our record had some great songs and still had the potential to do well and at least had other singles on it. But the label didn’t get behind it and pretty much everyone said, ‘Hey, this record’s dead.’ Our manager said the same thing. And things were really stressful because it’s so hard to work so hard on something for so long and then have to admit to yourself or accept the fact that your record’s done. So, we were under a lot of stress. It was a really bad time. We didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know if we were gonna get dropped. I think it made for a lot of tension between us and our management because our management was managing other bands that were doing really well. It’s really easy, when things aren’t going your way, to feel like the stepchild. Looking at it now, it makes sense. Those guys had things going on and our management was doing what they could with us. Long story short, we wanted more things to happen and we were having a hard time accepting the fact that our record was dead. So we parted ways with our manager, and it was a good parting. He’s a great guy and we wouldn’t be where we are now if it weren’t for the efforts and all the hard work that management team did with us. There’s no bad blood there at all. And as far as our crew goes, we were about to stop touring and go into the studio and those guys had to think about themselves. There was another band we were touring with, and they basically left us in the middle of the tour and joined their crew because they knew at the end of this tour, [they’d] be out of a job. We just never thought we’d get left high and dry. But the band they went to work for are good friends of ours, so it’s all good.

L.W.: Given all that you guys have been through, what’s kept the band together?
C.B.: This is what we love. This is what we want to do. The guys in the band, even though sometimes we want to strangle each other (usually it’s when we have a 12-hour drive like we did last night), even though those things can pop up once in a while, we’re like family. And when you spend as much time in a van together as we have, or a bus, and away from home, you kind of lose the rest of your life. You kind of divorce yourself from all your friends at home and all your acquaintances and you get to see them once or twice a year. When you go home, you see your old friends and it’s weird now because your best friend now has a new best friend and technically you’re his best friend but you don’t relate because you don’t know each other. Same with girlfriends, it can be rough like that. It’s a really tough thing to take yourself out of one world and put yourself in another and then just pop up every once in a while and have everything be normal. So, why do we keep doing this? We love it. We’re a family and if one of us left, we’d be letting down the rest of us and this is what we want to do. And this is all we know how to do. Write music, rock out and be stupid. It’s what we’re good at.

L.W.: 3 words that describe the Riddlin Kids
C.B.: Intense. Ridiculous and unstoppable.

Related Links:
Riddlin Kids -- Hurry Up and Wait Review
Riddlin Kids -- Stop the World Review
Official Website