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Son of Rust

Coope: Well, back in '96 or '97 I was hanging out at a RadioShack while my parents went clothes shopping—yep, old-school nerd—and I found this Tandy that was playing a very accurate remake of Tears for Fears' 'Shout' on something called a 'MODtracker.' Instantly I fell in love, so I went home and found out that MODs were little four-track sample-based sequences that you could put together on your PC. I immediately started recording bits and pieces of songs I liked on my Sound Blaster 16 and turning them into horrifying bastardized versions of the originals on MODtracker. My parents, either deciding they wanted to support my interest in music or just getting really sick of hearing the awful crap I was making, signed me up for piano lessons, and I eventually ended up in an arrangement/studio internship-like thing with this local R&B producer named Rick Callier who worked with El DeBarge back in the day. He taught me most of what I know about song structure. I've been writing little tunes ever since. An amusing fact is that I still used trackers all the way up until just after the release of the first Son of Rust album, Six Years of Gene Therapy. Other musicians usually had no idea what I was talking about when they asked me what I used to write music. I was very resistant to change. Now I use Ableton Live and kind of wish that maybe I had tried it about five years ago.

How did the band name come about?

Coope: The actual name 'Son of Rust' is from a James Morrow short story that chronicles an alternate reality where the 10 Commandments were originally destroyed, and a computer is built to recreate the pieces of tablet to inform the masses of God's truth. The 'Son of Rust' makes a cameo as a broken robot advocate for maintaining the status quo. Back in the day, it really jived with my obsession with machines and my ceaseless wrestling with religious ideology.

Do you read music or are you one of those exceptional prodigies who can create music entirely from ear alone?

Coope: I can read music very slowly, but most of my knowledge is simply regarding chord and song structure. Even then, I'm more of one of those 'If it sounds good, leave it in' kind of musicians. To be fair, I'm much more a technician then I am a musician, but I know the basics.

Of the tracks you have completed, which is your favorite and which is your least favorite?

Coope: It changes very rapidly. Usually the last song I worked on is the favorite. I get in the zone with something I'm programming, and it's like a drug high, and afterward I can still feel the effects of the endorphins or whatever, but I'm only really attached to a song for a brief period of time. Once it's out and people are hearing it, I'm usually on to something else already. Sometimes I'll go back and hear a track I remember being really excited about and just go, 'What was I thinking?' In the end, it's tough, because I can't really point to anything I've done and say, 'I am satisfied with that. That was perfect.' As soon as I have a song I feel that way about, I'm sure it'll be my favorite.

What track or tracks would you prefer to redo sometime in the future?

Coope: 'Strange' and 'Just Like Me' are favorites off the first album, especially 'Strange.' Like I said, I wrote that stuff using absolutely crappy old archaic technology, and I can do so much more now that I feel like I could turn 'Strange' into something really special.

The track 'Just Once' delivers a vocal fire. Who comes to mind when you perform that track?

Coope: I wrote that one from the perspective of an emerging sentience who becomes obsessed with a real girl and doesn't understand what it's feeling or what to do about it. I had this idea for a video where it would try to reach out to her through the Internet, and eventually on televisions she'd pass on the street or traffic lights and whatnot, and she just wouldn't get what was happening until the end. Maybe I'll still do that. The middle bridge part was actually taken from a different track but just seemed to fit there vocally. In retrospect I don't know if it really worked, as it seems too humanizing.

On the track 'The World You Live In,' there is a male chorus in the background. Is that an actual chorus of live voices or is that completely machine-generated?

Coope: Oh, they're all real, oddly enough, 'cause you'd think I'd be a fan of the robot backups, but the truth is that throughout the course of the last album I never had any plug-ins or soft-synths that did a very good job of generating vocal stuff. I learned the multi-track chorus trick from remixing Information Society songs as a kid; for every chorus, they'd just sing it three times—no big harmonies, just mostly the same thing over and over—then layer it left/right/center. I usually heavily effect them to make them fit my style, but it's a common technique these days.

How has life as a band changed after MP3.com went belly up for the indie artist?

Coope: Life hasn't really changed, but there's always the 'What ifs?,' you know? I was really close to actually being able to make a living off MP3.com with all the plays we were getting. That's also probably why they went out of business. MP3.com was really unique, because it was basically a contest site as well as a gateway to great indie music, as well as being really popular, so if your songs were being rated well you actually had a chance to be heard by a very good number of people. There are a lot of sites like that now, but with like five percent of the traffic MP3.com used to have. MySpace is great for coordinating fans, but it's very difficult to get heard on MySpace if you're not a household name already. I thought GarageBand was going to be the answer for a while, but its user base seems to have tailed off lately. 'Vicious Cycles' (the track) has had a solid 5/5 rating in the electronic section there for like four months, and it's been listened to maybe 50 times. It's just sad.

In a vein similar to early Gary Numan, you have a persona of man as part of a machine to some degree. What are your thoughts about man vs. machine in modern times?

Coope: I've never felt totally human for some reason, and machines really seem to like me. When I'm around, broken hard drives suddenly spin up, VCRs program themselves, microwaves cook my lasagna all the way through... However, like a lot of people, I feel that there's some piece of me that didn't make it into the batter when my DNA was being stirred, and that I'm more parrot than person in a lot of emotional respects. It can feel very isolating. That's mainly why I love machines and technology: they're easy. I'll be the first on the gurney for cybernetic implants.

You mention having a better relationship with machines than with people. Do you think this is starting to become rather common with the younger generation? If so, why do you think this has been transpiring?

Coope: I know next to nothing about the younger generation. However, I know that psychologists are discovering a whole range of relatively new forms of mild autism, like Asperger's syndrome, that can lead to similar emotional disorders. How much that has to do with technology and the way children are raised now is anyone's guess.

Some artists find unrequited love or anger as a huge impetus for crafting songs. What is your greatest emotional inspiration for writing songs?

Coope: Yeah, well, my answer to that previous question probably goes to this somewhat; I'm very familiar with feelings of isolation, regret and loss, so that's what I end up writing about most of the time. 'Write what you know,' they say. I'm really going to try hard to address some more interesting and less worn-out themes in future tracks, but at least for now I feel like I've been honest, and I think a lot of people can tell when you're coming at a song from a dishonest place. I'd feel really weird trying to write something that sells in the current culture, like 'Oh girl, you so fine / check my Bentley and Cristal wine...' I have no idea where I would go next. Maybe something about booties? So yeah, I try to be honest.

As an indie artist, explain to the readers the cost involved with creating music and why it is so important to support the artists with an actual purchase as opposed to stealing music from the Web.

Coope: Yeah, karma's getting back at me on this one. I used to be a dirty little music thief, and I still download the occasional track, but man, it's crazy these days. I hate to side with those pricks at the RIAA, but after working on a disc like Vicious Cycles for almost two years, shelling out $1300 for CD-printing costs, $2300 for mastering, and then trying to promote it, you really start to feel the burn of peer-to-peer. I mean, there was this Russian site that posted a BitTorrent link to the full album—with artwork and lyrics somehow, and I didn't even include the lyrics—about two days after the album came out, and after checking the tracker I found that it had been downloaded something along the lines of 8500 times. I mean, that's really flattering, but if even 10 percent of those people had actually bought the album from me, I would have been able to cover the production costs right out of the gate. Yes, I still have a day job.

Has music ever interfered with your personal life?

Coope: No, if anything, music has had a very positive effect on my personal life. I've met a lot of really great people at shows and in other bands that I never would have met otherwise, and it's made me a much more well-rounded person in the long run. I can't imagine how a person could live without it.

Are there any plans to move Ben Purdy's vocals into a more prominent spot in the band's line-up?

Coope: Ben has always been a great friend and a great ear in the studio, but he's decided to focus on his career and isn't working with me on Son of Rust anymore. He still talks about doing his own thing music-wise someday, so keep an eye out for that.

The track 'The Highest Cost' was featured on Hidden Sanctuary Radio and was obtaining 5/5 listener votes. This actually beat out some of the more popular underground bands whose track longevity didn't fare as well. Why do you think this track resonated so well with listeners?

Coope: Well, probably because it's a kick-ass song! [Laughs.]

I hadn't heard this before! That's very cool. Honestly, from the moment I finished that one I knew I had something special. The chorus just pops out of it in a way that sets it apart from a lot of the other tracks. In fact, I recently took a songwriting class from Jason Blume wherein he discussed a lot of the keys to good hook-writing and song progression, and it turns out that I did a lot of them in 'The Highest Cost' completely by accident.

The vocals on 'The Highest Cost' sound as though there is a machine harmonizing with your real vocals. What did you do to the vocals to get that incredible sound?

Coope: It's just layers and layers of mild to heavy distortion panned all around and pushed out of phase. You can cook up crazy crap nowadays with almost any digital audio workstation suite, like Ableton or Cubase. It's just a matter of duplicating your vocal tracks, running them through layers of effect plug-ins, and panning them all crazy-like. You want to make sure you've got at least one solid take taking up a large amount of the center channel, however, or you lose listener comprehension. The problem with doing all these vocal tricks to make up for the lack of a truly talented lead singer makes live shows much harder, as I feel like people are expecting the sound of that crazy processing, and what they're getting live is just me sounding very close to dry. Putting those kind of effects on a live track is impossible, as the feedback instantly kicks in and destroys all nearby equipment and eardrums. The other option is to just play prerecorded layers on top of the live vocals, but I always felt that was too close to an Ashlee Simpson show for me to feel really good about it.

Son of Rust has been around for something like a decade. How have you grown as an artist during this time?

Coope: Oh man, has it really been that long? I'm going to go down a roofie-colada and try to forget that little nugget. Anyway, I feel like I've gotten so much better. I listen to some of the stuff I was doing back in the old days, and I have to sit on my hands to keep from jamming pencils in my ears. Plus, there's been these various life lessons and personal growth things that have helped. Also, I feel like I've grown as a vocalist from abjectly awful to passably mediocre, at least for this genre.

What was your favorite show or venue to play?

Coope: That's tough, but I've got to say The Crystal Ballroom with Information Society was my favorite. They were childhood icons of mine, and the chance to share a stage with them was just mind-melting. It was a hell of a show.

Are you planning on touring any time soon?

Coope: Probably not. I wish I could say yes, but without a label funding a tour, there's very little chance.

If you could collaborate with any artist, who would it be and why?

Coope: Chris Corner of IAMX is my favorite current musician, as he's just got this fantastically 'out there' style that doesn't really conform to any of the usual genres, yet his music remains incredibly catchy and easily accessible to anyone who likes electronic stuff. That's kind of how I always wanted Son of Rust to jive with people, so I think we could collaborate well. If we're going all the way back here, I'd say Martin Gore, but I'd probably be too intimidated by him to be able to really collaborate on music. We could share a bottle of Scotch together, though.

What are some of your favorite films and why?

Coope: American Beauty, because I know I'll be Kevin Spacey's character when I'm in my 40s. Pi and Primer because I like twisted mathematical mind-fucks of movies; if you haven't seen or heard of Primer, you really owe it to yourself to find it. I love everything by the Coen brothers. Pretty much any Phillip K. Dick adaptation is fine by me for obvious reasons: Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall... All the Matrixes, even that last one that everyone hated. Eternal Sunshine because I had a girl like that. Recently, Children of Men was not to be missed. Man, there are so many good movies.

Who is your favorite author and why?

Coope: I'm going to say Stephen King, despite the groans I'll receive from everyone, because The Stand and The Dark Tower are just plainly some of the best fiction that has ever been written, hands down. Now, as far as the semi-pretentious publicly acceptable 'favorite authors' go, I'd say Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Douglas Coupland, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Other than making music, what do you do for fun?

Coope: I harvest the blood of the innocent.

What do you feel is the greatest trend so far that you would hope would last a long time?

Coope: The onward march of technology and its tireless efforts to connect everyone without the need to actually see each other and engage in all that exhausting conversation.

What trend would you like to see go away or never return?

Coope: The butchering of the English language from so many sources.

Who would you consider the most underrated celebrity?

Coope: Both Mesh and Iris. They are so good, yet nobody outside of this little scene has any idea who they are.

Which celebrity should not have had more than their 15 minutes of fame?

Coope: Britney Spears' little sister. I mean, seriously, why do you care, people?

What political issues are you most passionate about?

Coope: I hate the combustion engine. Why do we still have that thing? It's like 90 years old, and it hasn't changed more than a little! Why are we still pumping up all this disgusting muck and burning it? It's just completely ridiculous.

Who would you like to see become the next president of the USA and why?

Coope: I'm voting a straight Stewart/Colbert ticket.

If you could do a show anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Coope: I haven't seen Italy, Japan or Russia. I'd love any of those.

If you could travel on vacation anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Coope: Probably Japan. It seems like such a forward-thinking and beautiful place, a technology-loving geek's wet dream.

What would you like Son of Rust to be remembered for and why?

Coope: Wow, that's an incredibly hard question. I have no idea. I write music because I like writing music. It soothes my soul. If anyone listens to something I've written, and it somehow makes them feel better or like there's someone out there who feels the same way they do, then I guess I'd just be happy with that.