Wheatus profile
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Amplifier,
January-February 2006
As
much as he’d like to convince himself otherwise, Brendan B. Brown is
willing to
acknowledge what so many other musicians know in their hearts but
simply cannot
admit to themselves: that his band is not unique. Not that he doesn’t
try to
uphold the image of the sui generis artiste,
saying “I think we certainly try not to sound like anything else. We
also try
not to show any particular musical allegiance to any genre or any
school.” But
he can’t hold onto that for too long, breaking down to say, “I’ll stop
the
utopian nonsense by saying that it’s very conventional music in an
arrangement
sense.”
That
combination of idealistic optimism and grounded realism comes naturally
to the
Wheatus frontman, who has seen his band swing from next-big-thing
status with
their radio hit “Teenage Dirtbag” to persona non grata within the world
of
major labels. With the new Too Soon
Monsoon released on its own Montauk Mantis label, Wheatus is
finally its
own band, free to chart its own course without the encumbrances of
Columbia
Records, which tried to limit the keyboard- and backing-vocal-heavy
lineup to a
guitar/bass/drums power trio before its first album was even recorded,
or the
distraction of freeing itself from their clutches. This was, after all,
a band
whose second album, Hand Over Your Loved
Ones, was released in the
Brown
isn’t worried about burning any bridges. “I wouldn’t sign with a major
label
under any circumstances that they would agree to,” he says. “I would
never do
that again. I didn’t know what I was getting into the first time, and I
do
now.” Ironically, it was the band’s success on Columbia – specifically,
the
overseas response to “Teenage Dirtbag” – that provides Brown, his
drummer
brother Peter and singer sister Liz with the financial freedom to
remain
full-time musicians.
There
are other differences between Wheatus’s reception inside and outside
the States
besides simply the money. “It’s weird, because the further you get from
American culture, the less it seems to matter what genre you
represent,” says
Brown. “Like, American kids are either into goth stuff or punk stuff or
metal,
whatever they’re calling it. When we toured with Zebrahead here in the
States…
I mean, Zebrahead’s music in the overall spectrum is not that different
from
ours. It’s significantly different in a microcosm of rock, but it’s not
that
different, really. And there would be kids who wanted to kill us just
for being
on the same stage. And overseas you never get that. You never get that
sort of
vitriolic hardcore allegiance.”
Part
of Brown’s confusion stems from his own varied listening habits. A big
Ani
DiFranco fan, he has been through straightedge, hardcore and prog
phases and
started playing guitar because he wanted to be Angus Young, to the
point of
dressing up as the AC/DC guitarist for Halloween (thus creating the
brain-cramp-inducing spectacle of a child dressed as an adult who
dresses like
a child). While none of the above seems particularly evident in
Wheatus’s
music, Brown says that the indie rockers in his
If
Brown is the leader of the band, Wheatus still operates under a sort of
democratic dictatorship. Everyone is free to bring songs to the table,
but
there’s a band rule that the writer gets control over production and
arrangement, and Too Soon Monsoon’s
“Who Would Have Thought?,” a Kim Wildean slice of neo-New Wave, marks
the first
time backing vocalist Kathryn Froggatt got to be in the driver’s seat
since
being whisked away from her job at a Sydney music television station in
her
native Australia by the band. “I made a demo and it was just me playing
guitar,”
she says, “and I have really basic guitar skills, so it was amazing to
hear the
boys in the band take it and play it properly. And I had ideas of what
I wanted
the bass to do and the keyboard and the drums, but when they actually
did it, I
was like a little kid. I was so excited.”
Froggatt
has been focusing some of that enthusiasm in another direction, into a
long-distance, Postal Service-type project, tentatively titled
Amberlove, with
a Canadian DJ she met at a