The ‘80s are everywhere – from the Miami Vice pastel t-shirts at Urban Outfitters to Hot Tub Time Machine at the movie theater and the John Hughes tribute at the Oscars. Regardless of whether this is inspired by the nostalgia of the generation who lived through it or the fascination of the younger generation that is just discovering it, the ‘80s are on everyone’s mind. Listening to Hockey’s debut, Mind Chaos, makes you feel like we’re still there. Blending Blondie’s beats, Dire Straits’ swing and Talking Heads’ bounce, the West Coast fivesome – singer Ben Grubin, guitarist Brian White, drummer Anthony Stassi, bassist Jeremy Reynolds, and keyboardist Ryan Dolliver – have crafted a catchier-than-H1N1 collection of retrofit tunes that manage to sound both clever and contemporary. It’s a success story that almost didn’t happen, because the band got signed in 2007 and started recording with Jerry Harrison, before getting dumped and left for dead. Dispirited, but unwilling to give up, the group moved to Portland, Oregon, and wrote what became Mind Chaos in a few months of frantic creativity. The delayed debut was well worth the wait, because songs as poppy as “Song Away” and “Learn to Lose” are harder to find than Frankie Goes To Hollywood 45's. We caught up with Grubin in the midst of the band’s current US tour, which runs through the middle of April.
Moving out to Portland seemed to really help coalesce the band, huh?
Ben Grubin: We got there without jobs, so we spent two months down in a basement crafting songs. It was just a ten by ten box in an industrial part of the city with damp cement everywhere. We had to put carpet down, but even then it wasn’t very glamorous.
How odd is it to hear those basement demos on the radio?
When I take a big step back, it’s cool to think that we were able pull it off. Who’d have thought that was going to happen? At the time, I certainly had no idea where we would end up. There were only three of us then, which really affected the songs we wrote. We kept it very minimalist. There were no big keyboard lines or big guitar lines, because we didn’t have a big band then.
Does that mean that the next record going to have an orchestra and 87 layers of guitars on it?
We’re going to use what we have; now that there are five of us playing. Mind Chaos is very driven by vocal hooks and rhythmic hooks with very few instrumental hooks. I’m sure we’ll end up doing some weird stuff that will surprise even us.
There are a lot of ‘80s influences on Mind Chaos. Is that the music you grew up on?
The main thing for me in high school was rap and hip-hop. The ‘80’s influence came into play when we went to college. We wanted to play parties where the vibe was about having fun and contributing to the crazy atmosphere. So we gravitated towards the signature sounds that people have at parties – big choruses and drum machines. We still write with our live show in mind, because we want people to party with us.
There’s a lyric “I want to sing a truthful song over an ‘80’s groove” on “Song Away.” Was that what you set out to do when you wrote that song?
That song is a total confrontation of the moment. One of my favorite books growing up was Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, because it was about his whole life, including his struggle to be a writer. On “Song Away,” I put it all out there and it felt really honest to write like that. Maybe you’re not supposed to write songs about writing songs, but that’s what I did. F
