Once upon a time in January, Division Day was on the verge of taking the indie world by storm. They’d recorded a record—Beartrap Island—at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio, which was garnering all sorts of pre-release buzz in the blogs. They’d played to acclaim at the 2006 CMJ festival, and were preparing to tear up Austin for SXSW. Promos were hot in the hands of print journalists, heading towards a late March release. All in all, things were looking up. Then their label collapsed, and the band—guitarist Ryan Wilson, vocalist/keyboardist Rohner Segnitz, bassist Seb Bailey, and drummer Kevin Lenhart—were suddenly without a release date. During this time, before they announced their new home on Eenie Meenie Records, the boys sat down with Ground Control to talk about their album troubles, their life as a band, t-shirts, puking and their unabashed love for Mr. Andrew WK:
GC: I might be completely wrong with this, but I heard you guys signed to a label and then got dropped.
Kevin: We didn’t get dropped, the label folded. Essentially, we signed to this label in September, and then we were set to release the album in late March, March 27th release. We had a Spaceland residency and all that shit set up. We were building towards the release. Then in late January, early February the label—it was funded by the owner who is independently wealthy—suddenly all his funding vanished, and he said “I’ve gotta shut the label down.” So it’s like, cool, I guess we’re unsigned again. It’s been a while getting the contracts taken care of.
GC: Are you shopping it around now?
Kevin: Yeah, we’re finally back to shopping it. It’s taken a while to get all the legal mumbo-jumbo squared away.
Ryan: We had to get our master back, obviously. The lawyers had to wrangle and go back and forth.
Kevin: That cost us a lot of time. So we finished recording the album, Beartrap Island, a year ago. We’ve been selling it at shows and through our website, but we never went beyond that, because we were waiting for someone to pick us up and distribute it. Then we had signed on this label. And now we have this album that’s a year old, and we’re still shopping it.
GC: And now you guys are coming off the road to record stuff?
Kevin: Not record, but write.
Rohner: We’ve been playing so much in support of this record that we haven’t had time to write in any substantial way.
Kevin: We’ve got a bunch of song fragments lying around that we need to develop, and we need to take time to come up with new stuff too. The idea is that we’re going to do an official release for Beartrap Island. In the meantime, we’re going to start writing now so that as soon as we’re able to record a new record, we will, and then have another release right away. We’re just ready to produce more shit.
Rohner: The blogs got a hold of the record and did pretty well for us. For better or for worse, we got lumped in as a blog buzz band. Touring with Birdmonster was good and bad, because it helped cement the blog buzz band thing.
Kevin: They’re beautiful people, and dear friends.
Rohner: They’re great, we love those guys. So that’s been pretty much the last year, touring with Birdmonster, Great Northern, Peter Walker. We’ve been to Seattle four times in the last year. Mostly just on the west coast.
Kevin: And mostly without the label, just kind of on our own.
Rohner: With the label, we were really lucky, because during the time we were on the label, they got us some new gear, and paid for us to go to CMJ.
Ryan: We definitely suckered them out of some cash.
GC: So basically, you caused the downfall of the label.
Rohner: Basically, yeah.
Seb: Well, we don’t want to go so far as to say that.
Rohner: We sucked too hard, and they saw it.
Kevin: We blew it all on champagne, actually.
Seb: And by champagne, we mean Bolivian coke.
GC: The last album you guys recorded with Scott Solter, right?
Kevin: Yeah, Beartrap Island was with Scott Solter.
GC: I was going to make a comment about Seb’s Volcano shirt, and how I didn’t realize that t-shirts came in anything other than skulls and noble wolves, and then I looked over and saw what Kevin was wearing [a noble wolf shirt].
Kevin: I actually brought my Costa Rica sea turtles shirt tonight, but I didn’t have the balls to wear it this time.
GC: The one that dads always wear when they go on vacation?
Rohner: Yeah, it’s a total dad shirt.
Kevin: I went to Costa Rica for study abroad and I spent two months there looking for the worst tourist shirt I could find…
Seb: It’s tie-dyed.
Kevin:…and I eventually got this one, it’s blue tie-dye, with full print graphics with two sea turtles swimming, and then in Spanish it says “Let’s save the turtles.” It’s fucking sweet. I also bought a shirt in Wyoming on the way out to Denver, it’s my spirit animal shirt. It has an eagle, a buffalo and a wolf, and it’s tie-dyed dark blue.
Ryan: You could see a really tall hipster in skinny jeans wearing that shirt, and think “Oh that fucker, I hate that guy!” But when Kevin wears it, it just brings joy to the world.
Kevin: I almost threw up again tonight.
GC: During the set?
Kevin: At the end.
Rohner: Kevin goes hard
.[ed. note – This is very true. Kevin spent almost 20 minutes earlier that evening stretching out. He explained “if I don’t stretch, I’m guaranteed to pull a muscle.” His drumming is that energetic.]
Kevin: Me and Ryan were really sick at this show in Fresno. I didn’t barf, but Ryan was really sick, and I was getting over the SXSW sickness, so I was feeling shitty. I didn’t dry heave, but I had those puke burps, four pretty fuerte ones. It was the worst I ever felt drumming. I thought “it’s a toss up if I’m going to barf all over my drum set.” Now I think I’m developing a complex.
Seb: Ha! Toss up!
GC: How do you feel about the reception that the record has gotten?
Kevin: The blog reaction was awesome. I felt like it was very encouraging, and people really seemed into it. I wouldn’t want to speak disparagingly of the blogs, but some of these are dudes who have worked in the music industry forever, and some are fifteen year old kids from Indiana. They run the gamut in terms of journalistic credibility. So it would be a bad move to think “all these blogs think we’re great, so we must be great.” But nonetheless, it was really cool getting that reaction, because we worked super hard on the record. It was vindicating.
Ryan: You have to look at it in a wider scope: it’s really good for the record not being out. It’s not like we’ve worked super hard, we’ve released this record, and we’ve spent all this effort supporting it in the marketplace. It really just trickled out, and this is what people responded with. It doesn’t have distribution, nobody who isn’t in LA can go and buy it in a store after they read a blog, it’s not on iTunes. So it’s great for how it happened. It’s really people who are genuinely into it, because if they weren’t into it they wouldn’t take five minutes and write anything.
Kevin: We sold out of it. Our manager found 20 more in the office, we thought we were done.
GC: Does the name come from the Elliott Smith song?
Rohner: It does. It’s not like a tribute, he was very much still alive when the band was named. The band was named in 1998, before Ryan was even involved. We needed a name, and there have been a few bands that have cool names from song titles of other bands.
Seb: It worked out for Radiohead.
GC: Really?
Seb: Yeah, it was an old Talking Heads song.
Rohner: It’s kind of a dorky name, but I kinda like having that connection.
Seb: And it’s not like we sound like Elliott Smith.
GC: So what is your writing process?
Kevin: Historically we’ve written where someone brings something in, and we build on top of it all. So everybody has sort of been responsible for writing their instrument’s part. We would discuss ad-infinitum the structure of the songs, and take a really long time to arrange everything
Ryan: Earlier on [Rohner] wrote a lot of it.
Kevin: Yeah, our first EP, which we don’t even sell anymore, it was a lot of stuff that he had previously written. We had a month and a half to put them together and become a band, but once we were a band, it became this collaborative thing. Now we’re about to start writing and we want to figure out a new way to start songwriting.
Seb: At the very least, every time we go back to write, we turn some sort of style or method corner. It’s never really produced really contiguous results.
Kevin: We like a lot of the same music, but we have disparate tastes.
GC: It seems like on a lot of the songs on Beartrap Isand, the first thirty seconds of the song are not at all representative of the rest of the song.
Ryan: I feel like a lot of our songs have a slow motion quality to it, in the front half of the tune, until you get to some point that turns your head, and then you go in a different direction, and then you go around another corner. It’s never like “hurry up with the verse, let’s get to that other part.” A lot of it reads like a narrative or a sentence, you are always going on to the next thing. You never think “I want to read that word again.
Rohner: You may have also noticed that we have a real hard time writing two songs that sound like one another.
GC: But that’s not a bad thing, especially when you are at a live show. Sometimes you are at a show, it’s twenty minutes in, and you are wondering “are they still playing the same song or not?”
Kevin: That shit really bums me out. Unless it’s like Mastadon, or…
Seb & Ryan:…Andrew WK?
Kevin: Or Andrew WK. If the one thing you do is really fucking sweet, then cool, do that all the time. We may or may not have listened to all of “I Get Wet” on the drive down here.
Seb: If by ‘may or may not,’ you mean ‘may.’
Ryan: That was the highlight of SXSW for me, seeing Andrew WK in a bus station singing to his own CD with a throbbing crowd…
Kevin: …and a burnt out P.A…
Ryan: yelling along to every lyric.
Kevin: People were moshing and everything. Once you touch his sweat-soaked body, you’ll be a fan for life. That’s what happened to me.
Ryan: The first time we saw him was at the House of Blues during the I Get Wet era. Kevin and I had been watching MTV2 a lot, and we saw the video for “Party Hard” and we both looked at each other like “What is this? This rocks!” At that point, it wasn’t clear if it was ironic or not. Nobody really knew this guy. So we took a chance and went and saw him, and it blew my mind.
Kevin: It was fucking awesome.
Ryan: He spent probably 45 minutes after that set giving every person in the venue a piggy-back ride.
Kevin: What about the fucking toy car?
Rohner: I had a friend that went and saw him around the same time at the Fillmore in San Francisco. It was this guy Dave, this really unique character. He somehow managed to get this really big plastic toy cop car into the show, and then managed to somehow pass off the cop car to Andrew WK on stage. For at least a whole song, Andrew WK was driving the cop car all over his entire body, and singing and karate kicking, and whatever else. Then Dave got his cop car back, and it became this heralded…
Ryan: magical talisman?
Kevin: holy shroud?
Seb: relic?
Ryan: Yeah, relic. Just the fact that the guy had this fourteen inch long detailed plastic cop car model…who brings it to the show, and then who gives it to WK? And then WK thinks “I know exactly what to do with this, I’m going to drive it over my entire body!”
Kevin: It’s like when genius collides.
Rohner: Yeah, it’s right at the intersection of genius and cop car.
For more information, visit www.divisionday.com
Downloads:
From 2004's The Mean Way In EP
Bad Black Moon – [mp3]
There Is No Telling – [mp3]
