Whale! Whale! Rock & Roll

So were you actually playing on that keyboard when you were a kid, then?

Berkholtz: Yeah, it's been around since I was born. I started playing when I was five. Except that the one we originally had broke, and we had to replace it with the 301.

I always hate it when an interviewer thinks they know what a band's about, and you end up getting an answer where the subject is trying to politely tell the interviewer he's an idiot. That said, as far as your lyrics go, it seems like a lot of yours are fairly melancholy. But when you when you put them in the context of this really upbeat, crazy band it becomes somewhat ambiguous, and maybe a little more positive, a little more hopeful. Are your lyrics coming from a more negative place?

Bethel: You put that well. You really did.

Berkholtz: Yeah.

Bethel: Hit that on the head. [Laughs]

Berkholtz: The lyrics are kind of melancholy and....I wouldn't say depressing, but on the album that's coming out, I wrote a lot of those songs during a rough part of my life. But I wrote them the way they were because knowing the kind of music we were going to be playing with, it wouldn't come off as depressing, it would almost come off as sarcastic. I'm not gonna write depressing shit my whole life, but that's where I was when I wrote the album. I don't really think about the content of what I'm writing a lot of the time.

Are there clear-cut inspirations for what you write?

Berkholtz: It's very impressionistic, almost. There's really no format. I know what I'm thinking at the time, and I write down things that come to mind, whatever's affecting me at the time, and that will be what inspires the song. But then a lot of the time the lyrics don't seem to have anything to do with that. Like, nothing really tells a story; it's just a bunch of images and feelings.

Can you give us any examples?

Berkholtz: The song "Cancel the Parade," for instance, I wrote it when Nate and I were living together, during a time....

Bethel: We were really, really poor.

Berkholtz: Yeah. We were all really poor, and my car was breaking down, and my dad and I weren't that cool, and I had a one-year-old [kid]. Stuff that was pretty disheartening, I guess. The verses of that song touch on all that stuff. And the chorus is kind of like, I don't really need to give a fuck about what's going on in my life — like, shit happens, you know? And I'm not really trying to prove anything by that, or take any kind of stand. It's just what I wrote. It definitely gives you a sense of release when you write stuff like that, but I don't want people to think I have something to prove, like, "Oh, my life sucks."

You're not trying to be a role model for emo kids?

Berkholtz: I'm not trying to be Simple Plan. Not too much, anyway.

Bethel: I'm only trying to be Simple Plan with my guitar riffs.