Showcase: The Motion Sick Interview and Music

"This interview is over!" exclaims The Motion Sick's guitarist Patrick Mussari as he slams his hands down on the table in front of him, and all it took was a small mention of two words, Joy Division.

If there was one over-riding theme of the time Strange Glue spent with the Boston four-piece, it was that things don't always turn out exactly how you'd like them to.

Luckily for us, even the bad is approached with a clear sense of self-awareness and good-humour, meaning that promptly 1.7 seconds after the outburst from the beginning, Mussari sits back down with a smile on his face.

The point of contention? The inclusion of a cover version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on the band's second album "The Truth Will Catch You, Just Wait...".

Drummer Travis Richter explains, "We'd been playing it live for a while, so we wanted to spice things up, add something different on the record.", "Also," chimes in frontman Mike Epstein, "one of the things we're very concerned about is, er, I play acoustic guitar, but we don't want to be perceived as like, an acoustic rock band. So I think we were trying to pick covers which stood out, where people would say 'I think this is a little strange for these guys but it works."

"I think it's nice to include a cover," he continues, "because if people are a little reluctant to listen to you, they'll be like, 'Oh, it's a song I know, I can sing along'. But I'll tell you something very frank, erm, I think we're all very unhappy about how the recording of the song came out." All of the band nod their heads ruefully at this point. "It didn't capture the intensity of the live performance," explains Travis, "and we didn't have enough time to do it justice. I think if we'd of gone into the studio and played it through like twenty times it would of worked."

"We did the best we could in the time we had, and the situation we had," adds Matt, "and we could spend ten years re-recording the record and y'know, trying to make it perfect, but it would would probably turn into 'Chinese Democracy' then. So at some point you have to let it go."

With families and jobs left behind whilst they're on tour, the boys have to make a fair few sacrifices in the name of music. Some of the jobs are what you would expect, university teacher, arts school employee. Some throw you a little, that being the one who works for an insurance company. Then, we come to guitarist Patrick Mussari, who works with cheese.

"I'm a vegan, so i don't even eat cheese," says Mike, "but I feel like I have a vast knowledge of cheese." Added to the copious knowledge of dairy also comes an apparent influx of lesbians into the lives of the band. "We've been meeting a lot of people and spending nights at places where people offer us a place to stay," explains Travis, "and my girlfriend is a little concerned about the 'rockstar' lifestyle. So I tell her we only ever meet lesbians."

Mike goes on to add, "Over and over again whilst we've been travelling on tour, we've had people who have offered us places to stay, and they'd say 'I'm really sorry, I'm tired, I know you guys want to stay up late and party.' and we're like 'You can't even believe how exhausted we are after driving 10 hours today'. As far as I'm concerned, the 'rockstar' lifestyle is getting up on stage, playing to people, then getting some rest."

Going back to the beginning, Mike begins to explain the band's genesis before Travis loudly exclaims after casting his eyes around the lobby of the hotel we're currently sat in, "ooh, is that Perry Farrell? that's pretty cool, I've met him before back in '97 during an experience which I cannot talk about on tape." Moving on...

"The Motion Sick was really conceived as a studio project," Mike explains after Travis has calmed down, "for the first record 'Her Brilliant Fifteen', I got together with this guy Jordan Tishler (of Boston's Digital Bear Entertainment) we worked together to kind of develop the songs and turn it into a band sort of record. Matt here, who plays bass did a lot of engineering and Jordan brought him in and he ended up playing bass on the record. I wasn't sure if I was ready to have a band, but I asked Matt if he would carry on playing with us and then we held auditions. After seeing tonnes and tonnes of people, we ended up picking these two guys," gesturing towards Travis and Pat, "who we actually already knew prior to the process of looking for people."

Detailing his previous encounter with now guitarist Patrick Mussari, Mike recalls, "Pat and I were actually on the same team playing the board game Cranium and he made an awesome turtle. We needed this one round to win the game, Pat had to do the sculpting and it was an animal, now he was taking his time, the timer was running out, yet he was being really casual, and I mean really casual! Now I'm really competitive and I wanted to win and he's like, not really making any real effort. So he's rolling the ball of plasticine, he just slaps it down on the table and crosses his arms and he's done, so sure that everything is great. So I look at it, and I say 'turtle!' and we won."

Pat continues, "That night Mike told me he was thinking of starting a band called 'The Motion Sick' and I thought that was the best name for a band ever, so I was reading an advertisement one day and I saw 'Guitarist wanted for The Motion Sick' so I had to apply." Mike replies, "...and we knew that he was so good at Cranium, that he could probably play guitar as well."

Shifting on to the more weightier matter of what inspires their work and lyrics, Mike weighs in, "I would say my life's interest is sponging information. I know this is kinda a lofty goal, but I always want to write songs which are outside the normal realm of pop music. Something that's interesting and has the ability to grow on you. My wife actually wrote [the first song on 'The Truth Will Catch You, Just Wait'] 'Jean Paul' and it's inspired by a painting called 'The Death of Marat', when I first heard the song I was impressed, it had lots of interesting things going on, there was dialogue from five different points of view, but you're never sure if what they're saying is the truth, or if they're trying to be manipulative. So I like things like that, where you have to keep going back to work out 'Am I really understanding what's going on in this song or is there some other sinister thing going on underneath it."

As for lead single "30 Lives" there's a far simpler story behind it. "I blame that song on paint fumes!" Mike leaps in with, "I was decorating my house and I was definitely light-headed and my wife had been asking me to write her a love song for a long time, now I have a really hard time writing a positive, happy, love song. So I couldn't think of a way to incorporate things that are nice and happy into a song without it sounding completely trite, so, one thing that came to mind was spending more than one life with a person, sort of like a reincarnation thing. Now I was a big video games player, so it really connected with me that in video games you have multiple lives, so I thought maybe I could find a way to incorporate video game ideas into this song and so it just sort of popped out."

The response? "She doesn't actually like the song," Mike answers, "she says it's not about her, it's about video games. What're you gonna do, I did my best, she just didn't think it was serious enough."

So, Mike brings a brain intoxicated by paint fumes to the fray, what does drummer Travis have to offer? A question which is greeted by a none-too-short length of silence. "Erm, that's a good question. A lot of fart jokes mainly."

"He's actually writing a book, '302 Fart Jokes'." Matt adds.

"I guess one of my strong suits is in the area of musical arrangement," Travis finally reasons, "trying to make things sound bigger and better. Matt is also really great at that, in a way, being like musical director."

Putting forward further evidence, Matt says, "Travis also used to run laps around the drums as he was playing them, using his spare fingers to sort of draw in the excitement from the crowd, but we had to stop him because he was becoming just a blur. He's a really intense player and it comes over well."

"That's one of the most disappointing things to me of all," Mike surmises, "that I miss everything that goes on with these guys, 'cause there's a lot of awesome stuff. I'll see the audience reacting to stuff, and think 'something really great is going on right now, but I can't turn around 'cause I have to sing."

It's around this point, having easily passed midnight in a Texan hotel that we turn the tape recorder off. Now comes the fun part of Travis' sordid tale of his encounter with Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell. As for this story, the truth won't catch you, so don't bother waiting....

MP3: The Motion Sick - '30 Lives'

MP3: The Motion Sick - 'Losing Altitude'

MP3: The Motion Sick - 'Walk On Water'

Further Reading:

[MySpace] , [Website] , ['30 Lives' music video]

* both photos by Tanit Sakakini.