Photo by Tom Korbee
Robb Vallier and Jimmy McGorman may not be recognizable names but the two have been involved with a number of things you’re familiar with. They are accomplished songwriters-for-hire who have written a number of chart topping songs over the last three decades. McGorman, for example, has been the musical director for acts ranging from Avril Lavigne to Weezer to Ariana Grande, toured in the ‘90s as a member of New Radicals and Taj Bachman’s band, and, since 2018, has been a touring member of the Goo Goo Dolls. He also was in the house band on the TV series Rock Star Supernova and Rock Star INXS. Vallier, meanwhile, has worked with Marc Broussard and (along with McGorman) one of today’s most popular artists, arena headliner Sabrina Carpenter.
More recently, the two decided to collaborate on a project they could call their own: Flight to London. While most modern acts stay away from the early ‘80s MTV synth-pop influence for fear of being called a nostalgia band, Vallier and McGorman leaned into the music they grew up listening to on cassettes and CDs. Their debut, Instructions for Losing Control, is a dynamically retro album that should land with Gen X music listeners. While the influences are easy to spot, from Tears for Fears and Peter Gabriel to Scritti Politti and Depeche Mode, listening to this album is like taking a time machine to one of the greatest generations of music.
I recently had the chance to connect with Vallier and McGorman and admitted to them that this music sounds so perfect that I jokingly thought it might be an AI creation.
When I first heard about Flight to London and checked out your music, I thought you might be an AI creation, not real people. I thought that if someone had dropped a prompt into an AI tool that said, “Create a band that sounds like the music in Chip’s head in 1983” it would sound just like Flight to London. So, I’m happy to see you are real people making real music!
ROBB: It is a pleasure to meet you, sir.
I interview a lot of younger bands. I’m happy to be talking with guys in my general age range because in other interviews I’ll make references and younger artists have no idea what I’m talking about.
ROBB: It’s funny you say that, because I got asked to be a part of a songwriting workshop for ASU, and they had all these kids come in, and they’re all in the room. These guys are like, “I want to be a musician, I want to be a songwriter, I want to be all these things.” They didn’t even know who Nirvana was. They had no idea who David Bowie was, and then when I mentioned the Beatles, some girl goes, “Oh, yeah.” I went, “I was going to give you a half-hour break, but now you’re going to be listening to me for a half hour talking about the Beatles.”
I think our generation, and I don’t mean just like people our age, but the people who grew up listening to the music like we did, we always went as far back as we could to understand why the things that we like sounded the way they did. And nowadays, I think a lot of people just take it for what it is, they listen to it, then they move on. So there’s not really any of that, “Oh, wow, who were these guys inspired by?” Or “Where did this idea come from?” I remember when Robert Plant did that ‘50s thing on his Honeydrippers album, and I was listening, I’m like, “Where is this coming from?” That’s what he grew up with, and I got into that just out of curiosity. There’s not a lot of curiosity with the history of music as much as there used to be.
That’s so true. And when you talk about the kids in that workshop, it’s likely they were born in the 2000s!
ROBB: I can’t wrap my head around it. Jim and I have written and produced for artists for a long time, and we had just wrapped up doing a project in Napa. We were driving back to the airport, and feeling pretty good about ourselves because we were supposed to go up for 5 days, like over 2 weekends, and write these songs, and we did it all in two and a half days. So we’re going back, and we’re feeling good about it, they were great songs, and the client was absolutely thrilled. We were looking at each other, and we’re like, “Why aren’t we putting at least an ounce of effort into something that maybe we could do together?” We didn’t really do it for anybody but us. It wasn’t one of those, “Hey, let’s make it sound like” name any band that’s out at that time.
We started with some pretty serious rules about what we wanted to do with this project. It’s like, “If we’re going to do this, it has to be like this. We’re not going to bounce all over the place,” because we both grew up listening to so many different types of music. We’re like, “Here’s the rules, here’s the records we’re going to use as a template. If it goes outside or deviates, it’s out.”
We grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we had these albums that just kept coming back around in our heads, or in our playlists. We both agreed that that would be what we should do, something in the Tears for Fears world, in the Peter Gabriel kind of vibe, the Depeche Mode sound, and then there’s this band called Scritti Politti, which, if you don’t know them, it’s not going to just come and hit you over the head when you’re walking down the street. We went back in our own lives and researched what spoke to us around that time. That’s where we went with this record, and we stuck to it all the way to the end. We had to go back deep into our own brains and our own history to come up with this sound that’s now the Flight to London sound.
Did you record with older gear in order to get that ‘80s and ‘90s sound?
JIMMY: It was a combination of modern technology and analog synths. These three synthesizers I have here are newer, but they’re modeled after all the original stuff that those bands that Robb mentioned made those records on. We used some plugins, which is the computer-generated version of that, but we used probably 5 different hardware synths. I’m a player, so I’m not as adept as a programmer, so a lot of times there are things on the record that I think most other people would program, but I would play it just because it’s faster for me to play it, and then we can kind of quantize it or make it a little bit tighter after the fact. I’m kind of impatient at times when it comes to programming, so it’s just faster.
We write a lot of songs and produce songs for other people. I didn’t really understand why we needed to do our own thing but I felt the desire to do it now. When you write for other people, you’re trying to help them with their vision. We work with people who are much younger so we’re trying to get in the mind frame of a 19-year-old girl who just had her heart broken for the first time, or whatever it may be. A lot of the songs that we love from that ‘80s and ‘90s era, lyrically especially, there’s a much different side to those types of lyrics. They’re much more introspective, they’re much more driven from the standpoint of psychology and self-awareness, at least.
I’m very interested in the psychology of how our brains work, and our behaviors, and how we navigate life, to be able to write songs that talk about that. We can’t do that for most artists, because they just don’t want those songs. They want a pop love song, or talk about going out and having fun on the weekend, or a dance track, or whatever. So when we started writing for Flights to London, which went very quickly in the beginning, I think it was because we had a lot of stored up songs that were just inside of us that we thought, “Oh my god, I can finally write about this.” I can talk about my relationship with my daughter, or my parents, or things that we’ve learned after living on this earth for a while. That was exciting to me, and it still is, because Robb and I recently got together and wrote some new songs, and it went just as well as the initial first batches went. We finally have an outlet to write songs from our perspective. It’s not that anyone else’s influence isn’t good. But we decided, because we do a lot of collaborative co-writes in our other work, that “It’s just me and you. No other influence is coming in. There’s not going to be a third.” And if we get stuck, we get stuck, which we usually don’t, but we just thought, this is going to be our writing.
We brought people in to help make the record after the fact. We have Jon Button, who’s the bass player for The Who. He’s been a friend for 25 years. Rami Jaffe, keyboard player for the Foo Fighters, played on a track. We brought in guys to help, but the songwriting is just the two of us.
ROBB: We both grew up listening to intellectual pop, and those albums, whether it’s Todd Rundgren or Billy Joel, those albums I can keep going back to. I don’t get tired of them because there’s always something new to find in that intellectual kind of mindset. That’s why we were both like, we’ve got to do this kind of album instead of making another pop album that’s just dance or love songs.
We’ve talked to people your age and our age, and they’re like, “This is something I can actually listen to.” We wanted to make an album where you start it and you end it, as opposed to little one-offs. We talked to a guy a couple of days ago that was like, “It’s literally my favorite album, and I’ve listened to it 30 times on a drive from Omaha to Denver and back.” That makes us feel good, because we did want to make something that made people think and want to hear more than once.
Growing up in the golden era of MTV, there were guys like Huey Lewis and Phil Collins who, at the time, seemed like middle aged guys, almost like dads. They probably weren’t significantly older than me, they just looked that way. I’m not sure who those artists are for kids today.
ROBB: You’ve got to remember that we watched MTV, so whatever was on MTV was about as middle of the road as you got, and that’s why they were so good. I think you would throw in, and this is in no way, shape, or form an insult, Ed Sheeran. Everybody likes his stuff. His stuff is great, his songs come out, everybody likes him, young and old.
JIMMY: It’s interesting. If you look at Huey Lewis and the News’s music, they were a throwback band. They were a rhythm and blues bar band essentially that somehow made this little tweak to pop music. They have a song called “Heart and Soul.” It’s rooted in blues-based bar music, but it was elevated. The musicality in that band is unbelievable. They had horns, they had sax players. There’s really no one like that band that I can think of right now. But they had an unbelievable guitar player, Chris Hayes. They had a great keyboard player. Everyone in that band could play in Springsteen’s band. They were really top-notch musicians. The songwriting was fantastic, the harmonies were great. It was complex, but it was very palatable, very conversational. I don’t know if anyone’s doing that today.
One of the best compliments that we got was someone said, “The way Bruno Mars took ‘70s funk and made it pop, that’s what you guys are doing with ‘80s and ‘90s music.” I didn’t think of it in that way, but you could look at it like that.”
ROBB: Our album doesn’t sound like we’re trying to sound like the soundtrack to Miami Vice. The album is a darker, more intellectual version of what the ‘80s was. It’s not “Borderline” by Madonna. It’s “Shout” by Tears for Fears, or it’s “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel. There is a difference. The ‘80s had a lot of different sounds.
JIMMY: We were talking to our publicist, and she was talking about playlists. They’ve put us on a fair amount of synth-pop playlists, but when we listen to the other songs on that playlist, nothing against the label of synth-pop, but I don’t know if that’s really what we do. I don’t know if I would say that Tears for Fears is synth-pop, or Peter Gabriel, or Phil Collins. I think synth-pop is more like ABC or Kajagoogoo.
Robb was saying we had a pretty tight set of influences, and then it started branching out a little bit as the record went in. Howard Jones was one for me that kind of came in there a little bit, and obviously Phil Collins. But basically, you have to be English for the influence to get into our head.
I hear Duran Duran in some of your music..
ROBB: Oh gosh, they are a huge influence.
JIMMY: We love Duran Duran.
ROBB: People think of all of those ‘80s bands as just people standing there singing. These were all musicians. These were all real, legitimate musicians. Duran Duran produced the Rio album themselves. Nick Rhodes was the guy that was in charge of producing that album, and when you think about the quality and the arrangements, unbelievable. How can you not be inspired by what they did? The melodies are unbelievable, the sounds are fantastic, and they really captured a moment, didn’t they?
JIMMY: Even though we knew these records inside and out, when you try to do something that is faithful to it, it was even more challenging than we thought. We thought, “We know this stuff, we’re just going to whip it out,” and then you’re like, “Oh man, that’s so layered.” We wanted the layering of multiple parts, harmonies kind of crossing over each other, key changes. I don’t think there’s one song in there that has five chords. We were starting to get ready for a live show, and we were trying to remember how we wrote the songs, and I’m going, “What chord is that? What did we do?” because we were very in the moment when we were recording. When we get in there, you have blinders on. Time goes away, and Robb and I are just sitting in this room, creating, and then we come up with this thing, and we’re like, “Yeah, I think that’s it,” and then we keep moving. Then we went back, and I was like, “I don’t even know how we did that. What is this chord?”
ROBB: I started practicing before Jim because he was out on tour, and I said, “Jim, I’m just going to let you know, this is a hard gig.” It’s like somebody hires you for a gig, and you’re like, “We’re going to have to go back to Berkeley and start trying to figure it all out.”
How did you guys meet?
ROBB: We met at Berkeley, and then I moved out to LA first. Once you graduate from Berkeley, there’s three places you could have gone back in the day: New York, Nashville—and Nashville wasn’t even that big of a deal at that point—or LA. When I moved out to LA, there were 20 guys that I knew from Berkeley that were there, so it was really helpful because you’d actually end up supporting each other on sessions and things like that. Then Jim came out, and we hung out and actually lived in the same apartment complexes for a while. But then Jim went out on tour and I stayed doing some work in the studios, and we kind of took about 10 years off. He was doing his thing, I was doing mine, and I called him randomly one day. I got tired of doing everything myself, making all these records by myself, and it just burned me out. And I said, “I remember Jim, I really enjoyed working with him,” so I called him and asked, “Can I come by for a half hour?” Six hours later, we were both in tears on the floor, laughing. I think that kind of reignited our not only friendship but our partnership as well.
JIMMY: Also, my wife is from Iowa, Robb is from Iowa. If you’re from Iowa, you know about Okoboji, which is a very small town. They bonded over that, this special place in northwest Iowa, and then it went from there. We started writing songs again, not for ourselves, just for projects of various other artists that would come through the studio. We did a few songs that I thought maybe would be for a solo thing for me, but I never really put the effort into releasing them. Being an artist today is not easy. It’s a full-time job. Between our other jobs and our family life, it’s a big time commitment.
Jim, you’re in LA. Robb, are you in Arizona?
ROBB: I’m in Phoenix. I’ve got a studio here, so I do some of the work on the album out here if we have time. Right now, we have such a time crunch. We made the album, which was about this time last year – end of October. It was funny because we enjoyed taking a three-day weekend here and there, like once a month. The first five songs we wrote, we did in the first two and a half days, pretty much the first side of the album. It’s kind of funny to think that. I would go out there, to LA, and we go into that room, close the curtains, and everything kind of melts away. It’s just the two of us, unless the dogs are barking or something. It was so fun to do that because you let go of everything. We do more laughing when we’re writing than the average people do at a bar with a couple of beers in them. We just laugh, and just think it’s so much fun and so funny.
JIMMY: It’s like Spinal Tap. We feel like children even when we’re playing.
ROBB: We started writing three or four songs every weekend that I would come out. We decided that we were going to write them, demo them, and put them aside. We weren’t going to start producing anything; we were just going to get the songs together. And then we had about 15 or 17 songs and song ideas. We sat there and went, “This doesn’t work” and “This is perfect.” We put together on a big board a list of the 10 songs that made the album, and I remember writing that down, being pretty emotional, just kind of going, “There it is.”
Songs that barely made the album after we produced them were sometimes the strongest ones. We produced it over a couple of months, and then Jim had to go out on tour for a while. While he was out on tour, he and I started doing the administrative side of it, figuring out what the front cover was going to look like, what we were going to do for fonts, what we were going to do for photos.
JIMMY: But it was also good for the album, I think, in a happenstance way. There’s a book by Stephen King called On Writing, and he talks about how he writes his first draft all from the heart. He doesn’t do any editing, he doesn’t do any grammatical corrections, he just writes, and then he puts it in a drawer. I think he does it for like 6 months, or maybe 3 to 6 months, and then he takes it out and immediately cuts 20%.
Just by nature of me being in and out of town with the Goo Goo Dolls on tour, we would work on music, and then I would listen with headphones on airplanes to South Africa and to Australia, and I would make notes, and Robb would do the same, and our notes would almost be identical. “We need to add this, this needs to go away, we need a harmony here,” whatever it may be. Having the time away from the album, I think, actually helped it, because when you come back, you have a little bit more perspective, and you go, “Obviously it needs this,” or, “That kick drum’s wrong,” or whatever it may be. By nature of having touring work, it ultimately made it a better record as opposed to being so tunnel-visioned and stuck in a room for 200 days straight.
Did you know when writing this that you were going to put stuff out or was it more of a “let’s mess around and see if there’s anything there” type situation?
ROBB: I remember the moment when we both said, “Okay, we’re doing it.” We’ve done so many projects, and when you get paid to do a record, you’ve got to finish it. We both looked at this as a project like it was for somebody else. That was very helpful, because we’ve done that so often. It wasn’t one of those things where we wrote a few songs, and then we kind of started meandering off to do other projects. It was like, “This has to be finished.” And instead of doing an EP, we wanted an actual album from beginning to end. That was important. I remember at the end of the ‘80s there were a lot of singles happening. Everyone was talking about singles. It wasn’t really an album mentality, but Seal came out with that album that had “Crazy” on it and it was the first time I got back into the idea of, “I’m going to turn this album on, and I’m going to wait till it’s done.” He made an album that was an experience from beginning to end, and I remembered that.
When Jim and I were doing this, I’m like, “I want that thing, I want that feeling for what we’re doing. I want you to put it on to hear “Walls,” and I want the last song you hear to be “Secondhand Smoke.’” I’m really proud of that. If this is the last thing we ever did, I’d be like, “Okay, I finished something I’m the most proud of.”
JIMMY: We had both done solo projects many, many years ago, and having a partner that I respect and love their musical point of view, not only did it give me inspiration, but it gave accountability. That was really important, because, like Robb says, I always joke about when people say, “There’s 100,000 songs that get released on Spotify every day.” I think that number is complete bullshit because I know how long it took for us to get 10 up there, and that took months and months and months. 100,000 in one day? No way! Even just getting the songwriting credits and then uploading is exhausting. There’s no way there’s that many in a day.
So, to me, it was having someone to hold me accountable. Robb’s really great, even within sessions, at keeping us moving forward. There’s a lot of energy there that keeps the momentum going. Having the inspiration was part of it, but also the accountability was really important for me to know, “We’ve got to finish it.” That was great.
ROBB: We’re working on a project right now that has asked us to do two songs. Jim’s busy right now, I’m busy, we’ve got a few days here and there to finish it, but we both, because we’ve done so many projects and been on a time crunch so often, we can be efficient. I’m driving out there in four hours to work on Saturday and Sunday. We’re going to be in that room, and we know how to focus. We know what needs to be done, and we do it. I think a lot of people who have not worked on an album that you’re getting paid on, or a project you’re getting paid on, if you’re just doing it in your garage, and you’ve got another job, and you’re just kind of hanging out with your friends, sometimes there’s other things to do. We’ve had to be on schedule so often that I’m not really stressed out about this. But we’re really excited when a couple of songs come out.
When you’re writing for other people, and when it’s people that are at a totally different place in their life than you are, do you ever put yourself in their shoes and try to write as if you were them?
ROBB: There are different ways to look at it. Sometimes, by writing for somebody else, it’s easier because it’s not you and your feelings. Other times, it’s very difficult because, I’m sorry, if you’re 19 and you come to me and say, “I need to write a song about me and my girls going out to the clubs,” I mean, we’ve written a million songs in our lives, but that’s still difficult because you’re not in that world. You kind of have to know what you’re good at and what you’re not.
We’ve written songs for teenage girls, and we’ve brought in an amazing writer, this girl named Una Jensen. She’s a girl in her 20s, and she’s fantastic, and it’s good to have that perspective. Another big issue when it comes to writing with people is it’s usually a matter of time. You’ve got an afternoon to write a song, or you’ve got an afternoon to write three songs. You’ve got to start looking at it as a craft instead of, “you have to feel it inside.” You have to start looking at it as, “Okay, the verse has to be done by this point,” and sometimes that’s good.
JIMMY: We wrote a song for someone. We were in our 40s and there was a lot of stuff going on. I had just had a daughter. There was a girl that Robb had worked with, and we came in from Arizona with a song that had the phrase “in the middle of starting over.” We weren’t sure if she would even like that because that seemed like something an older artist would say, maybe something that someone in their 30s or 40s could relate to.
We ended up cutting the song. Then a friend of ours at Hollywood Records said they were looking for songs for a new artist. Her name was Sabrina Carpenter. I think we sent them four or five songs. It was strange that we even put it on there, but it had a female voice on the demo, so we put it in, and we thought, “Maybe they’ll like the production.”
To our surprise, our friend said, “She really related to this.” She just moved—she was 15 years old—she moved from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles to be on a television show, left all of her friends behind. That was a really cool way to understand that you can write a song from the perspective of a 40-year-old person and yet a 15-year-old young girl completely related to it. She didn’t change a word; she literally just sang the song. We fixed up a little of the production around what she did vocally, but we wrote this song, and it was called “The Middle of Starting Over,” and a 15-year-old girl sang it. Universal themes. So that was kind of cool.
ROBB: I think a good song is relatable to a lot of different people. I’ve been shocked when I’ve played this album for people. There are times when Jim and I would be like, “It rhymes, okay, let’s go.” But I would talk to people who’d listen to the album, and they’d be like, “That little phrase you said hits me so hard that I can almost not listen to it.” And we’re just sitting there going, “Really?” It’s kind of interesting, so I think a good song is relatable at all different levels. And people can read into it what they need to.
JIMMY: John Rzeznik, who I work with every day in the Goo Goo Dolls, his songwriting style is pretty unique. Everyone writes in different ways, but one of the things that I think I’ve picked up from him is how great it is, like Robb’s saying, when there’s a line or two in the verse that’s seemingly random but that people relate to. One of their biggest hits, “Name,” there’s a line that hits me every night: “Scars are souvenirs you never lose, the past is never far.” That’s a line that just hits you. It’s not in the chorus, it’s not part of a sing-along, but when we were making this album, there were moments where I think we thought, “Can we put something in that’s, maybe it doesn’t follow the storyline exactly, or whatever, but maybe it kind of makes us feel something just in this moment?”
ROBB: There’s a perfect example of that on the record. Jim wrote this killer line that literally, to us, meant nothing, but it was interesting enough to kind of keep people interested in the song. The line is, “The brother of an only child.” We’re just like, we don’t even know what that means, but it’s pretty cool. And somebody who heard the song goes, “Well, obviously, that’s an in-law.”
JIMMY: I think it was in my subconscious. My parents divorced when I was very young. My father has three children with his wife, and my mother had a child with my stepfather. So, technically, I’m an only child. But I have four siblings, so I’m the brother in the song, and it was just a weird thing. I don’t even think we connected it to me.
Not only do people relate to lyrics, but I’m very much someone who just vibes on the music. I may not pay attention to the lyrics, may not be able to sing along, but I just get into the groove of a song and let it capture me.
JIMMY: There are songs that you don’t want to be explained. You just listen to them, you either get something from it, or you don’t, and you don’t need to question what you get from it. It’s like, “Why do I feel this way?” You don’t ask why, you just feel that way. Sometimes when things are over-explained, it kind of takes that feeling away because it’s nice to have a little bit of mystery to it. It’s like when you watch a movie or TV show and you don’t know what happened but two days later you’re still thinking about it.
I think that’s one of the best things about our writing collaboration, because almost every time a line like that comes up, where we go, “I don’t know what that means,” we’re both like, “It’s cool, we’re going to use it.” That’s what makes me laugh, it just keeps it interesting.
This album has an ‘80s vibe, as we’ve been discussing. You do a lot of songwriting for other people. Is there anything you’ve done that is totally outside your wheelhouse? Have you ever written for a metal artist or a rap artist or a country artist?
JIMMY: Yes and no, I think. I mean, we’ve worked in country stuff. To me, a good song is a good song, you know?
ROBB: Most of the time, we’re doing the writing and the production. So it’s usually all kind of intertwined. I was in this band growing up, and we had a cassette of these songs we recorded. I was at a Battle of the Bands, just standing there, and some punk band played one of our songs in their style. I was like, “This song sounds familiar.” I walked up to the singer after the set, and I go, “Hey, I wrote that song,” and he looked at me like he didn’t even know what planet I was on. So, yeah, that was pretty cool.
At what point did you realize you needed a name for the stuff you were working on and how did you settle on Flight to London?
ROBB: Jim and I are terrible at band names. I had been working with a band that was short-lived out of Phoenix called Flight to London. These are young kids and I’m like, “That’s a great band name.” They did five songs, and then they all went off and got real jobs. This was maybe 15 or 20 years ago.
I’ve kept in touch with these guys, and they’re good friends of mine, and when Jim and I were doing this, I was like, “Dude, I’ve got a band name I’ve been holding onto forever.” Of course, I call the guys, I go, “Hey, is that cool?” And they’re like, “Oh my gosh, go for it.” Flight to London just nails what we’re doing.
JIMMY: It’s honestly one of the things that helped us get motivated, in a sense. I think in one of the first conversations I said, “I’m awful at band names. We gotta get something that’s cool, that we like,” and Robb goes, “Oh, I got it.” And I said, “Dude, I love it.”
The album title, Instructions for Losing Control, is great too.
ROBB: A lot of times when I’m doing some mundane stuff, I come up with lyrics or phrases or words that are kind of cool to remember, and I put them in my phone. The idea that you need instructions for losing control is just ridiculous. That’s the whole idea of it, right? It seems cerebral enough for us, and I think it works perfectly for the album.
And the cover is a Robert Pollard painting.
ROBB: Just like coming up with the band name, I know all these guys that are family members of Pollard, or roadies for Pollard, or play in his bands, and I knew he had these amazing little miniature books. He’s a collagist and I’ve seen these before. I love them so much, and there was this one, because we were maybe going to call the album The Great Escape, after one of the songs on the album, and it was kind of right at that time when we were thinking about that. I saw that picture, and I went, “Oh my gosh.” You know, all those ‘80s albums had really beautiful art. It was pre-AI. Musicians were artists, in a sense, and they knew artist friends, and so we wanted it to look like something that would have been used back then.
What is the plan for this? Do you want to play stuff live?
ROBB: We’re trying to do what we can with it. We’re looking forward to playing it live. We’ve got an amazing band that’s already ready to roll. We have a really neat project that we’re working on right now.
JIMMY: It’s not a secret. I use Moog synthesizers with the Goo Goo Dolls on tour, and we have them here in the studio. We have a friend named Joe who works in branding, and we actually all met at Berkeley. We had coffee with him while this record was being made, and he said, “From a branding perspective, who would you want to be associated with?” We said, “Well, obviously, a synth company or something.” And it just so happened that I had started a relationship with the CEO or president of Moog named Joe Richardson. I sent him the album, he loved it, and he said, “Do you want to do something together?” Robb and I have been kind of working with them. And we just taped a campaign documentary thing.
It talks about the history of the band, and we do an interview with them. We brought a bunch of synthesizers into a studio, and they filmed us going through the process of making a record. We had two new songs we did. That will probably come out at the top of next year. It’s going to take a little bit of time for editing, and we have to finish the songs, but we’re just thrilled to be able to work with a company like this because of the history of Moog synthesizers. My mother bought my father a Moog synthesizer back in the late ‘70s so it’s a big part of the sound of the album.
And like Robb said, we’re going to get a live show together. We’re doing as much as we can with our other lives, but we’re really proud of the album, and we had said to each other, “We’re gonna put it out. We’re gonna get it out there,” because that’s been a failing of mine. I would get so distracted on a project or I would finish it and immediately move to something else, and just kind of not put any effort into anything past making the music. It was important for us to put it out, and to actually take that next step.
What’s a song that takes you back to a specific memory?
ROBB: Five best friends in an Oldsmobile 88, and we are listening to Zapp, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” That song and Nu Shooz, “I Can’t Wait.” Those were the songs that were happening at that time, when we were out there trying to absorb as much of the world as we possibly could.
JIMMY: One of them for me is, ironically, Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” There was a pool party at a guy’s house, a kid I went to school with named Keith Kelly, and there was a girl there I had a crush on, and I’m pretty sure Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was playing there. Also, a song that emotionally gets me in a place is “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley. I love that song and “End of the Innocence” too. There’s something emotional about those.
Scritti Politti is the common love between Robb and I. There’s really something impactful about their albums. I remember being on the Jersey Shore, riding my BMX bike and listening to Scritti Politti. My father had borrowed an Ensoniq synthesizer, a SQ-80, from a friend and I remember listening to those CDs on my bike and then going home and trying to learn to play the songs on the synthesizer. Those records, they do that for me.
