Two Faint fans, one Faint interview. A dilemma only determined fairly by duel. Given that duels are illegal, Lash and I went mano y mano for the right to interview bass player Joel Petersen.Lash came out triumphant and, with the glow of victory, chatted it up with Joel via cell phone, despite being slightly loopy from the codeine her doc prescribed to battle her pneumonia.With the interview done, Lash promptly transcribed it just in time to make a trip to the emergency room, leaving me to write this introduction. Good thing the Faint needs no introduction. Just turn the lights down, the CD player up and get worked up so sexual. You have a reputation for amazing live shows. How do you maintain your energy? We still like playing our songs. We keep trying new stuff with video and lighting and that helps to keep us interested in that. The songs are still fun to play. Who produces the videos? We do all that stuff ourselves. Dapose and Jacob [Thiele] generally do most of the video editing. We generally all talk about it, but they’re the ones who spend time doing all the stuff. How do you feel about having your music used for cell phone ring tones and video games? It’s pretty entertaining. We write music and we focus so much on the creation. Once we’re willing to call it done I feel like it’s free to the world. Anybody can do whatever they want with it. We’ve had our time with it and there it is. So how do you feel about music downloading? I’m an avid pirate. I think music is just great. Personally, by getting to hear so many different kinds of music by so many bands that I never would have heard of, it just makes me way more interested in music and in creating art. Where do you see the new album going? What influences us most is what we’ve done last. We never like to repeat ourselves. We’re always looking for something that inspires us–something to keep our ears perked up. We’re just trying to figure out what the next album is going to be like. When’s it coming out? If things go according to schedule, probably in the late summer/early fall. Will I be able to dance to it? We’re interested in music that has a groove and we never lost that interest. We’re just trying to find new things that are exciting to us.
See The Faint at the Sunshine Theater on Monday, Dec. 11, at 7:30 p.m. with Passage and Unit 7 Drain. Tickets are $15 through TicketMaster.
