We spoke with Nick Reinhart, guitarist and singer of Tera Melos, for his Big Walnuts Yonder collaboration with Mike Watt, Nels Cline and Greg Saunier. At the end of the interview, Reinhart discussed how the writing process for a collaborative project like Big Walnuts Yonder and Tera Melos compares, how 2017’s Trash Generator was created and who from The Simpsons universe he would most like to jam with.
Tera Melos is supporting Minus The Bear on their farewell tour, so we decided to run portions of the interview with Reinhart to preview tonight’s sold-out performance at the Roseland Theater. This phone interview occurred in September 2017.
Revisit our profile of how Big Walnuts Yonder quietly defied supergroup expectations
Split Tooth Media: As of now, Kool-Aid Man is listed as a former member of Tera Melos on Wikipedia. [It has since been corrected.]
Nick Reinhart: Sounds like we’ve had Wikipedia vandalism (laughs). It would make sense if they were referring to the old Tera Melos era which was like us just jumping around and breaking shit for no reason, only to have to buy new stuff and repair it endlessly, much like the Kool-Aid Man would do. I feel like he would be the hype man for us. That doesn’t seem impossible for us to have someone in a Kool-Aid Man outfit with us, just dancing.
You’re heading out on tour soon. Do you have any new stage props you’ll be bringing?
We have no new stage props as of now. We’ve had Hot Dog Man before. We’ve had Freddy Krueger. I guess we had a plush Bart Simpson. Oh! On the last tour we did just this past summer [2017], someone in Florida had brought — I’m looking at it right now — not quite a life-size Krusty the Clown, but like a really large Krusty the Clown stuffed animal kind of thing. So the last show we played at Austin, I had hidden the Krusty behind my guitar amp and there’s a queue before this really, really weird part of a new song that I guess might be considered a ‘breakdown,’ but a Tera Melos-style breakdown, which is not what it sounds like. I was riding this note out and I grabbed the Krusty and just presented it to the crowd, and then I threw him into the crowd and he crowd surfed throughout the rest of the set, which was like 35 minutes. It was so rad. No one tore him up. Everyone was respectful of him. So he just got tossed around for the rest of the set, and then right at the end of the set, there was this big noisy crescendo. I think I signaled to get him back on stage, and it was on a dime, right when the set ends, Krusty flies back on the stage safely. We couldn’t stop laughing because it was this deep sea of people and Krusty all over the room just crowd surfing.
How does the collaborative process of Big Walnuts Yonder compare to your writing process for Tera Melos?
Tera Melos, 99 percent of the time, starts with guitars. Me farting around at home. And it could be completely dry guitar, a lot of the time it is. A lot of the time just watching Seinfeld with a guitar in my hand and my hands do something weird that catches my brain like, ‘Ooh what was that? That sounds pretty neat. What could happen after that?’ A lot of times that’s how my writing process will start. There’s definitely times, even as recent as last night, when I’m driving around and I just happen to be thinking about a few pedals and what they might sound like together. Then going home, putting a little board together, linking these pedals and seeing if that might inspire a riff or a part. That definitely happens a lot too, but usually, guitars are coming from a place of dry — even not even plugged into an amp — guitar playing.
In a past interview you said you don’t really like jamming anymore to write songs.
Yeah. Not really into the jamming thing, at least in this band, in Tera Melos. I don’t think we do jamming well. I don’t know if it’s the three of us as a unit, I don’t know if it’s just getting older and being like, weird frustrations and the time it takes to develop something out of a jam. Also, when playing tricky stuff like that, complicated parts that involve understanding the timing — not that we write with that stuff in mind — but more comes natural in my playing. I’m never counting, but when I have to explain this weird-ass guitar riff to John [Clardy] and Nathan [Latona], I have to maybe use numbers or some weird abstractions: ‘So this is what’s happening here. You’re missing a little skippy-skip thing,’ or, ‘No, no. This riff kind of slows down and does this weird kind of seasick thing and then it gets brought back up to tempo.’ Those concepts are hard to jam.
A lot of times that can just lead to being in a hot-ass practice spot. Our ears are blown out because we play for long periods of time, and just being like, ‘Fuck dude, I’m not trying to jam this 10-second part for hours.’ So we kind of edged away from that and really got on the file sharing thing. Here’s my idea. You guys fart around with this for a bit and then demo ideas will go back and forth and then maybe we’ll be like, ‘Oh that part is close, but actually you’ve got the downbeat and the upbeat reversed and that’s really cool for this section. Why don’t we use this here, and then for this section adjust it.’ It’s just easier to write that way.
What if you’re struggling with a riff? Do you ever bring it to the band and play through it together, or do you like writing individually?
Man, I really think it’s full-on individual at this point. But that stuff gets adjusted when we get in the room and start playing together. I could be like, ‘Nate’s got this weird thing he’s doing right here and that sounds really neat, so maybe I can accent what he is doing, or play less, or play this note instead of the note I was playing before.’ So that stuff definitely happens.
It definitely works well for this band to take these parts, each individually sit with them, kind of develop them on our own — because that’s the other thing: We all trust each other musically. I know the vibe of what Nathan or John is going to bring, and they know what I do, too. So it’s not like we need to sit there holding each other’s hands being like, ‘Ah-aaah! That’s not something this band would do!’ We’re all kind of hip to how we write now. It’s been long enough where we have that trust where everyone can do it on their own and then bring it to the table later where we can discuss it and make adjustments here or there.
Did you do anything different for the writing process for Trash Generator, or is it pretty similar to how you have been writing lately?
The difference in creating the sense of this record is just 100 percent ‘what are we interested in doing? Let’s not consider anything else.’ Not that we have ever considered anything else in the past, but you can’t help things slipping into your subconscious. Or just considering what anyone might think of your record in any context. I truly feel like when we were doing this, we did not give any thought to that. We’re so far into our career that that stuff doesn’t matter anymore. Our band is what it is and we’ve always done this slow-and-steady ramp-up. I think the difference with this record is really just ‘What do we want to hear? What is going to make us stoked to listen to and play these songs forever?’ The mindset was different, if anything.
Do you think you succeeded in making an album you’ll be happy to play forever?
Did we make the record that we sought out to make? Definitely. Every time we make a record, you do the thing where you listen to it a whole bunch and then you’re like, ‘Fuck this. I don’t ever want to hear this thing again.’ But with this one, I can definitely listen to it and almost fully remove myself from the band and just listen to it as songs. I like these songs. I can listen to them and enjoy them and not think about them from, oh the guy who wrote the guitar parts to these songs and sings on them. It’s kind of a weird thing. I definitely think we totally nailed what we were going for. We’re really happy with it. We’re really excited to stay on that attitude toward making records now.
About four years have passed since your last record. Do you think you’ll write more consistently now or just whenever the record is ready it’s ready?
It would be nice to make records sooner, but I guess I can’t say one way or the other. I don’t really know why it has taken us multiple years between each record other than it’s hard to write this kind of music. It’s not like you just show up at band practice and go, ‘Yeah, let’s jam this riff for a few hours. Man that sounds really cool. Maybe we can add this riff to it and call it a song!’ It doesn’t happen like that. Some of the songs on Trash Generator are from like 2009 that have just been stewing forever and it’s like we’ll practice it here or there, but it just doesn’t take shape like we want it to. Sometimes these things take a really long time when you’re doing complex music like that. If we were doing a garage rock record, we could make a garage rock record in the next six months. Something about that [more complex] kind of music just seems like it takes a while to get happy with it.
In past interviews you have said that going to Disneyland or even eating lobster inspires you. Were there any strange instances that inspired you on this record?
What I meant by Disneyland or eating a lobster, that just goes to say, when someone asks, ‘What’s inspiring to you?’ or, ‘What gives you inspiration to go home and pick up an instrument?’, truly everything does. Right now I’m looking outside the window, and there’s a massive fire happening maybe a couple miles from here, which is actually pretty scary because they’re offset mountains. Like six helicopters in the sky dumping water onto it, and it’s just this gnarly scene. There’s another massive fire off in the distance that I can see right now. That’s easy. There’s fucking fires going on right now. The political climate is very stressful and scary. And those aren’t conscious influences on writing, or inspiration, but it just happens. It’s a natural, instinctual thing. If I were to get off the phone and pick up a guitar and start playing looking out the window as I’m strumming, that has to affect where my fingers are going, or what my brain is telling my fingers to do.
Sounds like you’re on a movie set.
Yeah! OK, I actually have one. The song “A Universal Gonk,” I mean not musically, but the lyrical content, that is based on me working at Universal Studios a couple years ago. They do this thing called Halloween Horror Night. I guess I’m just revealing the content of the song, but that’s fine. Fuck it. They turn the entire park into a haunted house after hours, and going back to the theme park theme, Disneyland, I don’t know, the magical things occurring around you, that stuff is really important to me. I’m sure that stuff influenced music to some extent, the lyrical content for sure.
It was a job I had for a few weeks, working in the Haunted House, scaring people. It would be my dream to score some of the haunted houses. I think it would be amazing. I had written to them they didn’t get back to me. I will still bug them every year about it. But they didn’t let me bring my guitar. Not at all.
What might a Tera Melos Halloween sound like?
During our sets a lot of our songs have open-ended sections where they go on for a long time and they disassemble into just the sound of throwing all of our gear down flights of stairs to where it just turns into this, I don’t want to say dark, but it’s definitely unsettling. From what I remember about our live sets, and videos I’ve seen, it’s like — ‘Oh fuck, this gets really weird at times’ — which I love. That’s probably what a Tera Melos Halloween would sound like.
Finally, what Simpsons character, from the whole Simpsons Universe, would you most like to jam with?
This might be a copout answer, but when Sonic Youth was on Homerpalooza — I mean technically those were Simpsons characters — but jamming with Sonic Youth in Simpsons Universe, that would be the coolest thing. With maybe, fuck, I don’t know if I want to say Otto. I know Otto shreds. Having Otto in Sonic Youth, that’s already a really neat concept, and if I were to drop myself in there, like, dude, there’s a proper supergroup.
Follow Craig and Split Tooth Media on Twitter
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
