| Life on the nickel with MARK FOSTER of FOSTER THE PEOPLE... |
| Written by Shahlin Graves |
| Wednesday, 25 May 2011 10:53 |
 Nine years ago, an eighteen-year-old MARK FOSTER relocated from Cleveland, Ohio, with the Los Angeles music scene in his sights. To get by, he delivered pizzas and made coffee. To keep his dream alive, Foster paid $3 a pop to play acoustic solo songs at open mic nights in front of other singer-songwriters. Finally, the former computer programming nerd landed a full-time job composing music for commercials, and began toying with synthesizers and drum machines. Last February within a day and a half, Foster wrote and recorded a demo entitled 'Pumped Up Kicks'. Something about the four-minute song's characterization of Robert the gun-toting "cowboy kid" paired with a ridiculously catchy hook and gleeful whistling, really, really connected with the people of the Internet. A German blogger championed the track, resulting in a FOSTER THE PEOPLE chart takeover on The Hype Machine. Fast-forward to 2011, and 'Pumped Up Kicks' has sold over 222,000 digital downloads in the band's homeland - not bad for a song that was originally freely gifted online. Foster and his bandmates - bassist CUBBIE FINK and drummer MARK PONTIUS - may have only played their first official Foster The People show in October of last year, but between sold-out headlining shows and rave reviews of their Coachella and SXSW debuts this year, it would be a slight understatement to say that the band's debut album 'TORCHES' has been one of this year's most-anticipated records. Personally, I'm not only in love with 'Torches', I'm also in love with the fact that Greg Kurstin (the 'Bee' of The Bird and The Bee) produced most of my favourites on the album. We spoke to Foster The People frontman Mark Foster in advance of the release of 'Torches' this week - or as he so fondly likes to describe it, "giving birth" - to find out more about the porcupine-loving former child-petrologist and his equally as endearing best friends. And! Here's hoping that if we all wish hard enough, a Splendour In The Grass New Zealand sideshow might just materialize itself into reality... COUP DE MAIN: Your debut album 'Torches' isn't far from being released now! Are you excited? FOSTER THE PEOPLE - MARK FOSTER: Totally! It's a good, good feeling to put something out. It's like giving birth, you know? You carry your baby for nine months, except, in this case we've been carrying our baby for years, and all of a sudden it's like: "It's coming out!" Alright, now I get to play with my kid. <laughs> That's a weird metaphor I know, it's just hands-off-the-cuff. CDM: With everything that has happened in the last year, do you feel like there's been quite a build-up to this album release? MARK FOSTER: Yeah, totally. I feel like there's a lot of anticipation on people's part and on our part... it's been non-stop for us for the last year. It's just been one big adrenaline wave that we've been riding. It's been cool! It's good that the record is coming out and I'm already thinking about writing the second record, so it's like we're one step ahead of the game right now. CDM: 'Torches' is the fist album that I've been able to listen to this year all the way through, without skipping any tracks. Albums like that are so rare. Was it important to you to put out a quality record? MARK FOSTER: It was super important! We recorded thirteen songs for the record and we whittled it down to ten. We'll put the other three out too, but we really, really wanted to put something out that was solid - that you could listen to all the way through. And that's how I am as a songwriter too. I've written hundreds and hundreds of songs, but maybe one out of every twenty or something, will see the light of day. I just don't want to put something out that... if I'm not engaged the whole time, then I know that other people aren't going to be engaged the whole time. And I've got a short attention span. When I write songs, I have to entertain myself first. If I'm dancing around the room while I'm recording and writing a song and singing the lyrics or whatever, then I know that there's something there. CDM: Do you have a favourite song on the album? MARK FOSTER: I have a lot of favourites on the record. 'Call It What You Want' is one of my favourites for sure, I really, really like that song. 'Life On The Nickel', I really like as well. That was the last song that was written that made the record, so maybe it's just still really fresh for me. But I like that song. I feel like it's forward-thinking. It's cool. CDM: What was your favourite part during the recording of the album? MARK FOSTER: It was really fun recording! We were out there for two or three weeks recording a couple of songs with Paul Epworth, and it was just really cool being in a new environment. The rest of the record was recorded in L.A. and there's something to be said about that because we were at home and whatever, but once you're taken out of your comfort-zone and you're in a new place, there's just something really inspiring about that. We recorded 'Call It What You Want', 'I Would Do Anything For You' and 'Life On The Nickel' when we were in London when we were with Paul, and he's a fun guy to work with. That whole process was really fun. CDM: I love the 'Torches' album artwork! Where did it come from? MARK FOSTER: My good friend Japayork did it for us. He's just a super talented guy and I've been friends with him for years. When I was a solo artist he would do art for me for free, and I was like: "Dude, I promise, one day I will be able to pay you for this, just have faith in me." And now we get to pay him for it! Which is awesome. He's Dutch so he's from the Netherlands, but he lives in London now. He's been doing all of our artwork and t-shirts and stuff.  CDM: Considering that you only wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' last February, is it crazy thinking about everything that's happened in the last fifteen months? MARK FOSTER: It's still really hard to wrap my head around it. I've been in Los Angeles now for about nine years working on music - I'm twenty-seven now and I moved here when I was eighteen. I was a starving artist, just writing songs, playing shows, delivering pizzas, making lattes, just doing whatever to make ends meet for so long! And then, all of a sudden, I start this new band and seven months later we're on a record label and we're touring the world - momentum just built up really fast. A lot of people look at things like this and they're like: "Wow, they blew up overnight." But it's like, well, in a sense, but if nine years of working towards something like this is overnight, then... you know, it wasn't overnight. CDM: Is it weird - but awesome - to think that you sort of owe your first big break to a random girl in Germany that you haven't even met before, for blogging 'Pumped Up Kicks' onto The Hype Machine? MARK FOSTER: Totally. I sent her a message soon after 'Pumped Up Kicks' started to spread around and grow on the Internet and stuff - just thanked her, and was like: "When we come out to Germany we've got to hang out. We have to meet, get you a drink or buy you dinner, or whatever, like come to our shows"... definitely. That was kind of like the spark that started it all. CDM: Before Foster The People, you had been performing as a solo acoustic artist. Why did you decide that you wanted to be in a band instead? MARK FOSTER: I was doing the solo acoustic thing for a while and when I started producing music and playing with drum machines, the songs that I started writing, they changed drastically. I picked up piano again and started playing with synthesizers, my music really started to expand into something much bigger and just got to the point of: "I can't do this by myself." Nor would I want to do this by myself. Being a solo artist is hard, dude. You take everything on your shoulders and you don't really have anybody to hang onto. It's a lonely existence, really. And for the music that I started making, I needed to put together a band. When we formed, all those other songs that I'd just been writing in the studio, finally started to come to life and it was a good feeling. CDM: And you get to go on this adventure with your best friends! MARK FOSTER: With friends, yeah totally! I couldn't even imagine doing this if I was by myself. I would have to be best friends with the bus driver, you know? CDM: How did you meet the others in the band? MARK FOSTER: I met MARK PONTIUS the drummer through another music friend of mine in L.A. and I watched Mark play in the band that he was with for a few years and just really liked him as a drummer. We started playing together first, just kind of jamming off and on just for fun. Then CUBBIE FINK, the bass player, I was really good friends with his room-mates and that's how I met him. We would all just stay up at Poker Nights at their house every week, we'd go over there and just play and hang out, and I didn't even know that he played bass probably for like the first year that I knew him. We became buddies and then I found out he played bass and I was like: "Wow, this is perfect, let's start a band!" CDM: Tell me something no-one else knows about each member of Foster The People, including yourself... MARK FOSTER: Well! I used to have a massive rock collection as a kid. Mark Pontius can do a standing backflip and Cubbie Fink is good at pretty much everything that he does. He's like better than us at anything that we do. He's just one of those guys. CDM: What are your five favourite things in the whole entire world? MARK FOSTER: Gosh. I would have to say: lobster, 'FIFA 2011' for Xbox, making music obviously, coming up with short comedy sketches - that's something I've been doing lately - and porcupines. CDM: Having taught yourself computer programming in high school, do you think that was sort of the beginnings of you geeking out with synthesizers? MARK FOSTER: Probably! I really fell in love with computers in high school - and I worked for my high school and fixed their computers and got paid to do it, and I just loved it. So it was a really easy transition I think, when learning recording software and programming synthesizers. The type of music that we make is highly dependent on technology, so it was a really smooth transition for me.  CDM: Was it at all daunting playing your very first Foster The People show back in October? MARK FOSTER: Kind of! We'd only really been jamming for a few weeks together and yeah, I remember thinking in rehearsal: man, we're not ready. We're not ready! We're super sloppy right now and we need to rehearse more. I was worried about it but then I also had one of the first big eye-opening moments for me - and for everyone else in the band - when we stepped on that stage and played the show, everybody just clicked right into place. I remember walking off the stage... I mean, there was only thirty people in the room, and I remember walking off the stage and looking at the other guys and just being like: "WOW!" Everybody in the band is a born performer. There's certain people that when they step on the stage, it's like, that's where they're meant to be. And that's how I felt on-stage with the guys that I was playing with. It's a really good feeling as a singer, because if I'm up there, it's like we have to have faith in each other. They have to have faith in me that I'm going to deliver and sing and be able to entertain - and I have to have faith in them that they're going to be right behind me, following me, and that I can trust that they're going to back me up. And after that first show, I just had so much confidence. I was like: man, we've got something special. And that was good! Because when we first started playing together as a band, it wasn't like we were all.... we were all just trying it out. Mark and Cubbie were still kind of playing in other projects in the beginning, and this was just a kinda side-thing. I was composing for commercials and doing my own thing. We were just having fun. And then things started to really take off and it was serious, like man, we kind of all needed to quit everything else that we were doing and focus on this, because it was just demanding it. CDM: What's your craziest tour story so far? MARK FOSTER: We played a show in Minneapolis... I don't know if this is the craziest, but it's at the top of my head... after we got done playing, this sixty-year-old guy came backstage and he was wearing like a sheriff's policeman-shirt, and I was drinking a beer. He came up to me and took the beer out of my hands, like very nonchalantly. I was like: okay, what's going on? And then he started chugging it. And he walked past me with my beer - my full beer - and then he walked on the stage and started playing with the keyboards and stuff. Our friend who's on the road with us and is kind of a bigger guy than us, was like: "You need to get off the stage and get out of here." And this sixty-year-old-man fell into the drum kit and knocked everything over and then stumbled out of the club. So, that was pretty weird. CDM: You've already been to Australia and are returning for Splendour In The Grass... when are you coming to New Zealand?! MARK FOSTER: I would come to New Zealand tomorrow if we could! I would love that. I'll get back to you on that... I'll have to call our booking agent and see if he can set us up out there. |
