A Conversation with Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch – HuffPost 6.3.14

Mike Ragogna: Ian, you have a new album with Echo & The Bunnymen,Meteorites. How do you straddle the solo career and the band?

Ian McCulloch: Hopefully, quite well. I get asked this question a lot, it’s hard to give a definitive answer. Sometimes I feel I need… not so much a break from the Bunnymen, but I need to get certain songs out. The easiest way to explain it is sometimes I feel I write “I” songs and sometimes it feels like I’m writing “we” songs. They cross over slightly, for instance on this album there’s a lot of personal stuff. There’s something in it, maybe it’s the melody lines. There’s another way of describing that or explaining it which isn’t too flattering in one way, but with Bunnymen songs there’s less “woe is me,” or in fact, hopefully on this album no “woe is me,” which is kind of implies that I write my solo stuff “woe is me,” but I’m trying to eradicate that as well. I think that with solo stuff it’s more confessional and I’m kind of taking on blame for the way I am. But I think with the Bunnymen, whatever I say, even if it’s exposing my frailties, I do it in a more angst-ridding way.