Talking with Skaters’ Michael Ian Cummings – HuffPost 3.10.14
Mike Ragogna: So Skaters has a new album, Manhattan. Now, although you live in New York, you met your musical partner out in California, right?
Michael Ian Cummings: Yeah, Josh and I met at at a party in Los Angeles. I was living out there for two years, I left the East Coast for a little bit and I was just about to come back to New York when I met Josh at a party. We had some mutual friends but we’d never actually met each other. We ran into each other at a party, started talking about our bands and how they were dissolving and talked casually like you would, late night at a party, about starting a new band. I didn’t really think much would come of it, but when I got back to New York Josh wrote me an email from London and I was like, “I’m coming to New York tomorrow!” He caught us all off guard, showed up the next day and kind of strong-armed us into forming a band that night and we ended up booking our first three shows the next morning. It was very quick. That pace was kind of like the benchmark of the pace of the band for the next year or so.
MR: Right, two years into it, you get a record deal. That’s pretty amazing.
MC: Yeah, even less than that, like a year and a couple of months within starting the band that we got a deal. It was crazy. It wasn’t expected at all, for sure.
MR: So you bonded over bartending and The Pixies?
MC: Yes, and it was just like, “Let’s make a record,” really. We were just sitting around listening to records and just shooting the s**t. Nothing particular, just talking about anything and everything. Just running our mouths late at night.
MR: All of you have been bartenders, right?
MC: Yeah, we’ve all tended bars.
MR: So I’m sure you’ve met a lot of people and heard a lot of stories. I’m imagining that added to the repertoire lyrically.
MC: Yeah, you definitely experience a lot of stuff by hanging out until four in the morning every day, bar tending or not. You see a lot of things; people at their best and worst.
MR: So when you guys got together, you played each other’s material, but once you got comfortable, did you develop a game plan?
MC: Well, it’s interesting, I was writing songs, but only a couple specifically for this new project. The second Josh got to New York we booked three shows the next morning. We weren’t prepared at all, but we forced ourselves to be prepared by a date. Our first show we played like five originals and two covers and that was all the songs we really had. We just kind of got together anyone we could to do this thing and it just kind of took off from there, just a “fake it ’til you make it” kind of attitude and it eventually worked out.
MR: Who are some of your musical influences?
MC: I kind of came from more of a classic songwriting type background because my family was really into The Beach Boys and The Beatles and stuff like that. I grew up listening to Jackson Browne and lots of folk records and stuff like that, so that’s where I was originally coming from and then I played in a lot of punk bands when we were teenagers, that’s how I met Noah, our drummer, we played in a punk band together. From there we all had our own ways and our own different influences, but when we started this band we knew that we wanted it to feel fun, like it was when we were kids and we didn’t really have any expectations or give a shit. We want the energy of those early seventies Bowery, New York bands. That was the only goal in mind. It was a lot of Television, DEVO, Clash, Ramones, Pixies and obviously Nirvana and all that nineties stuff, too. We wanted it to feel how punk music felt when there were exciting new songs behind it.
MR: Who did you hook up with to record the album?
MC: There’s a producer named John Hill who produced the record with us. We had a list of producers we wanted to work with, which is crazy for us because we’ve never been offered the opportunity to work with whoever we wanted to. We went through a lot of people and it was a really educational experience because a lot of your favorite producers that might have made your favorite records when you were a kid aren’t really as relevant as you would think they are in your head. “What kind of record would he make for us now?” We actually found John and it was a perfect match because he come from the exact same musical background as us. He’s into all the same bands, had a heavy figure in reggae music and punk and pop and hip hop. We wanted someone who was relevant and contemporary and into making new sounds and challenging production and stuff like that.
MR: By the way, there was another John Hill who was a staff producer for Columbia in the sixties.
MC: The John Hill we work with is very secretive with his identity on the internet. It’s really hard to find him. We did the exact same thing when we were looking into producers.
MR: The name of the album is Manhattan. Is it based on your love of the city or being a resident or…?
MC: It’s a little bit of everything. It became a clear choice for the album title when we kind of sat back and listened to the songs and realized they’re all very in the city, about the city, and we’re all working in bars in Manhattan, and we had formed because we all moved to New York and recorded the record here and wrote about the city and what we were seeing and it was just kind of like a New York story. We didn’t really feel like it fit anywhere else. The titles we were coming up with just didn’t hold up to Manhattan.
MR: It seems like once you become a New Yorker you are never not a New Yorker.
MC: There is a little bit of that, yes. Once you get through that honeymoon phase and you actually live in New York for a while, yeah, I think it definitely changes you. You become educated in different ways.
MR: What are the roots of the band? Josh comes from England, right?
MC: Yeah, Josh comes from a town called Hull, which is in Northern England. We come from Boston, we grew up in Boston. Dan grew up a little south of Boston, towards the cape and we grew up in the greater Boston area.
MR: Do you realize the rivalry there is between Boston and New York City?
MC: Of course! That was my life.
MR: Then how did you dare move to New York?
MC: Well I still like the Red Sox, I’m not a Yankees fan or anything, but New York’s more exciting for me. It’s a much more inspiring city.
MR: You’re shooting a video for one of the album’s tracks, “Miss Teen Massachusetts.” What’s the back story on that one?
MC: That song was one of those songs that was written super quick, it came together in a matter of an hour and a half, two hours and it was totally fleshed out and done, it was one of those special tunes. I think everyone responded to it. It was kind of a dark, lurking song about wanting something that you can’t have once it’s already gone. Kind of a grass is always greener type attitude. I just thought it kind of sums up that feeling for me. Everything came together with that one really quickly.
MR: How do view what’s going on as far as “punk” these days? Is that even how you would classify your music?
MC: You know, it’s funny, it’s nice to put things into little tidy packages. Someone said that we were a pre-Giuliani punk band, I thought that was good because it’s really specific to a time and feeling. I think we’re a little more modern than that. We draw from a lot of nineties influences, obviously. I think we’re some kind of fancy punk band. I liked the days when people wrote punk songs, like Joe Jackson or Elvis Costello and people like that.
MR: What do you think about punk in general these days?
MC: There was a really good quote by David Berman, “Punk rock died when the first kid said, ‘Punk’s not dead,'” I thought that was amazing. I totally agree that the punk movement is not a movement anymore. I think it’s an attitude, I think it’s a mentality. I don’t think it has to do with liberty spikes or leather jackets, you know what I mean?
MR: I think probably like any other form it’s evolving, so you’ve got the next layer of what happens when groups are inspired by or gravitate towards a genre.
MC: Yeah, we love looking back at what it was, but it’s a different thing now, for us.
MR: Where do you see Skaters in the future?
MC: I hope we continue to grow. Everything has been looking forward three months, that’s how we got going this quickly, we just make really realistic short-term goals. Right now I’m not really clear what our long term goal is, I’m not really sure what the trajectory is for the band, but I hope that we can grow to headline festivals and become a band that’s a household name.
MR: Like any good bartender, you have to see two or three customers or events down the line as you’re working on one.
MC: Yeah, exactly. You’ve got to multitask.
MR: Hey, what is your advice for new artists?
MC: Just work really hard. I don’t think there’s anything else to be learned from what we’ve done. We’ve just really worked non-stop every day from when we started the band. Sleep less, work more.
MR: How much fun was it making the video?
MC: It was amazing. It was like an adult convent in the middle of Brooklyn and we totally transformed it. It was pretty special. Crazy.
Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne