Frank Iero - Full Interview (Patreon)

Hey all. A few weeks back I was lucky enough to be able to interview Frank Iero for MYM magazine. While I had to cut the interview down to 800 words for the magazine, I thought I'd share the full interview here, exclusively with Patreon backers. You can see the edited version, alongside a bunch of photos I took at the show, in the newest issue of MYM. Enjoy Laura: For anyone who doesn't know you could you tell us who you are and what you do? Frank: Absolutely! My name's Frank Iero, I come from New Jersey and I play music. I've been in more bands than I could even possibly imagine, far too many to count. Currently I'm on tour in Portsmouth at the Wedgewood Rooms with my band FrnkIero andthe Celebration. Laura: What was the core of what you wanted to create when you started your new album, Stomachahe? Frank: Well I suppose the core of Stomachache was me trying to be a good role model to my kids. I was trying to take a negative situation and turn it into something perhaps a bit more positive. Before having children, I use this word very loosely but before becoming an adult, when I would have these stomach issues I would would lay down and just want to die and that would be it. They would pass eventually but having kids and being a father, trying to be an adult, I didn't want to give up. I wanted to be able to say to my kids “This is how I feel but I'm not going to let it be the end of me”. I wanted to take that and kind of use it as inspiration. Laura: Who would you say were your biggest musical influences going into this record? Frank: I don't know, it's hard to pinpoint. I guess I feel like the record is very much inspired by things I went through or that I saw other people go through in my younger years. I suppose I drew upon a lot of musical influences that my dad used to play for me. My dad was really into old 60's rock and roll, stuff like that. Thinking about it a lot of my musical influences were the kind of bands that were recording just one microphone in a room in one take. I think there's a lot of that on the record, so there's probably that direct influence there. I wanted very much to just channel songs through me, I wanted to make almost a time capsule of that moment in my life. I didn't want to go in and adjust anything or fix things. If there was a mistake I felt like it was beautiful in it's own way and it was meant to be. If I'd thought when I was recording that I was going to release a record and go on tour with it maybe I would fix some things, but I'm glad I didn't. Laura: If there was one thing you could have gone back and changed on the record, what would it have been? Frank: I think this is one of the pitfalls of making a record that's going to be “our first record”, there's that urge to make sure it's perfect. I don't know if that's necessarily the best approach. One of my favourite things about the music that I love is the mistakes that you maybe don't hear right away but you get to the second or third listen and go “Oh shit, what was that? Was that a door opening somewhere?”. It's those beautiful instances in music that happen all the time where notes will rub in a way that maybe isn't the best but for that song it's the best because that's what happened on the song. I like that kind of stuff. Would I have gone back and changed things if I had known everybody was going to hear the record? Maybe. But I'm glad I didn't, you know? In the long run I'm glad I didn't. Laura: At what point during creating the record did that change? When did you decide you were going to put this record out? Frank: It certainly wasn't during the making of the record. You know what, maybe that is kind of a lie. I wrote one of the songs, called Joyriding, and immidiately when it was done I challenged myself to put it out on the internet. As a whole though I didn't think “Oh this is going to be my next record, this is going to be the next project”. I think putting this out as a record only came into play when a friend asked me what I had been working on and I realised I suddenly had fifteen songs to play them. They said to me “Oh, so this is a record then?”, and now I'm here. Laura: Considering you spent the last decade working on a large group project, what were the biggest challenges for you going back to creating a solo project? Frank: Self Editing. Big time, it's hard. I feel like that's the biggest problem when it's just you in a room. Sometimes as a young songwriter you have this sense of “Well I wrote it so it's got to be in the song. Because I wrote it”. You have to as a solo artist learn to take that step back and ask yourself what the song wants and what's best for the song. Once you start to work out how to do that it becomes easier to avoid some of those landmines. Also, getting used to not having that immediate reaction from someone else and being able to get their two cents or be inspired by their ideas. It's a bit strange but you do get used to it. Laura: What are your big aims going forward from this record into whatever you create next? Frank: What's intriguing to me is that if what I work on next is indeed a solo project, if it's just me again, I made this record and that's what I'm doing now going forward, if I dedicate myself to working alone and being a solo artist, then really anything at all that I do next is a follow up. When I think about it that way it's kind of interesting because it doesn't have to be another record. It could be a book, it could be a short film about me going to the store to buy groceries and that's the follow up for FrnkIero andthe Celebration. Realisitcally it's anything I want to do. I'm currently trying to think about things more in that frame than this established framework of what an artist and their career is supposed to be. For me the door is wide open, it's what ever I feel like. It could be an accapella fucking record or even nothing. It could be 35 minutes of fucking silence, maybe that's the record. I do like the fact that right now I can literally do whatever I want. That's also a big hole though, you can fall into that very quickly. Laura: If you could collaborate with anyone on any project, who would it be and what would the project be? Frank: I've been able to play with my kids, that was so immensely fun and fuffilling. I've been able to play with a lot of great musicians in my life, I feel very fortunate for that. I want to do something with my dad really, really bad. He's a drummer and I think that would be the next collaboration I would like to do. I'd like to do that sooner rather than later. Laura: Did you have any trouble separating your new solo project out as its own thing away from your previous large projects in regards to fan reactions? Frank: In terms of fan reaction I've been lucky, I think the fanbase for this project has grown pretty organically. I'm also lucky in that I wasn't the singer of the last band. In that respect I am lucky, nobody is coming to my shows now in order to hear me perform My Chem songs. If they're coming to the shows it's because they're fans of this, because this is so far removed musically. I think the more we've been touring, the more we have been seeing this spread of younger kids who are saying this is the first show they've ever been to in their life. There's also this really nice wave of older fans who've either been fans for a long time of everything that I have done or who tell me they've not been a fan of anything else I have done but I really like this. That's so cool, that's awesome too. There's thankfully a huge mixture of all of those groups. I think the hardest part actually about separating it out is in your line of work as journalists. When some journalists are trying to find their angle to sell a story they're sometimes the ones who have a hard time letting go of those past projects. They find solace in being able to label things without their readers having to hear it. That's the biggest hurdle and that will always be there for written journalists. For me that ultimately doesn't matter because I was in all those bands. I'm proud of everything I did in Leathermouth and Pency and My Chem and Deathspells. I did everything for a reason and I understand why people have to put that on the cover of their magazine but I did it. I was there and I stand by the things I did. It's all me and I'll never try to run away or to escape from my past. I'm proud of it. Laura: For anyone who hasn't heard any of your music yet and who has read this much of the interview, is there anything you'd like to say to convince them to give it a listen? Frank: I guess all I would say is what the hell is your problem? It'll take you about three and a half minutes to go listen to one of my songs. I have such disdain for apathy. If you want to know what it sounds like you've got to go listen to it. Don't just read about it and see what other people say it sounds like, go form your own opinion.