by Chris Mikesell
It’s been a few years and then some since the last album by internet band The Grammar Club but they are back with what could be called their 2.0 sound. We sat down with the band’s two leads (metaphorically speaking, as nerdcore rapper Beefy is living it up in the Spokane area these days while chiptuner Shael Riley is based in the New York City area) and talked about how they put this album together.
CM: I'm glad to see you guys do a return to a little bit of topical lyricism in this album.
SR: MC Horse is overtly political, though, yeah. Substantively. I'm flamingly liberal, and I'm anti-bailout. Maybe we can cut a horse-shoe pattern out of the country. Just keep the North and the coasts. And Hawaii, of course. But not Alaska.
CM: Well, TGC has moved from this sort of space where you haven't been overtly political, like you said, to being out there with it. What made you want to go in that direction?
SR: I was just writing about what was on my mind at the time. I've become more poltiical and so my music reflects that. Political stuff has been taking up a lot of mental real estate for me. It just hit a point in the late 2000s where I was no longer proud to be an American. I was downright ashamed.
CM: Really? Can you pinpoint where exactly that happened? I mean, we did elect a black dude to the white house. Just sayin'.
SR: No. No. I was really pro-Obama. But then there was this false dawn with Obama where I thought we'd get out of the Middle East and everyone would have good health care. I'm not strongly anti-Obama now, but I am disapointed, like any liberal. I guess I stopped being proud in 2004 when we re-elected Bush, but I wasn't moved to write about it until a few years later.
CM: Now, in MC Horse, you guys talk about Obama and the deficit and unemployment being awesome for your creative process. Now, we all know how Beefy doesn't like to hear about creative processes but still.
SR: This album is, funny enough, more personal than the last, yeah. And a lot darker. At first, Beefy was having trouble writing to the hooks I'd pitch him because they didn't relate to him personally and that was how he'd written his solo stuff up to that point - personal truths. A lot of our previous album, Bremelanotide, was escapsim, I think, for me and for Beefy.
CM: I noticed. Bremelanotide had, for instance, more tits per track.
SR: Right, whereas Horse has more dicks. Tit to dick ratio is flipped here.
CM: Gotta have that balance.
SR: But Beefy reached this epiphany early on with Bremelanotide where he was like "I know what I'll do. I'll just lie." So he'd say fantastic things about all these girls being notches on his bedpost in Balloon Flight when he'd really been with the same girl his entire reproductive life. It wasn't lying in a bad way. It's creative writing. He was writing about this super version of him he wanted to be and that became the sort of character he'd write all the Grammar Club stuff in when the hook didn't jive with his personal experience. We're not lying in a way that disrespects our audience. Sometimes we write from a viewpoint we're criticizing.
CM: So Beefy, tell us a bit about your strategy with writing for this album. In your previous work, you've always been about writing from your own experience, what you know, but this album was a pretty big departure from that - writing as a character. How did you make that transition and what was the hardest part about it?
BT: I think the hardest part about it was being confident that fans who like my solo work wouldn’t come to hate me as I ventured a bit with my writing. Writing with Shael is always a treat because he encourages me to step outside of my comfort zone, and being a big fan of his musically, I feel the need to impress or surprise him with every project we work on. My verses for the most part on our first track on the album “Suck My Wallet” are so vulgar and mean spirited that I was afraid it would turn off long time fans who know me as a kid who would sing-rap about being a Whitesican. But thankfully the response has been extremely positive and people seem to dig it when we change things up, both musically and as songwriters. I started writing as a character initially with Shael out of necessity because he liked to write about girls and I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience in that area. From there it just kind of grew, and I allowed myself to write as the kind of person each song called for.
CM: Some of the songs on the album sound likes they're closer to With Sprinkles, some sound like they're Toybox 2.0 or even Double Ice Backfire-influenced. How much of a part did you have in making that happen?
BT: Musically, I contribute absolutely nothing. My biggest contribution music-wise was recommending we bring in c64 of Dual Core on the project. He had done some tracks on With Sprinkles and I am a HUGE fan of his work with int-80 as the duo known as Dual Core (dualcoremusic.com) so that may be where that influence comes from. Shael and Ty both craft the sound of the DIB and they brought that same amazing talent to this project.
CM: This album took a long time to put out just because both of you have been super busy with other albums and other projects. What would you say the biggest gap was, chronologically between songs on the album?
SR: The piano for Breaking Up With Bret was recorded two and a half years ago. My vocals were recorded at the beginning of this year.
In part II of our interview tomorrow, Shael Riley and Beefy go down the tracklist with us! In the meantime, you can check out their new album, MC Horse Rides again free on www.thegrammarclub.com.
by Doug McCulloch 
Back in 2006, The Matches were poised to be the next big thing. This four-piece from Oakland became so swept up in the buzz around their own band that even they thought their sophomore album, Decomposer, would go gold. Unfortunately, while Decomposer was loved by critics and their fans, it failed to climb the Billboard charts.
Former Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley released her second solo album “Deep Blue” in March 2007.
