Interviews

Set Your Goals

Interview with Jordan Brown on Jun 22, 2007 by Archive Bot

Set Your Goals came out of nowhere for me. I think I read a few reviews of their latest Eulogy Recordings offering, Mutiny!, and it sounded like something I would dig, so I checked it out…and was fuckin’ awesome! The band recently completed a tour across the US with Anti-Flag, Alexisonfire, and Big D and the Kids Table, which was easily one of the most interesting and satisfying bills I’ve seen in a while (right up there with Against Me!, Mastodon, and Cursive). I caught up with lead singer Jordan Brown backstage at the Metro after their set and we discussed independent music ethics, violence in the hardcore scene, and what it’s like to try and make it in a band. Enjoy.
 
By: Ian Lashbrook
 
Jordan Brown: Please note in this interview that #2 from Anti-Flag is causing much commotion by playing ultimate Frisbee with Joe Sausito, bassist for SYG [Set Your Goals].
 
[laughter]
 
You wanna introduce yourself first?
 
JB: My name is Jordan Brown and I sing in the band Set Your Goals.
 
So how’s this tour been for you guys so far?
 
JB: It’s been incredible. We were super well received from the moment we walked into the first venue and the first show…ahh! It’s about to erupt right now. [Pointing to #2] That dude right there! No, #2 immediately came up and was like, “Yo, welcome to the tour. Anything you guys need, let us know.”
 
At this point, everyone backstage erupts into crazy monkey behavior, hopping around and screaming while throwing ice and beverages…all in a good natured way.
 
JB: This has never happened before!
 
No, this is by far and away the best backstage!
 
JB: [To all the band members backstage] Did you have coffee?!
 
Number 2: Nah, it was that energy drink.
 
JB: Ahh, man. No, dude, obviously you can tell - this is the most fun tour we’ve ever done and it couldn’t have been planned more perfectly and this is how the whole tour’s been. Everyone’s been super cool to us. They always look out for us, every time we roll up to the venue, they’re lookin’ out. The shows as well; kids are coming up to watch us on the tour. It’s obviously a different bill and lots of the kids who are into the music we play will go to the show and then some wanna see certain stuff but, luckily, I think we bridge different genres and everyone coming out is able to enjoy the whole bill, even if it’s not an entirely hardcore bill, or an entirely pop punk bill. You’ve got your strong, political roots with Anti-Flag and you’ve got your ska and dub…I had no idea Big D [and the Kids Table] were so versatile. And then Alexisonfire. That new album [Crisis], right now, that’s my favorite CD on this tour. I watch them play every night and it gives me chills.
 
Those guys are so solid. I’ve seen them a bunch and every time I’m amazed that they can pull it off on stage just like on the record.
 
JB: Yeah. I really hope America starts to open up to them, too, cause they’ve found their niche in every other country, except America’s just fuckin’ out of it. It’s a shame and it just shows you how we aren’t open-minded and we aren’t aware of what’s going on in other countries. And it’s not just with music, but with every issue and we need to start paying attention more. I mean, this tour has got me thinking a lot more than I have before. I was always focused on getting to the show on time, playing our set solid and all that. And now, I’m actually able to relax and take in life more than I have before.
 
Well, like we’ve mentioned, it’s a very varied bill with just about everything contained in “punk.” How has the crowd reaction been to you guys, especially opening the shows?
 
JB: I think - and I said it tonight - these crowds are coming to have a good time. They’re coming to the show to watch the whole show. They get there early, they get in front at the barrier, they’re standing there waiting for the bands and you can get these kids clapping and even if they’ve never heard your music before, they’re really responsive. All they wanna do is have fun. And then once you get them in that mode and you get that vibe going and people start listening to your music…like, this kid came up to me tonight as soon as we got off-stage and he was like, “Hey, I had never heard of you guys before, but when you walked out on stage I started to kind of listen up a little bit, the songs started and I started to pay a little more attention and as soon as that first chord dropped and you guys started singing, you had me.” And I was just like, that’s awesome; that’s what we wanna try and do. And the old fan base is still coming back, a lot of familiar faces, and if we didn’t have that to begin with, then we would have nothing, we would have to start from the ground up. I am so grateful that we’ve become one of those bands that has a loyal fans and I always make a note to make sure everyone knows that.
 
What were your ideas during pre-production and going into recording Mutiny!?
 
JB: We actually didn’t do pre-production, which maybe would have helped out a little bit because when we went in, it’s me, our drummer Mikey [Ambrose], and our singer Matt [Wilson], and we write all the music and we record all the music…I should take that back because on this album we had Joe do bass lines and we had Dave do some lead parts as well, but for the most part, it’s us three. So we go in there and our producer, Barry Jones, is like, “Okay, let’s just get you in the room.” And since we didn’t have any pre-production, he was like, “The first day is just gonna be devoted to you playing all the songs live and I’m gonna cut ‘em up tonight.” And I was like, “Well, we could do that, but I’d only be able to play rhythm guitar and I’d have to sing, and…” And he looked at us and was like, “Wait, you guys aren’t a band?” And I was like, “Well, we’re a band, but it’s in the sense that after we write the songs, we bring everything together and everyone has input on the songs.” But when we went in to do Mutiny!…you’re talkin’ about the whole album, not just the track?
 
Yeah, I mean this was your big debut full-length and your statement to the world…
 
JB: There was a lot of pressure and it honestly freaked me out and I think that’s why it came out the way it did, because there was so much pressure. Like the very first song [“Work in Progress”] was exactly what I was feeling in Seattle because we’d only gone up there with material for maybe nine or ten songs. There are eleven songs on there but we’d only gone up there with so much material and our label was like, “You need to record this amount of material, there needs to be this many tracks, they need to be this long in length, need to do this and this and this.” And a lot of the themes of the songs were about us being under pressure and just wanting to do our own thing and like the lyrics “deadlines are left to die and I guess I am truly free.” I remember being up in Seattle and doing all of this and all of “Work in Progress” came out of that. And so the album wouldn’t have come out if we hadn’t just stopped caring and just kinda gone for it because after we got the demo out in 2004, every review was like, “This is great, I can’t wait to see what they do next.” And we were just like, can’t we enjoy what we’re doing right now? It just really got to me and it’s kind of happening again with Mutiny!: “I can’t wait to see what they do next! I can’t wait for the album next summer!” I don’t even know if we’ll do an album next summer! We’ll have to wait and see. But the mindset was to just get up there, record the songs we wanted to with the messages that we wanted. We always wanted to touch on messages that people could relate to and wanted every song to be diverse and every song to have its own thing that people could look into and see. So, that’s a little bit of what went on during recording. It was three weeks and there was a lot more drama! I could do a whole interview on just that.
 
Having two vocalists, how do you divvy up vocal parts, how do you write lyrics, how does that dynamic work with Matt and you?
 
JB: The songwriting process is basically; I’ll sit in my room just jamming out riffs, every time I was bored, like when we were still holding up jobs, just jamming out riffs. And I take those to Mikey and he sort of helps me arrange them into a song more or less. And then we go back and forth and see what we like and then he focuses a lot on his drum parts, how he wants his drums to sound, and I’m really focused on the order of things and how we put this riff here and this riff here. Then Matt and I come up with a message that we both relate to and then take it to the band and ask, “How do you guys feel about this?” But it’s me and Matt that solely write all the lines out. But instead of writing line for line how the song’s gonna go, it’s just train of thought; we start writing these essays, non-structured essays on whatever it is we’re thinking on this topic and I’ll go in from there and I’ll pull out bits and pieces of it. Then, I’ll have these vocal melodies in my head and I’ll add lines into the vocal melodies and I’ll structure and organize them so that the song flows and you can read them from beginning to end so you can see what the song is about. And that’s just how we’ve always done it since the beginning; we’ve never compromised our writing styles. And then we’ll go and lay down the tracks just like that and then we bring everyone in and everyone learns the songs and then we go out and tour.
 
You talked about writing essays and things like that. Is that where the spoken part in the song “Mutiny!” comes from?
 
JB: That’s exactly where it came from. That was actually much longer, what I had written. It actually ended up being five lines of a page I had written for this speech because when I’m writing, I’m not thinking in terms of time, I just wanna get it out there. It’s just really a form of therapy, for us more than anything. So I go in there to read it and I just sorta read it and then all of the sudden the chorus kicks in and I’m like, “Alright, I’m gonna have to cut this down a lot.” So, it works. There was a lot more I wanted to say in it but those were the main themes, that was the main point I wanted to get across, but that’s totally where it came from.
 
And in keeping with the whole “themes” thing, there seems to be a lot of stuff on the record; general politics, religion, NOT writing about girls, pirates, and the Goonies. How does all this tie together? You said you bring ideas to the band before you write. Were these ideas that kept popping up that you wanted to tie together?
 
JB: Well, when we sat down in the studio, we didn’t have a name for the album and…we brought…see, this is how our band became a band and not just three members; we’ve gone through twelve lineup changes in the last three years.
 
Wow.
 
JB: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. It blows my mind. The lineup you see now on stage is the lineup we’ve had since May of last year [2006] and this has become Set Your Goals for us and it’s become where every member, for the first time, has their own role. And so we were sitting their in the studio and it was a really collective effort to bring all of our messages…cause, like, four of the songs on the record were written shortly after we released the demo [Reset EP]. So we had these songs which were a couple years old and these brand new songs and how does this all tie together? What are we trying to achieve with this record, what are we trying to achieve with pursuing this band full time? And that’s when it was just like, “Mutiny.” And what is a mutiny? A mutiny is a takeover from within something. So we’re sitting there in the studio and we’re the young, impressionable band and they’re trying to force feed us things and tell us you have to do this, this, and this, and all of these songs…it’s kind of like a coming of age, if you will. I’m twenty-three and the average age of the band is twenty-two, twenty-three, and we started playing music when we were sixteen. It really is like a coming of age and being like, “Hey, we’re old enough to make an impression now, let’s takeover.” I’ll listen to that CD and it brings me back to that time, it’ll bring me right back to those three weeks we were workin’ on the album, that whole period, everything else going on in my life, not just the band. So I hope that answers it a bit. I’m kinda just rambling.
 
No, no, that’s fine. Now we get to the fun, tough questions.
 
JB: Cool!
 
Being in a band that stresses such independence and DIY ethics, and you sing about these things, it’s part of your thing, how do you feel about being signed to a label like Eulogy? How does that play into your ethics and philosophy as a band?
 
JB: First of all, the song “Mutiny!,” and this has been something that’s been tough to set the record straight on, in every interview; I really try and push this out there and I’ve answered so many blog postings. Every time Punknews.org runs something on us, everyone’s like, “Mutiny! is the most hypocritical song ever.” The song was never written about a major label or a major label scene, it was based on events in the independent music scene and how they are trying to change the scene and stuff. With Eulogy, they have the major label distro and our releases are not distributed through Warner Bros., they’re distributed through Lumberjack. And that wasn’t by choice! I would have loved to have Warner distro! So how it ties in is your band…Anti-Flag is on RCA now and I had a big talk with Justin [Sane, singer and guitarist for Anti-Flag] about this a couple days ago and their label is like, “This is how you guys built yourselves up.” And that is how Eulogy came to us; “You guys built yourselves up as a band, what you’re doing is working for a reason, we’re not gonna do anything to compromise that. We’re not gonna make you guys do anything that will make you compromise that.” There’s things that pressure us, like the contract says that we have to whatever, but in terms of the creative side - how you want your songs to be interpreted, and even something as simple as the artwork for the album - I think some bands sign with majors and they lose that control. We push our band as much as we ever have before. And these six members, if you wanted to do a one-on-one with me, we could do a whole history! Like last year, we had two really bad management experiences. We actually signed a management deal with our A&R at Eulogy and he ended up losing us a lot of money and had us bound to this legal contract and there was no way for us to get out of it and work with other people that we wanted to and the reason we came to him and said, “We need to let you go because…” Basically, the way we saw it is he was able to help us do the things on tour that we were unable to do anymore, like keep up to date and keeping in touch with people on our Myspace. You can’t keep your website updated with your show dates cause it’s so hard to get on the internet when you’re on tour. You sit down at the venue for maybe an hour, but other than that, you’re running around. So, where I was going with that, was we realized that us six were more involved in our band than anyone outside of the band could ever be. Like someone’s upstairs workin’ on trying to get us gear sponsorships and my thing is touring. Like, we went crazy this past year; we’ve got so many tours lined up.
 
And it was nice to deal directly with a band member. Usually you’re goin’ through publicists or labels and I went through Eulogy, but they just said to “email Jordan.”
 
JB: Yeah, I tell them to do that; don’t send them to anyone else unless it’s a band member. Don’t ever send them to anyone. And we have no need to have…I don’t know at what stage a band will get in their career where they kind of don’t have the control over it. But from what I know…even Anti-Flag, they’re still doin’ it. And that’s what I model us after, even Bay Area bands like AFI. You have this cult band and they’re fully deserving of everything they did because they got out there and played every suburb and every market they could possibly play and if a kid emailed them, they’re on it. I get emails all the time from places I’ve never heard, like Arizona, we’re passing through; “We’re two hours east of Las Vegas and three hours west of Phoenix, can you please come play for us?” and I mark it down and I make note and I give it to our agent and him and I work on all the off days and where we can get to these places. I think it’s politics. What is a DIY band? What is not a DIY band? And I know we’re a DIY band and no one will see that except for us and not one needs to see it except for us. So that’s how it’s worked and that’s how it’s gonna work. And it’s rad that you noticed how easy it was to get in touch.
 
Yeah, it’s a rare thing, there are very few who actually deal with it that way. And my second question; you guys are associated with the hardcore scene - and it was evidenced tonight - and a much older sense of hardcore, maybe even, for lack of a better word, something like “thug core.” And Eulogy is a label that…
 
JB: And I’m wearing a First Blood hoodie; great choice!
 
It’s all right! But, Eulogy supports that to, to some degree, with bands like Hoods and Casey Jones. You have a lot of bands on that label that are very strict and straightedge. And I was curious about your take on the violence that’s erupted lately, especially on the east coast, in regards to the hardcore scene, namely the murder that occurred in Asbury Park [New Jersey] at the Ramallah show.
 
JB: What was this? I haven’t heard about this.
 
You haven’t heard about this?
 
JB: No.
 
At this point, I turned off my recorder and gave Jordan the story - as I had heard it in the Asbury Park press - of the murder that occurred at Club Deep in New Jersey at a show Boston hardcore band Ramallah were booked to play. I also explained the involvement of the FSU crew and the ongoing investigation into the events that took place both inside and outside the club the night of January 14th, 2007. I turned the recorder back on when Jordan was ready to continue.
 
JB: It’s like, umm…gee, honestly I don’t even know where to begin with that. It’s really sad that that happened and it’s not the first time you’ve heard of something like that happening in hardcore. I think that there’s such an aggressive quality to the music that it pulls something out of people and it’s undeniable. But if there was a way to control it a lot more…from where Set Your Goals is, speaking from our band, it’s never something you wanna see happen at our shows. Tonight, a little scuffle happened and it ended up being a couple of our friends and we stopped…make sure everyone’s okay, that’s the first thing. Honestly, it just comes down to being accepting of people, people that are different from you because every time I hear about this happening, it’s not the punk rock kid that started it; often times, it’s the hardcore kid that started it, but it’s usually the younger hardcore kid who sees the older crowd responding this way. And, if anything I would hope that…I’m 23, I’m starting to get older, up there and I would go to shows when I was 15 and I would see 23 year old dudes just goin’ crazy. And your mind is a sponge and it’s soaking all this up and I wish, the only thing I could hope for, is that eventually we’ll get to a point where we start to set, we start to become more like role models and start to be aware that people are paying attention to this and that’s how we’re gonna act and that’s how we’re gonna carry on; history is gonna repeat itself. But for the incident in particular that you’re talking about, that seriously bums me out that that even happened there.
 
Do you think it’s up to the bands to change that?
 
JB: I think it’s definitely up to the bands at the show cause this is like…okay, we played with Paint It Black, we played with Crime in Stereo, we played with The Loved Ones, Shook Ones at a basement in Bakersfield. There were fights non-stop, every band and Dave Wagenschutz, the drummer for Paint It Black, was the only one who was out there trying to stop these fights from happening, security wasn’t doing anything. And I had so much respect for him for doing that and it makes you, as a band member, wanna look out for all your crowd as well. We stopped a show on the Less Than Jake tour and Junior and I, cause it happened to the left where we stand, stopped the show. This kid, this little ska kid was just running around, having a good time, and this kid from St. Louis just started socking him because he skanked into him. And he looked at us and he had come and said what’s up right before the show, was like, “Hey, I’m stoked to the see the show.” And that was awesome, so we were cool with him. So I don’t know if he got the impression that we would be cool with him “representing” during our set, which we want, we want kids to go up and have a good time, we want everyone to look out for each other. And we had to stop and security didn’t know what to do, so we had to set things straight for security. So I think it’s always up to the bands to keep and eye on their crowd because they’re your kids, they’re coming to see you, look out for them. So, it’s up to the band there. In terms of, cause we have a lot of ties with FSU as well…none of us are FSU, but through degrees of separation.  Everyone’s networked and I think it’s up to us as friends of members of the crew or of any crew; if you see someone acting out, and not that we have yet, but, as a friend, you need to let someone know when they’re in the wrong. You need to let them know, “Hey, dude, can we just, like, let it go? Can you just not stress out about it and just let it go for this once?” Cause something like that affects so many lives than if you just let it go; one person might be angry for the night, but it’s not gonna effect this whole group around ’em like it would if someone were to actually get seriously injured. So, I hope that answers your question.
 
Yeah, that’s a good answer. If you were to think back to when Set Your Goals started, what inspired you to wanna start a band and what did you originally wanna sound like?
 
JB: Aww, man. I’ve been wanting to play in a band like this for a while. Ever since…when I was younger, all my bands were the Fat Records bands, like the Punk-O-Rama compilations and all the Fat comps and so I always had a niche for pop-punk, fast, melodic punk music. And Lifetime was the band that switched gears for me. In freshman year of high school, in 1999, I had a mixed tape and Lifetime was on it and from there, I found kids who were into Lifetime, who were into bands like the Gorilla Biscuits, who were into bands like Civ. And so that was my turning point and that was my gateway into hardcore and into bands like Minor Threat even, and you’re getting into much more aggressive punk rock. So I wanted to start a band that had that Lifetime sound, even The Movielife, these are bands that would come to California and brought both those for me. Matt came to me…there was a band in our local area called Towards the End, actually, that was doing it long before us and I never got to see them play. Matt’s been goin’ to shows since he was thirteen and he’s 24, he’s a year older then me. And when I got in to Towards the End, and for us, coming from the Bay Area, and this band wasn’t playing anymore, Operation Ivy was not playing anymore, a band called American Steel was not playing anymore, those are all like punk/ska bands, and then across the nation you had bands breaking up. When The Movielife broke up in 2003, it was like, “Fuck, man, people do not appreciate what these bands were doing, what these bands had done.” I guess I shouldn’t say that; Gorilla Biscuits is highly appreciated, but we thought no one, especially in the Bay Area, was doing what we wanted to do. On top of that, no one was touring how we wanted to tour, with the exception of Green Day, AFI, NOFX, these really great big bands, but we didn’t have any ties to these bands, so we couldn’t go to them and be like, “Hey! Help us out, give us the connection we wanna tour with.” We had to get out there and make our own networks. What we wanted to sound like, though, was exactly that. We wanted to sound like all those bands combined, pop-punk genres and hardcore genres. My thing with Mutiny!, too, to go back to your question about the sounds on the album, I didn’t wanna write a pop-punk song with a hardcore breakdown as much as I wanted to write a hardcore song like “This Song is Not About a Girl,” and a pop-punk song like “To Be Continued,” and I wanted them to flow on the record. But that’s basically how it all started, it was just in garages, and we’d been playing in other bands obviously. Mikey and I played in a band called Time for Living and that was straight up, uhh…dude, I don’t even know. All our influences were like New York hardcore stuff and we teamed up with these older dudes. Sick of It All…my friend Israel, he played in a band, he’s played in several older Gilman Street style bands. I met him at a show and I really looked up to him and told him, “Dude, I would really love to play guitar for your band, I know you’re lookin’ for a guitar player.” And so we got really heavy doses, really schooled on that scene of music and that was really cool and that all helped mold us into what this band became.
 
What would you be doing if you weren’t playing music right now?
 
JB: I would be in school for sure. I had to take a break from school and that’s why I started Set Your Goals, and I would like to go back one day. What I would be studying, I don’t know because my ideas were always changing. I was studying sound engineering when I was in school cause I was really into music. Music video production I’ve always been into. I was working at a movie theatre and then I working at an animal hospital and I was working at a humane society, so I was really into animal life. I’m not vegan or vegetarian or stuff like that! But I really like working with sheltered animals. But if I wasn’t in the band right now, I could see pursuing those part-time jobs and going to school to do something a little bigger. But always playing music and I love recording music and I love performing. I was always into theatre when I was in middle school and high school. Something where I can be out there and active, performing, and something as well to satisfy my need to learn and know things.
 
Alright, a few quick questions. Favorite place to play on tour? Favorite venue.
 
JB: Dude, that’s rough. Okay, umm…well, obviously Gilman Street for the Bay Area. Dude, you got Gilman Street, you got all the Oakland house shows. Dude, pick a house in Oakland and there’s a show happening in it, that’s just how the punk rock scene is there. We’re about to play the Filmore on this tour and that’s such a legendary venue for the Bay Area. Fleetwood Mac’s original lineup would perform there, so that’s gonna be a trip. We played CBGB’s. These are all notable punk rock venues that you can’t be in without getting a sense of being overwhelmed with all the history. We played the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. I love Bruce Springsteen and I was freaking out there. We played with the Gorilla Biscuits at Asbury Park, so none-the-less…
 
That’s where Lifetime reunited, too.
 
JB: I saw that show. For bigger venues, though, House of Blues shows are awesome, we always have fun at House of Blues shows.
 
Alright. Current musical obsession?
 
JB: Ohh, god. The new Lifetime album is fuckin’ awesome. I really like this singer/songwriter, Regina Spektor, she’s really cool. For last year’s albums, this band Over It put a record out called Step Outside Yourself and they’ve been doing it for much longer than we have and I would hope people would check that out. Hit the Lights’ album is awesome. I’m just droppin’ friends now cause we’ve made so many friends doin’ this now. And not just cause we’re on tour with them; the Anti-Flag album, the Alexisonfire album, and the Big D album. All the bands have brand new records and they’re all in rotation.
 
Cool. Okay, Set Your Goals can open for any four bands. Who are the bands you want your band to open for?
 
JB: Okay, since we’ve already opened for two of them, The Gorilla Biscuits and Lifetime…
 
Who would be the other two?
 
JB: Well, I would love to pick four more!
 
Go for it!
 
JB: Kid Dynamite for sure would be amazing. Jimmy Eat World has always been for me, their whole discography has always been great. They were another band that really got me into what they were doing with the indie scene, the emo scene, and that takes you places from there. Umm, I’m gonna say New Found Glory cause those guys have always been the best dudes. I only hope it’s a matter of time until we get to play a show with them. And then, fuckin’, dude…Rancid, Green Day, AFI, NOFX, like, do I have to honestly pick one?
 
This is anything, a bill you would never imagine happening.
 
JB: Okay, I’m gonna have to scratch this and start over. For me, definitely the Gorilla Biscuits and Lifetime because I got that sense, I got that teary eyed…because it is such a milestone. It’s like you build something and you see it grow and then these are the rewards, these are the fruits of your labor. And then, Kid Dynamite’s still up there, I have to put them on there. And the last one would be The Movielife for sure. If I could sing alongside that band in its original lineup, playing their songs…
 
Okay, so my recorder is counting down how much time I have left.
 
JB: Thirty-three seconds?
 
Yeah, so if you wanna say something, you better say it now.
 
JB: Okay. I really wanna plug all the bands were on tour with again right now because a lot of people have said things about Anti-Flag when they heard we were goin’ out with them and I wanna get that out there that these dudes are honest and have been doing it for thirteen years and are actually…with what their new album is, if you pick up that album and you read the insert in there, it’s something that needs to be heard.
 
Thanks to Jordan for all his time backstage and thanks to Jeff over at Eulogy for putting me in touch with Jordan.
 
www.setyourgoals.net
www.myspace.com/setyourgoals
www.eulogyrecordings.com