Chicagoland has fostered dozens of great power-pop acts, from Cheap Trick to Material Issue. At the rate their going, the M’s may be next on the national radar. Last year’s self-titled debut has already started to win the group attention outside of Chicago, but it’s their hometown support that keeps the band going. RedEye spoke with Robert Hicks of the M’s about touring with Wilco and working on album No. 2.
You were lucky enough to open for Wilco on a few dates last year.
Their fan base is just so rabid. Everyone was traveling around and going to all of the shows. This huge group of people that know each other and go to Wilco shows all over the country. I knew they had fans, but it was like a cult! A lot of those people were really nice to us, and saw us all four nights in a row. When we go on tour on our own, we still get people that come up and tell us they saw us on those days.
Wilco seems to get more popular the weirder they get.
I really respect them, because they’re not afraid of trying new things. All the bands that I used to like, every album had something different about it from the previous album. It seems now that most contemporary bands develop a sound and then write songs to fit their sound, instead of just writing songs.
So does that mean your second album will intentionally sound a lot different than the first album?
I don’t think we’re going to intentionally do anything. Basically, the way our process works is to go from one song to the other. We don’t know how the album will end up. Right now we’re just recording demos. Actually, we’ve got some that are pretty much final tracks. We’re just trying to record as much as we can. We’ve got about 20 songs or so that we’ve been working on. We’ll either narrow that down to make a concise album, or we might just throw them all together and have 25 songs on the record, which would be kind of ambitious. But I think that would be good for us and show people that we’re serious about what we’re doing.
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You had a pretty good 2004, so I think people know you’re serious.
Definitely. But I think this new record will be a lot more important for us, because I think a lot more people will hear about it. It just takes so long for things to filter through into people’s perception. When we played the Empty Bottle, we hadn’t played Chicago for four months or something. But it felt like there were still things building outside of us the whole time. The show was sold out. There were a lot of people who knew the songs, knew them well enough that they’d react to a certain part of a song. I don’t think we’ve ever had quite that level of [fandom]. …The first album established our existence in the world. Hopefully, when the second album comes out, it will just keep building the momentum.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and alBerto Trevino ([email protected])