Drums Aim to Bring Back Classic Pop Songs

Nowadays, pop music is all about calculated collaboration -- getting the right producer to craft your beat or rapper du jour to give a guest verse. When Drums singer Jonathan Pierce checks in with mainstream radio, he can't help but feel something is missing.

"We've been hearing so much music for the last 10 years but not a lot of songs," Pierce tells Spinner. "Songs are what last and, at least for me, what I've always loved is classic pop songs. And I think I'll never stop loving that, more than anything else."

He's not the only one. Over the last couple of years, the indie world has gone pop crazy, spawning a wave of scruffy surf-rock groups. Despite having written a song called 'Let's Go Surfing,' one of the many first-rate tunes on the Drums' recently released self-titled debut, Pierce hesitates to lump his band in with that movement. He will, however, cop to reacting against the kind of "perfect" pop songs foisted on the public by the likes of Lady Gaga.

"When I say perfect, I don't mean that in the best way, [but rather] factory-produced, conveyor-belt pop songs," Pierce says. "Generally, most people can listen to that during the day and it's fun. You do whatever you need to get by. But I feel like at the end of the day, when you're laying on your bed, staring at the ceiling and you're all alone, I don't think you're playing Lady Gaga. I think people are waiting for something a little more tangible, a bit more human and a little more relatable."

"What I found with bands like Pains of Being Pure at Heart or Night School, who we really love, [is] they're just writing simple pop songs," he adds.

If those bands are members of a "subculture birthed out of the Christina Aguileras and the Britney Spears'," as Pierce puts it, he says there might be other factors driving the indie-pop boom.

"The world is sort of going through a hard time, politically and economically," he says, "and I think great art and great creativity are always birthed out of hard times."