Drums Singer Places Equal Value on Words and Music

Alex Lake

Long before he formed the Drums, a group currently jet-setting around the world and playing summer festivals, Jonathan Pierce knew what it was like to front a buzzed-about rock band. In 2003, as leader of the dance-pop outfit Elkland, he signed with Capitol Records, and two years later, he released an album called 'Golden.' The record proved anything but, and after failing to crack the charts, Elkland found itself dropped.

The episode left Pierce demoralized and unsure of his future -- even three years later, as he and childhood friend Jacob Graham prepared to move from Florida to New York City and launch the Drums.

"The band was birthed out of frustration and confusion and getting older and feeling more upset about my life and sort of hopeless," Pierce tells Spinner.

He poured those feelings into the Drums' self-titled debut, a collection featuring infectious melodies, insistent beats and crisp, springy guitars that offset the disillusionment driving the lyrics. Pierce's songs are so catchy, in fact, that some listeners are likely to miss their meanings altogether -- something he says he doesn't mind.

"At the end of the day, we're just writing simple pop songs," Pierce says. "It is pop and the great thing about pop is that it's so subjective. People can take it for whatever they want. A song like 'Forever and Ever Amen,' people can look at it as a really uplifting and fun to dance to, and that's what a lot of people look for, and then a lot of people come up to me and say the song makes them cry or makes them sad."

"Whether it's a painting or a song or a sculpture, some people will be searching for something deeper," he adds. "Whether someone is excited about how the music sounds or the genre or the lyric or the mood, to me, that's just really fascinating and that's why I write pop songs. I have that fascination with how people react."

The Drums are sometimes compared to Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing, stylistically similar indie-pop acts whose frontmen have both said in recent Spinner interviews that they focus more on writing memorable hooks than meaningful lyrics. Pierce, it would seem, puts greater emphasis on his words.

"It's funny to hear because it's true but it wouldn't have been true a couple years ago," the songwriter says. "All the bands I've been part of, I've always been the songwriter. I write the lyrics and all that. And lyrics have always been second or third to me. The most important thing is the melody, and what's different with the Drums is to me, I've come to this realization that melody and the lyrics are both equally important."

A believer in the idea that "every great melody has great lyrics kind of wrapped up inside it," Pierce generally starts with a tune and adds whatever words seem to fit.

"For the Drums, we wanted to write the most simple, most stripped down, classic, not-trying-to-do-anything-new-or-edgy-or-interesting sort of simple pop songs -- barebones, classic songs about heartbreak and sadness," he says. "And the best way to do that is to come up with a great melody, a classic pop melody."

Insofar as he aims for emotional directness, he takes his cues from '60s girl groups.

"Rather than saying in 200 words why they're so sad, they'd just write songs, and in the chorus, the chorus would simply say, 'I'm sad,' or 'I'm so sad,' and that's all they had to say," he says. "And with those classic melodies, it has this sort of feeling that takes over and overwhelms you."

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