At the Drive-In Interview Outtakes: "We Found Love Together, We Lost Love Together"

Fearless Records

At the Drive-In

Our At the Drive-In profile yesterday focuses on the reunion of the seminal post-punk legends, who dissolved in 2001. Before they hit the stage at Coachella this weekend, we tracked down members Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Jim Ward and Tony Hajjar to find out why they finally decided to get the band back together. They also talk about their favorite ATDI songs, their new record label and getting heckled by So Cal fans in the early days. Here are excerpts from our interview that didn't make the story.

On brotherly love:
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez: I grew up with those guys. We became adults together in a tiny van. We lived in that van from when we were 17, when your hormones are all over the place, until our mid-'20s. We found love together, we lost love together, we lost friends together we found new friends together, and we came up together. That's what that experience is, that's what playing with those guys again is.

The music is a bi-product of that. That's why we knew that all we had to do is get into a room together again and it would work now that we're all talking again. The music is a bi-product of our chemistry; it's not independent of it.

On Rodriguez-Lopez getting over himself:
Rodriguez-Lopez: The guys started to say "Why not? Why wouldn't we play?" And I stuck to my same old high jargon of the past 10 years. "I kept saying that this band is in the past and I just wanna move forward." And then one of the guys says to me "Get over yourself. It would be fun." And then I go "You know... you're right." And so it all happened very naturally in the way that human relationships happen. I still know those songs, the rest of the band still knows those songs and a lot of people would love to hear them. So it just felt like a nice thing to do.

Tony Hajjar: We just really wanted to play with each other again. We would've made some really bad decisions if money was our only incentive to do this.

On owning their master recordings of Relationship of Command:
Jim Ward: I don't want to leave my life up to lawyers and managers. At the time we split up, it was the lack of control that really drove me crazy. We were put into this machine that we just couldn't survive in. I want to control my own destiny and part of that is making sure the five of us realize that this is something we made and we're lucky enough to own it, which is incredibly rare so let's take advantage of it and let's make something even cooler. We have a lot of plans in the next year. The exciting part of it is that we get total control of our art which is not the usual thing.

On starting their new label, Twenty-first Chapter: