Although the new single from the Cold War Kids is called “Louder Than Ever,” their new album is anything but that. In fact, many of the highly melodic songs on “Mine Is Yours” are devoid of the angst that first propelled the band to popularity with the song “Hang Me Up To Dry” in 2007.
Singer Nathan Willett says he just has less to be angsty about these days.
“I mean, I’ve gotten married,” he says. “And this was kind of the first time we’d had a long stretch of being home, reconnecting with our friends and getting back to a normal state of living.”
Willett also credits this normal state of living with a shift in his lyric writing.
“You kind of get the real life story back in, which I felt really was missing on the second record,” he says. “I got to spend a lot more time creating something more cohesive, and I feel like this is in some ways the first thing that we’ve done that just fits together.”
Willett says some of the credit for the band’s polished new sound goes to producer Jacquire King, who is best known for bringing the Kings of Leon to a wider audience.
“Definitely I think it flattened a lot of the kind of spastic and jerky rhythms and things that we do,” says Willett.
Ring of fire
Willett says for
subject matter on the new album, he found inspiration from an unlikely
source: Johnny Cash.
“One of the things he says actually in his
biography is that really, there is no other subject — politics, religion
or anything else out there — than the relationship between a man and a
woman. There’s nothing more fascinating to him. That got me thinking a
lot about the way that I tried to resist writing about relationships
because of just being cliche in pop music. Just being able to talk about
relationships in a way that was heartfelt and somewhat original, I
think, was kind of the goal.”
