99% of "A Chat With Todd Fink of The Faint"

I first heard The Faint in 2001 when a friend of mine gave me "Danse Macabre." For months after that I couldn’t get it out of my head or CD player. The unbelievably catchy beats and vivid lyrics were just too good not to play all the time. Needing more, I went to work on finding out what their back catalogue had to offer me and found the lighter (and sometimes dancier) "Blank-Wave Arcade." In 2004, I had the pleasure of getting up early on a Tuesday morning to peel the plastic off of the new "Wet From Birth" album and proceeded to punish my speakers with it non-stop for the next month or two. The next four years were restless ones; I played their whole catalogue inside out and laid in wait. When word of a new album hit my ears in 2008, I felt an excitement and anticipation that few bands could ever invoke inside of me. "Fasciinatiion" was an enormous payoff and to add to that, I had the pleasure of doing a phone interview with lead singer Todd Fink.

PC: In preparation of your latest album you guys built a studio and formed your own label. What were some of the benefits of these two things?

TF: Well, I think it’s something that we’d wanted to do for a while. We had had serious thoughts about doing that for Wet From Birth. We didn’t have any concerns with the label, like Saddle Creek not being good enough, we were just already doing a lot of the stuff that a label does. We thought it’d be cool to have our own label since we do so much of our band stuff ourselves, anyways, and we always have. So it just made sense for us to take on the responsibility of a label; especially now that we have a manager to help us with it. As far as the studio, I dunno if we could’ve made an album without that. We tend to over-analyze a lot of stuff and having your own studio is a much better place to waste time than one where you’re paying by the hour.

PC: Where have been some of your favorite places to play in and outside of the US?

TF: I think we all like to play in Japan. That might be our favorite if I was gonna guess how we’d vote. Also, southern California, well California in general, has been consistently really good. I think pretty much all of the major cities are where the bigger shows happen. A lot of times, though, the small shows that seem like they’re gonna be terrible have been the best; I dunno if it’s because we play better to compensate for how we’re feeling about it or what.

PC: I’ve read that you do a lot of graphic art design and collages and things like that. How did you first get into that and what are some of your favorite album designs you’ve worked on?

TF: I kind of go in and out of making visual art, it just comes in phases. Over the last chunk of years the thing that’s motivated it has been needing new designs for Faint stuff like shirts, posters, album covers, singles and all that. There’s enough of that to where even if I’m making collages or something for no reason at home I can go back and pull those out to see if they’d make a good shirt design or stickers or something. I definitely don’t do all of it by myself, though; Dapose and Jacob do a lot of it too. Dapose has probably done the most of it in the last handful of years. We all work together on the major things like album covers and singles. Otherwise, we just kinda share ideas for shirts and that kind of stuff.

PC: Which album cover would you say you had your hand in the most?

TF: Album covers really are super collaborative. Maybe "Danse Macabre" or "Wet From Birth." A lot of times what will happen is I’ll have gathered a bunch of things that I think will be good to put together and Dapose will work with that. Or if I don’t put together anything that he likes he’ll take those elements and do it himself; I usually find that I like his stuff a lot. So, a lot of the elements on those two albums were mine, but we really do it as a group. Dapose will be running the computer while we’re all insulting how it looks until we all like it.

PC: Can you recall, as a child, the first song that overwhelmed you and gave you the chills?

TF: Probably “Revolution” by The Beatles. I really liked that one, I had a 45 of it when I was very young. I haven’t really even listened to it in years, but it just has that real fuzzy guitar and organ sound. That really struck me when I was young because it didn’t sound like the other stuff I had heard on the radio and there wasn’t, of course, internet or MTV in Omaha at that point.

PC: What are a few of the major differences between the original vision of the band and the current feel and sound of it now?

TF: I guess, to me, the band kind of figured out what it wanted to be in 1998 or 1999 when we were making "Blank-Wave Arcade." So, to me, that’s the original sound of The Faint even though we had albums and 7”s before that. So, from that point... how is it different? You know, it might sound like an insult to the band as it is now, but it’s a little less focused sounding now, in a way that it sounded a little more cohesive before, not because the songs were that similar to each other, but because we had fewer instruments to work with and devices to manipulate. I think with so many possibilities now it’s hard not to indulge. So, now it sounds a little like us just trying a whole bunch of different approaches to the same thing. I think the original sound of The Faint is kind of a minor key somewhat fast or at least upbeat kind of abstract shards of observations lyrically that’s built on music that was trying to escape from what “indie-rock” meant in 1998. I felt like we were escaping from it when we were making that record, but because people liked it I thought, “well I guess we didn’t really escape it, but at least we came up with something that we like.” And I say we didn’t escape it because all the people that liked it were the same people that liked what we were trying to escape from. Not that we were trying to get away from the fans, it’s just that we didn’t feel like we could contribute anything to that whole scene anymore. I guess we could, though, and we accidentally did.

PC: As far as the old stuff I agree with you about it sounding more sporadic. Where as with the new stuff, it’s completely clean sounding; you guys have some kind of a tick or bell or note inserted into every empty crevasse and that’s what really impressed me with the new album is how absolutely complete it is. I guess that really comes with what you were saying about having all these devices at your fingertips.

TF: Yeah I think we were trying to fit in a billion things. As fun as it is, I don’t know, it’s probably not a good idea to have so much stuff in it, but we found a way to fit it all in the mix.

PC: Listening to it, it sounds phenomenal, but mainly it sounds like a ton of hard work finding enough stuff to constantly maintain the songs like that.

TF: That’s an interesting take on it; I hadn’t really thought of it like that before. Although, when we played it for a friend right when we were finished I kind of wondered if that was his impression. He said he liked it a lot, but was gonna need to listen to it a lot more to understand all the things that were happening in it. I hadn’t really thought about it being complicated before or detailed.

PC: “Detailed” is absolutely the right word. I was completely blown away by that the first time I heard it; even now I still take away something new from it every time I listen to it.

TF: Well cool, thanks.

PC: Last but not least, what’s next for The Faint and how long are you guys gonna make me wait for a new EP or album?

TF: Haha, well I dunno. If history is anything to go by I don’t think it’s coming very soon. You never know, though, we’ve got a studio and we’ll probably put something together. I think after making this record and touring extensively on it, right now it’s just kinda time for a break. So, we’ll see how long the break lasts.

*The Faint is:
*Todd Fink - singer/keyboards
*Jacob Thiele - keyboards, backup vocals
*Dapose - guitars
*Joel Petersen - bass
*Clark Baechle - drums, percussion