Interviews

Modern Life Is War

Interview with Jeffrey Eaton on Dec 12, 2005 by Archive Bot

There is dried blood on Jeffrey Eaton’s hand.  It has dripped down from a gash on his arm inside his black leather jacket. “I slashed a big piece of meat off my arm on the monitor.  I don’t really know what happened, but it looks terrible.”  Still, Modern Life Is War’s singer remains nonchalant.  Physical injury is not what matters.  For Jeff, and all of Marshalltown, Iowa’s MLIW, it is about something else. “The one thing that matters to us is to make a connection with the kids and make some difference in their lives as well as our own.”
 
Fresh off an inspiring, sing along heavy set in San Francisco, Jeff relaxes with a beer, nursing it slowly to spare his blood flecked lips any more pain. “I keep getting fat lips ever time we play,” Jeff says. “I don’t know what it is.  I’ve never had it before, but every night on this tour, I break my lip on something.”
 
This tour, half of which featured Modern Life Is War playing alongside Walls Of Jericho, With Honor, and The Banner, but now includes This Is Hell, With Honor, The Distance, and NYC’s merciless champions Most Precious Blood has gone through some tough times recently. “We had to cancel our Seattle show, one of the more anticipated shows of the tour.  The mountains in Oregon were impassible.  Most Precious Blood drove up into the mountains ahead of us.  They went twelve miles in an hour and half and then were so scared they turned around and came back.  They called us all and told us to cancel.  We were stuck at a hotel all day and we just ran around and drank beer, jumped on beds and played tunes.  It was a pretty good day actually, I can’t lie.”
 
Luckily, the beleaguered tour made the long drive from Portland, twelve hours south to SF, where weariness didn’t prevent a high energy set that tore through half the songs on Modern Life Is War’s latest Deathwish Inc. full-length Witness. “I am one hundred percent happy with the new record.  It was a major struggle to write.  It took us a year and a half and really strained the relationships within our band.  We all go back a long ways, ten years or more and we’re all really good friends.  We all knew where we needed to get together, but to get there it was as if we all had to each go a different way.  It may sound stupid, going to all that trouble for nine songs, twenty-seven minutes, but we needed Witness to be perfect for us.”
 
Witness, which was recorded with Converge’s Kurt Ballou at his God City Studios provided MLIW with a unique recording experience. “The first time I went into a real studio was to do vocals on My Love. My Way. I was just nervous and intimidated.  I didn’t know what I wanted.  The engineers would hit ‘record’ and I would do something.  They would ask if that was OK and would say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and that was it.  Working with Kurt, I was in a really wild mood.  I was seized with this idea of what I wanted to do and I would leave until it was like that.  A lot of the songs were just one take.   Kurt understood what I wanted and would say ‘This sucks,’ or ‘This is really good.’  We had a good connection going on.” Jeff smiles.  “Basically, recording at God City was an awesome experience.”
 
What came from those sessions was an outpouring of emotion, a frustrated record filled with hope and life.  It is inspiring because the hope comes from within us, and from within other young people.  It is a record about forming one’s own community out of those that society has left behind, and creating something positive.  Involvement in key, as Jeff points out. “The first real show I went to was a show that my friends were playing in.  I was handing out flyers for it, I was helping to rent the hall.” That DIY ethic was a necessary trait for young kids in Marshalltown.
 
“My first punk record was Rancid: Let’s Go.  That’s when I was hooked.  But we were in the middle of Iowa and the big tours didn’t come through.  Any tour that did come through was still a couple hours from us. We were fourteen years old and couldn’t go to them. It was this whole mysterious outside world.  We’d see the pictures and we’d read the lyrics and we’d listen to the CDs together and we’d skateboard to it, but we didn’t know what it was.  We had never seen it with our own two eyes. We just tried to imitate it in where we were from, with our friends, and we tried to get other people into it.”
 
In their imitation they succeeded in creating something real, a true community of like minded individuals.  “My community is small town kids, skateboarders, kids that haven’t found the kind of satisfaction they need through jobs, school, organized sports.  My community is small town outcasts. On the new record I call them ‘The chosen few,’  but then I correct it at the end and I say ‘The go-for-broke common-muck few.’ I don’t come from a big city or an amazing background.  I don’t have musicians for parents.  My dad works in a factory.  I’m a normal fucking guy. I tried all the established routes of society and none of them pleased me, so I found a skateboard and I found punk rock records and that has made me who I am.  It has defined my life. Any kid who knows what that is like, that’s my community.”
 
The Modern Life Is War circle recently expanded and took in a new guitarist, Sjarm, who played bass in Holland’s recently defunct Razor Crusade.  Sjarm sold merch for MLIW on their last European tour, and when the position opened up within the band, he received an e-mail.  Laughing, Jeff recalls the european experience,” When we went to Scandinavia, I looked like a fucking homeless person. I looked like a fucking jungle savage.”
 
Sjarm chimes in; “I looked even worse. Boy or girl, everyone is really hot there. At least Jeff is clean shaven.”
 
After the tour was over, Sjarm stayed in Europe. “I joined the band four or five weeks ago.  All of a sudden I got an e-mail from them asking if I could play the guitar.  I couldn’t really, but I said yes and spent the next few weeks learning how to play.”
 
The MLIW reach is expanding, but Witness remains a record very much rooted in midwestern America.  “We used to have this really big scene in Marshalltown, centered around all these old bands that my friends played in.  We built this whole scene when we were in high school, and then when my generation came of age, the younger kids who had gotten into it didn’t pick up the slack the way they should have.  No one was starting bands or promoting shows and it really dropped off for a while. There was a period where it was really dead.  Then we started our band and things remained dead for a while. But by the time we released Witness and had our record release show, there was this entire new generation of kids in Marshalltown.”
 
“It is definitely a completely different thing than from when we came up.  They’re all on myspace. They all can be exposed to so many bands so easily through the internet and messageboards. They can get educated in a couple years what took us three  or four years to find out about. So that’s really fucking bizarre. At our record release show, 180 kids turned out and I didn’t know 90% of them.  But they were all psyched and they were all into it.  The vibe in the room was really cool, and that night I just spoke my mind on everything.  i talked about our new record and I talked about why I wrote songs about Marshalltown.  I talked about all those things that night, so my hope is we’ll have at least some small influence on the new generation of kids in our hometown.”
 
Influencing others, inspiring others, changing lives.  This is what Modern Life Is War aspires to.  Jeff confirms. “Our goal as a band first and foremost is to be an important band.  And by that I mean a band that kids don’t just show up to because it’s the place to be, and they don’t dance just because we play a fucking mosh part, and they don’t sing along just because its a sing along part.  We want to be a band that won’t be forgotten.  We want the kids who are into us to know exactly what we’re about, to understand it, to have it relate to their lives, and I want us to last.  I don’t care about playing a crazy show in San Francisco tonight.  We play as hard as we play tonight every night we play and it doesn’t matter if we’re in buttfuck Utah playing to five people.  If kids that are there believe in our band and understand what we’re about then we’re not going to be thrown away when they go on to something different.  That’s what matters to us.”
 
Not all of Witness is drawn directly from experiences in Marshalltown, but the underlying emotions are always honest.  For example, “Martin Atchet is a song that’s based on the graphic novel Skin.  It takes place in England in the early Seventies where the predominate youth culture of the disaffected was skinhead culture.”  The parallels Jeff draws to our own scene illuminate the association.  “If you are in Nor-Cal in 2005 you might become a hardcore kid because you’re a fuckup and an outcast.  You don’t think the way people want you to think so you become a hardcore kid.  Martin, in the graphic novel, was born deformed so he became a skinhead basically because no one else would take him.  Only the skinheads would take him in so he became a skinhead.  For Martin that was his salvation in life.  This is many ways is our salvation in life.”
 
As long as bands like Modern Life Is War are being born and thrust into the world, not ever seeing what punk is but knowing at the same time what it is to be a punk, then the salvation offered can never be false. And as long as the audience understands the frustration, the need for creation of something new, MLIW will keep playing. “Ideally I like to see lots of different types of kids into it. Punk rocker kids, crust punker kids, hardcore kids.  Some of our best shows have been before crowds that are overall very young and maybe haven’t been to many shows.  Maybe that’s because we’re terrible and they can’t tell, but they just have so much enthusiasm.  I always like playing to younger kids.  Hopefully are shows have an environment where everyone is going off and having a good time, letting their inhibitions fly, not worrying about looking cool, but just being really into what’s going on and losing yourself a little bit.  I definitely encourage anyone who wants to come up front and sing or dance to do it, even if they don’t know the words, they don’t know who we are.”
 
At the end of the day, MLIW will get back in the van, and barring future weather related calamities, will be back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and then again after that, playing as hard as they can, suffering for their music, trying to get out their message.  They created it, they worked for it, they conjured it out of the dust of a factory town in the middle of Iowa.  This means everything.