From the Archives: Jeremy Enigk Interview

I interviewed Jeremy Enigk for Paste when the Fire Theft record came out. I guess that would put this in 2004? Here are some snippets.

On the demise of Sunny Day Real Estate

First of all, the whole, like, actually… William and I had spent 3 or 6 months after the last Sunny Day tour tossing around the idea of potentially quitting the band and starting a new one right away. After about 6 months of talking about it and sleepless nights and wanting to make a big change, finally we were just still sort of miserable about the idea of continuing the band, so we quit Sunny Day the same day that we started the Fire Theft. We didn’t really have a name for it yet. So that’s sort of how that went down.

On how the Fire Theft sounds

About 3 years ago—actually during the Rising Tide tour, I started listening to the Who—Quadrophenia. Rock and roll was something that I never got into until I heard one song on that album. It blew my mind and totally changed my whole perspective. Sort of frightening to try this whole rock and roll thing…it had a huge impact on me.

I think the music is a slightly different approach…probably Dan [Hoerner] not being involved in this project, because he had a pretty important songwriting involvement in Sunny Day was sort of a rediscovery for me, especially writing lyrics, and I just got a lot more blunt and honest and straightforward with the lyrics.

On being less lyrically opaque

This one in particular is based purely off of experience of life. Music, to me, is a reflection of how I feel a lot of the time. It can get really dark sometimes and it’s sort of embarrassing to wear your heart on your sleeve. During the writing, I found it’s a lot more relatable and a lot more…I just figured that if I—the more honest I got, the more it would actually make sense to other people, and I didn’t want to shroud it completely in poetry and imagery like Sunny Day—just my own personal struggles and triumphs that people can relate to in their heart and their soul

A song like "Uncle Mountain" is…about doubt, doubting faith. It was a pretty rough one for me to accept to be putting out such dark subject matter. I don’t know how blunt I’ll be with that topic; it’s so huge and ever-changing.