INTERVIEW: Nick Valensi of CRX

Photo credit to CRX and Tony Corella

The Strokes’ Nick Valensi recently debuted an album with his new band, CRX entitled New Skin. Right before the start of their US tour, WTBU DJ Kristen Lay got to chat with Valensi about creating this new project and getting back into playing live music. CRX will be coming to Brighton Music Hall on Nov. 20, and their album, New Skin, is out now on Columbia Records.

Was the title New Skin chosen as a sort of symbol of this new part, or project, in your life, or would you say you feel like you’re in a “new skin”?

Sure, I guess. At the risk of sounding corny, this is my new band, my new project, so that’s why the word “new” is there I guess. Just doing this new thing, singing, I’ve got a new role in this band. I just felt that title was appropriate and there’s something kind of reptilian about it as well.

What was this experience like for you to create something different with other people, and something that could be entirely your own?

It’s been really good, it’s been really fun. It dawned on me that I didn’t realize, but this is the first time that I’m launching a new project and being a part of this new thing for the first time in fifteen or twenty years since I did it the first time around with The Strokes. It’s been really exciting, the reception’s been really positive and I’m just really looking forward to starting this tour. We’re leaving on tour in a couple of days, and going on tour, being on stage is one of my favorite things about being a musician, and it’s kind of the reason why I wanted to start this new project in the first place. So, I’m kind of getting ready to bear the fruits of my labor.

On November 20, CRX will be coming here to Boston, playing at Brighton Music Hall, which is a really small venue compared to these large scale shows at huge venues and festivals that you’ve been used to doing. What do you miss about playing at these smaller shows and what are you looking forward to most about playing them?

Playing club shows is cool because there’s kind of a more immediate connection with the audience, just by virtue of them being so close. With The Strokes, for the most part we do these big summertime festival shows, which is really cool and fun, but it’s just a different feeling. I guess for me the coolest thing about having this new band and going across the country and playing these clubs is just that I haven’t done that in a long time. I guess I was just looking for some balance from these super big stages where the audience is like fifty feet away from the band and it’s a little tougher to make that connection. I just wanted to do something different. I think that if I only had the experience of playing clubs for ten years and only touring around the world doing these small clubs, I’d probably be really excited to get on some bigger stages, do some theaters, do some festivals, arenas, stadiums, whatever. But just because it’s been a while now with The Strokes where we’ve just been exclusively doing this particular kind of show, I was feeling a little out of balance and I wanted to be able to play all kinds of shows. It’s kind of like, you know you have some actors who do the summertime comic book blockbuster movie, but then they also do more indie pictures and other stuff, and I suppose that’s an appropriate analogy.

Yeah it’s nice to kind of find that balance.

Yeah, I mean I feel like life in general is all about balance. You can’t have too much of one thing and only that one thing because, inevitably, you’re gonna get sick of it.

You’ve spent a lot of time with the members of The Strokes, but with CRX you’re with all these new people. Were they exactly new to you, or how did you guys come together and decide you wanted to start this?

No, these guys have all been good friends of mine for a long time. They don’t feel new to me, we’re all buddies, and that’s actually how the band kind of came together. It was just very natural and organic. Once I put it in my head that I wanted to start something new and that I wanted to sing on it and put together a project to take on the road, I started demoing songs basically by myself at home on my laptop and just started putting all of the material together. I did that for a while—almost a year—pretty much by myself working in secret. And then, the way people do working by themselves, I kind of hit a wall and lost perspective on what I was doing and it got to a place where I felt a little stuck and was having trouble progressing. I think it’s probably because I’m used to being in a band and I’m used to the dynamic of a room full of people to bounce ideas off of. This new environment of working by myself was, at first, very necessary and important for me to do, but after a year of doing that it was really hard and really lonely and I got stuck. So, that’s when I reached out to some friends of mine who live in L.A,., kind of close to me, people who I’ve known for a while, who I respect musically, and opened the door to some collaboration to have these guys come in and help me finish up a couple of songs, finish up some lyrics on certain tracks where I was having trouble finishing all the lyrics. The guys who I reached out to are, for the most part, the guys who are now in the band with me, and once they came on board and we started writing together, things really started to feel like a band. That’s why this is a band, that’s why we’re presenting it that way because it feels that way. We all write on the record, and I figured it’d be cooler to go out as a band as opposed to some solo project.

When you guys were all working on this album and you were trying to figure out what kind of style or sound you wanted, did you try to steer away from any influences from The Strokes, or was it sort of inevitable? What kind of influences did the other members of your band bring?

I don’t really think about stuff like that when I’m in the middle of the process. I never sit down to write a song with this intention in mind of “oh, I want to be influenced by this” or “I want to not do something like this.” I actually consciously try to shut off the part of my brain that is telling me where to go, or any kind of critical or editorial function of my brain. I do my best to turn it off and try to be a bit more free creatively, especially in the early stages of writing. For me I can’t really tell what things are influenced by until it’s done, and once I’ve written it and recorded it and it’s finished and I can listen back to it, that’s when it dawns on me, like, “oh, this sounds like it was pretty heavily influenced by The Cars because it kind of sounds like a Cars song.” I mean sure, it probably was influenced The Cars, I love The Cars and I listen to them, but that certainly wasn’t what I was trying to do when I wrote the song.

What do you think is the most important part of creating songs and putting together an album?

I don’t know that there’s any most important part, it’s all really important to me. I’m pretty methodical that way, I scrutinize every little detail about things. I don’t know that one is more important than the other. But having said that, it does mean like a really good singer can help a mediocre song to shine and I don’t know that it works the other way around. If the singer’s bad, then the song just kind of tends to be bad. Vocals are really important and I’ve learned that through this process, it is an element that most people are gonna put their focus on, so it’s really important. I’m the kind of person who puts just as much weight on the tone of the hi-hat as I do on the tone of the lead vocal, so I guess I’m weird like that.

You worked with Josh Homme in producing this album; what was it like to work with him?

It was great working with him. We’ve been friends for a long time so I’m always happy to get a chance to hang out with him. To be working with him in this professional setting was really cool and really eye opening. He puts emphasis on a lot of things that I never thought to. I guess the things that he keeps an eye for detail out on are slightly different from the ones that I do. He placed a lot of attention on the drums, and not the sounds of the drums so much as the feel of the drums, and that was something that I do too and I’ve always known was important, but the way that he scrutinized the feel of the drums was just interesting and new to me. He’s a great guitar player and songwriter but he’s also a pretty damn good drummer, and I think it probably comes from that.

One song that I find interesting from the album is “Slow Down”, and in the song you sing about wanting to stop time and, as the title suggests, slow down. Do you feel that life moves too fast or, even more specifically, that your own life has moved too fast, especially with what success you’ve had at a young age?

Well, the short answer is yes. I feel when I compare myself to other people I feel like I’m a slow person. I really take my time with things, I don’t like to rush through a meal, I don’t like to rush through my morning, just getting ready to get out of the house. I’m really kind of a deliberate, methodical person and sometimes I feel like the world is speeding up and getting faster and faster and I’m still kind of taking my time. That song was just a reaction to those feelings.