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We Are
Scientists are Sagehens, too. Breakout band that
recently played on Letterman has musical roots at Pomona College.
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By David Scott
We Are Scientists is that three-man band with Pomona College
connections, of late seen making a joyful racket on The Late
Show with David Letterman. Virgin Records recently released
the band’s major label debut, With Love and Squalor
(the title is a reference to a J.D. Salinger essay), and the
band quickly has taken the pop music scene by storm.
 Along
with playing their hit "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt" on
Letterman, they’ve soaked up ink in leading music
magazines such as Rolling Stone and Spin, and
they continue to get added to radio and iPod play lists
throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The band members met as Claremont Colleges students, two
from Pomona, one from Harvey Mudd. "The bonds of friendship
that ultimately united those in the band were, as promised
in Pomona’s promotional recruitment literature, forged
during our collective time in Claremont," notes lead
vocalist and guitarist Keith Murray '00, who recently took
time out during the band's European tour to answer questions
by e-mail.
Murray and drummer Michael Tapper HMC '99 met while playing
in various campus bands. Murray and Bassist Chris Cain '99
were friends before the music, and after graduation in 1999 moved north to San Francisco, which is where they originally formed We
Are Scientists with Scott Lamb ’99. This line-up existed
until Cain and Murray returned to Southern California in
late 2000, where they recruited Tapper and again played
various gigs, "this time actually making something of a
name for ourselves." After Tapper finished his masters at
Harvey Mudd, the trio set off for New York.
The New York and national press has picked up on the band’s
collegiate connections and appeal, noting the band’s
“classroom scruffy” look and group name that practically
begs that age-old college mixer question, “What’s your
major?” (For the record, Tapper, as an engineer, is
the band’s only scientist. Murray and Cain majored in
International Relations and English, respectively.)
“PhD punk” may have been fodder for good press, but Murray
points out that it certainly wasn’t a calculated move on the
part of We Are Scientists. “The geek chic label has been
foisted upon us by the media, and we’re personally unaware
of what’s behind it,” he says. “I guess we do come off as
somewhat academic – more so in interviews and our written
product than in our actual songs, for sure. And, yes, we do
sometimes wear sweater vests and one member [Cain] has … a
vaguely silly mustache. Otherwise, though, I feel like we’re
not all that different from most bands, especially ‘indie’
bands, who often favor knitwear and spectacles.”
 However,
the band isn’t shy about being literate. When asked what We
Are Scientists currently is reading, Murray notes he's been
reading Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays
by noted author David Foster Wallace (who just happens to
be a creative writing professor at Pomona), while Chris has
been consuming Michael Frayn’s Headlong. "One nice
aspect of touring," says Murray. "Is that there’s plenty of time to read on
the tour bus, which we’ve been squandering by playing video
games.” Spinal Tap they ain’t.
Musically, We Are Scientist seem absolutely right for the
times; their sound reflects the return of strong hooks,
harmonies and melodies to edgier popular music. Their
growing audience taps into a resurgence of interest in the
more adventurous and avant-garde side of late-’70s
early-’80s power pop (think Talking Heads, Gang of Four or
the Buzzcocks). The New York Times noted that the band’s
sound “… finds a comfortable spot between the neo-wave band
the Killers and the disco-punk band the Rapture, all spiky
rhythms and yelpy vocals” and calls With Love and Squalor
"a modest little album that delivers on its promises:
it's full of neatly turned-out songs, familiar-sounding but
pretty sharp all the same.”
That sound first caught national attention at the 2005 SXSW
(South by Southwest) music festival in Austin, TX. For newly
emerging bands, SXSW serves roughly the same purpose as the
Sundance Film Festival, garnering wider industry exposure
for artists who have developed strong underground or
alternative followings. Murray explains: “We somehow
found ourselves touted as one of the ‘must see’ unsigned
bands of the festival. Why? We can’t be sure. We weren’t
expecting it, and, to be honest, were totally unaware of our
status as such until after our performance, when we were
informed and then reminded of the situation with
regularity…. Our showcase … was pretty much filled beyond
capacity with industry folk, so that our friends from the
Brooklyn band Oxford Collapse – with whom we’d played to
exactly six people in Atkins, Arkansas the night before –
couldn’t gain access to the building.”
One
of the music industry “heavies” in attendance that night was
veteran British DJ Steve Lamacq, who liked what he heard,
invited the band to play live on his BBC radio show, and
added their songs to his play list, ensuring that “Nobody
Move, Nobody Get Hurt” became a hit in the UK. “We in the
band suspected that Lamacq himself had chosen it solely
because it was the first song on the burned CD that he’d
been given,” says Murray.
This bit of musical casting-call luck was helped along
thanks to additional Pomona College connections. We Are
Scientists met their manager, Adam Levin, and subsequently
their producer, Ariel Rechtshaid, thanks to ties that band
maintained with Claremont-based band Speechwriters LLC.
Besides sporting an equally brainy moniker, the
Speechwriters are fronted by a pair of Pomona alumni, Dave Lowensohn ’00 and Misha Chellam ’04.
Murray says that We Are Scientists has been taking their
new-found notoriety and hectic pop-stars-in-the-making pace
in stride, noting that “some of us tolerate it more than
others. Myself, I do like meeting our fans, who largely seem
to be in their late teens and early twenties, kids with
discerning tastes and keen intellects. Overall, we tend to
enjoy our circumstances without getting overwhelmed by them,
which some people don’t seem to understand. It is, for
example, our manager’s belief that we should have wept with
joy at being booked on … David Letterman, and the fact that
we were merely quietly enthusiastic left him bemused and
annoyed. It was fun, though, as are most aspects of life in
a working rock band.”
He’s also coolly analytical – as any good scientist should
be – about the whole fame thing. “One thing you learn from
being on the road with other famous bands is that they’re
all just people – flawed and, apart from whatever musical
gifts they may or may not have, largely unremarkable. It’s
all a whole lot like The Wizard of Oz, and I guess
it’s healthier to just accept the anemic dude behind the
curtain than to worship the oversized, green, levitating
head.”
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