Southern California's No Motiv has just released its third album, Daylight Breaking, on Vagrant Records, an influential punk and emo label home to the likes of Dashboard Confessional and Alkaline Trio. Their single, "Into the Darkness," has received airplay on major alt-rock stations, including local powerhouse X-treme Radio. And later this year, they'll be touring with heavy metal crazy man Andrew W.K.
Yet, when he's not on tour, guitarist Max McDonald still works his day job, laying tile. "I actually like learning a trade, and I really like working with my hands," he says. "It makes me feel like I'm productive. Instead of coming home from touring and kind of sitting around and not really doing anything, I like coming home and learning something."
Of course, there's also that pesky need to make money, something never far from McDonald's mind. "I'm too stressed out about just staying afloat in life to just lose a couple, few hundred dollars a night and walk away from it happy," he replies, after being asked if he'll do any gambling when the band stops in Vegas to play Jillian's.
But it's entirely possible McDonald won't have those fiduciary concerns for too long. His band's mix of heartfelt lyrics, heavy guitars and big hooks is exactly what's popular now, and fellow Vagrant artists are the ones leading the charge to bring emo to the masses. Back in 1998, McDonald and his band mates made a few offhand remarks, referring to their music as "sad core."
"We'd always written sort of more melodic music and the lyrics were always a lot more personal than most hard-core music was at the time," McDonald says. "We weren't trying to market our band that way, but somehow people picked up on it."
That description, melodic hard core with personal lyrics, applies to most of what people today think of as emo, and to what's at the cutting edge of rock. Not that No Motiv wants to call itself emo. "Even though it's popular now, I don't know if we're still going after that purposely," McDonald says. "It might just be the way we've always written and the way we always will."
Of course, the trick with emo, like any media-hyped sub-genre, is that no one wants to apply the label to themselves. But No Motiv is an emo band if there ever was one, and that's not a bad thing.
On its latest album, the band made several shifts, including producing the songs themselves, writing darker lyrics, switching bassist Roger Camero to drums, and hiring a new bass player, Jeff Hershey.
"He was always a really creative drummer, and we liked that," McDonald says of Camero, who was a drummer before joining No Motiv on bass. "When it came time to write the record, we were talking about getting a new drummer, but meanwhile, we were just playing two guitars and drums, and Roger was just playing drums. One night we were like, ‘Man, this feels good like this. We should just get a new bass player.' We'd been having trouble finding a drummer anyway."
With a stronger lineup, No Motiv also came up with what they see as a stronger record. "We didn't have anyone kind of breathing down our necks, telling us to try to keep more hooks in the songs and stuff," McDonald says. "I think that made the songs a little more honest, a little more natural, than the last couple records."
Eschewing outside influences also brought the band, ironically, its biggest mainstream success to date. "It was a good feeling just to sort of take a step away from the idea of trying to make ourselves more marketable," McDonald explains. "And when we did that, people actually seemed like they were more interested in what we were doing, and so far, people have actually reacted better to the newer stuff than they ever have to any of the other stuff. It gave us a lot more self-confidence as a band, for sure."
It might even get No Motiv to the point where McDonald no longer has to come home and work his day job, not that he'd mind if laying tile remained a part of his life for a while. "The guy that I work for, he's been doing it for 30 years or something," he says, "and I can see myself doing that."