The Motion Sick: Photo by Tanit Sakakini

Meet The Motion Sick, a band that’s close to my nerdy heart. They’ve been dubbed, “Band of the Month” on Spin magazine, had their song featured in Dance Dance Revolution, and is now working on having their music being in Rock Band. How awesome is that? So sit back, relax and enjoy our in depth chat with frontman Mike Epstein.

NERDSociety (NS): Give us a little rundown about your band, The Motion Sick, and how you guys got started.

The Motion Sick (TMS): We’re an indie rock band from Boston.  We kind of pride ourselves on genre and style diversity in our songs.  The band started as a studio project of sorts.  I had written a lot of songs over a period of about 7 years when I was mostly playing as a solo artist and wanted to put those out into the world with full-band arrangements.  I kind of expected that to be the end of my serious musical endeavors, but I mailed it out to everyone I could think of and got an amazingly positive response including a whole bunch of coverage by SPIN.  So, it made sense to keep on doing it.  I guess if no one had responded to that first record, Her Brilliant Fifteen, I would have essentially retired from songwriting.

NS: Let’s go back in time to the year 2006. How did it feel when you were Spin Magazine’s Band of the Month?

TMS: It was a pretty surreal moment.  I really had made Her Brilliant Fifteen as a vanity project of sorts.  I didn’t expect anyone to really like it, but they did.  So, that was already a surprise, but then when SPIN, a magazine I had subscribed to for many years was covering it, I was totally blown away.  When they told me that we’d be featured, I kept thinking it was a mistake or something.  I expected to pick up the issue and for us to be cut for space or something, but sure enough, there we were.  It’s funny how much credibility something like that gives you. We just happened to have our disc land in the lap of someone at SPIN that really liked it.  If our disc had ended up in someone else’s hands, it might have gone into the trash.  Yet, their decision to spotlight us led to many opportunities, both local and national, that would never have otherwise been available.  It was kind of a nice early momentum.  By the time we played our first live show with the full lineup of the band, we were already featured in a very major music magazine.  How weird is that?

NS: “30 Lives” is easily one of my favorite tracks, with its catchy tunes that make me want to daydream about days gone by. How did you connect Contra, a classic NES game, to a song about spending time with a significant other?

TMS: My wife kept half joking with me that I never wrote a love song for her.  She is also a songwriter and musician – she drums and sings (and I play bass with her) in the band Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling (http://www.donotforsake.com).  She would always claim all of her songs were about me, which they definitely aren’t, and that I should reciprocate with a song for her.  Neither one of us tends to write very positive songs.  In fact, I hardly think I had ever written a positive song at that point, so I decided to give it a shot.  I pondered it for several days while painting the walls in our house.

It was particularly hard to come up with an innovative idea for a love song.  We’ve all heard so many love songs and it really felt like there was nothing left to say regarding love.  While rolling a brush across the ceiling, it finally hit me; I hadn’t ever heard a song about reincarnation as a means to spend more than one lifetime with someone.  I don’t think I believe in reincarnation and it felt a little new agey, but at least it was something different.  So, I kept thinking about it and recalled that in video games, you get multiple lives.  So, that was it, we would be in a video game and get multiple lives together.  Almost immediately, it became clear that a song about using the Konami Code to get “30 Lives” to spend with a partner was the solution.  I thought about how to include the code so that it was a fun reference for those in the know, but didn’t ruin the song for anyone who didn’t understand it.  So, I kept it just to that bridge section.  In there, we chant the Konami Code with select start at the end to signify two players.  I find that it works for people who love video games, but doesn’t alienate those who don’t.  My wife hasn’t totally accepted this as fulfilling her demands.  She says it’s about video games instead of love, but it was intended as a love song first and a video game song second.

A lot of people are surprised to hear that the song really started as an attempt to write a love song rather than just an attempt to work the Konami Code into a song.

NS: That song was featured in Dance Dance Revolution. What’s the story behind that?

TMS: Well, I knew that the song would be perfect for DDR because it contained the code and was kind of bouncy.  So, we created a dance remix essentially for this purpose.  Essentially, we just sent it in and music director Stillwind Borenstein, who very sadly passed away recently, sent me an e-mail that said, “I have heard many songs in the past which include references to our games, but I have yet to hear one turn the legendary 30 lives into an undeniably catchy love song. I think it will be a great addition to our game.”  We were all very excited about this.  When we got a copy, we were all jumping up and down shouting, “We’re in a video game!”

NS: The song, “Aquaman’s Lament,” shows how not all superheroes have it good. Why pick on poor ol’ Aquaman?

TMS: It was kind of a cheap shot admittedly.  We did a show residency two summers ago at a rock club in Boston called Church.  We played every Wednesday night and decided to call the series Ash Wednesdays.  Each week, we had a theme – Splash Wednesday (beach theme), Arthur Ashe Wednesday (tennis theme), ‘Stache Wednesday (mustache theme), and, of course, The Flash Wednesday (superhero theme).  So, for each of these, we came up with a song related to the theme. I wrote about 4 superhero themed songs, but the only one that worked at all was “Aquaman’s Lament,” a little tune about poor old Aquaman’s self-doubt and jealousy on a particularly rough day.

NS: Now I have to ask, who’s your favorite superhero? And don’t say Batman.

TMS: I don’t know if he’s really a superhero per se, but I have always been partial to The Punisher.  At one point, I owned every comic book appearance of The Punisher.  I actually sold a lot of it off to buy music gear.  I seem to continue to see most of the movies, but I haven’t really liked most of the superhero or comic book movies of recent years.  The Dark Knight was great for about the first 2/3rds.  I really liked Sin City and thought V for Vendetta was pretty good.  The rest, I could pretty much do without.

NS: As a band, what is that one goal you want to reach for?

TMS: Ultimately, I’d be happy if we get to keep making music and people keep listening to it.  That’s really an amazing thing for me.  It’s a great privilege to have ears and time lent to my musical rants.  I think, as a band, we would all agree that reaching a point where we made enough money to concentrate fully on it.  We don’t need private jets or gold chains, but just sustainability.

NS: So what’s The Motion Sick’s process of creating music?

TMS: Generally, I write a sort of song skeleton: the basic chords, lyrics, and melody.  I bring those in to rehearsal and we hack away at the song until it makes sense and until we all have parts that contribute to the purpose of the song.  Usually, the process of going from skeleton to something we can play live takes about 3-4 weeks.  Then, it takes about 3-4 months of playing a song live before we really start getting a sense of what we’re doing with it.  At that point, we try to record it.  Some songs have had this kind of development cycle, but others have had shorter or longer cycles.

NS: For those that don’t know, what’s this Rock Band Network all about, and how are you guys involved?

TMS: Rock Band Network allows us to prepare our songs for inclusion in the Rock Band store ourselves, or in our case, with the help of a third party.  In the past, Harmonix employees were the only ones capable of selecting and readying songs for inclusion.  We are currently working with Music Game Authors and song charter Kyle Zimmermann.  We don’t know exactly when they will be available, but we hope it will be some time in 2009 or early 2010.  We’re really excited to play our own songs and look foolish when we fail out.  I’m actually a reasonably decent Rock Band player at this point, so I expect I could at least handle the vocals on expert.

NS: Ok, now let’s get to the good stuff. Michael Bay or Uwe Boll?

TMS: Would you believe that I’ve never seen a movie made by either?  That’s no accident of course.  I will go with Uwe Boll because nothing makes me more angry than someone exploiting childhood nostalgia by transforming (no pun intended) it into a bunch of explosions.  Actually, I just remembered, I did see The Island, which was an unforgivable ripoff of a movie that I love very much, Logan’s Run.  Scarlett Johansson is okay, but she’s no Jenny Agutter.

NS: What nerdy hobbies do you currently enjoy?

TMS: My primary activity outside of music is doing research in the auditory sciences.  I actually head a laboratory called the Auditory Modeling and Processing Laboratory (AMPLab) and study the relationship between auditory perception and auditory physiology, specifically, evoked potentials and evoked vibrations.  You can read my work in journals such as the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and Ear and Hearing.

When I have time, I also still get to do a little bit of video gaming or movie viewing.  I kind of get on movie kicks.  In the last few years, I watched every James Bond movie, most of the Alfred Hitchcock movies, a ton of old noir films, and more ’60s spy television than I care to admit.  The Prisoner is my favorite.  In fact, my wife and I decided to write a song for each episode of the show for our musical project together.

I also play pub trivia pretty often.  I actually had a piece in the Boston Globe about how my interest in trivia is a consuming guilty pleasure.

NS: Any last words for our fellow nerds out there?

TMS: So long and thanks for all the fish.

http://www.themotionsick.com
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