It Has Been Written

Unwritten Law, though definitely successful by most standards, has nevertheless always appeared to be a band that would never achieve the adoration of the general public; a band that would never quite live up to the lofty expectations placed upon them early in their career. Coming out of the same San Diego punk scene at roughly the same time as Blink 182 (On the Blink song "Josie," when Mark Hoppus sings "My girlfriend likes UL," he's referring to Unwritten Law), Unwritten Law were seemingly destined to rise to the same heights of pop-punk mega-stardom enjoyed by their Poway brethren. But the payoff never came. Two labels, three records and quite a few years later, Unwritten Law scored a moderate radio hit with "Cailin," off of their self-titled third release, but were, for all intents and purposes, written off as major-label underachievers, fated to a life of opening for younger, more popular bands and eking out a living on foreign record sales.
Then a strange thing happened: Free of the expectations that had followed them for so many years, the members of Unwritten Law - vocalist Scott Russo, drummer Wade Youman, guitarists Steve Morris and Rob Brewer and bassist Pat Kim - went into the studio and produced a power-pop masterpiece, Elva. Released earlier this year, Elva saw the band explore the eclectic tendencies hinted at by their self-titled album. The first single from Elva, the decidedly mid-tempo "Seein' Red," began to get heavy rotation on rock radio mainstays such as LA's KROQ, with the accompanying music video getting heavy airplay on MTV and even busting into boy-band territory on TRL. With the extraordinary success of both "Seein' Red" and Elva, Unwritten Law are certainly a pleasant exception to the usual cynical "here-today-gone-tomorrow," attitude of the music industry.
In anticipation of Unwritten Law's first ever Chico show, this Tuesday at The Brick Works, the Synthesis recently caught up with UL guitarist Rob Brewer while the band was in Vancouver, Canada for a show as part of Snow Jam 2002, the Canadian equivalent to The Warped Tour. Though soft-spoken, Brewer nevertheless seemed genuinely appreciative of the fortuitous situation of both himself, and his bandmates.

How's Vancouver?
It's been really nice, 70 degrees. We flew up here for a Snow Jam show today, then we fly back down to L.A. tomorrow for a show, then we play Bakersfield.

That's a pretty gnarly itinerary.
Yeah, on the west side of the country that's how it is; every distance you travel is at least six hours or so.

With Elva being as big as it is, I'm sure this whole year has been kind of crazy like that.
It's been pretty much like that since October of last year. We initially thought that we were going to release Elva at the end of last year, so we went out on tour with Sum 41 in October, and we've been pretty much on the go since then the whole time.

When you guys were working on the material for Elva did you ever think that it would blow up as big as it has?
I don't think so, man. I think we were really just trying to write music and make an album that we really liked ourselves; something where we could try different things. If something sounded good, we were open to trying it and it's been kind of pleasant to finally get some recognition after being out for so long.

How does it feel to finally be the big-name headliner?
It's just weird that we would ever be a big-name headliner, but it feels good to have the recognition, you know, we've been touring since '94. And we've never been to Chico either.

There was supposed to be a show up here a couple of years ago, but it got canned. I was pretty bummed.
Yeah. There was talk a while ago that we were going to go up that way…I've got some friends up there - a lot of people from San Diego went to school up there.

Growing up, did you ever think that you'd be doing this for a living?
It's just really odd, for me anyway. I never really expected to do this for a career. When I was younger we'd just play some parties and have some fun. We just started doing demos for the fun of it and for our own interest and then they kind of caught on a little bit, and the next thing you know, it just kind of escalates. We played some shows in L.A., some shows for labels and things like that, and they had some interest so we were able to do a deal. It just took a lot of practice, you know, persistence.

Your overall sound has certainly changed a lot since those days though. Why is that?
I think that we're growing older a little bit, and we've already done a bunch of songs that are in the "one, two, one, two," drums and there's a lot of saturation of that type of music. At the time that we were doing Elva, we were getting pretty much burned on that kind of pop-punk. I just don't think that that was the type of album that we wanted to create. We didn't really set out to create a certain type of album, it's just nobody was really feeling those types of songs. There are pop melodies, but there aren't a whole lot of poppy songs on this album.

I remember when "Cailin" dropped, some people were pretty pissed that it had turntables and scratching on it. Are you ever afraid of burning the old punk rock Unwritten Law fans?
I think, at this point, that anyone who's really that annoyed with us has probably stopped coming and stopped listening. If people want to hear that, I can refer them to the older stuff. We never know what kind of music we're going to come up with; we're open to trying everything. It's weird because the slower songs always seem to be the ones that get played on the radio, and that's why people get angry or whatever. It just comes with the territory. You can't sit there and worry about it. We're just gonna make music and not really worry too much about…well, we'll worry a little bit about what people think obviously, but we're just gonna go out and try to do what we do and try to make music that we like and hopefully everyone else will too.

You guys just got finished shooting something for MTV. What was that all about?
It was this thing called Music In High Places, and it's a show where you go to different areas - they do it all over the world with different artists - and you go out and play acoustically in these elements. They film it in high definition film, and it looks really cool. We did that, which was a three-day shoot, and we did ours in Yellowstone Park.

That's pretty rad.
Yeah it was beautiful; geysers behind us, sitting on a bridge over a thermal river. It was a great experience; I'm glad we could do it.

So after The States you guys go to Australia right?
In October, yeah.

Then what?
We're looking to tour through the end of the year. There's a Mike's Hard Lemonade Tour that we're talking about doing. I'm not sure what the lineup is, but it seems like it'd be pretty cool; it's 15 dates and it ends in New Orleans for like a three-day festival called The Voodoo Festival. So we're still looking at stuff like that, just keep it rolling through the end if the year and then we'll look at our options at the beginning of next year to see what we want to do as far as another record.

Now that you've gotten the commercial success, what do you shoot for now?
I still enjoy playing live; this is actually the fun part for me. The studio stuff's fun and all, but it's long and painstaking. For me this is the payoff part, so I'm just going to enjoy the touring. I definitely think we're going to do another album. We've got lots of material and come the beginning of next year, I think we're going to be looking to do another album, sort of in a different way, like with ProTools, and not spending so much time in the actual studio as much as in someone's house doing all of the little things that we can do without the studio time. We want to put the techniques we learned on Elva to use on the next record.

Overall, you're pretty stoked, huh?
It's definitely harder work than just hanging out all the time, but it's the best job I could think of.

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