Dark Horses

"Unfortunately a lot of things that happen in this band have to go through me," laughs an understandably busy Craig "Squirrel" Tyler, guitarist for Crazy Town, as our phone conversation is briefly interrupted by another call. "I just had to handle a hotel situation in Vegas." Ah, the life of a rock star.
Thanks in part to their breakthrough single, "Butterfly" off their multi-platinum album, The Gift of Game, Tyler and the other five members of Crazy Town have gotten a taste of that elite lifestyle. However, while "Butterfly" shot to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 - featured on Top 40, rock and even R&B radio - the band has yet to match that lofty, and perhaps overrated, plateau. A one-hit wonder? Maybe, but that's one more hit than most people have.
After speaking with Tyler over the phone, it became quite apparent that he and the band have no desire to score monstrous hits, but to simply make music that moves them and not worry too much about what happens after that. November 12th, 2002 saw the release of Crazy Town's follow up to 1999's The Gift of Game, Darkhorse, a diverse recording and decidedly more of a group effort than their previous album. The band has seen a few changes - turntablist DJ A.M. departed and drummer James Bradley J was replaced by Shuvel's Kyle Hollinger - and their touring schedule has been grueling, but, according to Tyler, all this has only made Crazy Town into a tighter unit. In his conversation with the Synthesis, the guitarist discusses the new album, the ups and downs of sudden fame and the new additions to the Crazy Town family.

How's this tour been going for you so far?
It's been going really good, but Seth's [Binzer, vocals] wife was expecting their first child on January 25th, and it turned out that they had to go ahead and induce labor today. Seth is here [in Hollywood] for that, and he's gonna get on the plane tomorrow, so we can make the show for tomorrow [in Las Vegas]. Then he'll have a couple of days where he can fly back and hang out with his wife and the baby, and then we go and finish out the rest of the tour.

It must be an exciting time for you guys.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a little crazy.

After your previous album, you spent two years on the road. How much of that experience did you take into the studio with you when you recorded Darkhorse?
That's pretty much the best way to describe the difference between the first record and the second record is all the touring that we did together. That's why we wanted to make a live record with this one, because we love the way we play together, and we wanted to capture that in the studio. Darkhorse is supposed to sound like you're standing in the room with the six of us playing, and it's just loud as fuck. I've had journalists say to me, "I get the feeling that I'm sitting in the studio with you guys when I listen to it," and that makes me so happy, because [we had these intentions] when we were recording the album with [producer] Howard Benson and they translated well.

You wrote "Drowning," the first single off of Darkhorse while on the bus at Ozzfest. Are you able to do much of your writing on the road?
We do a lot of writing on the road - you can't ever really turn it off. When you're on a tour like Ozzfest, it may seem very exciting, but it can become very mundane. We're friends with all of the other bands, but we've seen them a million times, and there's a lot of down time. You only play for 25 minutes, if you're not like Marilyn Manson, so what are you gonna do for the rest of the day? Thank God we had a rehearsal studio on the back of the bus. Almost every band on Ozzfest had some type of recording [equipment] on the bus, because it was the only way to pass the time efficiently. Songs like "Hurt You So Bad," we wrote that on Ozzfest, but it was just a riff. Then six months later, scrolling through our stuff on computer, we found it and turned it into that song. If it wasn't for that rehearsal studio on the bus, that song would've just gone into the void like a million other things that we wrote and didn't lay down.

You've undergone some lineup changes since The Gift of Game…
The pivotal one is our new drummer. Kyle Hollinger was in a band called Shuvel, and they came on the road opening for us right when "Butterfly" started blowing up. We used to watch him play every night and say, "Oh my God, this kid is so dope." We have a lot of serendipity in the history of this band. We were about to go and record the album with another drummer. Kyle had already been by the studio, playing on some tracks and really lighting them up. And I was thinking that maybe we should have just went with Kyle, then all of a sudden the phone rang, and it was Kyle. He's been down ever since. We were really good friends before he was ever in the band, and he's the final piece of the puzzle - this is Crazy Town.

I was listening to the new album, and I noticed a lot of variety in the songs, from slower tracks like "Sorry" to much heavier ones like "Battle Cry." How important is it for you and the band to mix things up and play with listeners' expectations?
It's a very natural thing for us, because we would never want to make a record of two hit songs and then 10 worse versions of those two songs. We want to make records like they used to back in the day - something you'll listen to from beginning to end. It wasn't just about singles, it was about the album - we're trying to make albums. One of the coolest things about Crazy Town is that we're not afraid to write any song; that's why there's songs like "Butterfly" and "Sorry," but there's also songs like "Battle Cry" and "Take It to the Bridge." We're gonna do whatever feels right, and if the six of us think something's good, then it's going on the record. It's a free and open process. When we got to the end of the record, Howard Benson said, "I don't know. It still seems all over the place to me." But then I got in my car and started listening to Ziggy Stardust…that album sounds like a mixed tape. Bowie had 10 different voices on that, and that's one of my favorite records ever. Those are the kind of records we're trying to make.

"Butterfly," obviously, was a big hit and helped your last album, The Gift of Game, sell over 2 million albums worldwide. Would you say having a song blow up so huge, so fast to be a blessing or a curse?
I would say both, but more of a blessing than a curse, because it gave us the opportunity to tour the entire world. There are millions of people who know who we are and care about our music. It gave us the opportunity to make this record, which is like the record that any musician would dream about being able to make - we didn't have to cut any corners. It's much more of a blessing than a curse. The curse aspect of it, though, is that when anything becomes that big, there's going to be people who have to come off it. Our fans who helped blow Crazy Town up and bought the record when they heard "Darkside" and "Toxic," some of them [dropped off] when "Butterfly" crossed over. We don't write pop songs, it just went there. That wasn't up to us, that was the power of the song - it had legs of its own. It did what it did, and I think we turned a lot of people on to some different music who weren't listening to stuff like Crazy Town. I used to say that I thought it was cool that we were in the Top 5 taking out Britney Spears and *NSYNC because maybe those kids will hear our record, hear a Deftones song and go out and buy one of their records - that's cool! But we had to bear the brunt of being the band that crossed over. That's the curse side of it, but I wouldn't change a thing. I'm still making music for a living, and the band is such a family, that we're down for it to be the six of us against the world - bring it on.

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