Sparta

Sometimes it’s best not to force things. For Sparta’s singer/guitarist Jim Ward, it took nearly breaking up the band for him to realize this. “We played a show in Lancaster and I walked off the stage and basically said, ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore,’” he recalls. “I left to reassess my life, period.” Exhausted from touring, and questioning whether or not to continue Sparta, he returned to his home in El Paso, TX, for some much needed decompression time. Shortly thereafter, he began writing demos for what would eventually become Sparta’s third full-length album, Threes; the most epic, sonically astute album of their career. “It just all happened very organically, at its own pace, and we were very responsive to that,” explains Ward. “I mean, we let the songs do what they wanted to.”

Do bad things come in threes?

I think life happens in threes. It’s one of those things, some people say bad things, some people say good things happen in threes, but I just happen to think things happen in threes. It certainly happened that way for us, coming up to this album. There are a lot of references to threes in this album, and it was a working title early on, in my mind, and just sort of stayed all the way to the end.

Were there three big events that you are thinking of in particular?

Well, this is the third lineup in the band, it’s our third record, our third producer, it’s the third record company…And right when the record comes out it’s my third decade as well. My birthday falls on a Tuesday this year, so I was hoping September 19th would be the release date, ‘cause that would be perfect. I turn 30 that day. [My birthday is] like three weeks off, but whatever.

“Taking Back Control” is overtly political—what kind of message do you hope listeners get from Threes?

You know our generation’s had it really easy. [Iraq] is our first big conflict that’s affecting people our age; people are coming back terminally fucked up, people coming back who will never be the same again because of the things that they’ve seen that nobody should have to see in their lifetime. [“Taking Back Control”] is sort of just saying that it is time to wake up a bit. I think there’s a lot of people saying “Know what? I was Republican but my brother’s come back now and he can’t function, and that’s a direct result of the Republican Party.” America might have been polarized against the war initially, but it’s definitely not for it now, and there’s nothing we can do to stop the damage that’s been done.

America’s a great country, and I’m proud to be from it. I love it more than any other country in the world, because we have the freedom to do what we do, and the fact that I get to play music for a living and have the ability to talk on a phone with someone and tell them that I’m totally against what our government is doing is important, and isn’t lost on me. I want our country to be seen as a great thing around the world.

Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of bands spring up who are definitely inspired by At the Drive-In. What do you think when you hear new bands following the same musical path that you were on eight years ago?

I think it’s probably the same as when I was picking up Pixies records when they were broken up, trying to learn Pixies songs. It’s just the cycle of music. One thing about our old band is that it stopped at a point where it could become sort of mythological. A lot more people said they saw us than saw us, you know? It’s flattering, that was a great part of my life, that was the best way you could spend your early 20s. I learned a lot about the world in that band. For a while I used to fight not even wanting to discuss it or whatever, it’s just all part of the process of what you do. So now I’m in a different band and do different stuff. That band will always sort of retain its youth because it died young.

At the Drive-In looked good in the coffin.

Exactly, that’s the ultimate reason why it will stay that way, ‘cause that’s how it needs to stay. There’s no reason to resurrect a rotting corpse; let the pictures do their justice. 

So for the people holding their breath for an At the Drive-In reunion, what shade of color would they be?

I don’t think that they’d make it. I think they’d be dead. I don’t need to go back and relive those years. I lived them already. I can understand how other people can miss it, or wish that they had been there, but I lived it, I did it, I talked about it for a long time, that’s sort of why I don’t choose to…I mean, this is probably the one time I’ll even discuss it in an interview. You got me on a good day and it’s my first interview so…But there is nothing new to tell. Everything that is going to be written about that band has been written, and as far as what happened from the day that band stopped, I talk about my life and that’s all I fucking want to talk about. Know what I mean?

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