The Color Fred

When Fred Mascherino announced that he was leaving his position as Taking Back Sunday’s guitarist/vocalist and focusing on his new project The Color Fred, a certain strain of TBS fan was left with a new question to ponder: which is best, old Taking Back Sunday with guitarist John Nolan; new-old Taking Back Sunday with Mascherino; or the new-new Taking Back Sunday whose album will come out some time next year. Of course, it stands to reason that anyone comparing the validity of these lineups is missing out on something. Taking a minute between tours, Fred explained band rivalries (or the lack thereof) to Synthesis.net. 

I like that you hold your ideals in what you do, like how you wanted the shoe you designed for Macbeth to be made of vegan materials, and how you wanted your album packaging to be made out of recyclable and biodegradable material. Are you touring with biodiesel yet?
No. I recently bought a car that used oil that I get from a Chinese restaurant. My idea was to see if I could pull that off in a van. I determined that because of the amount of driving I was doing — I already had my tours booked before I bought a van — that it was going to be too much. I filter the oil and stuff. Basically, with biodiesel you’re still emitting some gasses, so for now I have a vehicle that’s just gasoline but I’m buying carbon offsets so they’ll plant trees that will eventually eat up the carbon that I’m putting into the air. I will be doing that for any of the touring that I’m doing.

It’s cool that you’re touring with John Nolan and Straylight Run.
Yeah, I’m really excited about that. I maintained a friendship with those guys. I also was in a band with their drummer [Will Noon], I was in Breaking Pangaea with him. Will is still one of my best friends. We were talking about the tour beforehand and it just wound up to be a really good idea. Both of us were open, we said “let’s do it.”

It’s pretty funny, both you and John having previously played in Taking Back Sunday. Did you know each other from before John’s tenure with Taking Back Sunday?
Breaking Pangaea opened up for Taking Back Sunday a bunch of times before I was in Taking Back Sunday, and so I knew him back then. It is a funny thing. My only worry with doing the tour was that I was going to upset, you know, people who sort of… There’s always this old TBS/new TBS rivalry thing, which who knows what that will become now. Now it’s the new-new TBS [laughs]. But I never bought into that argument of which record’s the best. To me, music’s never been a competition, I leave that to football players and things like that. To me, music is either good or not good. I enjoy good music and I respect what John did in TBS and since, so I wanted to do a tour with him. I kinda did the tout to prove that music’s not competition.



Some of the songs on Bend to Break, were they songs that you’d written that were intended for Taking Back Sunday, back in the day? 
Yeah, that’s the thing. They were ones that I had written and brought to the band. Like the single, which we just made a video for, “If I Surrender,” is a song that I brought to Taking Back Sunday and asked them if we wanted to put it on the last album, Louder Now. They were kinda like “Well, this is a pop song, you know…” Listening to it, I think most people think it sounds like Taking Back Sunday, but at the time I guess we didn’t think so, so it was put aside and that’s the way it went. Anything that Taking Back Sunday didn’t want to use that I wrote, I would just save it for this project. And then when I made this project, I wanted to write something that I thought the TBS fans would enjoy. I don’t intend on changing it up and disappointing… I’ve had people that have listened to me for years, and I want them to stay with me if they would.

Being that a lot of these songs were written with Taking Back Sunday in mind, now since The Color Fred is your number one project do you envision that your songwriting is going to change at all?
I think the project will evolve. I’m a person who’s always writing music and I think it will go through its evolution, but as far as the mood of the stuff, I’ve always enjoyed playing music that has a little bit of tension but also energy, positive energy. I like to, when I play live, move around and sort of put on a loud show. I love playing electric guitars. I wouldn’t expect any drastic change where suddenly I’m playing harmonica and tambourine, but we’ll see. This is the very beginning, I’m going to be touring on this record all year and through the summer; I’m gonna try to go to a lot of different countries and go everywhere with this. It will evolve naturally, as all bands do.

Can you tell me a little bit about what the “If I Surrender” video is all about? 
It’s very much a story, it’s almost a short film. I had the idea of doing a video based around the idea of the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. It was one of my favorite movies so I wanted to use it. I wanted to sort of give props to it. The main concept is that the clock switches to 6 AM and I wake up to the same day, but in my day terrible things keep happening to me. I have to try to remember them and avoid them the next day. So the first day I slip on the soap and hit my head on the tub, so I don’t even make it out of the shower that day [laughs]. Wake up again, I get into a car accident… I get hit in the head a lot of times. It was actually a painful experience making the video. The director wanted everything to look realistic so there’s one scene where I’m getting hit in the head with a 2x4 by a construction guy. I kept asking the construction guy to quit hitting me, like “Don’t hit so hard!” and the director kept saying “Hit harder! It doesn’t look real if you don’t [laughs].”
    There was like a lot of falling on the ground. One scene where I had to run into a bicycle, I had to run across a pathway not facing the bike, so I can’t see when it’s coming but I know it’s gonna hit me. We were getting hurt as well, the biker was actually bleeding down his leg…but we were doing anything for the cause. The biker, by the way, was my bass player in this band [P.J. Bond].



So in the end the pain was worth it?
Yes it was. It’s a really neat video, we’re not playing instruments at all, it’s just sort of me going through my day. We shot it in my house, and a lot of the footage is in my neighborhood. We’re driving my ’82 Volkswagen in it; we had cameras strapped to the hood. It was a really, pretty neat video. It tells a pretty obvious story, there’s no twists that confuse you, it’s just trying to entertain you.   

I was trying to find it today, I guess it hasn’t been released yet.
It hasn’t been released online yet, but it will be this week. [Editor’s note: Since the time of the interview, the video for “If I Surrender” has been released. You can check it out on The Color Fred’s official MySpace page: myspace.com/thecolorfred.] Here, let me send you a secret link. It’s sort of a thing we’ve sent to the super fans. We let them see it but we haven’t let everyone else see it yet. That’s another thing… The main thing about this band is I’m trying to be involved in every part of it. I was always sort of in a band before with a manager and sort of just didn’t have a lot of hands-on things. This is different. I miss putting 100 percent of my heart into it, so as long as I can handle it, I am going to be the guy who writes you back if you send me a comment on my Web site, and I’m gonna be a party of everything we do. So, anyway… Every part of this band will have come from me, from all the artwork to the videos, which was my concept originally, to the fact that a lot of it has to do with environmental issues. That’s what this project is.

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