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| Kristina:
Names and Instruments: Jordan: Play guitar sing. Chris: Bass horrible noises into the mic. Adam: Drums, backing vocals. Nick: Guitar. Kristina: You’re the only one who doesn’t sing? Nick: Yeah, it’s sad. You don’t want me to sing, believe me. |
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All: No.
Jordan: Not me. I moved from Connecticut about four years ago.
Kristina: How long have you guys been together?
Jordan: Probably about a year and a half now.
Kristina: You guys started in high school?
All: Yeah.
Kristina: Where’d you guys go?
Chris: Serra. Serra High School in Tierra Santa.
Jordan: It’s ghetto.
Kristina: What do you guys think of the San Diego scene?
Chris: It’s gotten a little bit better in the last year, definitely.
Jordan: But it’s gotten a lot worse in the last five years.
Chris: But its been getting better since then.
Jordan: Its been really hard to find shows it was really hard to find bands that would give us the time of day or be willing to put together a good show. Now it's all competition.
?: Not so much camaraderie.
Kristina: What’s your favorite venue around here to play at and why?
Jordan: The Casbah. You kind of get close to the crowd. It’s intimate.
Chris: I like the Scene.
Jordan: Yeah, as far as all ages go.
Chris: But we haven’t played Soma yet.
Kristina: So you guys recently recorded your last album?
Chris: Released it in June. We’re going to record another CD in January.
Jordan: It’s going to be a lot more mature. A lot more rocking. A lot more balls to it.
Chris: More solid.
Jordan: We’re spending a lot more money on the production so it will sound better.
Chris: Just better all around.
Kristina: Are you going to re-record any songs off the old album?
Chris: No.
Kristina: Who do you think has influenced you the most as a musician?
Chris: I think definitely bands from the early 90s indie rock scene.
Adam: San Diego. Lots of the old San Diego bands are really good.
Chris: Tanner, No Knife. Boilermaker. I could go on… Failure.
Kristina: Did you guys go to show a lot when you were younger?
Chris: Yeah, since middle school.
Kristina: What was it like recording your last album?
Jordan: We got in there pretty fast. It was really quick. It was probably about a day we did all the music. Went back and another day did all the…
Adam: There wasn’t much time to soak it in while we were doing it.
Jordan: Kind of didn’t really take our time.
Chris: We were just happy to hear our songs.
Jordan: That’s part of the reason we’re going back because we don’t feel the album really represents us, who we are. Kind of rushed a little bit. The songs are very last minute.
?: Didn’t really have time to reflect on the stuff we’d written.
Kristina: You have a pretty good response to the album, haven’t you?
Jordan: Yeah, definitely.
Chris: I mean, we like the songs. We're really proud of them, we just think-
Jordan: We could do better.
Chris: It could be better. Down to just like picking it apart. Lots of parts we want to change that people wouldn’t notice. I mean, you know your sounds…
Jordan: And we’ve gotten a lot of responses from record labels and producers saying that it’s a really good demo but it doesn’t fully like, represent us, our live sound. And we kind of want to capture that because we don’t feel that-
Chris: It sounds more rocking live. We’re a live band. Definitely a live band.
Kristina: What do you think sets you apart from other local bands?
Chris: Dedication. We practice a lot. Put a lot of heart into it. I don’t know.
Adam: Not much.
Chris: I don’t want to brag or anything. Say that we’re above anyone. We have our own sound.
Kristina: You’ve definitely had a lot of success. Considering you haven’t been around too long and you’re doing pretty well.
Chris: Its pretty much all we have going on. None of us are going to school or work, so pretty much music is about it.
Jordan: It’s all we have to do.
Chris: It’s all we put our efforts into. Every single one of us works hard on our own.
Kristina: Can you explain, in your name, why the A is in parenthesis?
?: It’s a deep story.
Jordan: Well, the name is kind of our take on the American Spirit, Christina Agulera. You have to-
Chris: Good Charlotte
Jordan: Sell yourself nowadays. No matter what it always comes down to how the lead singer looks, is he cute?
Chris: Corporate machine robot.
Jordan: Do these guys have the look and the sound? This endless assembly line of-
Chris: It’s like a sarcastic name, like hot like a robot.
Jordan: And the parenthesis thing? I don’t really know. Just cause it looks cool.
Chris: Does it look cool?
Kristina: Do you guys have goals as a group or as individual musicians?
Jordan: We’re going to tour in April. Hopefully have our CD ready to release some time in the spring or the summer. I don’t know, pretty much take this as far as it can go.
Chris: We’re not going to stop prematurely. I think individually that goes for the same. We just want to take our own personal thing as far as we can.
Jordan: It’s pretty much this and nothing.
Kristina: Everyone’s always complaining because there’s nothing to do in San Diego? What’s your favorite thing to do?
Jordan: Try living in Connecticut if you think there’s nothing to do in San Diego. As far as stuff to do in California there’s a lot better than a lot of places. There’s a lot more to do- it’s a big city. You can always make something up.
Chris: Go to Shows.
Jordan: See in Connecticut we don’t get that many show. There are bars, there’s clubs, there’s shows, there’s a lot to do in San Diego I think. Not that we do a lot if we wanted to I’m sure we could find something. Sit around the apartment drinking beers and stuff.
Kristina: What’s your favorite story you have from playing shows or recording?
Chris: We played in Las Vegas. The venue was really a crappy, just like a dive bar. We decided to play a set of death metal improvised songs and just went crazy and broke stuff and spilt beer on electrical equipment and stripped off our clothes and man, I don’t think we’re ever allowed back.
Nick: The guy was so pissed.
Jordan: He was really mad.
Chris: The band that we toured with like didn’t even get to play because he told us to get out.
Nick: He ended up throwing his monitors and stuff.
Chris: But luckily it was a dive bar so we didn’t get in any trouble.
Kristina: Where are you touring this spring?
Jordan: Just going to do another west coast and Midwest. Same thing we did last time. Basically just up the coast and down through the Midwest, Texas and back just covering as many places as we can, and hopefully we can get to the east coast by summer time. I mean hopefully.
Chris: We need to get a new van before we go on tour.
Jordan: Yeah, it’s a piece.
Kristina: Do you have anything else to say?
Chris: A new scene needs to start between bands. It needs to happen more than it is.
Jordan: It’s true.
Chris: That’s what basically being a scene is about. Bands like being together. If bands are all together, each other’s fans are together as well. And I mean it’s not really going on right now - that much. I think its slowing kind of happening.
Jordan: So wake up San Diego.
Kristina: No one wants to be your friends?
Jordan: That’s true.
Chris: Everyone’s trying to better themselves and not like better the scene. First of all it used to be so much fun when I was a kid. People would watch every band at a show, not just see your band and leave.
Jordan: In general, its like war out there. That’s not how we want it to be. We want to make friends. We want to be like hippies man.
Hot Like (A) Robot interview conducted by Kristina Eastham, December 2002.
http://www.hot-like-a-robot.com
http://www.mp3.com/hotlikearobot
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