With Stockholm Syndrome’s new studio album set for a February 15 release, here is a look at our Reel Time interview with Dave Schools and Jerry Joseph.

The coop

“It’s a hard to think about what makes a band versus what makes a side project,” says singer/songwriter Jerry Joseph while putting the final touches on the second album by Stockholm Syndrome, his off-season project with bassist Dave Schools, guitarist Eric McFadden, percussionist Wally Ingram and new keyboardist Danny Louis (who replaces the German-based Danny Dziuk). Five years after releasing its hard-edged, politically-fueled debut album, Stockholm Syndrome reconvened in the studio earlier this year to work on a new release, which Joseph and Schools both believe is a more positive and a touch more love felt – though still driven by crunching guitars and pounding bass. While Joseph typically hates “football team analogies,” he’s happy to say that Stockholm Syndrome is playing as well as it was “last season.”

Social Networking
Dave Schools: Jerry and I always get together once or twice a year to write songs. It’s a good way to stay in touch, and it’s a good way to get together and just play some music. Lately the purpose has been twofold – writing songs for Widespread Panic and for Stockholm Syndrome. He came out to my place in California with his wife around last August and we wrote 10 or 11 songs in three days. We convened a little later and sort of polished them up, made some rough track demos and sent them around to the other guys in Stockholm Syndrome.

Jerry Joseph: We’ve been writing songs together for a long time now, so it seems to come a little easier. We’re able to start with an idea or theme and then Dave just holds a gun to my head and says, “You’ve got 30 seconds to come up with the first line” and it usually works.

DS: We don’t argue about the communication stuff anymore – we’ve moved beyond that. Now we argue about what taco truck to go to at lunch break.

California Dreamin’
DS: Some of the topics Stockholm likes to address are more apparent and more political than with Panic. Making that first record – writing those songs in ‘03 and knowing that we were heading into a possible re-election of the Bush-type scenario – we had a lot on our minds. Panic is not a political band, so I had stuff built up that I had to get out and so did Jerry. Maybe these new songs are a little less political – since that last record, I’ve gotten married and a lot of these songs came when we were sort of in the process of solidifying loving relationships with our wives.

JJ: This record is definitely a lot more positive – there’s more love songs. It’s funny, we wrote a lot of these songs in northern California, up in the Redwoods, sitting out on a deck looking out – we had this California ideal in our minds. I don’t know if we hit that – maybe on a song or two – but it’s something that we were thinking about a lot – more of an early ‘70s L.A. thing than a psychedelic Bay Area sound. So basically we were trying to make Hotel California. Hopefully we fucking nailed it.

Stockholm Symptoms
JJ: The last time we weren’t necessarily writing for individuals and this time we had a pretty clear idea of who was going to be playing this stuff live. Eric McFadden does a couple of things fucking awesome, so we geared ourselves around those ideas as opposed to writing a record and then getting a band. It’s pretty fun to be able to write something and know that you can actualize it. I don’t know if that happens a lot in my life.

DS: One of the cool things that we discovered was that when we played these songs live, they immediately cracked open with possibilities. When we played a few of the songs on the Holy Happy Hour record live, we played them real close to how they are on the record and we had to talk about what possibilities might exist – whereas some of these new songs flew open right away.

Kickin’ It in the Coop
DS: We recorded [this album] about 10 miles south of where I live, in a town called Potati, Calif. There’s a studio there called Prairie Sun – Wally and Eric have recorded there and Tom Waits made some great records there. It’s a really nice studio, but it happens to be located in the middle of a chicken farm. It’s kind of a compound – you sort of feel a little bit trapped there. The band was tracking as a whole in the chicken coop for about two weeks and then Jerry and I literally ended a session at 2 a.m., grabbed the hard drives, got up at 4 a.m. the next day, went to The Bahamas to Compass Point Studios, transferred the files and spent about a week and a half recording vocals, engineering vocals and doing the mix. John Keane engineered the recording and Terry Manning did the mix, which was a flip- flop of what happened on the Holy Happy Hour record where Terry recorded the tracks and John Keane did the mixing.