Lagwagon's Joey Cape: "This Is My Bitter Old Man Record"

Lagwagon – Burden of Proof / Reign by Fat Wreck Chords

The inspiration to make another album eventually came. The band’s new identity revealed itself to Cape in a sort of an epiphany, as they toured in support of a box set which spans Laggers’ first five albums.

Something about playing all those golden oldies lubricated Lagwagon’s engine, and he knew he had to capitalise while the ball was still rolling. “[Usually] I’ll have a song fully arranged before I bring it to the band. And this time around, the way things were going and the way it was feeling just to play together, I thought, ‘This is a really good idea, to come to them just with ideas.'”

It’s his most collaborative effort with Lagwagon to date, with some songs written by all members of the band, and he says they’re an even stronger unit because of it. “I think everybody’s much happier… Part of the benefit of waiting a really long time to make a record is everybody’s hungry.”

Sometimes you gotta savour the meal, though. We’re dealing with a Lagwagon, not some kind of REO Speedwagon, after all. Since it was already such a long time between drinks, the band figured, “Why rush?” Joey had toiled away on the lyrics for two years, and the band put in a “pretty solid six months” writing and demoing the tracks.

“I think it paid off because this is the only record we’ve ever made that everyone in the band feels like we made our best record,” Cape says, satisfied. “Which I think is kind of amazing, considering how long we’ve been together, you know?”

Cape sounds like he’s joking when he describes Hang as his “bitter old man record”, but there might be more than a little truth to the description. While there’s definitely a sense of hope on the album, Cape sounds all of his 47 years when he talks about the changes in his perspective which have influenced the record.

“It’s scary for me that my daughter has to grow up in the world I see. The way I see things changing as I get older, and the lack of accountability that I see, less and less empathy, sympathy, compassion… People seem to be getting more and more introverted.

“I think as you get older, there’s some point in your life where you sort of wake up one day… and you think, “Jesus, my parents went through this,” and that causes you to identify with them more.”

“And even further, watching people make the same mistakes over and over again and seemingly having no memory of the history that they’ve been involved in, then you start to identify with even your grandparents.”

We feel a little like students in the school of life, and could easily listen to Professor Cape philosophise all day. But time is short and there’s still one matter to broach.

For many Lagwagon fans, if not most, their affections were transferable to Fat Wreck Chords labelmates No Use For A Name. Cape and NUFAN frontman Tony Sly created an enduring bond as they formed bands together, wrote and recorded together, played and toured together, and it came as a shock to many when Sly passed away in August 2012, aged just 41.

One More Song, a cut from Hang, stands as Joey Cape’s personal, original tribute to Tony Sly. A tribute song may have seemed a certainty, but if we’ve learned one thing by now it’s that nothing was certain when it came to making Hang. Cape was sceptical it was even a good idea at first.

Lagwagon’s last LP, 2005’s Resolve, was written immediately after losing another friend. “When we lost Derrick [Plourde], our old drummer, I sat down for a week with a bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes and I wrote the songs for the record in a week. I barely slept. It just came out.

“When Tony passed, I just felt like I didn’t want to write a song for Tony because I didn’t have the right words… I’d just written so many songs for people that we’d lost, at some point you feel like there’s a fine line between tribute and exploitation. It needs to be natural. It needs to happen the way that it happened with the Resolve record.

“I didn’t hear anything that made sense to the feelings that I had so I decided that I wasn’t going to write a song. Then, during the process of working the Hang demos… I was driving home and [the song] just came to me. I couldn’t deny it. I had to write it about Tony.

“I started hearing all these words and I had a different approach that I thought was more interesting. Yeah, so I don’t know. It just happened. I wrote it and I was really uneasy with it all the way till the end, because it was one song, and I could have probably written 100 songs for him.”

Cape can now look at One More Song as an appropriate tribute to his good friend. “I feel like it says what I wanted to say.” In the end, that’s all anyone can hope for, no matter how long it takes to come out.

Lagwagon’s first studio album in 9 years, ‘Hang’, is out this Friday 31st, October. Australian fans will next see the band when Lagwagon tours as part of Soundwave 2015.