When Lifehouse catapulted to stardom on the strength of their single "Hanging by a Moment," no one was more surprised than frontman Jason Wade. "Moment" -- the most-played song on rock radio in 2001 -- was written in a five-minute burst of inspiration while in the middle of recording a different song for the Southern California quartet's 2000 debut, No Name Face. Now, a couple years later, Lifehouse think they just might have stuffed lightning into a bottle again, with "Spin," from their new album, Stanley Climbfall.

Did you go into the studio with any kind of set plan?

We came to grips with the fact that in the studio sometimes less is more. You can overproduce. We put a little too much polish on the last record. If it has two guitar parts, bass, drums and a vocal, we try to make every single part count. Instead of layering stuff to make it sound really slick and polished, we took the opposite approach and just wanted to make it sound really raw and real. Me and my producer went into this record basically saying, "We don't want it to sound like a radio song, where you can't even tell what the guitar is or what the vocal is." And we wanted to make this band a four-piece band that could go on the road and duplicate what we did in the studio to the best of our abilities.

"Spin" is a song you wrote when you were sixteen. How close is the album version to the original?

The verse and chorus are the same, and all the lyrics are the same, but the bridge that takes the song into a different turn at the end wasn't there. It evolved into a completely different thing when that bridge came into play. I actually played that song for my producer about four years ago and he thought it was good, but it just didn't really go anywhere because there was no bridge. I tried to write three or four bridges to it but nothing was happening. Then I found a demo two months before we went in to do the record, and I played it for him again. He came up with the chords and I came up with the melody and then we pretty much finished it, and it started to take off from there. That bridge is my favorite part of the song. The chords are pretty simple but it gives the whole song a different vibe.

The language you use in the lyrics refers a lot to different kinds of turbulence.

It's probably a reflection of how the last couple years have been. You know it's pretty much been non-stop since the last record took off, and I'm kind of in a different place in my life than I was when I wrote the first record. I'm older now and I've figured out a little bit more of what I'm doing with my life. It feels like most of this record lyrically is trying to get over some issues that I had with the past with my family, so the whole record is about moving forward, not looking back. The main theme on this album captures the lyric in "Spin," about not changing anything about your past and basically taking the good with the bad and realizing that you need both to be balanced and live a normal life.

Why the title "Stanley Climbfall"?

The song in the beginning was originally called "Stand Climb Fall," and we thought it was a really lame title. We started slowly abbreviating it and it started sounding like a person, so it turned into "Stanley Climbfall," and we just thought it was a classic hilarious name. We thought it was the best song title, so why not call the record that?

What do you feel helped you move past that stuff?

Having a certain amount of fans connect with the first record really kind of validates what you're doing. It really makes you feel like you're doing it for a reason. I'm fifty-fifty on it. I love the fact that people are connecting to the lyrics, but performing live and photo shoots and that kind of stuff is my least favorite part of all this. Who wants people to just stare at you and analyze you all day long? That can be kind of difficult, especially because I never did this to become a rock star or a famous person or whatever. I just chose a couple friends to get out of my room and actually play these songs, but it's something that I have to deal with. The lyrics are really personal and vulnerable, but it's worth it when you realize people are connecting to the lyrics.

Are there songs on here you feel you couldn't have written before?

Yeah, totally. I think I really stretched myself quite a bit. There are some songs that didn't make the record that I feel like are a little bit of a step in a totally different direction, some ballads that are a little more Beatle-esque or like Simon and Garfunkel that just didn't have the rock sound that fit this record. The songs are a little bit stronger than the last record. "The Beginning" is strong, "The Sky Is Falling" definitely has some changes that I found that I didn't even know about on the first record. Just basically trying to write songs with more than E, C, G, D. There's a song called "My Precious" that actually got created in the studio in the span of fifteen or twenty minutes. We were actually recording "Spin" and I started playing it in the sound booth, and Serge [Andrade, bass] started jamming along and Rick [Woolstenhulme, drums] started jamming along and Ron [Aniello, producer] goes, "What's that? Is that a new song?" And I told him I just wrote it and we had him roll the tapes, and we did two takes of the song. The first one, no one really knew the arrangement, but we played it all the way through. We made some mistakes, but it was really loose but we loved the vibe of it, so we kept it and it made the record. I thought that was a real strong step forward to have enough faith in a song to not really worry about how tight or polished it is.

I hear you've got a new band mate.

Sean [Woolstenhulme, guitar]. He just joined the band. He didn't do the first record or the second record or the photo shoots or anything, but he just started playing with us a month ago and it's going really well. He's going to be in the next video and stuff. He's got an amazing variety of different sounds he uses. He has some amazing vintage guitars and his tone is just great. There are a lot of guitar parts on the record where we actually need a lead guitar player. Sean is going to make us sound a lot stronger and tighter, and obviously he's Rick's brother so he'll fit right in. We feel like a complete band right now. In the studio me and Ron used to do all the guitar parts. We pictured ourselves as a three-piece band, but we didn't sound like a three-piece band.

COLIN DEVENISH
(September 17, 2002)