It’s four hours before The Used will play New York’s Roseland Ballroom Tuesday night – the same venue where Hillary Clinton celebrated her 53rd birthday and Paul McCartney, Madonna and Nirvana have all performed – and bassist Jeph Howard is reclining on a puffy leather couch in the dressing room.
“This feels like our first real headliner tour,” Howard says, referencing an eight-year stretch where The Used played every festival from the Warped Tour to Taste of Chaos to Leeds.
Drummer Dan Whitesides nods as he lights up a cigarette.
“We put a lot of time into planning this one,” he says. “We created the set list, we designed our own lighting package. Quinn [Allman] even made a movie for the projection screen.”
But the tour is just a sliver of what the band has been working on. In fact, they’re freakishly calm for a bunch of dudes who were just commissioned to write a song for the New Moon soundtrack.
“[The people at Summit] wanted a song that was exclusive to them, that we couldn’t have on our record,” Howard explains, of why the project fell through.
“But we still ended [up] with a very creepy, really dark, slow song,” says Whitesides, of the never-before-heard track, titled “For You I Would.”
“It really belongs in something like Interview For A Vampire,” Howard laughs.
The Used instead plan to include the track on their next record, of which Whitesides admits songs have already been recorded.
“Quinn and I went into the studio and recorded five or six songs,” he says. “You can never have too many ideas.”
One idea the band has been tossing around fairly heavily in the last few years is the idea of change. With a new management company in place starting in July, a new, more aggressive record under their belts (Artwork, August 2009), and Whitesides replacing former drummer Branden Steineckert back in 2006 – the boys don’t feel committed to much.
“Record labels are dying,” Whitesides acknowledges, citing that the band owes one more album to their current label Reprise. “Maybe we’ll start our own label [after that].”
Howard, who checks the band’s MySpace regularly, then talks to Poison Ivy about a military personnel who recently wrote in to the band.
“[His letter said] he shot some dude in half while listening to “A Box Full of Sharp Objects,” Howard says. “He was like crying and laughing and shaking.”
“The only thing you can do [in that situation] is say thank you and glad we can help you,” says Whitesides. “And life is not that bad.”
We’re not going to sugarcoat it.
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