The DailyER Talks With 'Oxford Collapse' Guitarist And Lead Vocalist, Michael Pace

Story by Casey Welsch 

| Published Nov 25, 2008

DailyER: You and the whole band, you’re all from Brooklyn right?

Michael Pace: Yeah, originally I’m from Long Island. Adam, our bass player, he’s from Ohio and Dan, our drummer is from Connecticut. But we’ve all been living in New York for the last few years.

ER: How has the New York scene taken to your band?

MP: Ummmm, I feel like we’ve always kind of operated outside of a certain prescribed set of conforming to a certain thing.

Actually, I just move to Austin, Texas and Adam, our bass player, just moved to Pittsburg, so we’re kind of operating across the country right now, which kind of suits us for where we’re at.

But, you know, I feel like it was more of a thing of convenience. We were all living in New York, but it’s not like we were identified as having a distinctly New York sound.

We’ve always tried to do our own thing and we just happened to live in New York.

ER: When did you sign with Subpop?

MP: We signed with them in March of 2006.

ER: How are they as a label towards letting you do what you want and getting yours stuff out?

MP: Oh, they’re great. It was the type of situation where we had put out a few records on a small label based out of New York called K-9.

And, we were in a situation where we needed a new label, and Subpop wasn’t even on the list of things that were realistic, and then they happened to get in touch with us, which we took as very flattering.

We’ve had a great experience with them. The let us do essentially what we want in making the records what we want. They’re supportive of what we do.

ER: You’ve all kind of moved across the country, how does that affect your ability to make music since you’re all in such far-flung corners of the country?

MP: Well, this is actually a relatively recent thing. We all kind of parted ways in October. It’s actually worked pretty well.

We have touring plans essentially through March of next year. It’s easy for us to kind of get together in New York; we’re still kind of based out of New York, and we get our tours going there, and then we all go our separate ways.

In fact, we did just have to write a new song for a compilation that came out, it was a Christmas compilation.

We were back in New York for a week for CMJ in the middle of October, and I had kind of sketched out something that I liked and I brought it to the other guys and we kind of wrote a song in about a day and a half.

We've been playing together for almost five years, so it come almost naturally now. Just, how we all work together.

We were able to write this song and record it in a matter of days. We were all really happy about that. I mean, we’re not at a point where we need to write another album right now.

We’re touring for an album we just put out in August, so the fact that we’re touring the next X number of months, we can make this work living in other places.

ER: I’ve heard a few of your songs. I was just listening to your MySpace a little bit ago and, you can range from some real high-energy stuff to some slower things.What are some of your influences?

MP: It’s across the board. We are music fans. We are fans of American music, of British music, of classic rock, of punk rock, 90s alternative.

We’re all kind of voracious music listeners. We have kind of taken a lot of the things that we’ve been inspired by, like the DIY ethic of bands who were on the SST label like in the early 80s, with the Meat Puppets and the Minutemen and Black Flag, but at the same point we love the Band, and mid-70s Bob Dylan and 60s top hits.

It’s kind of a combination of putting things together that we love about music and trying to come up with something with we want to listen to.

At the same time kind of taking in the age that we grew up in and how we all grew up in the early to mid 90s when “indie rock” was sort of coming into the forefront and college radio was still a force that was incredibly influential and you still had to go out and gather records, if you read about something or go troll around the dollar bin or that sort of thing.

We all thought that was really exciting to find bands that way. I think all these kinds of things play into what we do, combined with things like back to the future and cheeseburgers and traveling the country and going to movies and things.

ER: On the topic of movies, what are some of your favorite films?

MP: I think, collectively as a band, we can say that “Back to the Future” has kind of influenced us in ways we never thought imaginable.

In fact, we just shot a video for a song that’s going to be our next single which involves us driving around in a DeLorian through Eastern Pennsylvania through all these corn fields.

It was like a dream come true to actually be behind the wheel of a time machine and drive around. So Back to the Future as a whole is a huge influence.

I’d also say something like Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick film, or Over the Edge, Matt Dylan’s first movie. We try to see movies when we can on tour.

If we’ve got the time if we’ve got a day off. Sadly it doesn’t always work out, but we just saw Tropic Thunder in Oregon. We had the day off. It was a good way to blow off a couple of hours.

ER: What sort of other things do you do when on the road to break the monotony or to kill that extra hour before the show.

MP: One of the things that we love to do is check out regional cuisine, local flavor, if you will.

We have this big book called Road Rood that was written by this couple from Connecticut who went all around the country and checked out these great burger stands and fried chicken places and barbecues and diners and stuff like that.

We try to treat ourselves like kings ever once in a while. If we know we’re going to be going through a town that has something like this, we’ll try to stop.

If we have a day off, we’ll have a “treat ourselves like kings day” where we’ll go to a movie and go to a steak dinner, and the band fund will cover it.

It’s about kind of taking advantage of what you have at your fingertips. I remember, this summer, we were driving through Wyoming, and we took advantage of the natural hot springs there.

I can’t remember what town, but we took a dip in the hot springs, and that stuff is always fun.

If you’re just driving from show to show, you’ll go out of your mind with boredom, because you can only drive across Missouri so many times. So we try to break it up with good eats if possible.

ER: When you’re on the road and out touring, how do audiences typically react to your music?

MP:  When they’re not all running for the exit, if people are into it, we’re going to try and put on the best show we can. If we can get a rise out of the crowd, we’re going to give some of that energy back and it’s only going to spur us on even more.

A great crowd is awesome and potentially makes the show, but at the same time, you’re going to have some shows, like, we had some shows where we only played to a handful of people and no one’s interested.

That just makes the good shows that much better. On a good night people are going nuts and dancing and they're into it. That’s kind of all you can ask for.

At the end of the night, as long as we know that we played well, that’s the most important.

ER: How important is “noise” to you in your recordings?

MP: It’s definitely important.

Those are the things that make your record yours. I personally love the recording process, like the technical aspects and the ins and outs.

When you do flub or make a mistake that to your ears doesn’t sound RIGHT, and the other guys go, “Well, that’s actually kind of cool.”

That is what makes your music stand out from anyone else’s. It’s funny because in my spare time now, kind of toying around with recording stuff on the computer using the instruments in the computer, which means your not going to flub something if you know what you’re doing.

There’s that human element that comes with playing the guitar or singing something weird that makes a recording unique, so I’m all for that kind of stuff.

I think we all are.