Q&A: Brand New's Jesse Lacey

Brand New's Jesse Lacey

Let it be known: Jesse Lacey still mows his own lawn. His band, Brand New, has toured the world and sold over a million albums, but the 31-year-old doesn't have any qualms about yard maintenance.

Well, except for one thing: "Noon in the middle of July isn't the best time to mow your lawn, I've realized," he admits over the phone from his Long Island, NY home. "You have to get up earlier."

Lacey's days of afternoon chores will end soon, though. Brand New's fourth album, Daisy, drops Sept. 22, and the quartet will kick off a 38-date North American tour one week later, a jaunt that will wrap with a Thanksgiving weekend homecoming/headline show at Nassau Coliseum, the 18,000-seat arena that hosted some of the first concerts they ever attended (Lacey's dad took him to see Springsteen when he was 11). But it's not quite a pinch-yourself moment, at least for the band. "I think [headlining the Coliseum] is a bigger deal for a lot of our friends and our family at this point and that's what gets us excited about it," he says.

In our interview below -- his first with an American publication in nearly three years -- Lacey talks about the making of Daisy and looks back on a decade of making music with Brand New.

When you saw Springsteen at the Coliseum as a kid, did you imagine at all what it might be like to stand where he was standing?
No, actually. I never even really thought about playing music until I was older. It was more like a natural thing, where suddenly, after six or seven years of playing music, I realized that it's what I did. My parents raised us with music in the house. There was always a record playing, and good music, too: the Beatles, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, Bruce Springsteen. They were also hip to new music at that time, when Michael Jackson put a record out or the Cure. I remember my dad listening to the Cure when I was younger, and I think he battled over the fact that he was listening to stuff by a guy that wore makeup.

What was markedly different about the recording process for this album?
Every other record, we always started off in a more traditional way: getting a producer, going into a studio. But we always ended up leaving that situation and recording the record on our own for the most part. For this one, we just decided to do the whole thing by ourselves. Our friend Mike Sapone produced the record -- he's been our partner as far as writing and recording since way before this band even started... He lives about a mile and a half from the house that I grew up in, in a town called Bethpage, so it's the same thing. It's suburbia. He's got two kids, lives with his wife with a pool in the backyard, and that's home for us.

You played a lot of solo shows in the past year. Did they influence your songwriting at all?
One or two of the songs that I wrote were written on one of those tours, during a soundcheck. A lot of our songs have always been written like that. Me and [guitarist Vincent Accardi] were kind of laughing at ourselves one day, because of the records we've put out, so few songs were actually written on electric guitar. And they're all performed that way. We just find it really funny that it's always just one of us and an acoustic guitar -- that's how the songs get written. It's weird that it never ends up sounding, for the most part, anything like it sounded in my room, in my living room, when I first wrote the song.

That's probably why they're so easily converted to that solo setting.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny, because I'm not really any kind of folk writer, and I'm not really a very good guitarist. For the most part, I'm playing power chords on an acoustic guitar, which I feel foolish doing, especially playing with someone like Kevin Devine, who's my best friend -- he can pick up a guitar and just make it sound beautiful. He knows his chords, his fingers are just comfortable with that, and I never feel like that. So when I do go back and strip those songs back down, it's kind of embarrassing a little bit to be like, "Well, this is how I wrote this, this is what it sounds like by itself."