Cartel has been on tour all summer, headlining the Ernie Ball Stage at this year’s edition of Warped Tour. Supporting their re-released Chroma debut, the band now finds themselves drawing bigger audiences and signed on a major label. We caught up with vocalist Will Pugh at the hotter than hell Warped date in Pomona, and spoke briefly with him about the tour, the major label signing, MTV and Madonna. Read on…
Introduce yourself, tell me what you do in Cartel, and how long the band has been together.
This is Will from Cartel. The band’s been around since August of 2003. We’ve all know each other for years and years and years. Kevin and Nick have actually known each other since third grade. We played in a lot of bands together growing up in high school and what not. We formed in college in 2003 at Georgia State University. We wrote five songs, recorded them in January – and that would eventually become the Ransom EP that came out on Militia Group. We released Chroma September 20th of last year, and re-released it June 13th on Epic. And that’s a brief synopsis of our history.
How did your signing to Epic come about?
We signed in March. Basically it was just Sony up-streaming. With the whole thing with Militia Group, they have RED Distribution, which is owned by Sony. So through that, Sony has an up-streaming clause, where if they like a band or after a certain number of records sold, they have to take a look at it and then they’ll decide whether they want to pick a band up or not. We actually got picked up before any of those normal tangents were achieved. It’s really cool to have the kind of spontaneity and excitement that Epic had to pick us up.
Congratulations on that! So the first time I saw you guys was out in Orange County, when you were touring with a band called A Small Victory and playing a very little club. Are you surprised at how far you’ve come since then?
Actually, yes, very surprised. We had been touring in a van and trailer for two years – this is our first tour in a bus. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep it – I don’t know – those things are expensive! It would be nice if we could actually pull it off for the rest of our tours. So yeah, it’s totally surreal, every time we see ourselves in magazines or on TV. We try to think of how far it’s come and how like the little things we would do – like some dude’s zine that 200 copies got put out – he went to Kinkos and did it himself and never put anything out again. Doing interviews for that, to now we just did an interview with AP and have a music video on MTV and stuff. It’s kind of mind blowing. But overall, I guess it gives you a better sense of appreciating where you come from after having spent all those times scraping the bottom trying to get something to work. And now here we are on Warped Tour in a bus. It’s like, “What?” It’s cool!
Whatever happened to A Small Victory?
A Small Victory were really good friends of ours. We’ve known them for years in the Atlanta music scene. I guess like any band who’s been around for a while and done all of the right things, just didn’t catch a break. I guess the road was wearing on them, not having any success, being broke as hell. All those things really contributed to it. But they’re doing a new band called Rouletta now with the drummer and two guitarists who are the only original A Small Victory members. I haven’t heard it, but I heard it’s pretty good, so we’ll see what they can actually do. We still remain pretty good friends with all of them. It’s hard to keep in touch with them when they all change their numbers and move.
So back to Cartel. How is the Warped Tour going for you guys?
Warped Tour is going awesome. This is our first full Warped Tour. We did four dates last year and did two dates the year before that. But it’s killer. The Ernie Ball Stage is a smaller stage we’re playing on. It’s not advertised on the big blowup balloon thing they have, so it’s kind of hard to get times posted out there where everybody can see. But overall, based upon all those things, it’s going incredible. To have the crowds we’re having everyday – the amount of people coming out and hanging out and getting stuff signed and everything – it’s totally surreal. It’s real cool to come out here and be on such a big tour with so many good and big bands and to manage to pull some of your own weight.
You walked onstage today and all of these girls screamed. What did you think of that?
(Laughs) It was kind of weird – you don’t know how to react. Do you look at them and wave or do you ignore it? So I don’t know. It’s always funny. My girlfriend is on tour right now, so it’s always funny. She’s just sitting back here just watching. But it’s always weird, but that’s just a new occurrence. Being on tour with The Starting Line this last spring – we come out onstage and you hear “whew, alright” from the one kid. And now it’s like you walk out and it’s like, “Wooowwww!” And you’re like, “Whoa! Alright!” It’s cool. It gets you pumped up and you get ready to play a show real fast.
How close are guys to putting out a brand new CD?
We’re not as far as you can get, but just a little bit short of that. We’ve just been so busy. For this record, six songs are kind of done, but not really. About three or four of those will probably make it, depending on the rest of the songs and how they come out. Some songs might be a little too out there for Cartel fans. We probably are going to go into the studio May of next year. The label hasn’t talked about it – they’ve just re-released Chroma – they want to see how far this goes. If it takes off, it might be another year before we do another record. We’ll just keep touring again – the same record! But it’s cool – we’ll get bigger opportunities on the re-release and being on a major and stuff like that. We take it all in stride. We knew that writing a record like Chroma would have the possibility of putting us in a position where it would be years removed from going into the studio again. It’s only a good thing if that happens, plus that would give us extra time to write cooler songs.
Your CD’s so far have only had one word titles. Is there any story behind these titles?
The truth is, I’ve never been one that likes the long album titles. Normally I don’t really care about album titles whenever I hear one. The only thing I care about is if it’s stupid – then I’m like, “That’s a dumb name for your album.” So we can’t really go wrong with just short, simple type stuff – like Cartel – it’s not like one of the long drawn out band names that you hear. I don’t really like when you have to sit there and explain something. Chroma – not everybody knows what that word means. I didn’t even know what it meant before I thought it would be a good idea for a record. It’s nice to just have those short, catchy things that are easy to remember. There were a couple of names we had gone through – like we wanted to do something Latin because that’s “cooler” or “smarter” or whatever. We were like, “Man, this is dumb!” Plus it fits our band. We don’t have long, long words in our songs. We’re not talking about politics or animal rights or anything like that, so there’s not really any sort of air of self-indulgence we have to have to sell records.
Do you have idea what the next Cartel record might be called?
Right now, no. As far as I could venture a guess, we might do a self-titled. Second records are always so important when you have a good first one. If it takes off to the extent that we’d like it to, it’s obviously going to be a lot of pressure to write another Chroma, because it’s what people are gonna want. It’s not really writing for what people want – we could sit down and write all of the extreme opposite end of the spectrum songs we want. We really can sit down and write whatever we want – if we wanted to. Like if we wanted to write an all country album, we could do it. You have music theory, you know tricks – you can write a song. But for us, we want to write a record that really follows up what Cartel is. And Cartel is pop rock – poppy, catchy – and having a record that went off of the deep end wouldn’t really work out for us – unless we did 18 songs, 12 of them hits and 6 of them crazy. We want to do some stuff like that, so maybe we will.
Cartel is invited to appear on a Madonna Tribute album. What song would you want to do by the Material Girl and why?
I’m gonna go with – it’s the one where the video is where she’s dating that bull rider or whatever. It’s (sings) “Say goodnight, the night is over.” Take A Bow! That song, just because that’s the song I’m most familiar with – I mean obviously she has bigger hits. When I was growing up and first started getting into music, that was the video that was always on VH1 or MTV. Watching that all the time, I was like, “That’s a good song!” It’s a good vibe song – you just wanna chill and girl out to it a little bit.
So are there any Cartel groupies wandering around the Warped Tour?
Uh, no. (Laughs) Yeah, there are. But it’s not like to that extent. We just have a video that’s barely going over the horizon on MTV, so people are just now becoming aware of it. So we haven’t gotten to those crazy fans who run upside the bus banging on the door saying, “C’mon, get me!” We don’t have any of those, but I’m sure our tour manager is going to love having to deal with it whenever that does happen – if it does.
You never know.
You never know. Maybe we can avoid all of the awkward situations.
Who in your band is the biggest Myspace whore?
Kevin Sanders, our drummer, is the biggest Myspace whore in our band. And not necessarily because he actually makes anything on Myspace – but he’s always on it, always talking to somebody. Like truthfully, when the band started blowing up a little bit – like at least on Myspace, we started to get hundreds and hundreds of messages a day – I’d sit down and check it – I’ve got 15 minutes, I’ll answer some mail. I look and it’s like 200 messages and like nope, can’t get to all those! After probably like 15 or 20, I’d have to leave and go do something else. So I’d come back and check Myspace later on that night, and I’d see that all of the other questions are answered. And I was like “Who the hell did that?” And I looked and it was Kevin signing everywhere. And I’m like, “Good god, you have way too much time to sit there and do that.” But seriously, every time he’s on the computer, he’s either looking at car parts or Myspace. I’m dead serious.
Do you have messages for Cartel fans here in the Southern California area?
Come see us on tour with New Found Glory this fall. If you haven’t picked up our record Chroma, come pick it up – it’s good. I promise you won’t throw it away. And otherwise, just keep hanging out with us and goin’ along for the ride – we really appreciate it!
Cartel is Will Pugh on vocals, Nic Hudson on guitar, Kevin Sanders on drums, Joseph Pepper on guitar, and Jeff Lett on bass. Their album Chroma is now available from Epic Records.
