Burn

A new lead singer, a new album and a lot of touring. This is what life is like for Click Five right now

by Yvette Tan

The band, composed of Ben Romans on keyboards, Ethan Mentzer on bass, Joe Guese on lead guitar, Joey Zehr on drums and their new member Kyle Patrick on lead vocals and guitar. The band has been getting a lot of press lately, what with their new album, Modern Minds and Pastimes, which has been heralded as darker and more mature than their first album, Greetings from Imrie House. Aside from their tours and videos, Click Five has also gained massive popularity on the internet. Their video, Click Five: The Band Behind the Band, is one of the most viewed videos on You Tube while their MySpace page is one of the most viewed one on the site.

Burn got the chance to chat with Ethan, who gave us the low down on what Click Five is up to, what it’s like to work with Fountains of Wayne member Mike Deneen, and what its like to play with Kiss.

What are you guys up to now?
Ethan Mentzer: We just finished eight weeks of touring about a week ago and now we’re just doing a couple of… shows, you know? Just a show here and there but we’re not really on tour. Tonight we’re playing in San Antonio, Texas.

Did you really set out to conquer the pre-teen crowd?
Ethan: I don’t know if we really set out to do that. We set out to make as many fans as we could. We found ourselves in front of a lot of teens. We toured with Ashlee Simpson and the Backstreet Boys so its kind of a lot of that audience. I think, really, what we want to do is gain audiences of all ages, both sexes, any race and nationalities. We don’t want to have boundaries or guidelines as to who can enjoy our band. We definitely like music of all sorts and I think that the people we look up to play music to a pretty diverse audience. That’s something that we definitely aspire to do.

And yet your core audience seems to be pre-teen girls. What do you think are the factors in your music that makes this so?
Ethan: I think that that audience is also a big percentage of who listens to Top 40 radio and who watches MTV. Those are the two factors that definitely put the name of the band out there. There’s that and we’re still pretty young too and I think that shows in our songs and our songwriting and recording. I can see that the appeal is certainly there for young people. At the same time, we’re influenced by a lot of other things as well in our music that I think that a lot of other people can find enjoyable as well.

How has a change of lead singers changed your music?
Ethan: I think that the feedback that we seem to be getting — and I think this would be my own 0opinion as well — is that we’re able to have a little more depth to our songs… that wasn’t quite apparent on the first record. I’m not putting our first record down in any way but it was raw musically and the four of us, excluding Kyle, who is our new singer, has grown as a band. We’ve had a lot of experiences over the past few years since we put up our (first) record… (we’ve) added a new singer (and he has) a different voice. In technical terms, he has a lower register (so) our songs tend to be a little bit lower in key and that sort of gives a thicker sound sonically so there’s just a little more slam to it. I think we’ve changed musically but I don’t think that changing the singer is all that’s changed with us. We as a band are in a different place from where we were a few years ago.

We’ve heard that the audience has responded very well to Kyle.
Ethan: It’s been pretty overwhelming that he’s been received (well) and at the same time, we’re sensitive to the fact that some people are probably skeptical because the band that they like is now different, but the ones who have given it a chance and (have) come out to see what we’re like now seem to enjoy it and in fact we get a lot of feedback that have led us to believe that people like (our music) more than they did before. That definitely is a good feeling.

Your new music has been described as darker. Why is that, you think?
Ethan: Part of it would be the technical difference in the key change, the fact that Kyle’s register is a little bit lower, so our songs are a little bit lower and — I don’t want to use the word heavy — but yeah, in a way, heavier, but subject matter wise, I think we certainly got to dig in and we’ve had a few years of life experiences and we enjoy writing about made-up storytelling as well as a little bit of autobiography in the songs. We’ve gone through a lot of things and there’s a lot of heartbreak on this record. I think most of us have been through the ups and downs of relationships. We’ve had romantic relationships and relationships with other people in our lives which lead to writing songs about break-ups, like that. At the same time, I think that there’s an uncertain quality, which we hope, gets in — sort of like a feeling of hope, I guess. Even though the subject may be a bit dark, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

You guys seem to react violently when described as pop. Why is that?
Ethan: Being labeled as a pop band doesn’t make me react violently or anything like that. I guess if we’re misunderstood, insofar as we’re labeled pop, the problem of that label can be that people may not take us seriously as musicians, as the band that we are. They might think that it’s contrived, that it’s put together or that we’re not really playing and writing and singing and doing all of that stuff. I think that those are negative connotations that some pop acts have acquired, so the only thing I would want to say is that we’re really up here playing and singing and out writing songs and recording them. We want to go down as a rock and roll band that people can come to see live and say ‘Hey, those guys are pretty good.’ I hope that people say that and we want them to see that we make really good records.

What was it like working with Paul Stanley of Kiss and Mike Deneen of Fountains of Wayne?
Ethan: Working with Mike Deneen is a blast. We did our first record with him and of course, we’re working with him again on this one. We have a great relationship with Mike. On this record, I think he gave us a little more leeway in what we wanted to do with it because we went into it with so many things up in the air… we were re-finding ourselves in the studio, and he sort of gave us grounds to do that and we had a blast doing the record.

Paul Stanley, we didn’t do anything with him on this record but on the first one, Ben wrote a song with Paul. His experience was pretty surreal. He stayed in Paul’s house writing with him, thinking ‘I’m with a legendary rock star…’ It was pretty cool. Paul is a really great guy, he comes out to see us when we’re in town. We did a show with Kiss in Japan last summer, which was a blast… we… played at the Fuji racetrack near Mount Fuji, and the backstage area was crazy, with a lot of big names and stuff. It was a pretty cool thing. It was something that we probably couldn’t have imagined that we were going to do, so when it happened, it was pretty surreal.

You’re very popular online. How does it feel?
Ethan: It’s amazing to me because when I was getting into music when I was… twelve, that sort of didn’t exist. The internet was brand new and it was a very mysterious thing and the access to things… to see a video, to find your favorite band, you had to watch for it, wait for it to come out on MTV and you couldn’t just type something in the computer and find it immediately. It’s sort of fascinating to me how out culture has bridged that and that you can have success in it. At the same time, I think (the internet) could make it more difficult to sell records because people have immediate access, they don’t have to go to a record store to pick up a copy of (the record). It’s hard to tell, I guess, where we stand in terms of popularity when we could be getting a whole lot of hits on our website, on MySpace, or being watched on You Tube, but then our record sales don’t necessarily reflect that. In the end, we would like the people who like us on line to at the very least come check us out live. We tour a lot. We plan on touring as much as we can, have as many shows as we can. That’s what we love doing, really, and it would be great to see our fans in person.

What else does Click Five want to achieve in the future?
Ethan: We aspire to be a band that when people come and see us live or when they buy a CD, they might be inspired to… come and see us again, (like) the way we have been to the bands who have influenced us.