ACE ENDERS: The Jersey Beat Interview
by Jim Testa
Ace Enders' new album is called Ace Enders &
A Million Different People, but it could have just
as easily been called Ace & A Million Different
Instruments. The extraordinarily talented former frontman
of Jersey emo pioneers The Early November wrote and
recorded almost the entire album himself, with some
help from producer Chris Badami. But now that the
record's done, he has a new touring band and they'll
be crossing the country promoting it as you read this.
There's still a lot of emo in Ace, but it's as if
someone turned back the clock to 2000 and recaptured
all the good things that emo promised to be, before
it all went horribly wrong and morphed into day-glo
sugar-coated bubblegum pop for hyperactive 'tween
girls and effeminate teenage boys. We talked to Ace
about the new album, his preoccupation with money,
the failure of Early November's three-disc magnum
opus, and where he goes from here...
Q: So you’re releasing the first album by Ace
Enders & A Million Different People. Is this another
project like I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s
Business, or is this something permanent?
Ace: No, this is my full-time band now. The rest
of the band is a bunch of guys I knew from a band
called The Verdict from Charlotte, North Carolina,
and Sergio Anello, who was also in the Early November
with me.
Q: Does it influence your songwriting when you know
you’re writing for a band, as opposed to writing
for a solo album?
Ace: When I write, I’m hearing all the parts
as I go, so I have everything almost there when I
show it to the band. I hear everything in my head,
bass lines and drums. Pretty much for this record,
I did everything with just me and Chris Badami, who
produced the record too. We just hashed everything
out between the two of us because the rest of the
band, being from North Carolina, it was hard to get
everybody together in the studio. So it just worked
out better this time to record it with just the two
of us.
Q:
You’re not addicted to writing songs in a traditional
verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus style. If fact, a
lot of your songs don't conform to commercial pop
structures. Does that ever enter into your thinking
when you’re writing a song?
Ace: Sometimes it does but most of the time, the
song just kind of takes me to wherever it’s
going to go.
Q: I’m sure you’ve had people tell you
that the songs won’t get on the radio if they
don’t have that big singalong chorus though.
Ace: (laughs) Yes, I’ve heard that. But my
time and everybody’s time is wasted thinking
about things like that. I’m a songwriter. My
thought is about writing a good song. I’m not
thinking about whether something is going to get on
the radio. Because unless you have a lot of money
behind you, that’s not going to happen anyway.
You can’t control what gets on the radio, you
can only control what kind of song you want to write.
Q: For better or worse, the word ‘emo’
is going to follow you around forever. And it’s
funny because what’s considered emo today is
almost completely different from what you were doing
when you first started making records. How do you
feel about that?
Ace: I used to really hate being called emo. I use
to hate the word. But whatever, I’m not going
to hate it anymore. Because let’s face it, it
got me where I am today. Whatever success I’ve
had has been because of it. So now I just make jokes
about it. I do a lot of acoustic music and when people
ask me if I’m emo, I tell them that I used to
be but I gave the word to Chris Carraba. It’s
his now. Some people don’t get it but I think
it’s funny.
Q: Does it bother you to see these day-glo bubblegum
teenybopper bands today that get lumped in with emo?
Ace: That’s just pop. Girls have always screamed
to pop bands and they always will. I’ll give
you an example. There is a huge difference between
say Hannah Montana and a band like All-Time Low. All-Time
Low really works hard at what they do. I know they
spent years living out of a van before they had any
success. Yeah, it’s pop music. But as far as
the people involved, they really work for what they’re
getting. Now I don’t know about Hannah Montana.
She probably works hard too. But you can’t lump
those two things together.
Q: You were still a teenager when you first came
into the public eye. You’re well into your twenties
now so it figures that your songwriting and worldview
would have changed. What are people going to hear
in this new album that they might not have heard with
the Early November?
Ace: I like to think that I’ve always brought
honesty to my songs. I think if anything has changed,
there might have been more a feeling of hopelessness
when I was younger. I still write about problems but
it’s not as immature now. For instance, I might
write a song about a problem a person is having, but
now the approach will be “…and here’s
how you fix it.” It’s not just complaining
about things, I’m also trying to find solutions.
Q: How about your personal life? It’s one thing
to write songs about girls when you’re 16 and
you’re just imagining everything. I would assume
your love life has changed quite a bit since then.
Ace: (laughing) Well, I’m married now and I’m
very happy, so yeah, that’s changed totally.
Q:
Money is a recurrent theme in your songwriting, and
it comes up quite a few times on this new album. Is
that something that you’re aware of?
Ace: Oh yeah. I think about money, I write about
money, money is always on my mind. That’s just
who I am. I didn’t grow up poor, but I wasn’t
one of those kids who had tons of money to spend on
stuff. Money is just something I really, really hate.
I wish we didn’t have to have it. And being
in this business too, and seeing how everything revolves
money. I mean, we’re trying to be artists, but,
like you said before, Hannah Montana runs this business.
She’s a big corporation and she gets on the
radio. That’s the way things work. It fires
me up sometimes when you run into that. And so I write
about it.
If I can be honest, I’ve struggled for a lot
of years. I made a lot of money, I spent a lot of
money, I lost a lot of money. I’ve been very
successful, and I’ve been in a place where money
was hard to come by for a while. Things are better
now but it’s always the same struggle, just
set to different words. As far as my personal life,
I’m extremely happy right now. With my marriage,
with the band, with my career. I’m not a person
who complains too much anyway, but right now I have
nothing to complain about at all. There was a time
when I was pretty obsessed with money, it was all
I could think about it. But that’s just like
running into a wall. Eventually you realize it’s
the same stuff that everybody goes through.
Q: When I first met you in the Early November, once
thing that struck me was that you really weren’t
very comfortable with the fact that there were teenage
girls screaming at you. Have you gotten more comfortable
with being who you are and accepting that a lot of
people really like you?
Ace: I don’t know if I’d look at it like
that but I do suffer from terrible social anxiety.
I do have trouble accepting some things. But I think
I’m pretty comfortable with who I am now. Anybody
who comes to a show and gives me attention, I appreciate
every second of it. I don’t like to think about
things like that too much, because there were good
days and there were bad days. But it all adds up to
something.
Q: I was really happy to see you included “Bring
Back Love” on the new album (it appeared on
Ace’s Internet-only release in 2008.) The lyrics
of that song epitomize the promise that President
Obama’s campaign brought to this country. Was
that part of your thinking when you wrote the song?
Ace: I think that’s what I was thinking when
I came up with it. I just woke up one morning from
a dream and I wrote that song in like ten minutes.
I guess the whole idea of change and things getting
better in the future had been on my mind so much that
that song just came out like that. But I definitely
was very happy that Obama was elected and I really
do hope for some kind of change in the world.
Q:
I wanted to ask you a little about the last Early
November album, The Mother, The Mechanic, And
The Path. To me that album was hugely underappreciated.
It was such an ambitious undertaking and it never
created the kind of dialogue in the music press and
the blogosphere that much less worthy albums enjoy.
Was the reaction to that album a big disappointment,
and do you think its failure had anything to do with
the band breaking up?
Ace: I think it was a disappointment that everyone
involved realistically expected more. I’m not
sure what happened exactly, it was such a whirlwind.
It took me forever to make that record, and I really
put a lot of myself into it. And I don’t know,
I guess you’re right, I expected a little more
to happen when it came out than what actually happened.
I think the label and even some of the band just started
to think that the album was a failure, and because
of that, they didn’t work hard enough to make
anything happen.
Q: So it became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy?
People expected it to fail so it failed.
Ace: Yeah, something like that. People were saying,
well, it’s a triple record, nobody buys triple
records. It’s really deep, nobody’s going
to understand it. There was all this negative energy
and I think that just carried through to everything.
And unfortunately we were in a situation where the
label had a lot of other stuff going on, and we just
kind of got lost in the shuffle. I feel like there
was a lot more stuff that could have happened with
the record. A lot of what was done to promote it,
or what wasn’t done, wouldn’t have been
my call. And I could just sit here and complain about
it. But that’s not going to change anything.
Q: Do you have any regrets? If we could wind back
the clock, would you still have done a triple album
like that?
Ace: I would do it the exact same way. I was very
proud to make that record. We went into it with our
eyes open and everybody told us that a triple album
wasn’t going to work, that it wasn’t what
people expected from us. And I said, well, we’re
just not going to do what they expect, because that’s
what art is all about. Trying to do something different.
And not only putting your heart into it, but risking
your career and everything else on it. Yeah, I wish
it had sold a little better, but hey, it happens.
It’s a gamble.
Q: Do you think the album’s lack of commercial
success is what killed the band?
Ace: I think that definitely contributed to it. Once
the record wasn’t doing what we hoped, everyone
sort of gave up. There was a lot of energy invested
in making the record and when there looked like there
wasn’t going to be much of a return, that failure
fell on me because I was the one who pushed to do
it. I told everyone, ‘Trust me, trust me, trust
me,’ and I definitely know that things changed
after that. The band was torn, the label was indifferent…
Maybe if the label had put a million dollars into
it, still nothing would have happened. You can’t
say. So I’m not going to complain or say that
that they should have.
Q:
Tris McCall wanted me to ask you this: If the grandfather
in the story is The Mechanic, who represents the working
class past, and The Path is the story of the grandson,
who is the Mother? (For those who haven’t heard
it, The Mother, The Mechanic, And The Path consists
of a mostly rock disc, a disc of experimental pop,
and a third disc that’s like the soundtrack
to an unmade film, about an abused child in therapy
that intersperses brief song bits with a spoken word
narrative. The illustration on the cover art shows
a young woman, an old man, and a young boy - the mother,
the grandfather, and the child.)
Ace: The Mother is the glue that ties them together.
(laughs) In the complete story, which I don’t
really tell on the album, the Mother is a real character
but I guess you can’t tell that just listening
to the album. But it’s all metaphors. Really
the names represent the three discs. The Mother disc
was meant to be a very pure-sounding CD, very acoustic.
The sound of The Mother is what binds the other two
CDs together. That was the idea, anyway.
Q: What have you been doing during this down time
when your new album is finished but not released yet?
Ace: I’ve been having a great time. I’ve
been doing a lot of studio work with other bands,
recording more songs for a new album. I’m going
to Australia and then when I get back, I start touring,
and then the record comes out. And so on and so forth.
So any downtime I’ve had lately I’ve just
been using to hang out and spend time with my family
and friends, because once tour starts, I’ll
be away for a long time. And even though I haven’t
had a record out for a few years, I’ve still
spent about eight months a year touring. So I’ve
been really busy.
Q: Do you think you’ll ever pursue any of your
other side projects? Do you think we’ll ever
see another I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s
Business album (Ace’s 2004 solo album)?
Ace: No, I don’t think so. I got that out of
my system. I may one day want to do something like
that again, but as of right now, I don’t see
anything like that happening. I just want to make
records and tour with this new band.
