Interview with The Crystal Method

Ken Jordan is in the studio, chatting with me on the phone while taking a break from working on The Crystal Method’s long-anticipated new studio album. It’s their first in nearly five years, and he’s ready to reveal some of the album’s special guests (would you believe Matisyahu?), and many iPod users recognize The Crystal Method as the creators of the Nike+iPod soundtrack, but none of that is why we’re on the phone today. We’re actually discussing the band’s first-ever single, now more than a decade old, which they’ve just remixed and rereleased with an even more surprising guest vocalist: Barack Obama.



Their “Now is the Time” track from 1997 has been retrofitted with clips from Obama’s “Now is the Time” speech from 2008, with the result now available for free download from the band’s official website. Which leads to the obvious question: why? The jovial Ken fills me in…



You’ve got the album coming out next year, you’ve got the big tour right now, obviously you’re busy. What motivated you to carve out some time to go back and revisit one of your oldest songs?



It was our first single, you know, and we had used a sample from way back that said “Now is the Time.” Anyway so I remember when Obama was gonna give his speech for the Democratic convention, it was on the anniversary, I can’t remember what anniversary, might be fortieth or something, but it was some anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. So Obama of course never said “I Have a Dream” but he did keep saying “Now is the Time” a lot, and so we were like aw man, we should take his sample and re-do the song and put it out. So we put it together really quickly but it came out really, really well. And, you know, we decided to put it out as a free download and try to encourage people to register to vote. And yeah, so we might put it out on the album as a bonus track or something like that, but it’s really separate from the new album.

So I take it you guys are voting for Obama?

Yeah that’s pretty clear, isn’t it? (laughs)

What is it about Obama that inspired you to not only vote for him, but to insert him into one of your own songs?

Well he’s not old and dumb.

Obviously some of your fans are voting for the guy who’s “old and dumb” – do you worry that they’re going to be offended and be put off by you saying something like that?

Well we do want to be sure everyone knows that we are just trying to get everyone to register and to vote, and we are not, you know, telling them who to vote for. But if they want to know who we’re voting for, we are voting for Obama.

Have you heard anything from the campaign, have they asked if they could use it, or do they even know this song exists yet?

We don’t even know if they know if they know it exists. We’re happy to have them use it for anything they want. We haven’t reached out to them, though. We’re trying to do this just independently. We did get Shepard Fairey, who’s a great artist who had done all those really cool posters, he made a special one for us that has NOW on the bottom instead of HOPE and PROGRESS and all that other stuff that you’ve seen on the posters. So now there’s one just for this track.

You just kicked off this tour. Are you guys having fun out there so far?

Yeah, we just had our first big weekend which will kind of get us into the groove, you know, it was an all-Southern California weekend, Orange County on Thursday, we played in Anaheim, and then San Diego Friday and Hollywood Saturday, so all the rest of the dates we’ll be flying to all the cities for, but this one was more of a driving kind of weekend. So not so hard on the travel, but it was really, really great events, especially San Diego and Hollywood was just really fantastic. So we start it back up again this Thursday.

We saw you at Vanguard in Hollywood the other night. I took our web guy who’s just a huge fan. We both walked out of there really impressed with your energy up there, both of you jumping around, pumping up the crowd, feeding everybody energy. You guys have been doing this for fifteen years. How do you continue to sustain that kind of energy night after night?

Well it just happens, you know? You get energy from the crowd and from the music and you just want to give it back. So that part doesn’t get tiring at all, you know? If you’re having a hard time having a good time up there with all that going on, then there’s got to be something wrong.

We were joking around, like are they taking that Nike+iPod soundtrack of theirs and going jogging themselves?

Sometimes that’s our only exercise too, you know, so we’ve got to get a good workout in.

I’ve always been curious since you released that a couple years ago, are you guys big iPod/iPhone users yourselves?

Oh yeah. We’ve been Mac users since, shoot, I think I had my first Mac-plus in ’86, ’87, something like that, and we’ve been Mac users all the time, you know, early adopters to iPod and iPhone, and so yeah, we’re Mac all the way.

I saw your Mac laptop up there on stage with you. How much of your show is running off the Mac? You’ve got all the visuals and everything, is that running off the laptop?

All the stuff you saw on the screens and everything, that was from Vello Virkhaus. We’re using him on some of the big shows on this tour. But we were just spinning CD off CDJ players. When we do our live tour though, our live concert tour starting next year, we’ll be using I don’t know if it’ll be a laptop or a tower or what but we will be using something to help us sequence out the songs.

We like to throw it out to readers to see who’s got a question for the band. Someone wanted to know, now that Filter is back together again, would you be interested in collaborating with Filter again?

Sure, absolutely. You know, we still see Richard every now and again, and yeah, we’re still friendly with him, and you know that might happen.

I know the album isn’t out til early 2009. Is there anything you can tell us for now?

We’ve got a lot of really cool guests on the record, and a little more vocals than we usually have on a Crystal Method record, but I think everyone’s gonna like it a lot.

Can you reveal any of the guests?

We’ve always been big New Order fans and we’ve got Peter Hook playing bass on a couple of tracks, so that was pretty cool for us. And I’ll give away one more, let’s see, we were actually doing this Pemberton Festival near Vancouver, and Matisyahu was also on the same bill, and he asked to come and perform with us. So he just did this sort of impromptu freestyle rap over one of our old tracks, High Roller. And it went so well, we decided to collaborate. So he’s gonna be on the new album as well.

Do you have any candidates for names for the album?

A lot of candidates and no decisions. (laughs)

If you want to take one more stab at trying to convince people to vote, whether they’re voting for your guy or the other guy, why is this such an important time that everybody vote in this election?

I think we need someone that’s not playing normal politics, that’s doing the right thing instead worrying about focus groups and lobbyists and all that stuff, and I think Obama has proven that that’s the way he would govern. And I think it’s gonna be real fresh and helpful and a better way to do business in the White House.

Do you think this election is more important than the last one four years ago?

Yeah well I thought the last one was important too, but apparently no one else thought so. Not enough thought so.