![]() You've talked a lot in previous interviews about making peace with your youthful lyrics, but what did it take to return to that youthful wail? When I saw Mineral on the 2014 reunion tour, I wondered how you would sing these old songs, especially given how loose and rollicking your Zookeeper album, which came out in 2014, would turn out to be. I remember driving all the way back from Illinois for a little show at Emo's here - I was so excited to get back to Mineral. ![]() ![]() It was fun to get to go play those shows, but I really missed Mineral. The Mineral record was already out, and I met a ton of people there who were into the Mineral record and excited that that was happening. So that was my first and only time playing Cornerstone. In fact, that Fluffy thing we did - the main goal of doing shows was to play Cornerstone. I played bass and he played drums, and Tess played guitar in Fluffy. Tess was dating Chris Colbert at the time, who is the guy behind Fluffy. She really wanted Jeremy and Gabe to go out as her backing band, and we were kind of bummed because we had some plans to be potentially touring at the time, so we decided to do a tour together. She had a tour booked and was looking to put a band together. Yeah, one of our early Mineral tours - the first time I went east was because Tess from Phantasmic is Gabe's sister Gabe played drums in Mineral. So I had this memory recently that the reason I first knew about Mineral was because you were thanked in the liner notes to the Phantasmic and Fluffy split album. If a band I liked thanked another band in its liner notes, nine times out of ten I would go track down their music. I was in high school in the late '90s, and the way I often discovered new music was through reading liner notes. But once Mineral was touring, it was word of mouth. I definitely remember getting into Jane's Addiction through that, and Smashing Pumpkins. MTV was still somewhat influential, like Alternative Nation, 120 Minutes and all that stuff. Lars Gotrich: How did you find out about new bands in the '90s?Ĭhris Simpson: Word of mouth, mostly. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. But Simpson also indulges a little bit of nostalgia on my part. "When we play together, it's almost like we can't not sound like Mineral," Chris Simpson says in an interview that explores the seeking nature of the band, as well as what it means to make new music as Mineral again. That frenzied warmth is Mineral's signature sound, so much so that it's easy to get lost in its eight-minute run time, the longest in the band's discography. "Aurora" meanders and waltzes through familiar fields, building on arpeggios with spindly riffs and sudden explosions of distortion. Oh, and not to mention a 10-inch record with the first Mineral songs in 20 years: "Aurora" (premiering here) and "Your Body Is the World." To celebrate the band's upcoming 25th anniversary in 2019, Mineral is going on tour once again and releasing One Day When We Are Young, a 56 page-book featuring rare photographs, handwritten lyrics and interviews with other luminaries of the music scene. But when the Austin band got back together in 2014 for a series of shows in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia, it was not only an opportunity for those who didn't get to see Mineral the first time around, but also the first time anyone got to experience the more elegiac songs from EndSerenading live. He's indulging me, another fan who missed Mineral by a year. "I've heard that story so many times," Simpson tells NPR Music, chuckling. After falling in love with Chris Simpson's fervent wails about romantic hopes and spiritual anxiety, his wild-hair guitar interplay with Scott McCarver, and the simultaneously crashing and tender punk rhythm section of bassist Jeremy Gomez and drummer Gabe Wiley, you'd soon find out that Mineral had already broken up in 1997 while making its second (and final) album. At least that's how it felt in the '90s, when friends or zines would recommend a pair of albums - The Power of Failing and EndSerenading - after you'd already gotten into Sunny Day Real Estate, Rainer Maria or Jimmy Eat World. Mineral was the emo band you discovered too late.
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