At one point during Houston pop-rock band Waterparks’ hilarious interview at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records — right before they autograph their new album, JINX, for a ‘round-the-block line of pink-haired Parxies — frontman Awsten Knight lets his guard down and jokingly lets it slip that he really does enjoy hanging with his bandmates, drummer Otto Wood and guitarist Geoff Wigington.
“Fuck!” he blurts after this cute confession. “Now we’re never going to get a Metallica documentary!”
Well, that’s perfectly OK, because a JINX documentary — or better yet, some sort of Tommy-style movie musical — would be infinitely more interesting. And it would have (Stefon-from-‘SNL’ voice) everything: key-party-hosting swinger grandparents, a spread-eagle Playmate mannequin, ‘80s beauty salon décor, X-rated green-screens, epic Biblical allegories, a giant Sasquatch, an evil butler, and Donkey Kong murals. And of course, it would feature cameos by Dillon Francis and Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus as “purgatory guys,” Danny Elfman as the Devil, and Foxy Shazam’s “unicorn,” aka Eric Nally, perfectly typecast as God.
JINX quite spectacularly opens with “Tell Me Why,” a three-minute, 35-second punk-poperetta with that above-mentioned all-star cast. At first, Knight actually voiced all of the song’s mythical characters — Waterparks exclusively reveal to Licorice Pizza’s LPTV that that alternate, all-Awsten version drops this week — but as Knight recalls, “Everybody was kind of like, ‘This is fucking awesome,’ but nobody understood it on first listen. Which is a problem.”
Yes, even for a band known for switching up not just hair colors but genres from album to album, the original “Tell Me Why” might have been too much of a leap. “I feel like if you go in blind, you’re just like, ‘What the fuck?’” says Knight.
“We needed different voices, different tonalities, and characters to really lock it in and, for a lack of a better term, sell it. Because in the earlier drafts of it, Awsten was doing all the parts,” explains Wood. “It was just him donning all of these different voices — trying to have this booming, holy [character], and then, conversely, this sinister gravelly tonality. For us, we already know the intent there, so it’s easier for us. Anyone hearing it for the first time might be thrown for a loop, and it wouldn’t quite land the same.”
“So, we needed to cast the movie,” adds Knight. “We couldn’t Nutty Professor this shit.”
Knight drops multiple movie references during LPTV’s interview. (The most amusing is when he refuses to believe that Waterparks have actually drawn a huge crowd to the store and mock-worries that this is all a big prank, exclaiming: “You’re going to Carrie me! This is going to be terrible! You’re going to pour blood on me in front of my closest friends and family!”) So, it’s fitting that for Waterparks’ most creatively risky album yet — their first in three years, after they scrapped the LP they’d been working on, Intellectual Property 2 — they’d go totally cinematic, with a statement-making, gauntlet-throwing overture like “Tell Me Why.”
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“That was probably the hardest song I’ve ever written,” Knight confesses. “Honestly, it was going to be a different song entirely. It was called ‘The Trick Is to Stay Alive,’ which was originally how the elevator part ended — like, there’s no escaping, I’ve already tried it. … But the main thing that stayed was the chorus. And when [longtime Waterparks collaborator] Joe [Ragosta] and I did that chorus — ‘If the only point of life is not to die, can you tell me why?’ — it was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is so much bigger than the rest of that demo.’
“It kind of unlocked this whole thing where we had just done ‘Red Guitar’ and it was like, OK, that was such a story. This is an even bigger idea,” Knight continues. “What if it’s actually a full-on narrative, like a linear narrative, and you show both sides of all of it, at least as far as Christian lore goes? Heaven, hell, purgatory, all this stuff, and at the end, you’re still at exactly where the song started, exactly where you began again.”
“None the wiser,” Wigington interjects.
“Yeah, exactly. I felt like that was just the perfect way to start this album, because the next song [“Red Guitar”] is discussing this with your inner child,” says Knight. “And from there, it does feel like a very linear throughline.”
Waterparks don’t consider JINX a proper concept album, but Knight says it’s a “loose concept. It’s not like such a tight story as [Green Day’s] ‘Jesus of Suburbia,’ but it all operates in the same world, and it starts in a particular place and ends where it does make sense to be a story.” And what a wacky world it was created in.
Just when it doesn’t seem like Waterparks’ JINX story could include another plot twist, as their LPTV interview continues, they begin discussing the Long Island funhouse (or swinghouse?) where the album was recorded. The immersive space included playrooms with Barbie, G.I. Joe, Elvis, and Playboy themes — “Playboy is the bathroom, and it scares the shit out of you the first five times you go in there, because there’s a mannequin in the bathtub in a chair, like really aggressively spread out with the ears on,” recalls Knight — but Waterparks recorded in the basement, “which is even weirder,” Knight says.
This extreme but much-needed change of studio scenery came upon the recommendation of Ragosta, who introduced the band to producer/engineer Nick Zinnanti. “I trust Joe. He’s one of the few people. I shouldn’t because he’s a very bad guy, but I trust him. And he was like, ‘We should really try this out.’ I had no idea what I was getting into,” Knight chuckles. “I had no heads up. He was just like, ‘Yeah, it’s just over at Nick’s parents’ house.’ And I get there, and I realize it’s just a full-on swingers’ pad — it’s not confirmed, but it is. His parents were definitely like swingers in the ‘80s, because you go in there and there’s all the weird shit, but then there’s also giant lips on the wall and red leather couches and a big grand piano and checkered stuff. Do you know what Visible Changes is? The haircut place in the mall? Is that just a Texas thing? Well, it looked like that. It’s like the horniest place I’ve ever been.”
Just in case Knight hasn’t painted a vivid enough picture, he animatedly continues. “There’s also a giant Donkey Kong portrait on one of the ceilings. … There’s a Bigfoot predator, like from the movie Predator, not like the president,” he says. (Incidentally, Waterparks released a non-album protest track called “ICE” earlier this year, as seen below.) “There’s giant, life-sized people everywhere. There’s massive silverware. You walk in, and there’s a giant butler and a bear. He looks like a Haunted Manson butler. It’s not like a Bruce Wayne butler, like Alfred. Alfred seemed nice and helpful; this butler was like, ‘I want to drain your life force.’”
It was while Waterparks were exploring the funky funhouse basement that they noticed a “big-ass room” next to the studio’s control room that was “fully green-screened out. The floor is green-screen. There’s pillars that are green-screened. The walls, the ceilings, all green,” laughs Knight. “I had never met Nick before, and I was just like… ‘Um, Nick, what do they need a full green-screen room for?’ … And he’s the opposite of Joe. He was quiet and kind.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a swinger couple would have a quiet child; Zinnanti probably kept to himself, in his room, a lot when growing up. “He did — and he got really good at recording!” laughs Knight.
So, did the band film anything at the funhouse? Any green-screen music videos? “We did — with Nick’s grandparents,” Knight deadpans. “Maybe I’m coming off as a fun person, but in the studio, I’m not. I’m very locked-in and in mad-scientist mode. … So, I kind of was in a very different space where I wasn’t like, ‘We should go film in that fucking green room.’ Normally I’d be like, ‘We should make 10 videos today! Every song on the album gets a video!’ But no. I went in there, I was like, ‘This is crazy,’ and then I’d go back and keep working. … We’d never made an album anywhere except for one place with Zakk Cervini, so this was the first time trying something new. And I hate trying new things!”
courtesy of BMG
But of course, recording a Biblical fable about life, death, and purgatory in a swingers’ ‘80s party pad was a completely new experience, so it will likely open up the band to even more adventures. For instance, they haven’t attempted to perform “Tell Me Why” live yet, although they’re toying with the idea of doing it with rotating guest stars. “We’ve run through different ideas and logistics where we can pull it off and make it collaborative,” teases Wood.
When it’s suggested that Waterparks recruit all of their fellow acts on the current Warped Tour for a Jesus Christ Superstar-style live staging of “Tell Me Why,” Knight amusingly blurts, “Not everyone!” But then he comes up with a Warped-specific “Tell Me Why” cast that includes Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzara, the Used’s Bert McCracken, Motion City Soundtrack’s Justin Pierre, and members of From First to Last — and they’ve also pinky-sweared, on camera, to come back to Licorice Pizza to perform the song live — so watch this space
And watch Waterparks’ entire incredibly entertaining LPTV interview in the video above. It’s clear that these guys really do enjoy hanging out together.
