Well-connected: Motion City Soundtrack teams up
By KELLY WILSON
Get Out

Motion City Soundtrack's Justin Pierre is in Colorado, and he's frightened to leave the cozy confines of his band's tour bus.

“Me and Denver aren't really on speaking terms,’’ the singer and guitarist explains from the tour stop. “Once I was here a long time ago and I had like two King Cobras, which are like 40 malt liquor or something like that. I was just annihilated and obliterated, and I was walking the streets of Denver at like 4 in the morning. There was some crazy (expletive) going on in Denver, so I'm kind of hesitant to leave the bus.’’

Pierre and his band are in the middle of a big punk-rock tour — where the Minneapolis-based act is road-testing some new material set to appear on their sophomore release, “Commit This to Memory” — with three fellow Epitaph Records artists.

The band's new album, scheduled to drop in June, is produced by blink-182 singer Mark Hoppus and is the follow-up to 2003's “I Am the Movie.” Pierre says they hooked up with the blink funny man when the bands toured together in Europe last year.

During the tour, the band asked (Mark) if he had any recommendations on who should record their next record, "and he gave us some names and he happened to mention that he was looking to get into that,’’ Pierre says of the new album, which he describes as bigger and louder. “He hadn't pursued it, but he thought about it. And then we just thought, ‘What the hell? Why don't we just have him produce it and have whoever worked on his record work on it?’ So we all took a huge chance. We all kind of jumped into it blindly.’’

Pierre says that working with Hoppus was “awesome to the bone.’’
“We knew that he wrote amazing melodies and songs, and his band is just great, but he has an amazing ear for whether or not things are in tune,’’ he says. “It blew my mind. He was the one that kept us in check as far as singing issues and stuff.’’

Hoppus — who once listed Motion City Soundtrack as one of five bands that he was digging on at the time — even sings on a song titled “Hang Man” on the album.

“We just did something where apparently I suck really bad,’’ Pierre says. “It was unfixable even with the magic of Pro-Tools, so we just realized we should go to Mark. We called him up and asked if he would sing this part that I just couldn't do. We just got it back, and it sounds awesome.’’