20 Years Later, the Cold War Kids are all right

Midway through Cold War Kids’ hourlong set supporting Young the Giant at the Forum in July, frontman Nathan Willett took off his guitar and sat down at the piano. He began playing “We Used to Vacation,” the opening track of the band’s 2006 debut album, “Robbers & Cowards,” stopped to adjust his microphone, and started again.

Seemingly overcome with emotion, he paused once more. Turning toward the audience, he explained that performing the previous song, “There Goes the Night,” had transported him back to the downtown Long Beach house that inspired it.

“It’s funny the memories that flood to you,” he added.

Facing the piano again, he said, “We’re going to keep going on the old stuff. This is the first song from the first record,” before leading the band into a three-song run from “Robbers & Cowards.”

Months later, Willett, 47, says he was initially wary of celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary. He appreciated the milestone but worried that marking it with a reissue and tour would simply be an exercise in nostalgia, like former high school football players reliving their glory days.

“You want it to be an important moment, but not where you hang your hat,” he says, drinking a Kronenbourg on the patio of an Atwater Village bar.

Then, while combing the band’s archives, he and bassist Matt Maust unearthed four unfinished songs from the “Robbers & Cowards” era, giving Willett an idea: “What if we recorded these songs for the first time?”

“They excited me, and I wanted them to become the kind of songs that we play every night, the kind of songs that become important in our catalog,” Willett says.

Recording them, he adds, “was so much fun and made the whole anniversary thing make sense to me.”

The resulting “Robbers & Cowards / Complete Cowards” adds six live recordings from 2007 to the original album, along with the four newly completed tracks: “Loyalty,” “Jesse Latour,” “She Can Do No Wrong” and “There Goes The Night.” (The digital version includes Phantogram’s cover of “Hang Me Up to Dry.”)

Of the new songs, the first three had been early live staples, captured in videos of performances that Maust, speaking via Zoom, jokes were “intimate because no one was there.”

Using the footage, old journals and memory, Willett reconstructed and expanded the lyrics. “It felt like restoring an old painting,” he says, “where you very much know what it was, but it also needed a lot of work.”

“There Goes The Night,” however, had been little more than a sketch but became “almost like a statement on this whole anniversary thing,” Willett says. The gospel-tinged meditation on time passing revisits the Long Beach house where Cold War Kids’ then-guitarist Jonnie Russell lived with friends during the band’s early years.

It was a “very wild” social hub, Willett recalls, where they were reacting against their conservative upbringings while searching for spiritual meaning. Many of them, including Willett, Maust and Russell, had met at Biola University, a private evangelical Christian school outside Los Angeles that forbade drinking and smoking.

At 21, Willett had reluctantly transferred to Biola, where his father had taught, hoping to repair their strained relationship following his parents’ divorce when he was 13.

“Suddenly I was at this conservative Christian school, and I was so mad that I was there because I hated the things that it was about, and I hated a lot of the values and the politics,” Willett says. “But then I found this group of people that were so into art, music, film and poetry. I never knew people that I could talk about this stuff with like this, so that was life-changing for me.”

Matt Maust, left, and Nathan Willett. Maust calls Cold War Kids “a small big band” and “a big small band.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Maust, an art major, bonded with Willett over Blur’s album “13.” Willett admired his punk style and conviction that a band’s artwork matters as much as its music.

With Russell, Willett would drive off campus to sneak cigarettes, listen to music and sing. He remembers Russell turning to him and saying, “Oh, my God, you can sing!”

“I needed that validation and affirmation,” Willett says.

As a boy, singing along to the “Stand by Me” soundtrack in his father’s car, he’d felt the opposite. “Soulful singing is very vulnerable, and I think there’s a feminine-like quality,” Willett says. “I felt that my dad was like, ‘What is happening here?’ I was like, ‘Oh s—! I feel exposed.’”

Willett’s expressive voice — capable of soaring to high notes and falsetto, yet at times raw and biting — became part of Cold War Kids’ signature sound.

Looking back, he believes he knew that “this is who I am, and this is what I have to do” when friends responded enthusiastically to his singing at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, where they’d take turns playing rock covers onstage.

A music career, though, didn’t seem possible. At 23, Willett figured he’d already missed his window. Friends had signed record deals as teenagers, only for their careers to fizzle by their early 20s.

Nathan Willett, from left, Matt Maust and Matt Schwartz perform along the L.A. River.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

After graduation, he lived with his father while enrolled in a teaching credential program. He hoped the work would be fulfilling, but he quickly grew disillusioned. “This isn’t the ‘Dead Poets Society’ version of this that I thought it would be,” he remembers thinking.

“I felt like I was wasting my life,” he says. Still, “wanting to be a good and responsible kid,” he tried to stay the course.

But over the next year, he felt increasingly trapped. Riddled with anxiety, he sometimes pulled over while driving so he could vomit. Eventually an ulcer landed him in the hospital.

The turning point came when a friend’s band bought a van for a tour. “You just decide to do it and make it happen,” Willett realized. “I’m going to start a band.”

“I already knew who my guys were,” he says.

In 2004, he formed Cold War Kids with Maust, Russell and drummer Matt Aveiro. Named after Maust’s art blog, the band started in Fullerton, moved to Whittier and then Long Beach.

Gravitating toward British bands like the Clash and the Jam, New York’s the Velvet Underground and the Strokes, and artists such as Nina Simone, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart, they honed their sound through three independently released EPs and kinetic live shows, adding piano along the way.

A string of performances at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in 2006 sparked a bidding war, and Cold War Kids signed to New York-based Downtown Records. The rush of industry attention was exciting but unnerving.

“It was so bizarre. We were these post-religious, seeker, weird, super sincere kids who, in many ways, had no idea about the bigger world. It was shocking to be courted like that and fawned over,” Willett says. “And I think we were embarrassed because we knew so many musicians who had never been taken out to dinner, let alone by legends like [producer] Steve Lillywhite.”

That autumn, the swaggering, blues-infused “Robbers & Cowards,” drawn largely from their EPs, established Cold War Kids among indie rock’s most promising new bands.

“We were pretty young, trying to be old,” says Maust, noting their fedoras and older musical influences. “To me, it’s endearing that we pulled it off.”

Maust designed the album cover in the same vein, modeling it on vintage jazz sleeves to evoke a 50-year-old record and hoping the band’s youth would surprise listeners.

The album produced three singles: “We Used to Vacation,” a portrait of alcoholism inspired by David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”; “Hospital Beds,” later covered by Florence + the Machine; and the breakthrough hit “Hang Me Up to Dry,” an angry swipe at Willett’s then-ex-girlfriend, whom he later married.

Fans watch Cold War Kids perform as a trio along the L.A. River.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Radio airplay, MTV rotation, late-night TV performances, Lollapalooza and Glastonbury slots followed, along with a top-five spot on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart.

But a harsh Pitchfork review that interpreted the album’s imagery through an evangelical Christian lens cut Willett to the core. Angry at being cast as part of the culture he’d rejected, and fearful it would shape the wider media narrative, he began censoring his writing.

“It made me so much more self-aware of writing anything that seemed like religious language,” he says. “But the problem is that any powerful, vivid imagery, like a fire in the sky, can be biblical language, even if you’re totally unaware of it. It’s very hard to avoid, so I worked hard to avoid it.”

It’s a decision he now regrets. “I wish I would’ve just said f— it, I’m going to double down on whatever this thing is that speaks to me,” he says.

In 2011, the band moved to Los Angeles, hoping to cement its longevity. But a year later, Russell left for graduate school. The loss disappointed Willett for years. He says he’s only recently come to understand that the band was “probably my dream more than his dream.” Dann Gallucci took over on guitar, and in 2013 Joe Plummer replaced Aveiro.

Two years later, Cold War Kids scored their biggest hit with the anthemic “First” from their fifth album, “Hold My Home.” It topped Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart for seven weeks, went platinum and ranks among Billboard’s all-time top alternative hits.

Maust credits filmmaker Cameron Crowe with catapulting the song by featuring it in the trailer for the 2015 rom-com “Aloha.”

“ ‘First’ is really one of those special songs. It’s personal and heartfelt, but it also feels grand. It’s transporting in the way that great songs are,” Crowe says. “I was so happy to use it for the trailer because it immediately signaled that the movie might have some real emotion to it.”

Yet for all its success, “First” almost didn’t make the album. Willett had started writing it, but Gallucci, who was co-producing, didn’t like it, and the record was completed without it. During B-side sessions, Maust and Plummer urged Willett to finish it.

“I remember listening to the final mix, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this song is big. I think this is what a hit song is,’ ” Willett says.

Breaking from the band’s longstanding democratic process, he insisted “First” be added to the album. From then on, he took the lead on musical decisions.

Amid ongoing tensions, Gallucci and the band parted ways in 2016, and Cold War Kids settled into their most stable lineup with Willett, Maust, Plummer, keyboardist Matthew Schwartz and guitarist David Quon, a fellow Biola alum.

Writing the next album, Willett hoped to sustain the momentum of “First,” but his acute awareness of the band’s expanded fanbase made him second-guess himself.

“If you’re trying to think of how all of these different kinds of people are going to hear or receive what you’re doing, it could break you. I understand why it breaks up bands,” he says. “Suddenly an artist who knew how to write doesn’t know how to anymore.”

Joe Plummer, from left, Matt Maust, Matthew Schwartz, Nathan Willett and David Quon. “You don’t get to choose how big you are. There’s a huge surrender to what the audience is and the fans that come your way, and I feel proud of where we are,” Willett says.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

But, he adds, “At the end of the day, I need to be myself, and I need to feel excited about the music.”

2017’s “L.A. Divine” saw the band leaning further into pop while embracing gospel and R&B, and it reached the top 10 of Billboard’s Alternative and Rock albums charts. Its success and Willett’s newfound creative freedom ushered in what he calls Cold War Kids’ “second life” — an ongoing run of EPs and singles preceded by the “New Age Norms” trilogy and a self-titled record in 2023.

Still, Willett acknowledges that ambition can be difficult to quiet. That summer, while opening for Tears for Fears at places like Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, he occasionally found himself wishing Cold War Kids could headline venues of that scale.

“I’m always going to have that. I think everyone is always going to have that,” he says. “I think wrestling with it is really good … but you don’t get to choose how big you are. There’s a huge surrender to what the audience is and the fans that come your way, and I feel proud of where we are.”

Nothing, he says, rivals the joy of seeing fans singing along: “How could I want anything but that amazing feeling?” At the same time, he adds, “I’m always a little skeptical of it because I don’t want to love it so much that I’m finding myself in it.”

Maust calls Cold War Kids “a small big band” and “a big small band,” whose name recognition has sometimes outpaced the size of their venues. But he considers it a luxury to still fill 2,000-plus-capacity clubs. “I’d rather have an entire career that’s very warm,” he says. “And we’ve been pretty warm for a long time.”

That devotion was on display last month, when some 300 fans gathered along the L.A. River in Frogtown for a short, free acoustic 20th-anniversary set by the band. “I’ve loved these guys since the beginning,” one fan said with a smile.

Next year brings a full “Robbers & Cowards” tour, and Willett will soon release a solo EP of covers. A new Cold War Kids album is underway, but Willett is in no rush.

The anniversary has made him realize he spent most of his career as “a workaholic,” driven by a fear of how fleeting success in music can be.

“I always felt like if it all goes away in an instant, I want to feel like I wrote and gave as much as I could,” Willett says. “But in hindsight, that’s a scarcity mentality. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t want to hustle so hard.”

Recently, he became emotional listening to “Robbers & Cowards” in full for the first time since it came out.

“I never would have imagined 20 years ago that I’d be sitting here talking about it, or that it would give me a career in music,” Willett says. “It’s a really special thing to celebrate.”

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com