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Chances are, even if you wouldn't necessarily classify yourself as a fan, you'll know someone in love with Manchester Orchestra by now. After a hugely successful year of touring with the mighty Kings of Leon, and having their songs appear on such teen TV sensations as The Hills and Gossip Girl, the band are finishing up 2009 in our own cold and rainy country.
But, don't be fooled! Teen shows or no teen shows, this Georgian five-piece possess the ability to grab ahold of your throat and shake you to the very core with their magnificent musical catalogue, and incendary live shows. With songs that are both brutally honest and shrouded in mystery, this band are one set to change the way you look at music.
We had the chance to chat to Andy Hull and Robert McDowell of the band, as they toured as support to Biffy Clyro this November.

OS: You've been in the UK a lot of times so far in 2009.
Andy Hull [vocals/ guitar]: Since the beginning of this year, this is our fifth time here.
Robert McDowell [guitar]: The first time was March of 07
Andy: Yeah, right before the Brand New tour. We came over before we did the US and then we just kept coming back.

OS: Is that to do with playing here, and your UK fans?
Robert: The actual show is a lot of fun over here because people are more relaxed. Maybe because the drinking age is younger, maybe they have liquid confidence. The shows are fun.
Andy: The fans are fantastic. Supporting over here is difficult. OS: You've played a headline show too.
Robert: The York show! We thought there was only going to be fifty people there.
Andy: We had no idea there would be that many people there. That was really cool.

OS: You're currently on tour with Biffy Clyro. How has the tour been so far?
Andy: We've been playing in front of an enormous amount of people who have never heard of us.
Robert: We're playing in front of a bunch of people who don't know who we are but we're doing well in merch, so we're getting good feedback.
Andy: We made friends with Biffy in the US. We opened for Say Anything in the US and they were on directly before us on that tour. They're supporting us in the US in March next year. They're coming over to do that. They haven't broken through there yet.

OS: Earlier in the year you played Reading and Leeds for the second time. How was that, since you were playing on a bigger stage but performing earlier in the day?
Andy: It was fun!
Robert: Reading was the bomb!
Andy: We were shocked. The promoter for the festival told us the tent was at capacity. 12,000 people were watching us - it was nuts.
Robert: Whereas two years before there was fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand people
Andy: More like twelve hundred.
Robert: It looked the same though
Andy: All festivals look the same.
Robert: Despite how big the crowd is - unless it's the headliner where there's 80,000 people - it's always like, "that's more than five hundred people!", which in my book is a successful show!
Andy: Chris [Freeman, keyboards and additional percussion] also has a terrible judge of amount of people. So, when Brand New were playing at Reading and Leeds two years ago, our friend Kevin Devine standing next to Chris at the side of the stage. They're looking out and Kevin goes, "dude how many people do you think that is?" and Chris goes, "Um.. Eight hundred?" It was like fifteen thousand! Kevin was like "eight hundred?!"
Robert: And we still tell that story! He can't live it down.

OS: Recently, when you've been playing at festivals, or in supporting slots, you've tended to solely play songs from your latest album 'Mean Everything To Nothing'. Would you say that's because you've grown out of some of your older songs?
Andy: I think that has to do with timing more than anything else, because we're selling that record for Columbia, who is our label over here. We just feel like this is a job so we've got to smoke what we're selling in a sense. We love those old songs and we love playing them, and we love the new ones, but y'know.. it's just more.. they're newer and we feel we've grown a lot as a band so we want to play songs that we've grown up with.

OS: So how would you define the differences between first album 'I'm Like a Virgin Losing a Child' and the latest release, 'Mean Everything to Nothing'?
Robert: With 'Mean Everything to Nothing' we kind of knew how we'd be playing those songs live a little better because we toured on 'Virgin' for like 400 shows. The songs got faster and heavier and more dynamic. So, we were able to envision them more; "here's the song and here's how we're going to be playing it live, so lets make it sound more live on the record."
Andy: We recorded it live too which obviously helps make it sound like that.
Robert: We also had Joe Chiccarelli who is the master of tones. He was able to put live tones into a microphone very well.

OS: Do you prefer an album?
Andy: Well I know which one Robert prefers!
Robert: I didn't even play on 'Virgin..'!
Andy: Robert and I's story goes back to way early; I was 16 and he was 13 or something like that. He dated my little sister and pretty much has since then. So, he had a studio in his basement when he was like 14 years old. Well, first it was in his bedroom. I remember we used to go up and record in his room and then he moved down to the basement Now we actually run a full professional recording studio - we're not in the basement anymore! So, when we were doing 'Virgin', he was interning on our album - like helping us out with guitars and pretty much getting me cough drops or something if he had to. He was around for the whole process and was apart of the creative energy. A couple of days into the record, I asked him if he wanted to play the show we were going to do at the very end of recording, which was just an awful, awful idea looking back right now. We were gonna do this show right after recording - invite only, family and friends. So I asked Robert if he wanted to do it and it was two weeks away from when I asked him, but the next day he knew all the songs so.. we've been pretty sexually involved ever since! [laughs]

OS: It seems as though the way in which the band came together was such an organic process.
Andy: Orgasmic! [laughs] Definitely. Robert and I and J[ohnathan Corley, bass] went to the same school and.. pretty much Chris. He went to a different school but was at our school a lot. They probably didn't let him into our school because he never got anything higher than a D in his life. Anyway, the process then of having Robert in with the writing of 'Mean Everything to Nothing', we just blew through it. I wrote 75 songs for it and didn't use any of them. We just started writing in our rehearsal space and that was that.
Robert: We finished a song a day. Not recording; just writing.
Andy: We'd just do it on a MacBook; pull up Garage Band and press record with the computer microphone and that was our demo for the new record. So, we sent out a bunch of these distorted, hardly audible songs. When we wrote it and had finished we had the entire sequence from the start to the end. I think one song changed where we split 'Pride' and 'In My Teeth' and that was it. Pretty simple.
OS: The record does seem to flow very well.

Andy: The first record consisted of all of us going into a room, including Robert who wasn't officially in the band, and writing out what we thought the order should be and they were all pretty much exactly the same and we were all writing in different rooms.

OS: You're friends with a lot of bands who, over the years, have become associated with 'emo'. Do you ever get irritated with this emo-by-association tag that's been thrown upon yourselves as a band?
Andy: No, because we're not an 'emo' band and I think we proved that by releasing a record that wasn't an 'emo' record. Our first one sounds like 'emo' - I don't mind at all.
OS: But the genre of 'emo' doesn't even really exist anymore..
Andy: Exactly! But my good friend from Say Anything, Max Bemis that's something for him: 'emo' does mean something to him, and I respect how much it means to him. We have the same sort of heroes. We were listening to Get Up Kids and Saves The Day. The funny thing with our connection with Brand New is that I got 'Deja Entendu' when it came out and then like, the next week I heard Built to Spill, Flaming Lips, Death Cab for Cutie and Elliott Smith and it just got shuffled away and I kind of forgot about them until we ended up touring forever. We're not concerned with the connection with all that [emo] at all. It's all just bullshit.

OS: When you go to write a record, especially the lyrics, what are your inspirations. What do you draw from?
Andy: Well, that just depends on what the song is. What would you really like to know?

OS: For example, there's a strong use of religion in your music, obviously showing that you're a religious band. How does that effect your writing?
Andy: I'd say we all have our beliefs. If you were a farmer, you'd write about cows and chickens. If you're a pastor's kid, you'd write about religion. Every member of the band grew up in a very similar, if not identical, religious upbringing. So we all have the same shitty Christian band records; we all have the same experiences going to churches and all that.

OS: I felt as though on a record like 'Virgin' especially, there was some confusion, or perhaps even negativity, presented regarding religion.
Andy: I would say the opposite. I'd say the second one is more..
Religion is not something I think exists. I'll tell you what I think. I believe in a higher power and if people to chose believe in a higher power then they do, and if they don't, they don't. I base no judgements on them so they base no judgements on me. That's kind of what it is, and for us, with the writing, I'm never afraid to sound too Christian. But, what Christianity is right now isn't really relevant to what the bible is really talking about in my opinion.
It's more kind of wandering. It's not really confusion, more like whacking through the weeds and just trying to get into the clarity.
The first part of the second record was literally literal. For example, the song 100 Dollars. When I was 18 years old, my wife and I, it was around Thanksgiving.. She was my girlfriend at the time; we'd been dating for a couple of months, maybe a year, and my dad had given me a hundred dollar bill to take her out and have a great date. Then, I lost the hundred dollar bill somewhere between my parents' kitchen and my car. I've always been like that - I just lose all my shit. And I freaked! You know when you're looking for something for so long.. you ever lose something and you start looking for it, and the longer you're looking for it the more you can't find it. Then you finally get to the point where you're ready to punch a wall and freak the fuck out and then you find it! I was looking under my car and pushing my seats back and she's sitting there watching this guy she's with losing his mind. It was the first time she saw me act that way, and it's definitely not been the last, because we're all babies at the end of the day. So, that song is literally about me sitting in my now wife's apartment at her college, there being women's magazines here and there's a picture of me underneath it, and I called her and she couldn't call me back cause she's a second grade teacher and she was at school and we'd had an argument that morning.

OS: Since you can quite literally be so literal with some of your music, how important would you say honesty is in music?
Robert: I would say.. not that important because it's a lot of figuring out. Writing can help you figure out something, but you can write the exact wrong thing and that can be you realising.
Andy: On the first record, 'Sleeper 1972' isn't an honest song but it is honest, yet my dad's not dead so.. it's important for bands to make music and records for themselves and for what they want it to be and to never make something for something else or somebody or some label or something.

OS: So, how would you want someone to perceive your music?
Andy: I have no idea. It's hard.
Robert: I would like for them to interpret it in their own way, but I get annoyed if they don't interpret it in the same way that I do [laughs].
Andy: Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine: his manager e-mailed our manager and said they were sitting in an airport and he put 'Shake It Out' on Tom Morello's headphones and Tom Morello heard it. He said - here's a great phrase - "that shit's the jam" or "that's a serious jam", something like that: something very, very flattering. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine said that I did something good.
We've had Matt Sharp, the bass player from the first two Weezer records, come into the studio as we were mixing and he heard 'I've Got Friends'. He called it "an epic mind-fuck." We tried to base our entire record on their second album 'Pinkerton'! And to have a guy, that had such a big part in making that, give me - ten years later - a verbal compliment reassured me. It was like, "oh man, I don't give a shit what anyone else says about this band. If Matt Sharp and Tom Morello like our record then no body else in the US or UK can like it, that's fine – those two thought it was good and that's more than I got done than I thought I would when I started this thing."
Robert: I think I just want people to enjoy it.
Andy: Which is an issue because, especially with this record, a lot of people tell me at shows that they thought the lyrics weren't as personal or as intimate but I'm like, "man, you just don't know that they are!" In fact, they're far more personal than the first record.
Robert: Plus, I think we were all in completely different places for 'Mean Everything To Nothing'. There wasn't as much time to day dream or anything.
Andy: We were at a time to get shit done, and with the lyrics, they were really just coming out of my head and that's how I feel. This is what this is about. Everything from that line on 'The Only One' that goes, "I was amazed by the colours and shapes that you drew" is talking about my wife making an arts and crafts thing for her class because she's a second grade primary teacher. That's what that line means. I tried to take every bit of mystery out of the lyrics because I wanted to be so brutally honest, and it ended up just being very mysterious to everyone because no one knew what the hell I was talking about.

OS: To be honest, as a fan, I love 'Virgin' and it probably took me longer to get into 'Mean Everything To Nothing' because of that..
Andy: It also is that too. You're not the first to say that. We knew it was going to take people time.. What the true fans of 'Like a Virgin' wanted was 'Like A Virgin 2.0' and we're never going to do that. This better is done better than 'Virgin'.  

OS: You also had a video series to coincide with 'Mean Everything to Nothing'. What did you want to achieve with that?
Andy: A video series to coincide with Mean Everything to Nothing! [laughs] We really like these guys Jason and Clay from Destroy Rock Music: they did an amazing video for 'I Can Barely Breathe' off of 'Virgin', so we asked them if we could use the budget from what our first single video would cost, and make eleven of them that all coincide with each other. And they did it. It was a cool thing to do.
Robert: It was nice because I think they first said that they didn't have time to do it and then they heard the record. Then they got the album and they did it. They were like, "we can't do it, we're too busy, this is too much to achieve.." or whatever, but then we gave them the record and they were like ,"oh, we'll do it!"  

OS: Is it important to you as a band to be pushing different boundaries compared to other musicians? Not many bands are willing to go that far in an artistic manner.
Andy: That's what we want to do all the time. We want to constantly do something innovative and weird and different.  

OS: To go into a broader subject, why did you get into music?
Robert: Because I thought it would be fun.
Andy: The reason why I got into music was because I was shit at basketball, I played varsity golf in high school and there was just one day where I was like, "I hate golf." Then I started playing guitar a lot and Chris, he put up a sign at the church that our buddy Harrison went to for guitar lessons, for a drummer and he was the drummer for our first band, and J Corley was the bass player. That was it.
Robert: I think we all ended up doing it because it was the first thing we were not getting bullied at. It was the one thing we could do to be cooler than other people. That we enjoyed as well.
Andy: And that we could all pay attention to for longer than two minutes because we're all ADD out the ass, so school was never good for any of us. School was never really the high point for any of us. We just came together and started playing basement shows and that was fun and that was it. That's why. Oh! And because we can't do anything else! That's the reason.  

OS: So what does music represent to you?
Andy: It just represents music. There's probably five different answers to that!
Robert: Creating and writing music represents one thing but listening is another.
Andy: It's the thing we all magnetise towards. The reason why I don't care if there's 16, 15, 14 year olds that enjoy our music is because that's when I loved music the most. I understand that; that's when we all loved music the most. We still love music, we listen to a lot of music of every kind.  

OS: Where would you say the direction for the next album will go?
Andy: I think it's going to be bloody. I think you're going to be able hear the emotion in the recording a lot more. We're going at it from a totally different approach to how we did the last two records. We're starting in June.
Robert: We're gonna make it more organic.
Andy: I wanna make it the greatest, most agonising, beautiful, happy fourty-five minutes I can. That would be our goal. Chris said recently that we're never going to make a record that we don't like because we'll hate it. And I said, "that was it, you're right. We're never going to make a record that we don't love." For me, I want it to be.. it's not going to be anything like this last record. It's gonna be heavier or softer. I want it to sound like nothing else that's ever been done. It's going to be completely quiet in reverse.
Robert: We're gonna record it in reverse! [laughs]  

OS: When will you next be in the UK?
Andy: We come back a lot so y'know.. 
OS: Are the rumours true about the Brand New Long Island show being parallel to the Wembley show in January?
Andy: There are no rumours. It hasn't even been talked about. At the end of the day, Brand New are probably going to get one band to open for them, probably mewithoutYou or someone; it'll be one of their friends. If they ask us to do it, I can't say that I would – I've already played at Wembley! It depends on what their ticket sales are like too, if they need another band to fill that thing. I think they're gonna try find the coolest band they can. Those guys have some really cool music too. But no, the Long Island show is not at all correlated with Wembley. As far as I, or my band or management or booking agents are concerned. We're meeting up with Brand New in Salt Lake city a few days after - we definitely would have known by now.
OS: When do you expect you will be returning to the UK?
Andy: Next year we're touring the States so I guess we'll come back here after we finish doing the record right before the US tour. So, I'd say probably August?  

Manchester Orchestra's latest album 'Mean Everything to Nothing' is out now.