By Brittany Flynn

Bloggers and critics agree: with their recently released Behave Yourself EP, Cold War Kids have managed to deftly dodge the dreaded "sophomore slump." Banking on the momentum of 2008's sweetheart hit Loyalty to Loyalty, the Southern California band is now planning to attack the mainstream with full force, pushing their blues-influenced indie-party anthems to new heights.

On the eve of their ascendance (or, rather their current, sold-out tour), MOG's Brittany Flynn caught up with frontman Nathan Willett to get details on the next album and find out why he wants to go more mainstream, what he and Leonard Cohen have in common, and why he stands by the religious imagery in his lyrics, even if it brings a backlash.

MOG: You guys had a video come out for "Audience"... still considering music videos relevant even in this day and age?

NW: Yeah. I mean if you're gonna do 'em, you should, I think, say something with them. Even though, we probably normally wouldn't say it, I think we like 'em. It really has to be somewhat of an art-piece and it's tricky, because it can't just follow the narrative of the song. It has to be something else unto itself.

MOG: I also read you guys recently did KCRW, and you said you were putting the ep out "for the good old days" As you become more ambitious, will the EPs become less essential or phased out?

NW: Um, you know, immediately, yes. I think with this next record that we're doing -- as far as taking a risk and trying on making a big record with a bigger producer - it's definitely a big step forward for us in that direction. I think this record is like... we wanna try on kinda try on being a big band and see how that feels for us and if we wanna go that way.

MOG: So can we expect more instruments, instrumentation, or orchestration?

NW: Yeah. I think we've always put a huge emphasis on very live recordings with very few overdubs and really nailing the take all together, but this one will be much more of a studio recording with much more kind of lush and atmospheric and layered and that's something that we haven't explored at all.

MOG: The band gets labeled as having very unsettling narratives. Are all of the characters that show up fictitious, or are there any real life experiences that make it in?

NW: I think especially for the older songs that they were, they were more kind of masked in fiction... I think probably for this next record they'll be more autobiographical. Like the song "We Used to Vacation" is the first that comes to mind. Kind of an alcoholic father and that affecting the family and everything. It was the David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest... I was reading that, and it seemed like a character out of there, but also my grandpa, it was his story in a way. So all of them yeah hit a little close to home.

MOG: Something that also got a lot of attention was, maybe a couple years back, the spiritual and religious themes that come up in your songs a lot. Would you say that the backlash affected the way you went about thinking about songs, writing songs, or did it have any effect at all?

NW: You know what, I think it definitely did and I, especially for the writing of the second record, I think I kinda wasn't mature enough to be able to not care at all. I wasn't overcome with caring about it, but I definitely, it definitely was something that was on my mind a little bit, and because it was on my mind I feel like the second record even suffered a little bit, but, uh, yeah.

MOG: So it was a little bit toned down?

NW: Yeah, I think so. I mean - and it's one of those things where I don't know if I can say, kind of subconsciously - I don't know how deliberate some of that stuff was. But you know, I think that for us, like I've always wanted to write about spiritual themes. I think pretty much all, so much music that I love it has such spiritual themes and I think because people talked about it like it was a bad thing that it made me wonder if something was bad about it or something. And then it took me a while to realize that so much of the music that I really love from all those artists that I already said, like uh, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Johnny Cash, to all the way to you know U2 or something. So many, so much Christian symbolism and imagery that is really important to songwriting, especially American songwriting, that I think it's, I think I kinda came full circle on that where I realized how important that really is to me.

MOG: So pretty much you guys formed in 2004 and the buzz was all over the place pretty quickly. Were you ready for it? Did you think that it came at a good time?

NW: Hmm...I'm trying to think of how to take that question [laughs]. It's kind of something that I guess it just happens. I had been through school and had a English degree and was doing my teaching credential,,, and I definitely thought that being in a band was too late for me. In a way I think I wish that I had been doing it longer or had started sooner, but I think I needed to really be in the having more kinda real world experiences. Leonard Cohen also, he was a poet before but he didn't start writing his first album I think till he was 33 or something like that.

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