INTERVIEW: MisterWives on love, their spirit animals and quitting their day jobs

MisterWives, Mandy Lee, Will Hehir, Jesse Bluhm, Etienne Bowler

MisterWives, courtesy.

If MisterWives had arrived in San Francisco for Outside Lands as just another pop band, the New York quintet left as something else. Sitting in the grass behind the Lands End stage a couple of hours after their set (where they played to one of their biggest crowds in a brief shared history), the band couldn’t go more than five minutes without an interruption from another performer, label rep or radio production assistant.

MisterWives
WATERS, CRUISR

7:30 p.m., Oct. 19
The Fillmore
Tickets: $22.50.

Half of the Polo Field was filled for MisterWives’ set at 1 p.m., and they used the opportunity to make a strong impression – that of a happy family and possible second coming of a certain SoCal female-fronted pop-ska quartet.

Perhaps now’s a good time to mention the band, which brings its Scrapbook Tour to the Fillmore on Monday, are huge fans of No Doubt and coincidentally include a dating couple – vocalist Mandy Lee and drummer Etienne Bowler, not unlike a former relationship between Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal.



“We’re going to show Tony Kanal and Gwen that we’re not walking through spider webs, you know?” Lee joked.

Like much of the conversation, Bowler and bassist William Hehir (guitarist Marc Campbell and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Blum sat this one out) followed Lee with zingers of their own.

“There’s no tragic kingdoms coming,” Bowler said. “It’s only going to be a bunch of love.”

In 2012, Lee waitressed at a New York restaurant, where she once actually served Tony Kanal, No Doubt’s bassist – “I made him a latte and by the time I got to him, the whole latte spilled out.”

After high school, the 17-year-old skipped college and moved out on her own to work to be able to afford 2 a.m. recording studio sessions. The middle of the night was the only time she had available or could afford.



MisterWives: Tongue firmly in cheek

At Outside Lands, I met up with the entire band and then had a quick picnic with vocalist Mandy Lee, drummer Etienne Bowler and bassist Will Hehir. These guys are completely down to earth and fun to be around. Let me put it this way: MisterWives are not as stuck up as, perhaps, they should be.

Are all of you actually from New York or is New York just where you got together?

Mandy Lee: We’re actually all from New York. Except our guitarist (Marc Campbell) is from Scotland. That’s the only thing that throws us off. I’m from Queens.
Etienne Bowler: I’m from the Bronx.
Will Hehir:  Queens.
Lee:  We’ve got Staten Island. We’re literally every borough but Brooklyn. We’re an odd bunch of people.
Bowler: We’re the ugly duckling in the group (of New York bands).

The Our Own House album cover has five animals inside a tree house.  What are the animals representing?

Lee: Our spirit animals, which were in the EP and also the album and will probably be a recurring theme with our album artwork because it’s more fun to live vicariously through your spirit animal than have your face plastered on an album cover.
Hehir: If I could be a dinosaur, I would totally be a dinosaur.
Lee: He’s the dino, I’m the elephant.
Bowler: I’m the octopus. Hummingbird is our guitar player and a squirrel is our keyboardist, multi-instrumentalist—
Lee: —who loves squirrels. He’s got a bowtie, too. He wears only bow ties.

Are these animals going to make an appearance going forward?

Lee: I think so. Yeah, it’s going to always be a theme, I think. I don’t know.  … We don’t like being in front of the camera.
Hehir: If you could put fictitious animals there instead of us, excellent.
Bowler: It works a lot better. They’re much better looking than, well, me.
Lee: They definitely are.

No Doubt is a huge influence for you. What about other influences?

Lee: For me, definitely Aretha Franklin. I grew up on a lot of Motown, Otis Redding, then Stevie Nicks and Janis Joplin. I like a lot of chicks who are like, “Fuck the system.” It’s got soul, I like soul, anything that’s got soul.
Bowler: Rage Against The Machine?
Lee: Yeah, them too, they’re great.
Bowler: I grew up on a lot of band-oriented projects like The Police, No Doubt, even punk stuff like Blink-182, Green Day, with great drummers.
Hehir: Yeah, and it’s obviously been awesome to just be able to go on tour with a lot of bands that we love like The Royal Concept, Half Moon Run…
Lee: Walk The Moon. When we first started … that was a band that we looked up to. … This is something that we aspired to be. Now, we get to hang out with them at festivals and they tell us that our show is inspiring. It’s just like, “What?” Everything comes full circle.
Bowler: We’re pretty sure that we’re just making all this up. We’re really in a mental institution and someone’s tying us down.
Lee: This is not real life.

On the members returning to their roots after MisterWives:

Bowler: Music is going to only last so long, you know? So at the end of music; we’re planning our next career.
Lee: Yeah, we want to open up a restaurant.

You could wait your own tables!

Lee: Yeah, bring us back to our roots, you know?Hehir: I would burn water. I don’t know how to do any of that stuff.
Lee: He cuts the onions because he has no soul. Will cuts the onions because it doesn’t make him cry. You know how if you open an onion and you’re hysterical and every human reacts that way? He’s the only person I know that does not react. I always force him to cut the onions for me.
Bowler: I’ve also never seen Will sick in the three years I’ve known you.

Maybe you’re like the Bruce Willis character in “Unbreakable.”

Hehir: Yeah, shit. I might be. I always think that it’s the “Three Stooges” syndrome, that there’s so many things that should be killing me that they all get stuck in a door frame and they don’t kill me. I stole that from “The Simpsons.”

At first, she had no money for furniture, but realized her bare apartment was perfectly suited to host a party. Hehir played bass in an ‘80s cover band that performed at the party, and the two hit it off instantly. A month later, he was her roommate.

Bowler, Hehir’s friend, happened to work at another restaurant down the block and soon joined their fledgling trio. They kept their day jobs for another year, which Lee describes – in thick Queens accent as, “A year serving your soy bacon cheeseburgers and then we realized we could play music really well together.” And about that accent? “You should meet my mother.”

The three began playing around the city, usually at the now-closed Canal Room. Just prior to the show that would go on to launch their career, they added Bowler’s friends Blum and Campbell, the Scotland native who is the only member not originally from one of the New York boroughs. The show drew the attention of the people who would become the band’s booking agent, manager and indie record label Photo Finish. They were offered a deal right after walking off stage.

The name “MisterWives” is a gender-flipped play on words of the Mormon practice – Lee is married to the other male members of the band. In a way, she sits at the head of the table. She is the primary driving force both musically and lyrically.

“It’s definitely humbling to be working and sitting with someone who is as talented and just literally puts everything into it,” Hehir said.

Lee writes melody and lyrics on a keyboard, and brings songs to the band already thought out, but she’s uncomfortable taking so much credit for the band’s quick rise.

“Mandy is one of the few remaining songwriters and singers that actually does everything,” Bowler said. “The band just plays parts around it. She is the heart and soul of the music. It is very rare in today’s age to be both.”

MisterWives released an EP, Reflections, in early 2014. The same-named getting-over-a-relationship single quickly became a hit. Then they got to work on a debut, which would become February’s Our Own House.

The album name has dual meanings. The first is the metaphorical belonging the members feel with each other. The second is the tree house in which Lee wrote most of the songs.

Experiencing writer’s block, Lee secluded herself with a notebook and a keyboard in a tree house Bowler built with his mother in high school. She was mostly uninterrupted, other than her boyfriend’s mother stopping by to offer homemade smoothies and snacks. She wrote the album within two weeks.

Since the release of the album, MisterWives has been on the road nearly nonstop. Traveling inspired the band to use their shared passion of food to compile a cookbook of interesting recipes, a concept that started off as a joke but became real somewhere along the line. Lee is vegan, while several other band members are vegetarian. Hehir had to be persuaded to give up meat after moving in with her. The band is also making a tour scrapbook and will raffle it off, with proceeds going to charity Food Not Bombs.

“Music and food are very similar things,” Lee said. “They make you happy, they’re therapeutic (and) good for your soul.”

In the entire time the band has been together, Hehir said, they have not had a single fight – despite never spending more than two days at a time apart. Even with Lee and Bowler, whose relationship was frowned upon by some in the beginning, no major disagreements have emerged.

“As long as she doesn’t break up with me, we’re cool,” Bowler joked.

Hehir (the sneaky one), saw the benefit in a break-up: “It’s actually good for me, though, because then I get two Christmases,” he said. “Now, I can go to dad’s house and mom’s house and it’s going to be awesome.”

His thought was quickly nixed by Lee.

“We’re going to prove everybody wrong; that you can be in a band and have a healthy relationship and love each other forever,” she said.

MisterWives, Mandy Lee, Will Hehir, Jesse Bluhm, Etienne Bowler

MisterWives, courtesy.

Follow Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.

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