thecorrespondence:

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Justin Pierre of Motion City Soundtrack and the next 45 minutes produced one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever done. From the 4 Albums, 2 Nights tour, to their upcoming album, and even their exciting new project with Drexel University, there was never a dull moment. Check out the interview below.

Hi, my name is Justin Pierre. I play guitar and sing in the band Motion City Soundtrack. Yayyyy!!

How would you describe your genre to people who had never listened to your music before?

I don’t know, I just kind of tell people that we’re a rock band. I think a lot of people think of us as “pop-punk.” That is the phrase that gets thrown at us and I think that’s because we spent many years on Warped Tour, playing Warped Tour and we’ve sort of been associated with bands that have also had that label, whether it’s Blink 182, The All American Rejects, or Fall Out Boy, you know those are the sort of bands we went on tour with. So I don’t know. It neither pisses me off nor excites me, that label –pop-punk. I mean it is what it is and if people want to call us that, that’s cool with me. But I usually say “I’m in a rock band,” because that’s very generic and just sort of the simple answer.

What got you into music, originally?

Man, I don’t know. I guess this could be totally crazy. I think I was always a fan of music, it was always around my house. I know my dad had a lot of records and as a small child, wearing diapers, he has pictures of me listening to headphones of his Beach Boys albums and Beatles albums and stuff. So I think I’ve always listened to music but as far as playing music, I sadly attempted to play the saxophone when I was in grade school and it was not so good. But I had this friend who played guitar and we were both into Metallica so we decided to start a metal band where he played guitar and I played sax and it didn’t go so well. But, yeah I think it was kind of, I’ll have to say Metallica made me want to play guitar. So this was around the time, before the album “End Justice For All” but somewhere around there was when I got a guitar and I basically just taught myself how to play by reading their tablature books. So I learned how to play guitar to Metallica tablature books. And then I just, I don’t know, I started playing and in high school I got into different music, I guess it would be considered alternative but it was more of the weird, indie music that sort of blew up in the wake of Nirvana blowing up. So bands like Super Chunk, Pavement, Pixies, Nirvana, Jawbox, Fugazee, things of that sort throughout high school. Then after that I ended up, I had one high school band that was pretty good and we ended up playing like in Duluth, Minneapolis, and St. Paul, Minnesota - those three places. And I ended up playing a lot of shows with a band that Josh Cain, who’s the guitarist in Motion City Soundtrack, was in. So we sort of became friends that way and then when our bands broke up we ended up forming Motion City Soundtrack in 1997. So that’s kind of how I got to be in Motion City Soundtrack.

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