June 21, 2008
Relient K – John Warne, Ethan Luck

Cathy: For the record, can you state your name and what you do in the band?
John: I’m John and I play the bass.
Ethan: I’m Ethan and I play the drums.

C: Relient K has now been around for 10 years. How have things changed for you in the last decade?
J: Fuel prices have gone up, for sure.
E: And real estate! It is not a buyer’s market right now.
J: Mini golf scores have gone way down, which is nice. But in the band, more specifically… A lot of member changes, but we’ve got the perfect line-up right now. Ethan just joined a couple months ago.
E: I’m the newbie of the group.
J: I’m also somewhat of a newbie – about 4 years ago I joined.

C: On your new release, The Bird and the Bee Sides, each member had the opportunity to write their own song. What song did you write, and what inspired it?
J: I wrote a song called “The Last, The Lost, The Least”. It’s about… I don’t know! I haven’t had to explain it before, so I don’t know what to say… It’s about me becoming more aware of people that are less fortunate than myself and just kind of responding to that need.
E: I wrote a song called “No Reaction”. It’s kind of a silly, punk rock / ska song. It’s about trying to write a song that the other 4 guys are happy with… and I failed at it. That’s what the lyrics are about. It’s just kind of tongue-in-cheek.
J: Yea, he shows us a song and we have no reaction, nothing to say.

C: You guys created an online scavenger hunt for your fans in order for them to access free b-side downloads. How did you guys come up with the idea to do this?
J: I don’t even know who came up with the idea!
E: I think it was [Matt] Thiessen… or management maybe?
J: It wasn’t Thiessen. But, I don’t know. We’re trying to make it not too hard, not too easy.
E: It’s just another way for fans to get songs we couldn’t fit on the album. We wanted it to be longer, but we could only fit 27 songs onto one CD. We didn’t want to do 2 discs. It’s another way for people to get more than what we’re putting out.
C: Why did you guys call it an EP if it has so many songs on it?
E: The first half of the disc is the EP, the second half is the b-sides. Even though there’s 13 new songs, it’s still only 31 minutes. I think if it’s 32 minutes or less then it counts as an EP. –laughs-
C: So you do it by time, not number of tracks.
E: Exactly! Quantity over quality, for sure.

C: Blood:Water Mission is joining you on Warped Tour this year. What led you to the decision to bring them along?
J: I think it’s been prickling for awhile. We had an opportunity to partner with Habitat For Humanity on a couple tours previous to this, and it was a really positive experience. We kind of just wanted to keep that going; partnering with other organizations that are just doing good things for the world. Blood:Water is definitely one of those. We just want to keep stuff like that going.

C: What do you look most forward to this summer on Warped Tour?
E: Showers. Air conditioning.
J: I’m interested in checking out all of these bands I’ve never heard of. There are so many bands on this tour I’m not aware of yet. I’ve already gone past a lot of bands and thought they sounded awesome. Finding out new music is a good thing.
E: There’s a big list of bands that I haven’t seen live before that I’m excited about seeing, like The Bronx. GBH should be fun – those guys have been around since the 70’s. There are a lot of good punk bands I’m real excited to see.

C: How much influence do you think you have on your audience? Do you think the messages in your songs are ever misinterpreted?
J: I would say that anytime you put lyrics in front of a bunch of people, they are going to be misinterpreted in a number of ways. You can’t really worry about that so much. I see a lot of myself in the fans that we have. Sometimes they’ll get star struck - which is ridiculous to us because we’re normal dudes, we’re total dorks. But I remember being 14/15 years old, really looking up to dudes in bands.
E: I still do.
J: Yea! Absolutely. We just want to be as positive as we can.

C: If you had the opportunity to go back and choose a different name for the band, what would it be and why?
E: I would go back and rename our band “Metallica”. I would go back and copyright that name before 1981.
J: Because it fits our band, for sure.
E: Totally!
J: I don’t know, I’d be really bad at naming bands. No band name really sounds cool.
E: The Clash? That’s really cool.
J: Okay! I stand corrected.
E: I know I’m a huge fan of them, but it is just a cool sounding name… “The Clash”! That’s cool.

C: If you could choose any animal to be Relient K’s mascot, what would it be?
E: I think we had one… We kind of had a buffalo for a little while. We had one on stage. Well, not a real one. A plastic one.
J: I would say a braying donkey. A really annoying animal that you can’t get to do anything. It drags it’s feet all the time but it’s really loud. That’s us.
E: I would say an alligator. Because it’s vicious and fierce. If anyone was ever messing with us we could just open up its cage, and out comes an alligator…
J: Put a moat around the bus, then we'd be safe.
E: Put a moat on stage!

C: If you were stuck on a deserted island with no food and no one but your band members, who would you eat first and why?
J: Well…
E: Just say me, because I’m the biggest.
J: Ethan is good eatin’.
E: I definitely wouldn’t pick [Jon] Schneck first because he’s all bone.
J: Yea, it’s definitely slim pickings on Schneck.
E: And Thiessen. Does our road crew count, or is it just the band?
C: I’d say just the band.
E: Shoot. I may just eat myself first. Maybe [Matt] Hoops. I’ll go with Hoops.
J: Yea, Hoops. Everyone in the world plays guitar, that’s easy to replace.

C: Closing Statements?
E: We’re not good at closing statements. Thank you for interviewing us.