Since the early 90s, Built To Spill has been revered as indie-rock royalty. After two albums on independent labels, the band was picked up by Warner Bros. but still managed to retain their indie integrity. In 2009, the band released There Is No Enemy (their fifth record for Warner and seventh over all), which could be their best album to date. They’ve stood their ground for almost 20 years, never once compromising their vision. Built To Spill may be singed to one of the largest record labels on the planet but they exist in their own world, making music on their terms.

In setting this interview up, I was told by Amanda and Warner Bros. that I’d be speaking to Brett. The thing is, there are two guys named "Brett" in Built To Spill. One is Brett Nelson, the bass player and brainchild behind their recent self-released Electronic Anthology Project EP, which is all synthed-out new wave versions of Built To Spill songs. The other is Brett Netson, the guitarist who is also in Caustic Resin. It would have been a pleasure to speak to either one, and I’m sure the issue of “which Brett are you?” has come up many times in the past, so my first question would be something they’ve heard before.

As it turned out, I spoke to Brett Netson who is an amazingly nice and open guy; and very funny, too. It’s hard to convey in text the inflections in his voice, but if you read carefully, you can figure it out. He also indirectly emphasized over the course of our chat that Built To Spill take what they do very seriously. Sure, they love making music, but they realize that they are in a position where their success, as they define it, depends on the band making the right decisions with regards to how the operate as artists and as a business.

REAX: Which “Brett” is this?
Brett: Netson, not Nelson (laughs)

REAX: I didn’t know which one I’d be getting. You folks are currently out on tour. How’s that going and what can we expect to see when you get down here?
Brett: It’s going pretty well. We did a lot of trips this summer. This is the uh, shit, third one. This trip we’re doing a lot of shows in smaller places, so it’s less comfortable but plenty of good, too. When we did that trip opening with Kings Of Leon, it was huge amphitheatres and all that. It paid really well (laughs). Now we’re going back to doing small clubs with small bands, which has its charm as well. It’s been pretty cool. The places where haven’t been in a long time are awesome ‘cause the people are super excited and psyched.

REAX: I noticed you are doing six Florida dates, which is almost unheard of for any touring band and we down here thank you profusely for that.
Brett:Yeah, yeah, yeah… it’s rough getting down in there.
You tend to loose a day going in or out, so bands kind of avoid it. It’s hard to do, but it’s also so easy to avoid.

REAX: I agree whole-heartedly sometimes.
(both laugh)
Brett: Yeah, yeah. It’s been a long time. So I’m kind of excited actually since I haven’t been there in so long.

REAX: We tend to get a lot bands that don’t make it through on their first round of touring or sometimes not even their second. But we get the “extra” tour. But they seem to play amazing shows. I’ve seen a lot of bands come through in that situation and we get spectacular, special set lists or stuff that hasn’t been played in while.
Brett: When I was with Caustic Resin, Tampa was great! We weren’t a huge draw anywhere, but Tampa was a riot.

REAX: So, you were not the “Brett” that was directly involved in the Electronic Anthology Project?
Brett: Correct.

REAX: Is there anything you can tell me about that?
Brett: Yeah, Brett Nelson pretty much did all the music himself. He’s sort of a fan of “new wave” music, that’s just kinda what he’s into. He just kinda did it on his own at his house and went over and had Doug re-sing ‘em. He’s just funny like that (laughs). He just kinda did it.

REAX: It’s fun stuff.
Brett: He sent emails of the songs to us and I was like “Whoa!” I was kinda blown away.

REAX: Part of me was secretly hoping that the whole tour would be just that, everybody with keyboards and no guitars.
Brett: (laughs) Maybe someday.

REAX: I’ve only seen you guys once previously and it was fantastic. I was completely blown away as I’ve been a big fan for a long time. But I had heard, and I’m not trying to touch on a sore subject… I had heard from so many people “Don’t go see Built To Spill live. It’s the most boring show you’re ever going to see. They just stand there, play and leave. And that’s it.” But that didn’t happen at all. It was amazing. Do you get any feedback from people in the same manner?
Brett: That might tell you more about the people who are saying that than it does about us. That just says more of what those people are expecting from a show. Built To Spill isn’t about wild posturing or any of that kind of crap. I think the people who come see us don’t really care about that kind of stuff. Well, obviously they don’t care about that kind of stuff because we don’t do it. You know, we just try to get to work and deliver the goods on the music. There’s a lot of guitar parts, you know?

REAX: Yeah.
Brett: That’s just what we’re into, making records with those kinds of guitar parts on ‘em where you got a basic really good song that sometimes Doug will write or sometimes the band will write or whatever. You’ve got a song. But that’s what we’re into, making these psychedelic, weird guitar parts that make the song happen. And just the way that is, logistically, you have to pay attention to what you are doing.

You’ve got to start the song and get to work and do those parts. You can’t jump around and act cool (laughs). We’re lucky that there are people that can enjoy coming to a show and hearing the music and not having a big sensational show. I mean, it’s sensational in its own way, I think, really. There’s three guitars going berserk the whole time. I don’t know, whatever. I went to see the Jesus Lizard?, too.

REAX: I went to see them a bunch of times back in the day, but it’s a completely different thing.
Brett: Well, they’ve got both things, which is cool. They’ve got all the intricate music with it and just one crazy guy that goes nuts.

REAX: I had the distinct pleasure of holding David Yow naked in my arms at a show once.
Brett: (laughs)

REAX: He rolled off the stage right into my arms and it was like catching a baby falling from a two-story window.
Brett: (laughs)

REAX: But he was all sweaty and gross.
Brett: I’m glad that you could look at that way.

REAX: I threw him back like he was a fish that was too small. I heaved him back onto the stage. I was maybe 20 years old at the time. I thought it was the greatest moment and the most disgusting thing that had ever happened to me.
Brett: Exactly! What more could you ask for?

(both laugh)

REAX: Not much more at that show.
Brett: But you know what I’m saying with all that?

REAX: Yeah.
Brett: There’s just different kinds of people that like different kinds of things. I really kinda wish there was something we could do, but there’s just not. Just like I said, the music ends up being kinda intricate as it is. That’s just what it is. In the future, if we think of something, we would do it. Like we did the video projections of the painting by Mike Scheer, the guy that does our record covers. Did you see that one?

REAX: I don’t think so.
Brett: It was all right. It wasn’t like super crazy, but we tried to do that. We’ll think of something again that we’ll try to do. We haven’t really thought of a good idea, something that we could do that wasn’t… It’s a huge pain in the ass doing that kind of stuff, you know; if you don’t hire a separate crew to do it.

REAX: Oh yeah, it’s a massive undertaking. Speaking of the music, what’s always kind of baffled me about Built To Spill is what genre to put you in. There’s so much going on. I hear lots of psychedelic influences, some country, some straight up pop music or whatever you want to call it; some rock and roll… there’s so much lumped in together. What does the band say, or what do you call it?
Brett: Well, I think that a lot of that comes from Doug where his main priority is like… Doug likes to write songs and make records, primarily, and so do I and so do all of us. Me and Doug became friends because of that. So when you start from that point, when you start from that kind of view of what music is all about; writing songs and making records, it lends itself to doing all those different things, using everything available to you to come up with as many different kinds of interesting songs that you can.

I always kind of looked at Doug as sort of a literary kind of writer or something. Not in a pretentious way at all, but like different books. You write different stories about different things and you use whatever textures and sensibilities are available. It’s not about a lifestyle, it’s about doing, you know, just making something nice. Making something that going to be enjoyable to people and will hopefully last several years past it’s release.

REAX: I think you’ve done that.
Brett: Just that kind of thing… we’re all in our formative years. We all started playing at a real young age. So we’re at the end of the 80’s when college radio was in the golden ear of college radio, the late 80s/early 90s, where it wasn’t just indie-rock. When you listened to all the college radio stations, they would play everything. You had all these stoner record collector people everywhere, Seattle, Portland. It was just kind of the thing. Back when there was a middle class in the United States. I don’t know, shit. Where people could afford to sit around and smoke pot and listen to records all the time. Ultimately, that’s the kind of lifestyle that we all have in common.

REAX: Back in the 90s, when a lot of indie bands were making the jump to major labels, a lot of them got dropped or broke up or it just didn’t work out. But you guys seemed to have carved out a little niche on Warner Bros. and just flourished and grown there. Is there anything that you’ve done with the approach of the band that been different than your peers?
Brett: All the record industry people, even if they mean well, it’s all about money. If you start getting into a situation where you’re dealing with a group of people and a company whose basic concern is making money… so they can steer you without them even knowing. And I don’t want to say that they are all horrible people ‘cause they’re not. We work with some really wonderful people at Warner Bros. But, there’s this inherent tendency to be steered in these weird, bad directions, you know? You’re constantly being pressured into doing things. Luckily, over the years, Doug has made some good decisions and turned down a lot of money to just be able to stay doing what we’re doing. You can do the TV commercials. You can do this or that. I don’t know if you remember around the mid-90s when all the Clear Channel “alternative rock” stations started coming out?

REAX: Yeah.
Brett: It was like they all just fell down from the sky and there was one in every town, “The X” this or that or something. A lot of people went ahead and had their records played on those stations. The climate with that whole thing, there’s no loyalty in that. Nobody really cares. It was just a corporate thing. By default, when your records get played with all those other horrible, horrible corporate alternative bands, just by default, you wind up being logged in with all that.

Poor old Beck, he got kinda sucked up into all that. And then things change and people look back and go “That was that, so fuck all that” and things keep changing. It’s a really complex and hard to understand thing. Once you start dealing with money, things get weird. As much as you can, if you just don’t take the money and concentrate on doing your own thing, making your own money at your own shows with your own people who like your records.

Maybe it’s a trust issue, sort of? If people feel like they can trust you as a band, as a person who makes their art for them, they’ll usually stick with you. And other people will come in and stick with you as well over time. I mean, that’s just been my experience. And that was with the bands that I liked, bands that I could trust to know that they aren’t fucking with you. We’re not fucking trying to fuck with anybody. We’re trying to do the thing, do the work, do the job and have a simple transaction: we work our asses off making the records and they work their ass off so they can buy our records. Simple.

REAX: Every time I put on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and “Car” comes on… Praise God that has never been in a Ford commercial.
Brett: Yeah, yeah. I know that Doug has turned down endless amounts of money.

REAX: I’m sure. I can just see advertising executives getting a hold of this song, drooling “This is perfect!”
Brett: It would ruin that song forever.

REAX: It’s just not gonna happen.
Brett: Totally. Doug is amazing. He’s got ribs of steel with that stuff. (laughs)

REAX: What’s up next for Built To Spill? Are there new songs in the works, a new album after the tour?
Brett: We did Europe with Dinosaur; we did the Kings Of Leon thing. We’re doing this small club thing and we’re gonna do the northwest. We’ve already started to work stuff out at sound checks. I think were gonna dive right in. The plan right now, which could change at any time, the plan right now is to try to dive in and see if we could whip up some songs and maybe record it kind of faster and see if we could come up with something different that way. It might come out like some sort of crazy guitar record that way. We’re going to go back to recording in Seattle with Phil Ek.

REAX: He’s one of my favorite contemporary producers. I guess “contemporary”…
Brett: We’d been making records with him for years and years and we did these last two with some other people. So we’re looking forward to going back to Seattle and recording with Phil. We’ll probably gonna work on that next summer and we may not tour that much. We’ve said that before and we’ve just ended up touring a lot anyways.

REAX: Is there anything else that you feel you need to share with the world that maybe no one knows about Built To Spill or anything at all?
Brett: We really love having people still come to our shows, its awesome. We feel lucky to still have people interested.

REAX: As long as you keep making good music, people are going to respond to it.
Brett: We will shit-can the whole thing if it ends up looking like it’s not gonna sound very good.