Company of Thieves are fast becoming one of the most buzzed about bands of 2009 for their literary and pop culture references, catchy guitar hooks and their singer’s killer vocals. Bethany had a chance to catch up with Company of Thieves’ guitarist Marc Walloch. Check out the interview below: 
Bethany, PopWreckoning: How are you doing today?
Marc Walloch, Company of Thieves: Good, we just rolled out of our hotel and are driving to Austin right now.
PW: Cool, you guys going to SXSW?
MW: No. We were kind of bummed that we weren’t able to book a show there. We’re going to play El Paso.
PW: That will still be fun.
MW: Yeah
PW: So how did your band form?
MW: Hugely through mutual friends all around the same time. We all came from other bands that we were in for many years before this and those all kind of broke up around the same time. Genevieve [Schatz] and I kind of met through a mutual friend of ours going to school at Columbia College at the time that I knew. She brought us together and there became friendships. We were hanging out every night, listening to music just for fun. Mike [Ortiz]’s old band used to play with Genevieve’s old band and that’s how they came together. Genevieve actually met me at Union Station, which is the same place where she met Mike a few months later and he told her that his band just broke up a few days before and she was looking for a drummer. It all just fell into place at the same time.
PW: So with Ordinary Riches, you kind of did that as DIY originally, but then you got the opportunity to record and re-release it with Wind-Up.
MW: Well, we didn’t really re-record it. We left it as it is pretty much. The only thing that we did was just do radio edits.
PW: Oh, I thought you did add some more like keys to the album?
MW: Well, when we were working on the album, we had a bass player at the time. We went through several line-up changes. We had an original bass player on the recorder and then we had a friend play keys for us and then we just went through several different line-up changes with bass players and other players. Right now we have some friends who have been playing with us as well like Bob Buckstaff has been playing bass.
PW: In the studio you guys worked with Sean O’Keefe. What was it like to work with a person who has worked with artists like Fall Out Boy?
MW: He’s known for these big bands, but it’s not his style at all. He works with a lot of bands in Chicago that are much more organic sounding, and that’s just the kind of style he likes recording. So we knew right away that he wasn’t going to change our music anymore than we wanted it to be changed. He was going to help guide us and help structure everything and get the right sounds that we were going to need to be on the same page with. We knew it was going to be a good match from the beginning.
PW: Living in Chicago, do you guys ever worry about ever getting typecast with all the other pop bands that are coming out of there?
MW: Like right now?
PW: Well, like right now a lot of people associate Chicago with like the Fueled by Ramen sort of bands.
MW: Yeah, there’s definitely that scene, and we’ve never been a part of that from the beginning, so I don’t think anyone would ever put us into that category at all. It’s just a completely different style of music and a completely different style of doing things. You know? Like all those bands kind of have their own way of doing things and how they get to where they’re at, but just never followed any guide lines. We just did our own thing. We never had specific plans, just an idea of what we wanted to do and what we wanted to do with our music, so we wouldn’t be stuck in a specific genre.
PW: I heard that a fan got you signed to Wind-Up records. What happened there and do you know this fan?
MW: No, actually we played SXSW last year and through mutual friends of our manager, we met an attorney, who is actually our attorney right now, Mark Lieberman, and he knew some labels. So a month later we were going to New York, this was last April, and he invited some labels out to some shows we were playing and one of them ended up being Wind-Up. And the A&R, Diana Meltzer, she loved it right away and wanted to sign us. So it took some months of communicating back and forth and we signed to them.
PW: On the album Ordinary Riches you guys have a lot of references, especially to Oscar Wilde. How did you all find a mutual love for Oscar Wilde and decide to pursue that as a theme for the album?
MW: Basically, it wasn’t until Genevieve thoroughly explained where she was coming from with that. Mike and I have always been interested in lyrics and we understand the importance of knowing what the songs are about and where they’re coming from. I don’t get how some bands can go out there and play music and have no idea what they’re playing. It is important that everybody knows what is going on. So when we ask her about things and she explains them, it is kind of like, well with us the more we learn about things the more we realize we agree and are on the same page.
The thing about Oscar Wilde that is so great is that we share his perspective and humor in social situations. You know that quirky and awkwardness about different sorts of people in those situations. That’s one aspect of it. Then the title of the record is from an Oscar Wilde quote. It basically goes back to when we were talking about Sean O’Keefe. We knew that we didn’t know what we were doing at the time and we didn’t know a title or if we had a title. We knew that we just wanted to do whatever we were doing and not have anyone mold it into something else. That quote is, “Ordinary Riches can be stolen. Real riches cannot.†That’s just basically saying, you can’t really take what’s yours and what you’re passionate about. This is who we are and this how we want to be presented and that just kind of fit in with how we wanted to be represented at the time. We just all agreed and were on the same page with it.
PW: That is really cool. I also really enjoyed the music video for the song “Oscar Wildeâ€. Was that your guys’ idea to have that Rushmore theme or the music director’s?
MW: Thank you. Yeah, well there wasn’t even going to be a music video. It was just going to be this promotional thing and we were like, “What are trying to do with this? Why don’t we just do a fun video?†And the director that we were working with liked shooting in the same style as movies we liked. So we were talking about what we wanted it to look like. We didn’t want it to look lame. We wanted it to be very loose and fun. We wanted to do some wacky looking scenes and cool visuals.
We’re all really into Wes Anderson and how his films look and how his sets look. Our director was like, “That’s my favorite director. It’s funny you mention that.†He came back to us and said we could do the intro to Rushmore and have us be all the clubs. And we thought that was a great idea. It’s fun because that tied into the whole thing we were talking to and with “Oscar Wildeâ€, it just fit. 
PW: Where else do you draw inspiration from?
MW: Everything. Musical artists, places we’ve been to, people we’ve known, mostly. A lot of Genevieve’s lyrics come from dreams or real life experiences. Musically, it is from everywhere.
We have our main influences that we’ve grown up on that we love. That’s kind of like any kind of music we hear and we like, we try to incorporate a piece of that. We’re always trying to challenge ourselves, do different things and never be pigeonholed into a certain structure or formula.
PW: Who are some of the people that you’re listening to now or reading now?
MW: Right now, we’ve been listening to a lot of Dr. Dog and Pedro the Lion. We go back to a lot of our old favorites like Wilco, Radiohead and the Beatles. There’s this new guy that we’ve all grown to like on this tour that we heard at a record store. His name is Nathan Davis. It’s just a great jazz record that came out in the 70s that no one has ever really heard of. It’s really hard to say. We have seven people traveling with us and seven different iPods get thrown on every day, so there’s a lot of music and it is just hard to really narrow it down.
PW: That’s awesome that you cite a lot of jazz artists. You don’t often hear a new band citing jazz.
MW: Yeah. Everyone has an appreciation for it. It’s really cool.
PW: What’s next for you guys after this tour?
MW: That’s a good question. We thought we were going to come home in April, but we’re not going to come home until much later. The closest we get to home is we booked a show for a suburb outside of Chicago and right after that we’re doing another video for “Pressure†that we’ll be doing for two days. The next day we’re driving to Canada to meet with some executives in our label’s office in Toronto. Then we’re going to New York to play some store openings and do another promotional video. Then we’re going home. April’s already filled up and at the end of April we’re going out to San Diego and do some radio shows actually. They’ve been picking up “Oscar Wilde†on the West Coast quite a bit. So we’ll play up the West Coast and then come home finally. Rest up a bit. The plan is to just jump on some festivals and whatever opportunities we can for the summer. We’ll probably go on a full tour about mid-summer.
PW: Good. Well, I hope you guys find some rest at some point. Thanks so much for talking to us.
MW: Thanks for having me.
Company of Thieves: website | myspace | Ordinary Riches review | CoT Contest
