For a band on tour, "closing time" may mean the concert's over, but for these lads...the party's just beginning. At least that's how Semisonic's lead singer-songwriter Dan Wilson sees it. "Once the doors open and everyone goes out...that's when the story starts!" says Wilson of the band's hit single "Closing Time." The tune originally was penned as a set-closer to thank Semisonic fans at last call, and it was engineer Bob Clearmountain who recognized its potential as "the one" to take this band mainstream. Clearmountain was right, and the song launched the Minneapolis threesome's career, introducing their sophomore album Feeling Strangely Fine to modern rock programmers nationwide. It was a nice turn of events for Wilson and bandmate John Munson, whose previous band Trip Shakespeare never quite achieved "big break" status. The trio, originally formed in 1992 under the moniker Pleasure, also features keyboardist/ drummer Jacob Slichter. Semisonic can be seen in an interactive video interview and live performance in Issue No. 19 of the LAUNCH CD-ROM. The full transcript of Wilson's conversation with LAUNCH executive editor Dave DiMartino follows.

LAUNCH:
"Closing Time" was a breakthrough hit for your band. Were you conscious of the fact that this particular song was so special?

DAN:
I thought "Closing Time" was going to be for the fans. I had been trying to write a closer for our set that would be our way to say, "We love you, the show's over, we salute you, now get out of here." I gave up on the project because I came up with a lot of different cheesy things. One night, I was home and the whole song just popped into my head in about 20 minutes--except for a couple of lines I needed to work on. At the time, I thought, "Great. Now we have our closer." I didn't really have any thoughts like, "This could be a single."

LAUNCH:
Now that you mention it, that song is a perfect set-closer, especially for a bar band.

DAN:
Yeah, it's got this after-hours vibe about it. The idea is "closing time" might be the end of bar hours, or the end of a concert, or the end of one thing--but the doors open, everyone goes out, and that's when the story starts. I'm a late-night person when we're on tour, so I sort of think of closing time as mid-day.

LAUNCH:
Before Semisonic, you were in the band Trip Shakespeare. How does your current experience compare to your past experience in that band?

DAN:
Trip Shakespeare was sort of alternative rock before there was any alternative rock radio or alternative rock festivals or alternative rock whatever. And I think because of that we were thought of as a "cult" favorite thing. We never really intended to be a cult band. We wanted to make great music and be popular. Semisonic is actually really different musically from Trip Shakespeare, but it's kind of similar because we're just trying to make as good of music as we can. I don't think of it as an exclusive thing where only the cool need apply. That's bullshit.

LAUNCH:
I read somewhere that your original goal with Semisonic was to make "greasy, horizontal dance music." Can you explain?

DAN:
Well, we used to have this band called Pleasure, which was like a cover band. We learned all these pretty cheesy '70s covers like "Dancing In The Moonlight," "Drift Away" by Dobie Gray and "Erotic City" by Prince. Good stuff with a beat, but definitely kind of funny stuff. Pleasure was that. Meanwhile, I was writing some original songs with Jake, and suddenly we had a record contract, but this lawsuit came down about our name. Apparently there already was a band named Pleasure. We didn't care about changing the name because our version of Pleasure wasn't intended for the ages anyway. Plus, we also had Semisonic, which came from this brainstorm I had to make trippy, sampled makeout music--just stuff that could serve for someone who brought somebody home to their apartment and needed some kind of sexy groove that sort of stayed in the background but encouraged a sexual kind of situation. As Semisonic, we were doing our very best to do some greasy, slow-groove, horizontal dance music. Once we got the offer for the lawsuit from the other band named Pleasure, we just adopted Semisonic and put everything we did under that name.

LAUNCH:
How did you like working with producer Nick Launay?

DAN:
Nick was the only producer that I talked to who thought it was a good idea to skip the assembly-line process that everyone makes rock records with. I was telling everybody, "I don't want to go in and do all the drums in the first week, bass second week, guitars third week, vocals fourth week, mix fifth week..." If you work that way, you might as well be popping rivets in a car. That's not making music, that's an assembly line. I was telling producers, "I want to do an album where we don't have a plan, don't have a deadline, don't have an assembly line get-the-rock-out-to-the-people-in-minimum-time approach." I didn't want to do this and Nick was the only guy who said, "Oh, great. Tremendous. I'll come to Minneapolis. This better be good, do you have any songs?" Everyone else said, "That's cool, but not really practical." Nick, being the old-school punker, was into doing it in a really chaotic way, which is the vision I had for the record. And Bob Clearmountain is the opposite of punk. He's a sonic genius. It seemed like a weird but cool combination to have him mix the record.

LAUNCH:
Are you into punk?

DAN:
Rancid, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, I don't qualify as a punk--punk passed me by. Put it this way, years later I rediscovered some of the punk things. But the first even vaguely punk thing I got interested in was Elvis Costello and everyone tells me that's sellout, bullshit corporate rock. So...

LAUNCH:
When did you decide you could be a musician as a full-time job?

DAN:
I think when you're a musician and you decide to do music for a living it's because your day gig is going to fire you because you keep going out of town for shows. They give you an ultimatum, you're desperate for money--your day gig is like, "Hey, get serious, quit f--king around. You can't do this band thing forever. Quit so you can work full-time." Sometimes, a musician is lucky enough to quit the day gig and scrape by. It's not like I sat down with that book What Color Is Your Parachute? and filled out all the blanks until I came up with "rock musician." It just sort of happened.

LAUNCH:
Would you call yourself a pop band?

DAN:
I guess so. We're a rock band, but we're also kind of puss, so it's a pop band. I think that's because we don't look like a hairy rhino coming to hump everybody and then kill them. No, I don't know. The pop thing comes up because we do some stuff that is gentle along with the other stuff we do. I'm going to sound like an arrogant f--k when I say this, but I think we're a rock band and I write f--king great songs. That's why people think "singer-songwriter" or people think "pop," because most great rock bands have really good songs, but most of all the rest of the rock bands don't have songs at all. It might be about the groove or the types of noise they make. We've got a sound, but, it's like U2, they're a pop band. They've embraced it in a weird way. They're a pop band because their songs are great even though obviously it's rock 'n' roll.

LAUNCH:
Name something you regret doing. DAN:
I don't regret anything. Well, I pulled the chair out from underneath my Sunday school teacher when I was a kid. He fell and hurt his back. I was bummed out about that. That was really horrible. He was okay though. That was bad judgment that haunts you your whole lifetime.

LAUNCH:
If you could back up any band in the world, who would you choose?

DAN:
If we could pick it up, Bjork would be amazing. Joni Mitchell would be amazing. I think we'd get our ass kicked, but I'd love to play with Prince. But we'd totally get our ass kicked, and from what I understand, we'd also get phone calls in the wee hours of the morning, "You missed that guitar intro...$200." We'd get fined like crazy. But those are the people I respect.

LAUNCH:
In a fight between Ray Davies and Pete Townshend, who would win?

DAN:
I think Ray Davies is more of an artist. He might be in physical danger, but his tunes are better than Townshend's.

LAUNCH:
Now that you've had some success, people write about you and talk about you. Have you discovered some interesting things about the way people perceive of you?

DAN:
It's hard for me to know how people perceive of what we do. One thing I've heard or read is that some of our songs sound like pop encyclopedias, as though we're these really clever guys putting all these hints and clues regarding the history of rock into our songs. Which isn't true at all. We think we're coming up with these really great original ideas and there's no ironic quotation mark around anything we do. I don't care if people hear it that way--it doesn't bother me. It's funny when people say they had to dig through the album for all the references. I'm like, "Great, let me know when you find them, so we can tell our lawyer in case they're dangerously close to something else." But I think we work a lot more unconsciously than that.

LAUNCH:
How have things been going for you in your hometown now that you've "made it big?"

DAN:
In Minneapolis, we're partly perceived as that band that's always gone on tour. I have a lot of friends who are musicians in Minneapolis. Sometimes if you have a deal and you get a good show, the other musicians think of you as those guys who are in their way. But generally these days, the scene is really positive. There's not a mood of people competing for a limited pie slice. It's a supportive and a good-feeling time, I think.

LAUNCH:
Are you very computer-savvy? Do you ever use the Web?

DAN:
I'm totally into what the Internet has done for us to be able to keep in contact with our fans. I'm a little bit overwhelmed right now by the fact that there's no way we can maintain it. We're just getting too much email. Everyday there's a dozen pictures of people in their backyard with their dog that they want us to download and look at. There's 50 people who want to be our warm-up band. It's gone beyond the fanatics asking questions about what we do, and it's gone into this phase where everybody's trying to market themselves and we're seen as this big catcher's mitt that they can throw things at. Just like all the other sites on the Internet. I would love to maintain--maybe have a cool website. I don't have a CD-ROM player, so I can't do any of the fancy stoner computer graphic stuff I like, but I like the fact that in a really basic way the Net allows us to get information out to people and stay in touch to a certain degree with our roots.

by Dave DiMartino