Warrior Soul

Space Age Playboys (Futurist)
An interview with vocalist Kory Clarke
by Chaz Thorndike

I’ve been a fan since like 1990 and shit so I’ll probably compare and contrast from the old days… What are you drinking anyway?
I’m going to have a Budweiser in a minute.

I got a half bottle of Captain Morgan’s in me so…
Really? You’re talking to the Captain tonight?

It’ll be a foursome, you and me, Captain, and Bud. All right, new album: Space Age Playboys. Your guitarist got a new haircut.
It’s a different guitar player. X Factor beamed himself into our lives in late ’93, and he went out on the Chill Pill tour in Europe with us.

But he didn’t record the album with you guys?
Not Chill Pill. We came back from the tour and started writing. We wrote and wrote and wrote, jamming, jamming, jamming, and we finally got into the studio and recorded it and we’ve been touring again.

What happened to the old guitarist guy?
I think he tried out for Nine Inch Nails.

All right, so different guitarist… I was way into the first album.
Last Decade Dead Century.

Yeah, it defined something and was the shit for me and the circle of friends I was hanging out with. It was exactly what we were going through. And now, like four or five years later, where are you coming from now? Can we still hook up like in 1990?
Did you bond with the new album?

I’m from a different place now and so are you.
So, do you think we do or we don’t?

I don’t know. I was really fucked up in 1990.
Well, I mean, we’re going through the same stuff. I think I’m just writing it down in different ways.

So where are you at now?
Well, each record that’s made is selecting from what we’re going through. That’s the honesty and the continuity. It’s just purity. It’s purity because when somebody’s saying the truth, it rings true. If you like people that sing like that, you’re definitely going to dig us.

Maybe I’m just talking shit, but in 1990, I bonded with you guys the way people bonded with Nirvana a couple of years ago. Why didn’t Kory and Warrior Soul make it the way like Cobain…
We weren’t from Seattle.

What about your last one, Chill Pill, wasn’t that on Geffen?
Mm-hmm.

Now you guys are on Futurist?
Right. Yeah, we can do what we need to do, and these guys will actually pay attention to us.

What’s the philosophy behind the label change?
They didn’t like us and we didn’t like them. It’s pretty much as simple as that. Anybody who says otherwise is full of shit. As far as perspectives and the new attitude, it’s just I think that Eddie Vedder and all those guys are singing about real issues and real problems and stuff like I was doing in ’89 and ’90. I think I accomplished what I wanted. Now we’re in New York, getting high, getting fucked up, and being with beautiful women, the government sucks, and it’s great to be in New York because we’re free. I think it’s good to react against big movements. I think that that’s the only way it can change. I don’t think what they’re doing sucks either. I think it’s good. It’s just, like, enough already.