{"id":12090,"date":"2016-12-25T05:30:56","date_gmt":"2016-12-25T10:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=12090"},"modified":"2016-12-20T08:05:11","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T13:05:11","slug":"my-holiday-gift-to-you-the-verve-pipe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2016\/12\/25\/my-holiday-gift-to-you-the-verve-pipe\/","title":{"rendered":"My Holiday Gift to You: The Verve Pipe"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of you who observe and\/or celebrate the holiday, Merry Christmas! Here’s my gift to you.<\/p>\n

Oftentimes when I do an interview, worthwhile content doesn’t find its way into the finished story. Space considerations often dictate that; other times, we go off on a tangent that \u2013 while very interesting \u2013 doesn’t fit neatly into the subject matter of the story.<\/p>\n

Whenever I can, I write multiple stories (for multiple papers or magazines) based on a single interview. But sometimes opportunities to do that are limited or unavailable.<\/p>\n

With that explainer out of the way, here’s an excerpt from my recent conversation with Brian Vander Ark<\/strong> of The Verve Pipe<\/strong>. You may recall their ’90s hit \u201cThe Freshmen.\u201d You may also recall that some people confused the Michigan band with Richard Ashcroft<\/strong>‘s similarly-name band The Verve<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Yeah, well Vander Ark has some thoughts on that \u2026 this is too good not to share.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

BRIAN VANDER ARK<\/strong>: We get way too many requests for \u201cBittersweet Symphony.\u201d In fact I would say it happens once every three shows. Somebody will come up afterwards and say, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you play \u201cBittersweet Symphony\u201d? The worst was \u2026 we just played in Arlington, Texas and this little girl who was probably four years old made a big beautiful sign that said \u201cPlay ‘Bittersweet Symphony!’\u201d It was like, \u201cAww \u2026 do I want to strangle your parents right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

BILL KOPP<\/strong>: It\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, great song. But not us.\u201d \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

BVA<\/strong>: It happens all the time. And we\u2019ve played around with it at kid shows, too, you know. We poke a lot fun at ourselves; all of our stories are about shenanigans when we grew up Every now and then we\u2019ll play the keyboard riff just to be funny.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure we have a better sense of humor about it than Richard Ashcroft has! When our songs were [on the charts] within months of each other, I\u2019m sure that [The Verve] got the worst of it. We weren’t the \u201ccool\u201d band, and our teeny-bopper fans were on their message boards all the time screaming about how much they loved it. And I can\u2019t imagine \u2026 his head would explode if somebody requested \u201cThe Freshman\u201d at a Verve show. Oh my God! I would like to be there for that.<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: The upside is that you never got in trouble with The Rolling Stones<\/strong>‘ lawyers for taking stuff off of a recording and using it in your song.<\/span><\/p>\n

BVA<\/strong>: They had a lot of bad luck, that band, because of the name, with Verve Records.<\/p>\n

We had just named [our] band in 1992 and I saw in \u2026 it might have been two music magazines from over in England … this advertisement for A Storm in Heaven<\/i> by The Verve, so we thought, \u201cOh my God, there\u2019s already a band called Verve!\u201d And then we were like, \u201cWell, we\u2019ve got to change it.\u201d And then we thought, \u201cWell, what are the chances that they might get big and we might get big?\u201d Really, literally, it was in March. It was crazy.<\/p>\n

So once they got sued and had to add the \u201cThe\u201d to their name, we thought, \u201cWell, we\u2019re pretty safe. We\u2019ve already got \u201cThe\u201d in there.\u201d The fact that we weren\u2019t sampling or doing anything like that we felt pretty confident that we were ok. We considered changing the name right up to the release of Villains, <\/i>but decided against it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Verve Pipe feature-proper will be on Musoscribe in January. — bk<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those of you who observe and\/or celebrate the holiday, Merry Christmas! Here’s my gift to you. Oftentimes when I do an interview, worthwhile content doesn’t find its way into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12091,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,62],"tags":[2945,2320],"class_list":["post-12090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-rawk","tag-brian-vander-ark","tag-verve-pipe","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12092,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12090\/revisions\/12092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}