Q&A: Interview with Brian Cook of These Arms Are Snakes
Pitch contributor Saby Reyes-Kulkarni recently caught up with current These Arms Are Snakes and Russian Circles (and former Botch) bassist Brian Cook. An edited transcript of that interview follows.
The Pitch: You like collaborating with other people, and These Arms Are Snakes likes to keep things fresh from album to album. What else are you into, creatively?
Brian Cook: I don’t know. I kinda like doing more simple, traditional song stuff from time to time because I don’t feel like there’s any pressure with that kind of stuff. I have a weakness for simple Americana-type stuff. But I’d also really like to do something obnoxiously ugly again. Even though both Russian Circles and These Arms Are Snakes are pretty abrasive, something that’s not melodic at all, really brash and ugly would be really fun.
When you were in the band Roy with Dave Verellen from Botch, an interviewer quoted you as saying, “When you spend years and years playing loud music, touring with loud bands, and attending hundreds or hardcore and metal shows, you reach a point where you need variety or you get totally burnt out.” How do you still get excited about playing and listening to heavy music?
Especially around the time that Botch was really active — I guess at our peak — I was trying to stay very involved in the local hardcore scene. I hate to say it, because it sounds so negative, but at a point it just stops being something that you do because you love it, and you do it because you feel this sense of obligation. You have to keep track of what’s going on and who the new bands are and what’s going on at certain labels — all the stuff that makes hardcore cool because it’s more community based.
But when you’re in a band that tours more, your worldview expands. So all of a sudden, it’s not “I have to keep track of what’s going in Seattle.” It’s like “I have to keep track of the whole US.” To try and stay abreast of what’s going on in all these cities with these people that you’ve gotten to know, you sort of feel like you don’t give anyone attention anymore. That’s how people get burned out a lot of the time. So for us, rather than driving around listening to shit that sounded like the stuff we were doing, we’d listen to Belle and Sebastian or Neutral Milk Hotel or Bob Dylan — whatever was the antithesis of that.
