Interview

Up until about six months ago, you probably knew Michael Welch, vaguely, from...somewhere. "Joan of Arcadia," maybe, or "The Riches?" "CSI?" "Star Trek?" "Law & Order?" The actor has, after all, been acting for a full ten of his 21 years, and he's worked on everything from happy-family fare to edgy premium cable series to big-budget blockbusters. And yet, until recently Welch had enjoyed that fuzzy ubiquity that comes with years' worth of small roles in film and on television.

But then came Twilight. On November 17, 2008, The Greatest Love Story of Our Time opened in theaters everywhere, and Michael Welch instantly forsook "Where do I know him from?"—level fame for the kind of face recognition one gets when one is in a record-breaking, heartthrob-making, teen-obsession-for-the-ages kind of movie. True, Welch doesn't get to engage in any Edward Cullen-style smoldering eye-gazing sessions—his character, Mike Newton, is known for his overly-friendly demeanor, pleasantly-popular social status, and hopelessly-enduring crush on Bella Swan (Need we say it? Kristen Stewart.)—but then, he's also not getting hit by cars. We spoke with the young actor while he was on a brief hiatus between filming New Moon and the saga's third installment, Eclipse, and he filled us in on a little behind-the-scenes gossip.  


LUCY MADISON: How's it going? Where are you? Are you guys done filming New Moon?

MICHAEL WELCH: I'm great! Right now I am in Silverlake, California. I'm outside and it's a beautiful day. New Moon is, is all wrapped up, and we're going to be doing Eclipse in August or September, I think, so we're knocking them out pretty fast.

LM: What are you doing in the meantime?

MW: I'm actually leaving Los Angeles in two days to go to Lexington, Kentucky to work on a film called Unrequited. It's a very intense little independent project, sort of a modern-day teen version of Misery. R-rated, though, so not for all of the Twilight fandom.

LM: Speaking of which... When you went into Twilight, did you have any idea what a huge success it would become?

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This week in New York, the three men of Miike Snow finally showed their faces. The band—which had been lurking anonymously on the Internet for a few months now, dropping tracks all over RCRDLBL and remixing every Indie pop hit it could get its hands on—took the stage for its first New York show this Saturday at Brooklyn's Music Hall of Williamsburg, and then reprised the performance last night at the Mercury Lounge. Through relatively short but energetic sets, the band revealed itself to be neither a lonely sad bald guy, nor a Wizard of Oz-ian robot-producer-puppeteer, nor the mythical Jackalope that they've been using as an avatar for the past few months. Not quite, anyway.

As it turns out, Miike Snow is a team of three talented young writer-producer-songwriters, each of whom boasts his own individual laundry list of musical accomplishments. Andrew Wyatt—formerly of Fires of Rome, Black Beetle and the AM—was an in-house producer for Downtown Records for a number of years. Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, also known as the Swedish writing-producing team of Bloodshy & Avant, have spent the last decade or so writing and/or producing pop songs for basically every reputable name in the field—including Kylie, Madonna, and Britney, for whom they penned the indubitably anthemic pop masterpiece, "Toxic." It's no wonder, then, that the band's eponymous debut album, which came out on June 9 with Downtown Records, thumps with eclectic, hook-filled electronic pop jams. (See: "Animal," for starters.) What is surprising is that the band can replicate the experience live, without the help of a computer, an iPod (God forbid), or anything that was invented after the year 1980. Andrew Wyatt explains to us how this is even possible.


LUCY MADISON: First things first. You live in New York and Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg are based in Sweden. How did this group come together? And why?

ANDREW WYATT: We met through a friend, a music business guy. I was in Sweden visiting, and someone told me that I should hook up with these two guys. Actually, it turns out I'd met Christian in the studio maybe a year before, but we only actually recently remembered that. He was super skinny when I met him, so I didn't really recognize him the second time around. [Laughs] But when we first got together for the first time several years ago, we did some writing for an album. It never really came out, but we stayed in touch. We had a fantastic time; we have a very similar sense of humor. It's very Dadaist.

LM: So you just clicked immediately.

AW: Yeah, we really clicked as people immediately. Musically, not much came out of that period, but when I came back to Sweden for something else we hung out. They said, you know, we'd love to start a band with you. I have a high level of respect for them as artists, so I decided it would be a fun thing to do. An experiment.

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About a year ago, a friend sent me a link to the Myspace page of Ida Maria—the next young, female, Norwegian singer-songwriter, she said—along with an urgent note advising that I listen to the track "I like you so much better when you're naked" immediately, at high volume, preferably on repeat. Under such circumstances I do as I'm told, so shortly thereafter I was listening to the track in question—and then as many other tracks as I could get my hands on—loudly, and on repeat. This went on for several weeks straight. Several of my friends had similar experiences.

The responsible party, 24-year-old Ida Maria (full name: Ida Maria Børli Sivertsen), finally drops her debut full-length today in the US (via Mercury) and the album, Fortress Round My Heart, reveals a rock star in the making. Ida Maria has the kind of voice that makes you think of Janis Joplin - powerful, raw, and a little bit wild - and she takes more cues from classic American rock than from her Scandinavian peers. Onstage, she's bold and frenetic: When I saw her perform in New York a few months ago, she thrashed around the stage in a miniscule gold dress, which she proceeded to drench with water when she dumped it over her head.  A fair number of Ida's songs are about being unapologetically drunk, promiscuous, and/or lonely. Oh, and she has synaesthesia, the rare neurological condition that allows her to see music as color. In other words, Ida Maria is one of those fearless, brazen, exciting female American singers that America has been hurting for in recent years. So what if she's actually Norwegian?


LUCY MADISON: Hey, how's it going?

IDA MARIA: Hi, I'm good. I'm in Norway, in my hometown.

LM: I read somewhere that you moved to Sweden. Not true?

IM: Yeah, fuck Sweden. I'm done with that. Everything's so square, and everybody's so polite.

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Last night, on East 23rd Street, Manhattan's Blender Theater was teeming with tough-looking characters. There was an abundance of very large hair. Dark eye makeup and leather were in high attendance. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovered above the theater's entrance between Park and Lexington Avenues. It was the premiere of Anvil!, The Story of Anvil, a documentary about the Canadian metal "demigods" by the same name, and the crowd was, as one might expect, a little bit rowdy. The film, which was directed by one of the band's former roadies, Sacha Gervasi (who ran away at 16 to go on tour with the group), tells the story of frontman Steve ‘Lips' Kudlow and his drummer and best friend Robb Reiner, as they make one last run for a shot at fame—25 years after the band's (arguable) heyday. Throughout the screening, antics abounded: Constant, back-and-forth heckling prompted some near brawls, and at least one person was spotted storming out of the rafters, shouting a surly remark. (He was found later on downstairs, beer in hand.) There was a lot of coughing, a lot of drinking, and a lot of cheering. When the woman in the seat next to me asked for a coke without any sort of alcoholic additive, her order was met with polite surprise. Given both the scene and the subject matter, I would have bet on leaving the theater in a thick layer of eyeliner, maybe, but not tears.

But then, the dudes from Anvil are used to being underestimated. That's part of what makes this movie so good. (Gervasi's excellent direction doesn't hurt, either.) This is more than a movie about heavy metal. Actually, it's not really about heavy metal at all. It's about two sort of awesome fifty-something-old rockers who have been pursuing what they love for twenty-five years. It's about the brotherhood, and hardship, that were borne out of that. The resulting movie is both deeply hilarious and, at times, surprisingly emotional: As we follow the band from their catastrophic 2006 European tour—which was organized by Tziviana, a woman of Eastern European descent who emailed the band out of the blue with the proposal, as well as a picture of herself—to their return to the studio for a 13th album, to a triumphant performance in Japan, we the audience (particularly this one) have become rather emotionally invested in these guys, their music, and their careers.  Also in their wives, and kids, and decades-old friendship! By the time the band took the stage for their live encore performance, even the non-metal-enthusiasts among us were awestruck by the blur of Reiner's drumsticks in the air, the poignancy of Lips's onstage theatrics, and the urgency of the middle-aged fistpumping that was accompanying the band from below. Quite a feat, indeed.  

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