Spend Our Cash: $848 With Motion City Soundtrack
| How They Spent It Motion City Soundtrack New York, August 30, 2007
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All the plans are in place—“We’re having a build-your-own-nacho bar!” the groom-to-be enthuses—but given Cain’s hectic touring schedule, the couple never quite got around to taking dance lessons. “I can only dance with a guitar in my hands. So as long as I can pick her up and pretend she’s a guitar, I’ll be all right,” he reasons.Then again, handling your bride like a Flying V seems like an inauspicious way to begin a lifelong union based on mutual respect. That’s why Cain and his bandmates—singer Justin Pierre, bassist Matt Taylor, drummer Tony Thaxton and Moog player Jesse Johnson—have decided to use $848 of Blender’s money to buy the whole group a crash course in tripping the light fantastic.
At the Empire Dance studio in New York, the day’s head instructor, a lithe brunette named Isabel Rodriguez, starts things off by running through some fundamental swing steps. To their credit, the guys aren’t half bad. It’s not until each of them is paired with a female partner and the music starts pumping that the real panic at the disco sets in. But amid all the furrowed brows and flailing limbs, Johnson is busting out some moves worthy of a Squirrel Nut Zippers video. (Turns out the keyboardist took a swing class back in ninth grade.) It’s fair to say that, for the other four musicians, the answer to that all-important question, So you think you can dance? is a resounding Hell, no!
They may be a shambles on the dance floor, but everything else is looking good for Motion City Soundtrack these days: They’re about to release Even If It Kills Me, their third and most accomplished album. Produced by a trinity of music vets—former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger and Girls Against Boys bassist-keyboardist Eli Janney—the disc is packed with contagious pop songs about breakups and breakdowns and leavened with silly references to Indiana Jones and Transformers.
Motion City Soundtrack have also been basking in what Pierre describes as “an everlasting glow” since June, when the singer emerged from a stint in rehab. “While we were writing and recording this album, I was sober,” recounts Pierre, who has struggled with addictions to both drugs and alcohol. “But about a week before we finished the record, my girlfriend and I ended our union, and I went out and got completely blitzed. I threw up all over my bed, my room, my everything. It was disgusting.” Pierre sobered up for a short while after that, but soon enough he set out on what turned into a two-week bender. When the singer’s family intervened, he checked into the Fairview chemical-dependency treatment center in Minneapolis for a monthlong stay.
“I visited there for three of the days,” Cain recalls. “They had therapy sessions where Justin had to reveal all this stuff in front of his family.”
“It was really hard,” Pierre says of the experience. “Who wants to tell their parents they smoked crack?”
Despite the drama surrounding their breakup, the singer and his ex remain good friends. In fact, Pierre is still taking her as his date to Cain’s wedding. And if today’s dance lesson is any indication, she’s going to have quite a time keeping up with him. What he lacks in technical skills, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm—Pierre is positively gleeful as he (literally) sweeps the head instructor off her feet. Sure, he’s a show-off—but would you expect anything less from a lead singer whose hair approaches troll-doll-like proportions?
When the class comes to a close, the group and their instructors break out the bubbly (and ginger ale, for Pierre) to toast Cain, who’ll soon become the band’s lone married. After Motion City Soundtrack bid their dance partners farewell, the boys take some time to reflect on the afternoon’s activities. Thaxton, for one, found the experience slightly humiliating. “When we were done dancing and we walked off, our manager told me, ‘You’re stiff,’” the drummer says, before delivering his punch line: “But that could’ve meant something else.” At that, the rest of the band joins him in a hearty, “Hey-ohh!”
And how did the groom-to-be fair? “My partner, Charlotte, was trying to do the dip and she decided, Maybe I should step forward a moment,” Cain says, wincing at the memory. “I got a knee to my nuts! I didn’t get knocked out or anything; it was just a little tap on the junk.” Narrowly avoiding severe groin injuries—always a good thing. And something for which Cain’s bride will undoubtedly be grateful on their wedding night.
