The Used: Still vulnerable

31 January 2012

by Poppy Reid

In the early noughties, if you were feeling defeated and melancholic, he may have been the one who enunciated your pain, perhaps even saved your life. With insurmountable experiences that festered over years of drug abuse and self-loathing, Bert McCracken could write it better than you ever felt it.

The man behind The Used is now the happiest, most deucedly powerful he’s ever been; the 29-year-old married his Australian girlfriend last year and started an art production company called Anger Music Group; his bandmates are all in various stages of white picket fence normalcy and they’re set to release a fifth record in the coming months. It’s safe to say McCracken is a considerable deviance from the 22-year-old who released seminal album In Love And Death with The Used in 2004. The fervor that still surrounds the record is apposite upon knowledge of the devastating stimulus: after a predominantly drug-induced and homeless adolescence, McCracken’s ex-girlfriend and his unborn child both passed away the year prior to the album’s release.

“It’s really crazy for me to look back at that time of my life,” he says over the phone from his less humble, Hollywood home. “I was in a very, very, very vulnerable spot and I think that’s how I allowed myself to create those songs. It was a broken moment in my life and I’m glad that I have music to keep me going, and keep me sane, and probably keep me alive.”

For the first time without Warner Music’s sub-label Reprise Records, The Used will release Vulnerable (a negative-conjuring epithet, which means quite the opposite in this case) through their own Anger Music Group and Hopeless Records. The switch may have been Warner’s decision but for a band who used music as catharsis, another album with the major could have birthed another Artwork.

“I feel a bit of a disconnection with that record,” he admits of the 2009 album. “It’s a really negative record.”

McCracken says The Used were dropped last year along with several other acts and top-level executives when “their company fell apart to pieces”; but not before a series of quarrels with label-heads throughout the recording of Artwork.

“We had quite a few songs that I really enjoyed on the record and after they ended up putting their two cents in and changed the sound of a song, or changed my words ,it just became like ‘well fuck this song,’ and I was really not into it anymore.” McCracken says the label’s ‘two cents’ reached as far as blatant requests to ready them for commercial radio. “Towards the end of our time at Warner they were actually asking me not to swear. ‘Instead of saying you’re full of shit you should say you’re full of it’,” he laughs at both the concept and his imitation. “It got messy toward the end, out of resentment for a lot of things that maybe I had done.”

It was a bitter-sweet departure for The Used however; Warner took the option to back record number five and paid them to start writing, after breaking their deal with the band Warner were forced to pay out the contract. “They kind of screwed themselves on the way out...they paid for our new record,” chirps McCracken, indulging in his last laugh.

With a tight grip on The Used’s business reins, McCracken seems to have overtly suppressed the loose cannon we’d come to almost expect to vomit onstage at every show. But although he professes he has “no inspiration to go out and do heroin or smoke crystal or anything like that,” he does admit to still having an addiction. “Being addicted to drugs is being addicted to drugs,” he explains. “But I don’t do drugs so I think that things do get easier as time goes on.”

Stumbles off the proverbial rails can be expected but when McCracken literally fell offstage at the Musnik Tattoo & Music Festival in California in May last year, breaking his elbow meant prescribed painkillers for three months. Remarkably, what would normally send most into a dilatory, unreliable stupor instead lead to a creative burst and actually sped up the album process.

“I knew that I was eating way too many pain pills and feeling, looking, acting unhealthy,” he confesses. “That was my time to shine right there, and that’s what sparked this whole creative movement that finished this record in two weeks rather than another nine months.” Stylistically, the movement couldn’t have started more different than the first stages of the last four records. Instead of guitar, drum or bass beginnings, each track on Vulnerable spawned from a synthesiser, with instrumentals added later. McCracken is adamant the new release won’t borrow at all from its predecessor but instead from their debut.

“It absolutely holds the whole emotional vibe of the first record, and that wanting to be free and to break away. I think that that’s really what this record Vulnerable’s about; it’s for everyone who was picked on growing up or who is still being picked on, it’s for all the outcasts, the kids who aren’t as cool as the kids who think they’re cool; the real cool kids, the music fans.

“[Being vulnerable] is actually a positive thing. Those moments in life where you allow yourself that vulnerability are the moments when you fall in love or you succeed like you’ve never succeeded. Dare to dream and really follow that dream, that’s what vulnerable means to me.” - This from the man who called for his listeners to take his life in 2004 (re: Take It Away).

The Used are healthier, more gratified versions of the band they were in 2001 or even 2009, “we all have our shit together a lot more,” he laughs. It would only seem trite if McCracken continued to preach of his depression from his Hollywood home, and although many fans still hold the band’s early work in a protective choke-hold, Vulnerable’s intentions and maintained significance should satiate their zealots.

“As human beings we’re so much stronger than these things that seem to be controlling us and it doesn’t have to be drugs it could even be bad relationships. “I think if people dare to take a step in the right direction, you build some momentum and you can really have a positive life if you want. I’m not talking like super positive, I hate people that are happy all the time.”