Freezer chiefs

Nathan Willett of Cold War Kids sits in a tiny dressing room, surrounded by bags and sticks of celery, looking slightly bemused.

Today he is in Dublin. Yesterday he was in Paris. Tomorrow he will be in Manchester. Travelling hasn’t always been his favourite past time – as one disgruntled post on his band’s website last year made clear.
“Travel is the downside,” Willett explains. “But we still love doing this for the most part. It’s a weird kind of work. It’s not like a normal day job where you get off work and five hours or so before you go to bed. We get pockets of time across the day.”
Willett’s astonishing songwriting would seem to suggest that he is something of a keen observer, drawing on his day to day experiences in his music. Does the touring lifestyle offer more or less opportunities for him to indulge his muse?
“We definitely have written way less during this process. You do walk into a new city and observe new people but you can’t see the same things if you’re just eating in a restaurant.”
If Willett provides songs that are unique in content, then his musical colleagues are more than capable of twisting them even further. Their strength as a band lies in their ability to draw on a vast sense of musical history that stretches way beyond most of the usual influences.
The resulting sound is an impressively coherent jumble of ideas, although the impact of African-American music on the four is clearest of all. “I’d say we do listen to a lot of black music, in the same way that Tom Waits would take that influence. A lot of good rock ‘n’ roll would come from that. I love Sam Cooke and a lot of the ‘30s jazz singers or ‘60s soul artists. They’re just better.”