Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love. The year was 1682 when English Quaker, William Penn coined his settled land with the motto. His vision was that the area would become a place where anyone of any color or background or belief could live together in peace and harmony, and ultimately brotherly love. It seems there could be no better-suited place then for the birth of a band called mewithoutYou.
“The one thing that we all agreed on before we started writing this album was the idea of ‘helping and healing,’” explains guitarist Mike Weiss of the band’s new album, “Catch For Us the Foxes.” “I’ll be happy if someone listens to it and feels a sense of hope in their life in some small strange way.”
The five members of mewithoutYou don’t just poetically style their ideals to music; They live these ideals out amongst the masses. A dimly lit stage covered with floral blossoms sets the mood for what will become an energetic, destructive, and exhausting performance. Lead singer Aaron Weiss flails himself about the stage, changing moods from joy to frustration, taking the intrigued crowd on his personal roller coaster of emotions, but all the while vocally extending his message of love. “We all need each other,” Weiss states simply.
The world was first introduced to mewithoutYou in the summer of 2002 with their critically acclaimed debut release, “[A‡B] LIFE. Drawing quick comparisons to artistic masterminds like At the Drive-In and Interpol, the album set the standard for what was to come from the gifted group. Now with the completion and October 2004 release of their newest full-length project, “Catch For Us the Foxes,”produced by Brad Wood (Fire Theft, Smashing Pumpkins, Pete Yorn), fans will get a chance to witness the obvious growth to this album from the last. With their insatiable knack for writing both engaging lyrics and music, mewithoutYou have created an anomaly: a record worthy of both thought and dance.
“What you will hear with this new record are a lot of new textures both vocally and with our instruments,” Mike Weiss notes. “There are songs that we wrote two years ago right after [A‡B] LIFE was released and songs that came together a week or two before we left for the studio. It really covers a lot of different phases that we moved in and out of over the past two years. All the songs share Aaron’s amazing way of writing lyrics though, and the almost blind passion that we get out of performing.”
Their performances have become so intriguing, in fact, that over the course of the past two years, mewithoutYou have gained a reputation for beginning tours as an opening band and working their way up to the headlining position. Audiences come in hopes of not just mere entertainment, but something deeper, something thought provoking.
And in the end, nearly everything mewithoutYou stands for can be taken back to that simple vision of love and harmony William Penn visualized for the community he helped create. “The first song, ‘Torches Together,’ I wrote it mostly after coming home from the Bruderhof, a community living in New York,” lead vocalist Aaron Weiss states, “To love your neighbor as yourself is the most important thing in all the world.”
