Nick Valensi on Side Band CRX, The Strokes' Future: ‘I’m Still in My First Marriage; We Aren’t Getting Divorced’

There’s an old saying that a band is like a marriage, and a veteran musician who strays from his main gig to work with another outfit is “taking on a mistress.” The practice was once frowned upon, but with the development of digital technology and a marked decrease in album sales, it has become pretty common. And for the Strokes, side-projects have surfaced with greater frequency than actual new Strokes records. Frontman Julian Casablancas has the Voidz, drummer Fab Moretti has an ongoing project Little Joy, bassist Nikolai Fraiture has been busy working with Summer Moon, and finally the last holdout, guitarist Nick Valensi, has released New Skin, the debut album from his band CRX.

While Valensi is excited to tour with CRX (see tour dates here) and play songs from New Skin, he emphasizes that he’s not at all tired of the old skin. “I am not trying to pull away from the Strokes in any way,” he insists. “I was just looking for a way to have fun and stay busy during downtime. I’m still very much in my first marriage. We are not getting divorced.”

Even though the members of Strokes have been active on the side, over the past year they’ve been getting together for 10 days to two weeks at a time to work on new material, Valensi reveals. So far they have written “a handful” of new songs, but nothing has been recorded.

Valensi started working on his own material in 2014 and after recording a basic demo he recruited guitarist and keyboardist Richie Follin, guitarist Darian Zahedi, bassist Jon Safley, and drummer Ralph Alexander to help focus the project. “At first when I started doing this thing, I wasn’t sure if it was a solo project an experiment or what,” Valensi says. “It wasn’t until the other guys started offering advice and collaborating that it felt like it was a band.”

New Skin is a euphoric amalgam of new-wavey melodies (the first single “Ways to Fake It” brings to mind the Cars) and gritty, riffy rock, with guitar tones reminiscent of Strokes but an overall vibe more geared towards clubs than stadiums.

“From the onset, I really wanted this to be an outlet for me to have fun with and to enjoy the process of making music start to finish,” Valensi says. “I feel like it’s a natural progression for me, but also a little bit different. The biggest similarities between the Strokes and CRX come with the guitar playing and the guitar arrangements and the guitar sounds. But that’s not me deliberately trying to copy what I’ve done before. That’s just how I play guitar.”

YAHOO MUSIC: Why did you call the band CRX?

NICK VALENSI: It’s a Japanese car that was made in the ‘80s and it became a kind of theme. It’s a s—ty, cheap, lightweight hatchback that ended up becoming a car that people modified a lot and would race around, and it was known for its nimble handling. We would talk about the car while we were recording the album. And the name was also kind of inspired by the drum machine we were using, which was called a CR78, which was a widely used drum machine in the late ’70s.

Did you just take away the “78” from “CR” and then just add the X?

What happened was we were mixing that sound with our live drums and our producer Josh [Homme, from Queens of the Stone Age] started saying things like, “Dudes, all I can picture in my head is this Japanese future punk-rocker guy with a Mohawk and he’s driving through Tokyo in a CRX and the streets are all deserted.” He kept coming back to these kinds of visuals. Eventually it became a verb. When we wanted to use the CR78 drum sound we’d say, “Oh, let’s CRX that song!” By the time we named the band, CRX was like a description of the sound of the music.

You started writing for CRX two years ago?

I started by myself. I got to a point where I liked the idea of starting a new project and having a new thing I could pick up and take on the road whenever I wanted to. I didn’t want to book shows and play Strokes songs or cover songs, so I said, “Lemme try to write a record.” I worked by myself for a year and did about eight songs before I formed the band.

Why did you decide to get other musicians involved?

I’ve always been in a band and I really value having a room full of people with good ideas to get feedback from. After a year by myself, it got hard and I started to go a little crazy and get a little lonely. I was having trouble completing some of the music and I wanted help with the lyrics, so I reached out to a handful of friends and fellow musicians. My best friend for the past 20 years has been Fab Moretti, who plays drums in the Strokes. He didn’t work on the record and is not officially a part of it, but he was definitely one of the people who I consistently reached out for advice, guidance and feedback.

You’re a guitarist in Strokes, but you sing and play guitar in CRX. Was that at all intimidating for you?

I was reluctant to be the lead singer on this project at first — not because I felt like I couldn’t do it, but I wasn’t sure what that was going to mean in terms of the live performance. As a guitar player, I’ve always appreciated the ability to step up and get the spotlight when you want it and get some glory from the crowd when you want it, and then when you don’t want it anymore you can step back and retreat into the shadows and divert the spotlight onto the frontman. That suits my personality a bit more than being a frontman.

Did you consider hiring a lead singer for CRX?

I thought about it. I was faced with the decision of doing it all myself or trying to find a singer who complemented the songs. I went with the former, because my goal with the project was to get onstage and get on tour, and I felt finding a frontman to tour with could delay the process.

You’ve done more than a dozen shows with CRX. Have you gotten used to singing?

It doesn’t feel that different for me anymore than just playing guitar. Early on, when I forced myself out of my comfort zone, I said to Josh Homme, “I can do this, but man, I don’t know if I’m really going to enjoy it.” And he said, “You’re going to start to enjoy it so much that when it’s time for you to just play guitar [again], it’s gonna bum you out.” I’m not there yet, but I’m definitely enjoying performing with CRX and connecting with an audience in a way I haven’t before.

Is there something you get out of performing with CRX that you don’t get in Strokes?

When the Strokes do shows, we mostly play summer festivals for 40,000 or 50,000 people. It’s really fun doing that, but when that’s all you do you start to miss the feeling of performing to a smaller audience on a club stage or in a theater. With CRX I’m playing to a club full of kids that have never heard the music. They’ve never heard me sing. They don’t know what to expect. And the feeling of having to win these audiences over is something I haven’t experienced in a long time, since I was 19 or 20 years old, and I’m really enjoying it. The flipside of that is if CRX was my only band and I was on tour playing clubs and theaters, I’m sure at some point I would miss being in the Strokes and playing to tens of thousands of people. It’s not about liking one more than the other it’s just nice to have a balance.

New Skin is a pretty upbeat album, but the lyrics are cynical.

I’ve always loved songs that are u tempo, bouncy, major-key, and happy-vibed, with depressing lyrics. I like that juxtaposition. But when I was writing, I was just purging. I didn’t know what I was saying, I was just trying to find lyrics that worked. But looking back at it now, some of the lyrics sound really frustrated, which is me venting s— that I may have suppressed.

“Ways to Fake it” seems especially sardonic.

It deals with feeling one way on the inside but having to front like you feel differently on the outside. There’s a lot of dealing with phoniness and the lack of authenticity in the modern world that we live in, with reality TV and Instagram and phony politicians. There’s a part of me that’s commenting on that, and then there’s a part of me that’s commenting on the frustration that I’m a part of this phony machine just because I’m part of the entertainment business and I’m on Instagram and Twitter and all these weird platforms that help us to obscure our reality.

Back to Strokes for a moment. How do you want the band’s next album to be different than your last EP, Future Present Past or your 2013 album, Comedown Machine?

Every time we start working on a Strokes record I wonder what’s going to happen. At no point have we ever sat down and said, “OK, what direction do we want to take? Are we going to try to sound similar to what we did before or try to sound different?” It’s never that deliberate and it’s never that methodical. We really just go in, try a bunch of s— out, and see what sticks. It’s more about trial and error. Perhaps people give too much credit to artists and creative people, because in my experience most creative people don’t know what the f— they’re dong. And that’s part of the beauty of it. I don’t know what I’m doing? I never have. And in CRX or in the Strokes none of us know what the f— we’re doing. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. You keep working and eventually you stumble upon something that turns you on, and that is the creative process — at least in my experience.

So, when do you think the next Strokes album will be done?

It’s hard to tell. We write together; we share ideas together that we wrote individually. We jam. It could be, “Hey, I’ve got a cool chord progression. Let’s jam on it for an hour.” But for me, this stage is the most fun. I love the feeling of having endless possibilities when you have just the genesis of an idea and you’re defining the way it’s going to go. But I’m terrible at predicting things, and if you give me a deadline I’m sure to miss it. We could be done with it in six months. It might take longer. It might take a few years. Right now I don’t know. But I can say it’s moving along really nicely. The pace feels really good and I feel really good about the material we’re putting together.