“I was substitute teaching and it wasn’t until I kind of hit the point where I was like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do this at all,’” Willett says. “‘I don’t want to do anything else other than, like, we just need to start a band.’”

Family lives

For most of the past decade, the Cold War Kids lineup has been stable. Drummer Joe Plummer and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Schwartz became full-time members with Willett and Maust around 2014. Guitarist David Quon completed the current lineup when he joined in 2016.

For Willett, changes in the band over time were necessary if not always easy.

“The changing of the lineup over the years has been some of the toughest transitions,” he says. “For me, becoming that kind of leader that makes those decisions about what’s going to work, and how it’s going to work, and keeping it all going has been some of the toughest things.

“You’re in a place where business and friendship and art are all just deeply tied in a way that I haven’t really seen in any other type of job I see anywhere else,” Willett says. “It’s all in the blender.

“So now, the five of us, it’s almost come full circle in that we have this incredible chemistry and great understanding and appreciation of each other.”

The band is a family with all the responsibilities and rights the term implies, Willett says.

“You can’t have tension where you’re against each other or an awkwardness where you can’t talk about certain things,” he says. “You have to get those things out in the open. And at the same time, you know it’s not perfect. You live with a degree of just understanding in the way that you’re family.”

At 44, Willett also has a family outside of his work, a home life with his wife and three daughters between the ages of 3 and 9.

...continued

©2024 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit ocregister.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.