Living Things 'Habeas Corpus' album

Living Things, an American band based in St. Louis, Missouri features brothers; Lillian, (vocals/guitar) Eve, (bass) and Bosh Berlin, (drums), and their friend Cory Becker(guitar). Their songs have politically driven lyrics and their major label debut Ahead of the Lions (Jive/Zomba Records-released October, 2005). The album was recorded by the Steve Albini (Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies) and the first single "Bom Bom Bom" and was featured in a Cingular commercial promoting an iTunes-compatible phone.

"All the major labels have a lot of pop and R&B [artists], 'cause that's the only thing that seems to really sell these days," Lillian Berlin says. "The strength of [Jive] is that they don't have another band like us, and they want to. We're sort of their rock band to break so that they can sign others. I feel like it's an ideal situation, rather than just being lost in the shuffle with 30 other rock bands."

A major label may seem like a strange pairing for a band that cites such diverse influences as Tupac Shakur, poet Sylvia Plath and novelist Henry Miller, but Berlin is quick to disagree.

"It's important that our message be heard by as many people as possible," Berlin says. "A lot of indie labels could get the message out, but not to a broad spectrum. When we went looking for a new record company [after Geffen], Jive was the one that said, you guys can do anything you want to do onstage or off. So we said, 'Hey, why not?'"

Although the band's lyrics attack capitalism, war and the "dumbing down" of society, the "message" he is referring to is more of a desire to provoke debate about these issues.

"Our political beliefs and our music go hand in hand," he notes. "What inspires me to write a song is what I read in the newspaper, so I can't really separate them. Entertainment and politics influence each other. If somebody doesn't agree with what I am saying but walks away with their own opinion, then my job is done."

Berlin hopes to spread this political awareness through more than just his music. He has written a book, "Post Mortem Bliss," about his personal struggle with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and his concerns about more and more children being prescribed Ritalin and Prozac to battle this type of disease. He is also close to signing a cable television deal for a show called "The Blackout Generation," where Berlin "invades" schools across the country to "hand the mike" to junior high and high school students who want to express their opinions.

Before he can pass the mike, though, Living Things must continue getting its music out to new fans. Berlin takes the challenge in stride.

"People are intrigued by our story. We're the band that the record [industry] tried to kill, but we kept chugging along," he says. "We've stuck to our guns and haven't given in to the corporate machine. This is what we believe in, this is what's important to us, and we'll keep doing this regardless [of what happens]. We're like the underdog, and everybody loves the underdog."

Their latest song, called Let It Rain, which impacts Alternative on November 18th, is moody and dreamy and screamy, perfect for late night venting or early morning dance parties.

Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, noted " Lillian Berlin is Johnny Rotten with politics. His art would be nothing without his rage; he is possessed by the need to get his point across that he grabs his brothers' music by the throat and makes it bellow his tune"

The band's new album, Habeas Corpus will be released January 20, 2009.

Living Things interview
Lead vocalist/lyricist/guitarist Lillian Berlin and bass guitarist Eve Berlin comment on the tracks:

SNAKE OIL MAN
(“War is just murder with a noble name”)

LB: Multinational war or world peace is the blunt choice that will face America in the coming year. Will the change being offered by our government be the change we are seeking? “That snake oil man, he’s dammed the peace from our land, and he’s going out softly with our blood on his hands/ Everybody let’s keep the peace.”

COST OF LIVING
(“Money is as dirty as Wall Street’s floor”)

LB: The cost of living has never been more present in people’s minds.

THE KINGDOM WILL FALL
(“The trial of law and order has begun”)

LB: I was sitting in Hansa Studios looking outside and thinking that Berlin was much like Rome, this kingdom that fell due to abuse of power and humanity. I saw similar parallels between Rome, Berlin and America.

EB: This song is close to what we sound like live. It’s a true, stream-of-conscious song.

LET IT RAIN
(“Our glory days are over/ Our glory days are gone”)

LB: I always looked at rain as being divine semen. There’s a quote from Mark Twain, who’s a big influence on me as a writer: “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

MERCEDES MARXIST
(“I want the good life”)

LB: We were in Berlin for eight months. I went home for a break and was completely broke because the Euro was killing me. It’s easy to say that you want the good life – everybody wants the good life – but as an artist, you don’t want to trade in your values or what you think is artistically beautiful in order to make money. So I sat down and wrote a cynical record about wanting the good life and the big car like the gangsters drive. I wrote, “I made up my mind, I’m out of my mind” because I would be out of my mind to want that!

OXYGEN
(“Stop playing Jesus, Judas disguised/ I know you fake good all the time”)

LB: There are a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothes. I have experienced this in love and life. These kinds of vampiric blood feeders are sometimes the ex-love, the teacher at your school, the rulers of the world. They can “take away your oxygen” more powerfully than a bullet to the heart.

SHAKE YOUR SHIMMY
(“Your name is a myth, Lord/ Your love is a crime/ Life is just my gift while death’s your surprise”)

LB: Adam and Eve is the oldest story in the bible, the story of Eve being branded with eternal sin for the apple and meanwhile Jesus is straddled by hookers and artists. A lot of women in America don’t really have a choice anymore with all these pro-life issues, yet at the same time God gave women both the ability to have children and make a choice. In the lyrics, Eve protests to God and God says, “Shake your shimmy [ass] and shut up,” which is what chauvinistic men do.

EB: This is another song we wrote and recorded in the big opera ballroom at Hansa Studios. We were jamming for 12 hours straight, writing and playing this song.

DIRTY BOMBS
(“Obama, have you heard the news/ I lost my red, white and blues/ I sang them words you spoke and now the people want me stoned”)

LB: I wanted this song to feel like singing in the cotton field, a weeping sound, our voices and women’s voices in the fields. Lyrically the idea is that the house of cards is collapsing.

EB: At any point someone could drop a bomb on you and we’re wiped out. There are a few cities that reflect what can happen and Berlin is one of them. Now it’s a great city, but 65 years ago you would be shot dead if you weren’t part of the system. It’s funny that I can walk around and live in Berlin with a Jewish star tattoo and nobody questions me, whereas not so long ago I would have been put in a concentration camp. It shows how things can change if we all get on the same page.

BRASS KNUCKLES
(“We got your Ritalin and guns/ We are ready”)

LB: I was walking around Berlin looking at pictures in Bosh’s iPod of us playing a gig in Washington, D.C., where 100,000 people were protesting the Iraq war in front of the Washington Monument. This idea of “taking to the streets” came to me. There is something beautifully clichéd and simple in the image of people taking to the streets to be rebellious.

EB: People need to realize that if elected presidents don’t do what they promise, it’s for the people to take to the streets and say, “This is not right.” The lyrics say, “You are our general but we are your army,” and what is a president without his people?

ISLAND IN YOUR HEART
(“Only love can break your heart”)

LB: We recorded this song as dawn was rising in Berlin. We were in Hansa’s ballroom, with 20-foot windows overlooking the old Berlin Wall. It was snowing. We had been in Berlin for six months at this point, and Eve got to sing his first vocal part on the record. The appropriate lyric for him: “Only love can break your heart.”

EB: It represents a part of the music we make that no one has really heard because we’d never put it on a record before. In the studio we decided we needed a track that was like the sun coming out of the clouds, like a breath in the whole record. Lillian suggested this old demo of ours and we worked on it. We love big beats and loud guitars, but we love all this other kind of music that’s like “Island In Your Heart,” too.

POST MILLENNIUM EXTINCTION BLUES
(“Will we survive these times”)

LB: We have run the population into disorganized and psychotic thinking, successfully creating delusions of grandeur. I feel we’re moving into post-millennium extinction in some regards. There is talk of State vaccinations. There are already engineered pigs and chickens and hormones in beef. A lot of the climate is dying out. I see Orwellian society on the horizon.

EB: Lillian used to always sing these lyrics with his guitar but we’d never found the right music to go with it. I always liked the lyrics. They sum up a lot for us so I took it as a personal mission to make sure the song happened.

DRUGSTORE BUMMIN’ (EVERYBODY’S SLUMMIN’)
(“I’ve danced with the shadows/ I’ve walked their bridge to nothing”)

LB: Prescription pills are simply under-the-radar drug abuse, because they’re legal. I was prescribed Ritalin at 10 or 11 and simply forced to take it. When you are a young child you don’t have a choice; unfortunately, you do as the elders say. As an adult, if you take something numbing, it’s a choice, and I’m all about choice! Put whatever you want in your soul. These days it seems a lot of people are “drugstore bummin’.”

Living Things biography
Habeas Corpus, the second album by Living Things, is a slingshot of modern Americana, arching from St. Louis through Chicago, New York City and London to pierce the international vagabond outpost of Berlin, as seen through the eyes of four political junkies high on the poet and the layman’s right to intellectual freedom. The themes they cover include life, love, money, religion and war in these turbulent times.

“In some ways I’ve looked at this whole record as a celebration of the uncertain times ahead,” says lead vocalist and lyricist Lillian Berlin. Anthemic, prophetic and bumping through Habeas Corpus, Living Things have taken their journey from St. Louis, the city where old-timers pick out the blues on their porches and giant signs proclaim “Guns Save Lives” and “Jesus Saves,” on to new cities and new horizons of the mind. Yet St. Louis and the contorting contradictions this city wears is never far from their minds. It’s still the homestead for which they sing their fiery hymns of revolution and revelation.

With Habeas Corpus the scream of four angry young men evolved into a record that brands flesh by way of a more elegant, textured fury. Released Feb. 17, 2009, on Jive Records, it was birthed in the beating heart of Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin, an expansive ballroom used by the German military, at the height of its power, to entertain society with classical recitals. Today, through a line of wide, tall windows, a virgin dawn breaks over the dark city skyline, touching Potsdamer Platz, where the Berlin Wall once stood, and sweeps across a Gothic city blinking in the light of a new future.

Inside, three rock ’n’ roll adventurers-in-residence attacked their guitars, taking their cue from the beating drums of Bosh Berlin, which, amid the wide acoustics of the ballroom, sounded like rolling peals of thunder, pumping bright blood through the dank air of this ancient, cavernous, six-story building. Drums, cables and percussive instruments were strewn across the floor. A Chamberlain box (etched with graffiti by previous Hansa tenants “David+Iggy”) kicked up freaked-out distortion and noise. To one side lay an old metal army suitcase heaving with notebooks full of lyrics, riffs and ideas scribbled by Lillian, some as old as 10 years and others as new as here and now. When Eve Berlin dropped his bass guitar to reach for one of the timbales, congas or shakers at his feet, a Star of David tattoo on his arm was revealed.

“Berlin is like a scar that reminds us of how serious bombs, weapons and dictators are,” says Eve (who, of all four band members, soaked up the Dionysian delights of Berlin with the greatest relish). “For us, to be writing our own version of soul music inside Hansa, knowing that once upon a time the most evil powers gathered there …Yet there we were, looking out the windows and seeing that good prevails. It felt really powerful. Berlin is a great city now.”

‘The starkness, the gothicness, the melancholy of Hansa and the heathen, debauching atmosphere of Berlin seeped into our sound,” observed Lillian. “The visual reminder of a broken dictatorship was a theme that haunted me, along with writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Mark Twain (whose house is in my home state of Missouri), Oscar Wilde, Anne Sexton, Charles Bukowski, George Orwell and Philip K. Dick. Musically it was Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Revolver era Beatles, John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, David Bowie, Brian Eno and Bob Marley blaring in my subconscious.

The three brothers, Lillian, Eve and Bosh Berlin, have been in a band together since grade school. “We have a concrete basement at the bottom of our parents’ house; we’ve been rehearsing in it since we were kids and recorded half our first album there,” says Lillian. “It was totally our own world, where, at one point, everybody lost their virginity, tried drugs for the first time, wrote our first songs. It was the nucleus of our reality.” The three boys would disappear into the basement and play music late into the night. “There are also a lot of caves in St. Louis,” continues Lillian. “We’d go down to the caves after rehearsing, hold parties and the band would play. Two to three hundred people would fit into the caves, and the music would go on until either the power generators blew, the cops came or the sun came up. Then we’d all go skinny-dipping in the Missouri River.”

With Lillian on vocals and guitar, Eve on bass and Bosh on drums, the boys migrated to Chicago, then New York, then across to L.A., up to Canada, over to Europe and back. Inspired by a ’60s poster that read “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” the band found its name. Joining them on both the journey and guitar was childhood friend Cory Becker. He came on board just as they finished recording their debut album, Ahead Of The Lions (released Oct. 4, 2005, on Jive Records, which included the tracks “Bombs Below,” “I Owe” and “Bom Bom Bom,” the latter featured in a Cingular television commercial). Big, brotherly bust-ups and arguments are par for the course with the Berlin boys – “Things don’t get going until one or all of us has thrown down their instruments and started yelling,” Eve attests – and Cory turned three into a balanced four.

While relentlessly touring in support of the critically praised Ahead Of The Lions, Lillian was loved and hated for visceral actions like burning George Bush posters onstage. “This whole idea of speaking out against the wrongdoings of government was something that we were taught at a very young age by our mother, who protested in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Lillian. “When I first started writing songs it felt natural to sing about socially conscious ideas. Early on, as a young band, we were admonished not to talk about this or that. But an artist is in many ways a reflection of what is going on in their surroundings and they’re going to express what is affecting them. We write about what interests us.”

This doesn’t always lead to a happy result. After one gig Lillian was jumped and beaten by angry Bush supporters, one of whom fired a gun, the bullet whizzing past Lillian’s ear. “We’ve been perceived in some corners as an anti-American band, but that’s the furthest away from what we are,” says Eve. “We love our country and that’s why we care to understand the reality of where it stands and how to make it better and to sing about it. What inspires us most is what’s going on in the world. Sometimes you need to step outside and look back in to have perspective on your own country, to see what’s really going on. We’re not content to wait 50 years for the history to be written.”

Living Things haven’t changed their vision to fit anybody’s desire for politeness; instead, they’ve pursued their own musical story, coming back up for air with a new chapter.

“Lillian came up with the name of the album and it sums up a lot of things,” says Eve. “Habeas corpus is supposed to safeguard our individual freedom against arbitrary State action. It’s supposed to protect us from unlawful imprisonment by a rogue government. So many people we meet don’t even know their rights have been eroded lately. But we need to be aware of these rights to protect them.”

Lillian sums up his philosophy: “Society is divided into two antagonistic factions, those who issue the orders and those who obey the orders. The problem is that the ones who issue the orders have abused their authority and have seduced society into abdicating their rights. It’s time to learn to recite your rights like the ABC’s and 123’s so you are aware of what you’re giving up.”

Adds Eve: “We really value our Constitutional right to express ourselves. When somebody says ‘rock ’n’ roll,’ to me it means freedom, being who you are, running wild and letting it all hang out.”

meet the band Living Things
Lillian Berlin – lead vocals, lyrics, guitar
Eve Berlin, bass guitar
Bosh Berlin, drums
Cory Becker - guitar

Living Things discography
EP (2003) Turn In Your Friends and Neighbors (SKG); US only
EP (2003) The Blackout Generation (Loog); UK only
EP (2004) Resight Your Rights (DreamWorks)
Album (2004) Black Skies in Broad Daylight (Universal); not released in US
Album (2005) Ahead of the Lions (Jive/Zomba)
Album (2009) Habeas Corpus (Jive/Zomba)

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