[0:07]Will of the People, the new album by the British band Muse. was written in Matt Bellamy's Santa Monica studio. Are we going into the Red Room? The Red Room. Yeah, which uh, are you a twin Peaks fan? I Twin Peaks fan. Yeah, so maybe you'll recognize this space. So in Twin Peaks whenever they have the weird nightmares and it goes into the strange red room when everyone's speaking backwards, I've got good news. This is the space. So I wanted to model it exactly like the Twin Peaks Red Room, so here we go. That's an interesting inspiration.
[0:44]Bellamy is the band's lead singer and songwriter. So I got all my favorite toys here. This synth here was the first synth I ever had when I was about 12 years old, I think. And you still have it? And I still have it, yeah, this very one.
[1:04]Yes. And with this you can just play like a simple chord like that. And then if you put this arpeggiator on, you get this. Making an album here in the midst of a pandemic required improvisation. With the song The Will of the People, I really wanted to get like a crowd of people going the Will of the People, the Will of the People, the Will of the People like that. I wanted it to be like almost our crowd from a show. But during the pandemic, obviously you couldn't get any group of people together. So we had no choice but to do it ourselves. So it ended up adding our wives and all of our kids and, you know, so, so basically we've got all, it's basically all of Muse's family, essentially. It's a family chorus. It's a yeah, and it sounds like this, yeah.
[1:47]The album is epic in the apocalyptic tradition of Muse.
[2:00]The trio, Bellamy, Dominic Howard, and Chris Wolstenholme has scored six number one albums in the UK. I've read that you described yourself as nobody's from nowhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We sometimes say to this day, we're still the biggest unknown band in the world.
[2:20]Did you feel like you were viewed as uncool? I think I think we we were I think we're still pretty uncool here. I'm not sure I'm not sure if we've ever been actually cool, you know? I'm not we're still we're still striving to be cool, yeah. Is that something you still aspire to? I don't know. I don't know. I think we might have had like one brief moment in late 2001 where we were nearly cool, you know? And it just lasted for like a couple of months. But uh, but generally speaking, we've always been outsiders, you know?
[2:54]Muse won their audience on the road with their extravagant live shows. That's just really how we connect with our fan base, you know? So I think a lot of the fans that we have will say the same thing. It's like until you've seen the band live, you can't really sort of know what they're about, you know? I mean, it wasn't like it was really hit singles. No, no, we're still we're still waiting to have a hit. It's like I don't think we've ever had one. But when the new Wembley Stadium opened in London in 2007, they filled its 75,000 seats twice. You were the first to sell it out. We we were supposed to be the first to play it as well. And then then George Michael came in and just jumped in, jumped in right in front of us. He bragged about it in the artist's guest book at Wembley. George Michael wrote, I was the first to play here. Nah, nah, nah, nah. And then and then we wrote, okay, we were the first to sell out twice. Nah, nah, nah, nah.
[3:58]Even bigger for Bellamy was playing the Glastonbury Festival in England, which he'd snuck into as a teenager. You give like £5 to a local farmer and he put you under the bales of hay in the back of his tractor and just drive you in, you know? I imagine it's actually pretty spooky under a bail of hay. Oh, it was exciting though, you know? Going to class for me like that a number of times and then and then headlining it like uh 10 or so years later, that was just that's always going to stand out as a very special moment.
[4:28]Bellamy grew up 90 minutes south of Glastonbury in Devon, England. How would you describe the music scene in Devon? Music scene. I mean, there there really we were the music scene in Devon. Matt, Dominic, and Chris met in high school and formed Muse in 1994. And we were just left going like, okay, someone's going to have to sing. Like who's it going to be? And I was I just gave it a shot. You know, I mean, I couldn't sing at all the first you know first two years of Muse. I was just kind of mumbling. Then at a music festival, he heard a voice similar to his own.
[5:10]And I I straight away I was like, what is that? It was Jeff Buckley. Uh discovering Jeff Buckley really sort of changed me and put me on a on a path of feeling more confident to actually give it give singing a shot, you know? Because I realized that kind of that kind of tenor high pitched, especially falsetto, male voice could actually work in in a rock in a rock setting, you know? I've got his guitar here. Do you really? studio, yeah, it's it's in storage in the back there. But uh, yeah, I got I've got his guitar that he made the Grace album with and I actually use it a little bit on this album. Bellamy had another inspiration for this album. Who's this? His daughter, Lavella, born during the pandemic. When I really started to tuck in to making the album, I needed that little face just to look at the cutest face I've ever seen those chubby cheeks. And when he's writing, Bellamy's always imagining the next massive Muse tour. the best stuff, I think is almost like subconscious, but it feels a bit like a visualization of something from the future. Like I feel like I'm imagining myself playing that on stage in a year's time, you know what I mean? Is that where the thrill comes from? I think so, yeah.
[6:23]I'm so lucky. The band's so lucky that we've got to the point where we can make uh those those kinds of dreams or or you know, things become real, you know?
