By Kiel Hauck.

If his recent work is any indication, Dave Melillo may have more talent up his sleeve than anyone previously knew.  Nocturnal Me, the brainchild of the former Cute is What We Aim For guitarist, had previously been a pop rock outlet for Melillo and some of his former Cute band mates, but with the release of their third EP Two Faced, change is in the air.  This newest collection of songs is a diverse offering, one that dabbles in a number of different genres and shifts in sound from track to track.

Melillo has been offering his songwriting services to a number of different artists across the pop landscape, an endeavor that played a large role in the changing sound of Nocturnal Me’s newest release.  Substream recently had the chance to catch up with the busy Melillo to chat about the creation of Two Faced, why Nocturnal Me has required more effort than any of his past work, and much more.

Substream Music Press:  Dave, thanks for doing this interview.  I wanted to start by asking you to talk a bit about the theme of and meaning behind your new EP, “Two Faced.”

Dave Melillo: Well, the title for the album represents several components of the record.  If you look into the record, there’s R&B songs, there’s straight up rock songs.  A lot of what Nocturnal Me has done has been multi-dimensional but on this EP, it’s been split.  It’s almost like Jekyll and Hyde.  You listen to the first three songs and they sound more like Cute is What We Aim For, the stuff people are used to, but you listen to the second half of the album and it’s like a mix of Trey Songz, Mike Posner, and stuff like that.  So sonically, Two Faced represents that dissection of the sound.  Lyrically, it also represents what Two Faced is all about.  You know, for me, I’ve been in one relationship for a very long time, which the album talks about a lot, and through the whole relationship I’ve experienced so many emotions.  That’s why on this record there’s songs like “I fucking hate you” and then there’s songs like “I want to get you back”.  So for me, this all happened naturally.  I picked all of these out of a lot of songs that I wrote and when they all sounded so different and juxtaposed I figured that Two Faced was a great way to represent what I was trying to say.  You know, in life, everything that you do is going to have a good and bad side to it.

SMP: As you mentioned, it’s obvious upon first listen that “Two Faced” touches on a number of different genres.  How did that change in sound come about?

DM: I started writing for a lot of different artists over 2010 and 2011.  A lot of them were pop artists and a lot of it was stuff that I’ve never written for before.  So I wrote all of these songs, some of them got picked up and some of them didn’t, and some of the songs that made it to Two Faced were leftovers and what I thought were awesome songs.  Honestly, the type of songwriter I am, I never let a bad song leave me.  I know that might sound arrogant, but I’m just saying that if I write five songs in one day, I only will take the good ones.  There’s so much stuff that is left as an idea or just left half-written because I only like to give people what I feel are the best songs.  One song was written for Sean Kingston and another was written for Cody Simpson or an R&B artist and so that’s how the genres kind of skipped around so much.  Some of the songs I wrote just for Nocturnal Me, which has always kind of been like that Maroon 5, white boy rock type of thing.  So when you put it all together, I wanted to just have the best songs on the EP rather than “oh, I want this to sound all R&B” or “I want this to sound all rock.”  I just wanted the five best songs so that’s why it’s kind of between different genres throughout the EP.

SMP: In a genre where often times a number of different bands are all coming to the table with the same sound, how important is it for you to differentiate yourselves from the pack and do something different?

DM: It’s very important.  I think us leaving Cute is What We Aim For was kind of a statement about how we feel about the music industry.  I think the scene we grew up in, the Warped Tour scene, the alternative scene, the punk scene, whatever you want to call it, it’s lost a lot of its luster.  It used to be that you went to the pop-punk/emo/whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-call-it genre to find substance and to find genuine musicians giving you a message you couldn’t get anywhere else.  That was the allure for me.  When I listened to the Starting Line, I listened to it because you knew it was original and that these guys weren’t trying to do anything, they were just speaking their mind and they were my age.  I was like “oh my God, these guys are talking about my life!”  Now you don’t have that.  Even the big bands in the scene, a lot of it has become like this kind of hardcore bullshit that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, it just sounds self-indulgent.  Even the pop bands, they’re just very manufactured and terrible for the most part.  So Nocturnal Me is definitely a stand against that.  Even the pop songs on here, I think you can hear, are written with a type of sincerity that I feel I don’t find in this scene anymore.  I didn’t want to just be another “x band.”  I don’t want to use any names and I don’t want to call people out and stuff like that, but I don’t want to follow that trend.  I really do believe that ship has sailed and sunk and I would like to blaze a new trail.  Even if we’re just on the forefront of it and it’s going to take awhile to materialize, I don’t care.  I’ve always felt like Nocturnal Me was about making progress musically and not just beating the same dead horse.

SMP: How did the decision to record the accompanying acoustic versions of the songs from the EP come about?

DM: Apparition Records were trying to get me from the beginning of recording the album to do a whole acoustic version of it.  Every time I come out with something, people always say “oh, well Dave did this acoustic stuff and that was so great and that’s what I want to hear.”  So we figured instead of shunning those people, we would play into it this time.  They’re really not recordings in the sense that I sat down and tracked the acoustic guitar, tracked the vocals, and then edited it and mixed it.  What I did was, I sat down in front of a camera and my friend taped me doing one take of each song on an acoustic guitar and then we took the audio from that camera and used them for the acoustic takes.  I felt like that was a way of telling people “hey, we listen to you.  I know you guys want this.”  But it’s also a way of being real about it and not just making an acoustic version of a rock song.  I don’t know if that makes any sense, but a lot times bands just play their songs acoustically and that’s it.  When I play songs acoustically, especially Nocturnal Me songs, they have to be so different.  I have to change the composition, change the way I play it, I have to add different things and subtract others.  These are almost completely new songs.  I feel like when people listen to the acoustic version, they’ll get a whole different perspective of the song than they will when they listen to the full band version.

SMP:What has your experience on Apparition Records been like as opposed to releasing your music independently?

DM: It’s been great.  It’s almost like releasing stuff independently except there’s more support.  In the past, I’ve really taken the reigns in the band and I’ve had to set up distribution, work on all the press, work on all the marketing, and it was way too much for one guy to do.  I was also trying to write the songs and record them and I’m a big part of the editing mixing process as well.  At the end of the second EP, I knew that we couldn’t do it that way again because I just got so stressed out and I don’t feel like it came out as good as it would have if I’d taken a step back and let some other people have the reigns.  So working with Apparition was great because they picked up the slack in places where I needed it, but they also allowed me to have complete freedom with what songs I wanted on there, how I wanted to record them, how I wanted them to sound.  They never overstepped their boundaries and that’s definitely why I decided to work with them in the first place.

SMP: What’s been the biggest difference in the creative process of Nocturnal Me as opposed to your time in Cute is What We Aim For?

DM: I mean, it’s simply that in Cute we didn’t do much work and in this band I do so much work.  We did an album called “Rotation” and we went in with John Feldman, my personal hero, and we went in there with two songs for him for a twelve song album.  John really picked up a lot of slack and really filled in a lot of holes and if we didn’t have him, there would have been no record written.  That’s just how that band worked.  We were very young and very spoiled and were not willing to work for it.  I’ll be flat out about that.  Now with Nocturnal Me, it’s completely the opposite.  I like to have my hands on every single instrument, every part of the recording process, I help with vocal editing and mixing.  When it goes out there, I want it to sound like me.  That’s the main difference.  With Cute it was very lackadaisical and kind of like “whatever happens, happens – we have a great band name.”  This time, we want to put a lot of tender, loving care into this because it matters.

SMP: Have you found it hard to separate from some of your past endeavors or have you felt that Nocturnal Me has really developed its own distinct fan base?

DM: I don’t think that Nocturnal Me has, and I’m not sure that it will, develop a distinct fan base.  At least to this point it hasn’t.  But Nocturnal Me just changed with this record.  I shouldered most of the writing and most of the recording.  The guys came into the studio for one day and put some parts down and stuff like that, but for the most part, this was more of a slow endeavor.  That’s what Nocturnal Me is going to be like in the future.  The releases I see for Nocturnal Me are going to be a lot more experimental, they’re going to completely stray from the genre that it started from.  Some people may say that’s kind of stupid, but I’ve never wanted Nocturnal Me to be a cash cow, I’ve wanted it to be an outlet for expression and for me to do whatever the fuck I want to do.  If I want to release a dubstep album, if I want to make a freaking disco album, whatever it is, that’s what Nocturnal Me is for.  While I don’t think it has exactly stood out from everything that’s out there in the past, I feel like we’re on the road to that.

SMP: Nocturnal Me hasn’t done much in the past as far as touring or shows are concerned.  Do you have any plans to support this new effort on the road?

DM: No and that’s just another reflection of how I feel about the music business.  I would love to go out on tour if it made sense.  I think that us living in a van and playing every dive bar and stuff like that is not the formula to break a band anymore.  It definitely makes you feel like you’re doing something with yourself and a lot people argue that it makes you more visible to labels and people that matter, but at the end of the day, if people are hearing songs that they like, that’s where it happens.  For me, it’s all about continuing to release awesome material and focusing on what really counts, which to me, are the songs.

SMP: If you were to capture the heart or purpose behind Nocturnal Me to express to a new listener, what would that be?

DM: I would say that it’s an experimental, free place to say what I want and to be creative.  With Cute is What We Aim For, people expected to hear a certain sound when they turned on those records.  They expected to hear “these” type of guitars, “these” type of vocals, and “these” type of lyrics.  With Nocturnal Me, it will never be about that.  Nocturnal Me is for me to kind of step into a role and play that role however I want to.  If one day I want to be this crazy, dark, weird, synth music dude, that’s what I’ll do.  If one day I feel super happy and it’s going to be a duet with Celine Dion and a big fucking orchestra, that’s what it’s going to be.  So musically, that’s what it is, it’s a no-holds-barred creative outlet.  As far as the lyrics go and the message I’ve always wanted to portray through Nocturnal Me, it’s just to give people a realistic view of what our world has become.  A lot of people play into the excess and hedonism of this time and I feel like a lot of the younger generation doesn’t really get that the decisions we’re making are ultimately really going to suck for us down the road.  So in a lot of the songs, I try to put that kind of thing in there.  “This isn’t Love” from our first EP is a great example of it.  It creates this story where there’s someone who’s just sleeping around and kind of acting in a way where if you saw it from afar, you’d be like “what the fuck are you doing?”  But a lot of us act that way internally and we’re not able to recognize it.   So for me, I try to paint that picture for people and let them see how stupid we look as a generation.

SMP:Any parting comments you’d like to add?

DM: Thank you very much for the interview!  On another note, I’m releasing my own solo mixtape, so for any of the fans of the acoustic part of  “Two Faced” or of what I’ve done in the past, that is going to be continued later this fall.
I have a program Called Homegrown Half Hr, we tape it on Wed and it’s a 15 minute interview and we play 3-4 mp3′s