Trevor Lissauer and The Glass Plastiks. Just the name would make most people open the shrink wrap and give the CD a try, and that's a good thing, because the music inside is addictive pop that deserves an audience. Lissauer's voice is engaging and versatile, sometimes gentle and sometimes a bit angry as he sings the songs that make up Transit Plaza. The album deals with relationships, transitions and catharsis, and it's quite real. Lissauer writes from experience.

One transition that was definitely important and on his mind during the making of Transit Plaza was his career move, which could be seen as a bit baffling by many. It's not like he was leaving the pizza delivery industry to make music. Trevor Lissauer is a successful television and film actor whose credits include the WB series Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (on which he played Miles Goodwin) and movies like The Skateboard Kid and An American Vampire Story (in which he played the lead character, Frankie). Why stop steady paychecks and jump into the world of indie pop? It helps to believe in yourself, and in your band. In Keith Tenebaum (drums) and Barry Whittaker (bass), Lissauer has found what he was always looking for in a rhythm section: talented, creative players he actually likes. In the music business, that last one's usually the dealbreaker.

Now that Transit Plaza is out, it's time for the next steps to be taken in Trevor Lissauer, Career 2.0. Lest you think this is just another case of a TV star making a crummy record with studio musicians and cookie cutter writing, let me assure you such is not the case, as proven by the fact that I pursued this interview before I knew about Career 1.0. Trevor the musician is very much the real thing.

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Cosmik: So I reviewed your CD without realizing you were Miles from Sabrina The Teenage Witch, I fell in love with the music, arranged the interview and THEN found out about that and the rest of your acting career, and I keep thinking how rare this is, because usually actors who make albums... if we're lucky they're so-so. Makes me wonder, which is your true passion?

Trevor: Music. I've been doing it since I was a little kid, without knowing what I was actually doing. I've been singing since I was a kid, not in front of people, but in my bedroom on little cassette tapes, making up songs, making my voice [be] the electric guitar sound. I didn't start acting until I was in high school, and that wasn't even professional. Those were just plays. I didn't start acting as a profession until I was like 18, and even then I'd come straight home, hang out playing my guitar and writing songs, so that's always been the constant in my life.

Cosmik: Did the two worlds meet easily?

Trevor: Well I was always acting and being a goofball, you know? Dressing up in costumes. I guess I'm a performer.

Cosmik: You really concentrated on your acting through the 90s, though.

Trevor: Yeah, it took a while for me to figure out that music was something I'd want to do as a career. It took my whole life, I guess, because I really just started pursuing it fully this year.

Cosmik: You didn't write all these songs this year, did you?

Trevor: No. A few of the songs, like "Remember," were written five or six years prior, and five of the songs, like "Unnamed," "She," "On," Okay" and "If I See You," those were songs written about my ex-girlfriend. We'd just broken up at the time of [making the album]. I wrote "About The Sun" the last week of recording, and "Windows" was written years ago. I've been putting songs down on paper since I was about 14, so I have a lot. I have a few hundred songs. If I never wrote another song, I'd have enough to make albums for the rest of my life.

Cosmik: As good as these?

Trevor: They're not all great, so it helps to write new songs. I write crap songs, too, you just don't usually hear them.

Cosmik: Good policy.

Trevor: I test 'em out on myself. The thing is, a lot of my crap songs, some other band might do better playing them than I would, but they're just not my style. Sometimes I'll write a song and think "That's not bad, but it's not my style at all."

Cosmik: So it's not really a "crap song" so much as it's not a Trevor Lissauer song.

Trevor: Exactly. But it came out of me, so I'll put it in the stack and maybe three years from now it'll make sense to me. I've done that before. Brought a song to rehearsal and we aren't really into it, so we put it away, and then four months later we all love it. We don't know why that happens.

Cosmik: Like with anything else, the timing just has to be right.

Trevor: Yeah, it's like the song is ahead of its time and then we catch up with the song. [Laughs]

Cosmik: Are you actively avoiding acting gigs right now so you can totally concentrate on music?

Trevor: I'm not avoiding. I did Sabrina for two years, and I'd done a lot of other jobs before that, nothing extremely inspiring, but good experiences, and when I finished Sabrina I put some money away. When I was done I decided if I was going to act, I'd rather just go out for a film, because those things start and end, as opposed to a television series you have to do every season. It takes up a lot of time, and although you make a lot of money, the work itself isn't that inspiring. It's very rare to get on a show where the writing is perfect and intelligent. When I was done with that show I decided I didn't want to do television anymore. I started making my CD, Transit Plaza, which then turned into making a web site, which then turned into getting a publicist which turned into getting a manager, and then it was the beginning of the year and I find I've got all this stuff done now. I was driving in my car and it hit me: "Wow... I love music. I love it more than acting. This is what I want to do."

Cosmik: Even when you've been doing it all your life as a hobby, it's a radical thing to shift gears like that right in the middle of a successful acting career. Takes guts.

Trevor: I guess because I'm 30 now... People go through changes at the end of their 20s. Everybody was always telling me, since I first started playing music a long time ago, that that's what I should do. When I told them I was an actor, they'd really be surprised, they wouldn't understand why I'd want to do that. I used to get upset, actually, when they'd tell me that I should choose music over acting. "No, I'm an ACTOR!" It's pretty funny, because now I'm like "Hey, I'm a musician! Yeah!" I never would have thought, three or four years ago, that I was ever going to reverse that.

Cosmik: If you're pressed to tag your music with a genre, what do you consider it?

Trevor: I don't know, really. It's mellow pop, but...

Cosmik: But not at all in a formulaic, boring way. Dreamier. Pop's hard to define.

Trevor: Well, what is pop? The Beatles were pop, right? They had so many styles of music, but they were still pop. I'm not afraid to have my music called pop. I like it. To me, it's the main genre that everything else comes from. Can you keep a beat, can you get a good melody to it and make it start and finish in a reasonable amount of time and have a good hook? That's pop, you know? I don't set out to write a well structured song, I just write a song. There are so many different levels of pop music, though. Even Kurt Cobain... I don't know what his music was, really. At one time he said it was punk "because punk is doing what you want to do and not caring what anyone else thinks," but his songs were pop songs. I don't care if he was screaming his lungs out, they had verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / verse / chorus. Perfect. Total pop.

Cosmik: The hooks were miles long, too, way more than most punk, and I love punk so I'm not putting the genre down here. But I do agree, he wrote pop songs and made them sound and feel like punk. Neat trick.

Trevor: Great hooks in almost every song. It was awesome. He knew, too. I think he even said he wrote pop songs.

Cosmik: Kept things simple, too.

Trevor: He'd repeat the main verse, you know, like bring it back at the end to remind you where the song began. I do that in some of my songs, and I kind of got that from him. It's a good way to end a song.

Cosmik: Would you say he's a big influence?

Trevor: Unintentional influence. I think everyone's an unintentional influence.

Cosmik: The only influence I'd wager on with you is George Harrison, because on one of your songs I really feel George's influence. Just one song, though. Beautifully done, too.

Trevor: You know what's interesting is I've got my nine favorite reviews on my web site [www.trevorlissauer.com], and all of them mention George Harrison.

Cosmik: I heard it in "About The Sun," and it's beautifully absorbed. The atmosphere of that song is beautiful.

Trevor: I do like George. My favorite singer/songwriter of all time is Elliot Smith, and then after that, I think, John Lennon and then Beck. Not every album, but certain songs by Beck. I like his last album and Mutations the best. I like his chord changes. They're pretty weird.

Cosmik: Tell us about the concept of Transit Plaza. Starting with the basic idea of what a transit plaza is, for the people who don't know.

Trevor: A transit plaza, literally, is the hallway in the train station where people go to meet their trains, or where they walk when they go from the train to the street. People coming and going from one place to another.

Cosmik: How did you apply that to your album?

Trevor: At first, I just thought it was a cool place to take pictures, so my bass player, Barry Whitaker, who took all the pictures for the album, went with me to the train station. We were going to name the album Trevor Lissauer. Then we were down there taking pictures in the transit plaza area, some of the pictures were of people going by me while I was sitting still, and later when we were looking at them we saw one and said "That one would be a good cover." The publicist looked at it and said "You should name the CD. Don't just call it Trevor Lissauer." I said I'd think about it. Then I saw, in the photograph, a sign that said "Transit Plaza," so I said "Hey! That's it! Let's name it Transit Plaza!" Then we started talking about what it means and what a great thing it was to find in that picture, because I could relate it to my life, to the relationship that was ending at the time, the new relationship that's come into my life since I've written it, friends and whatnot, so it all fell into place. In transit.

Cosmik: Serendipity.

Trevor: Yeah, it's nice when it happens like that.

Cosmik: Cool story. It doesn't surprise me, though, considering your lyrics, that you'd be into connections and deeper meanings. You kind of invite lyric freaks to read between lines and try to guess at messages in some of your songs, which is fun.

Trevor: Yeah, I'm sure I do. A lot of the stuff is like a poem, like "I'm A Monkey," that I don't even know what it means. Well, I know what it means, but I don't know why I wrote it.

Cosmik: Specifically?

Trevor: "Chocolate and furniture - Soft lies and a burning purse..." Could mean a lot of things.

Cosmik: Yeeeah, come to think of it, why did you write that? [Laughs]

Trevor: I don't... I said like "Maybe she's running from - The bright rays of the sun - She likes the solo path - Yes I can do the math." That part's obvious. The girl doesn't like me, I can do the math.

Cosmik: But then we have soft lies and a burning purse, and I was wondering what the hell was going on over there. What's the part right after that?

Trevor: "Your fame is uncontrolled - But those were the dice you rolled - You had a hot stance in the dark - I passed by with no remark - You got razors under your skin - You're addicting like heroin."

Cosmik: Cool. I knew, but I just wanted to sneak it into the interview because I love that song. [Laughs]

Trevor: I started writing that four or five years before I recorded it, and I had all the verses down but no chorus, and I was sitting down in my living room with my friend and I said "What do you think of this song?" He says "It's pretty cool," and I'm thinking "Yeah, if I could just think of a chorus." Right then and there I came up with a chorus, when he was sitting there.

Cosmik: Maybe you needed the pressure. Put yourself on the spot a bit. Do you do that when you're recording, too? What is your process for putting your music down?

Trevor: Well, on Transit Plaza we recorded differently than I'd record the next album. This album we recorded me first playing guitar and singing, then my drummer and bass player came and added their parts.

Cosmik: That's a different approach. I assume you recorded with a click-track.

Trevor: Yeah. Then we went back and did the vocals again, so we had bass, drums, guitar and lead vocals. Then I did the backup vocals, electric guitar in some spots, some acoustic picking, added some keyboards. Pretty basic. The next time we record, though, we're going to record together as a band, live in the studio, and then if I have to I'll go back and re-do the guitar, but at least the drums will be there the first time through, when I'm playing. It makes the music have a feel I like.

Cosmik: I would never have guessed you did it the way you did, though. It's hard to get a real emotional performance out when you're just playing with a click track.

Trevor: We would have done it the other way this time, but the studio we were at couldn't hold a drum set, so we had to record the drums separately. Next time we won't have that problem.

Cosmik: You've got some solid players in your band. How did you hook up with them?

Trevor: I was recording some tracks four years ago, and the person who was recording me knew this drummer and he called him. Keith came in and we recorded together, made some cool songs, and he said "Hey, if you ever want to play any of these live, I'd love to play with you," and I said "Sure!" He had a friend who was a bass player, but he was a big pothead. He would show up to rehearsal late. He wasn't totally passionate, you know? Too stoned most of the time, to be honest with you. After a while of playing together on and off, maybe a year and a half, Keith's wife, who was living in Austin for a while going to UT [University of Texas], she managed a band there for a bit and they'd moved to L.A. and then broken up. She talked to the bass player about us, and he came over to Keith's house and we played a few songs and it felt easy, so I asked if he wanted to play with us and it's three years later now. He's still here.

Cosmik: Was it hard to keep the band together while you were still concentrating on acting?

[Drummer Keith Tenebaum]

Trevor: We were playing, and Keith was kind of playing in this one band, and Barry was messing around with some people, but we weren't taking the music seriously here. They want to play music full time, and they weren't counting on me to take them there because I kept saying "No, I'm an actor, I'm actor, music is just something I do." They kept saying, though, "I like the music. You should really do this," you know? Then, like I said, I made some changes, we started taking it seriously, practiced twice a week. and we started getting really tight, and it was really easy. We flow together really well. They're my band, you know? "Trevor Lissauer" is the music, really, it's the bass player, it's the drummer, it's me on guitar and my voice. The way I feel right now is that if I'm going to play a show, I want the music to be heard the way it's meant to be heard, which is bass, drums and guitar. At some point we'll acquire a keyboard player to add to the live sound, and if that works out, then that person will be part of Trevor Lissauer.

Cosmik: As opposed to a hired gun, you mean?

Trevor: They're not. They're in it for the publishing as well. I want them to get a percentage of the publishing.

Cosmik: You're kiddin' me, right? Nobody does that, not when they've written all the songs and sing them.

Trevor: No, I'm not kidding. The reason it happened is because we did a lot of growing together. It's a relationship, you know? We had times when I was getting inspired by different things, and I'd tell Keith "Play softer on the drums" or something, and he would get offended, and I'd explain that I was trying to get this "unplugged" type of sound, so he'd change his sticks to play softer. And at the beginning Keith and Barry weren't seeing eye to eye, and there were other things going on, so we went through our early phase of weirdness and...

Cosmik: Growing pains.

Trevor: Yeah, and craziness. I finally realized, though, that if they're hired guns, then that's just me telling them what to do. But then in rehearsal, I always say "Do whatever you want to do," but then I'm gonna get full credit for it. "Ha ha ha! You make no money! You'll get money when we record and when we play live, but you'll get no money from the publishing." I was feeling pretty weird about that.

Cosmik: And yet most solo artists have no trouble with it.

[Bassist Barry Whittaker]

Trevor: Yeah, but it felt different to me. Keith wanted to feel like he was part of something, like part of a "band," and I'm like "Yeah, but..." But then I started listening to the songs and I said "Wait a second, that was a good song, but when he put that drum part to it, which I did not write, and when Barry came up with that cool bass line, that adds to the dynamic of the song. I can't take credit for that." I can say "Hey, play a thing like that there," but I'm not actually doing it. Nine times out of ten I'm not really telling them what to play, specifically. Maybe one time every few songs I have an idea for them, but just an idea, and even they have ideas for something I'm playing, and I'll try it and it works and changes the song. So... I'll feel like a jerk if we become really big, and I'm having my mansion and they're living in apartments trying to make rent because they have no publishing. The money's all in publishing.

Cosmik: Long as you keep enough for yourself so you can feed your Martin habit. I understand you've got a thing for vintage Martin acoustic guitars. Which explains the warm acoustic sounds. Is that a D18 on most of the album?

[Trevor's 1959 D-18E]

Trevor: On Transit Plaza I played a D18e, a D28e and I played the 1973 D28. I sold a 00-18e and I'm now in the process of selling the D28e, but I'm keeping the D18e because that's the one I really wanted in the first place. Now the guitars that I currently have... I've got a 1959 D18e, which is the kind that Kurt Cobain played on MTV Unplugged, and there are just 300 more in existence. I just loved it. That's how I got into Martins, by chasing that guitar. Then I've got a Mini-Martin that's all mahogany, which is pretty cool. It's really small. I've got a 1953 0-18, which is a really small guitar but it has a big bass sound. I had a pickup put in it and I've been playing that lately. I've also got a cheapie Martin called a DX-1 I got for something like 400 bucks. It's a hybrid wood. They take all this wood and moosh it together until it's one solid piece. That's why it's cheaper, but it's great. I wanted a cheap one I could knock around if I wanted to. Then there's the 1974 D28, which I used to play a lot, but now I'm getting more into the thinner bodied guitars, and I like those because they're a lot closer to your body. The thing is I'm plugging in now, so it doesn't matter quite as much if I'm playing a big body or a small body, because it all becomes electric. I also have a Beck Hansen guitar, which is pretty cool. It's called a D16-BH. It's a Martin and it sounds awesome. It has a Dreadnought body, but it has the depth of a triple-0 or an 0M.

Cosmik: What's on the hunting list?

Trevor: I'm really excited about getting an OM-42, but I'm not getting it until September. I'm looking forward to that.

Cosmik: That's quite a collection. What kind of amps do you play these through?

Trevor: When I play live, I plug straight into the PA system, but I do have a Fender AcoustiSonic at home.

Cosmik: Who makes up your audience? Generally speaking.

Trevor: A lot of people of different ages really like it, actually. Really young people like it, and much older people seem to like it, too. I've seen a lot of people in their 60s that obviously dig it a lot, and there are definitely a lot of teenagers who are into it, and even younger kids. Then people your age and my age. It's all over the range. All ages.

Cosmik: This is a very good CD, but career moves like this can be scary. Do you ever have second thoughts about jumping totally into music and putting acting so far into the backseat?

Trevor: I'm not worried about it. When I decided I wanted to be a professional actor, I came out to LA and said that was it, that was what I was going to do. The very first day I was in town, in this order, I got an agent, I got an audition, and I got the lead in the movie The Skateboard Kid. Not the best movie in the world, but it was my first day in Hollywood, so not bad. I've always just gone after what I want, and always believed in myself. It won't happen as fast this time, but we're going for it. We're just now starting to book gigs out of town. We can now because a lot of college stations are playing our stuff, so hey, the word is getting out, slowly but surely.

© 2004 - DJ Johnson