Mini Mansions interview

Michael Shuman has had little time to relax after a hectic few weeks. The Mini Mansions multi-instrumentalist has only just returned to home soil in Los Angeles after traversing the United States on a support tour with ubiquitous rock n’ roll newbies Royal Blood.

His band are also hard at work with the release of their second LP, The Great Pretenders, very much on the periphery.

And Mini Mansions aren’t resting on their laurels just yet. They are currently on the road supporting Brit Award winning buddies Royal Blood, including a sold out show at Rock City.

Shuman, who you may also recognise as bassist of arena-churning monoliths Queens of the Stone Age, reminisces on his budding relationship with the British breakthrough duo.

“We get along really well with Royal Blood. I met Mike probably a year and a half ago at a Queens show and we’ve played some festivals together and hung out. We had fun on this last run and they’re up for the party, I’ll tell you that much,” Shuman muses.

With the Royal Blood hype seemingly percolating all over the world it was no surprise that this upcoming tour would be an instant sell out.

Is it a daunting prospect filling the support slot for one of the most in-demand bands of the past year?

“Supporting other bands is tough. You’re trying to win over a crowd that either doesn’t know you or doesn’t care – they just want to be drinking and waiting for Royal Blood. It’s tough, but I kind of like the challenge and feeling like I’m an underdog going into a game.”

The LA three-piece have already had a taste of the UK this year, managing to squeeze in a London headline gig in between a laborious touring schedule. On the gig, Shuman says: “We did loads of shows with Royal Blood and then to come to London to our own people in a small venue was super fun.”

It was at this show at the Lexington where Mini Mansions unveiled a very high-profile collaboration – with Arctic Monkeys’ indie deity Alex Turner. Michael compares the track, Vertigo, to a 90s West Coast hip-hop standard.

“We had this idea that Tyler, our keyboard player and vocalist, would take the first verse and then maybe I would take the second verse – having a different voice come in.”

Although the collaboration came about organically, the band initially imagined the track in a completely different way.

“I envisaged some kind of British thug character from a Guy Ritchie movie so we tried a bunch of different things and spoke to a number of people. But then Al had been hanging out with us a lot in the studio, so when we went to do the vocals it was a no-brainer. He wrote his own lyrics and melody for that verse – and that was it.”

If that collaboration wasn’t impressive enough, then Mini Mansions really up the ante on single Any Emotions – featuring none other than The Beach Boys’ founding member Brian Wilson. For Michael, this was a pipe dream which became a reality, but he admits that he never got to meet him in the studio.

“Someone from our label was working on the recent Brian Wilson record and asked our bass player Zack to play on one of his songs – which was insane.

That track went really well and a few days later we were doing the vocals for our record and Zack thought if he didn't ask Brian to sing on our record then he’d regret for the rest of his life. We gave him two or three songs to choose from and he picked Any Emotions. It’s just one of those things that you never believe will happen – having a guy like that who has been such a huge influence on us playing on your record.”

Aside from the dream collaborations and crazy touring plans, the conception of The Great Pretenders was a fairly stunted process. After writing eight songs in 2013 for a proposed EP, the band soon found themselves mired in record label issues and Michael was swamped in with Queens of the Stone Age album sessions. The only resolution was to start from scratch.

“It wasn’t really going our way and in that time, so we started writing a bunch of new material and those original eight songs are now the B-sides to the singles from our new album because we wrote so many new songs over the last year and a half.”

So how is it juggling both Queens of the Stone Age and Mini Mansions?

“It just means you have no life,” Michael puts bluntly.

“I just give everything to both bands and when I’m not doing Queens, I’m in the studio writing for Mansions. It’s tough because you make sacrifices to do what you really want to do and a lot of things suffer, like friendships and relationships. It’s been an interesting, but exciting, couple of years.”

As for the upcoming record, Shuman insists it still retains the Mini Mansions sound, but is far more engaging on a lyrical level.

He adds: “Where the first record was much more fantastical and arrangements were wilder, this is more focused and we’ve been able to open up and talk about real things.”

Themes like love, death and existentialism all feature heavily on The Great Pretenders – and are motifs which reflect the band’s current life, says Shuman.

As he talks about the new record, it’s obvious just how much he has invested in Mini Mansions. Quite simply, he loves his job. For a man who has headlined some of the world’s biggest festivals with Queens of the Stone Age, Shuman remains refreshingly modest and entirely engaging.

Juggling projects and a compromising schedule with apparent ease, you could say he is one of the hardest working musicians in the game. And with Rock City on the horizon, that work ethic shows no signs of abating.