Strokes guitarist strikes out on his own with CRX

By Gary Graff
October 28, 2016

If there’s a silver lining to the Strokes working so sporadically and taking so much time between albums, it’s that the band members don’t just sit around; instead they launch other bands and projects to keep the music coming. Guitarist Nick Valensi joins the party this week with the aptly titled New Skin, the debut album by CRX, a band he formed to fill some of the Strokes’ interim.

Produced by Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, New Skin certainly nods to the trademark tone of Valensi’s “day job” — particularly the opening track and first single, “Ways To Fake It” — but it also cuts a broad and diverse stylistic path; the songs themselves may be compact, but they also give Valensi a change to expand his palette, exploring heavy rock, vintage New Wave and even ambient, soulful textures, as well as his first foray into being a lead singer. CRX is hitting the road as well, and we caught up Valensi behind the wheel of his car, struck in traffic. “You can’t get more L.A. than that, man,” he says with a laugh.

FGPO: So how did CRX come to be?

Valensi: I guess it was kind of a slow burn for me, man. The whole thing started with finishing a Strokes record [2013’s Comedown Machine] that we didn’t tour and just getting a hankering to be on stage, be on tour, just perform more. Y’know, you write songs, you record music and you perform music, so there’s kind of this trifecta of stuff, and when the balance is off I feel that. So I just wanted more balance and to perform more. The end goal was getting on stage, but I had to start by writing. I wasn’t just going to go on stage and do Strokes songs or do cover songs. I wasn’t really interested in that, so I had to start out by getting some material together.

FGPO: Did you always envision yourself as the singer?

Valensi: That was the big decision, who’s gonna sing this stuff that I’m writing? I had to force myself out of my comfort zone a little bit and push myself to be the singer on the project. Once I wrote and recorded an album I didn’t want any obstacles in the way of getting on tour, so that meant me singing, too.

FGPO: You started these songs on your own a couple of years ago, right? When did it become a band?

Valensi: Yeah, I just started writing these songs on my laptop. I didn’t know what I was doing, what the endgame was other than being on stage. I wasn’t sure if I was working on a solo project or if it was gonna turn into a band or a side project thing. It was pretty much open-ending, and I spent a little over a year pretty much by myself, not even telling anyone that I was doing this, just kind of writing a lot. But after about a year-and-a-half of that I started to go crazy. I’ve been in a band my whole life, and I’m really used to the dynamic of having people in the room as you come up with ideas and just bounce ideas off of and get feedback from. So I started to feel kind of stuck, and I reached out to friends for feedback. I needed kind of a committee so I started sharing my demos with a handful of friends, and most of the people I shared the demos with are the guys who are now in the band with me. They’re all just L.A. friends of mine, musicians I respect, dudes who I love hanging out with. At first it was like: “Hey, can I play you some songs I wrote? I’m curious to get your take on it,” and from there it became a kind of collaborative thing where they were all helping me finish lyrics, and it really started to feel like a band, and that’s why we ended up going that route.

FGPO: How did Josh Homme became part of this?

Valensi: He was one of those people I reached out to in a friendly way, just to get advice on my songs. He didn’t end up in the band for obvious reasons; he’s already got several very successful bands. But he came on board as a producer. I played him all these demos, and he really got excited by all these songs and wanted to produce them. I’m no dummy; Josh Homme, produce my record? Uh…yeah.

FGPO: Did you consult the other Strokes members as well, or did you try to separate CRX from that completely?

Valensi: Oh, no. Actually Fab Moretti, the drummer from the Strokes, he’s my best friend for over 20 years. He’s not credited on the record, but he may as well be because he was really instrumental in kind of, like, boosting my confidence. Fab was really one of the main people who really pushed me to write a record on my own and start singing. I was sending Fab demos and sharing song ideas with him — I think he was probably the very first one I shared things with. We’re both in the Strokes and that’s our main band, but it was understood I was writing for a new project and he knew that. I can’t tell you how big of a support Fab was to me.

FGPO: Talk about the stylistic range of New Skin. You cover a lot of ground here, some of which might be surprising to Strokes fans.

Valensi: I just kind of stumbled on to something I guess. The first couple of songs I wrote for the record were really fast, really uptempo, really aggressive, kind of borderline…I don’t want to say heavy metal, but there’s definitely a thrashy influence in those songs. I call it hipster metal. I found myself getting excited about that direction, which was something more aggressive than what I’m used to doing with the Strokes, and kind of more angry. I guess I had a lot of latent anger to get out [laughs]. So I figured: “That’s gonna be my record. I’m gonna write this heavy, hipster record.” Then maybe the sixth or seventh song I wrote was “Ways To Fake It,” and that sounded different from what I had done to that point; it was kind of power poppy, reminded me a lot of the Cars, definitely an early ‘80s Cheap Trick, Cars, Elvis Costello vibe to me, which I love, too. I hesitated to add it to my list of songs, ’cause it didn’t fit with this heavier vibe I had latched onto. Then I just kept writing and I got into a mode of writing a couple of these power pop songs, and I found myself with half an album of heavy stuff and half an album of this more power pop stuff and I was not sure how to reconcile that.

FGPO: And the solution was…?

Valensi: It wasn’t until I reached out reached out to Josh Homme, and one of my first gripes I aired to him was that the songs were all a little disjointed. It sounds like two albums, and he was really quick to assure me that was one of the keys to making this a great record. It didn’t take much convincing on his part, but he was really quick to remind me that writing an album where you’re stuck in one genre and only expressing one emotion really can get boring fast. He was like Fab; Josh was really one of my biggest supporters and was really helpful in giving me the confidence boost that I needed to finish the record.

FGPO: What kind of guitar work did you get to do on New Skin that felt like, well, new for you?

Valensi: Well, I got to play all of Josh’s guitars and amps, ’cause we recorded at his place and he’s got a wealth of cool stuff. So in terms of the gear I was playing with it was all new to me. I did bring a couple of my things that I’m used to and I know really well, but I ended up gravitating mostly towards Josh’s stuff, a lot of old Japanese pawn shop guitars and shit like that.

FGPO: What did you get to add to your repertoire as a player?

Valensi: I kind of go back and forth about whether it’s a good thing to have a style as a player. I feel like I’ve gotten to a place where I recognize my playing when I hear it, and I think other people do, too. But the flip side of that is you can feel kind of stuck with what you’re playing, like: “I always do this style. It’s getting old to him.” So there is an element of wanting to branch out and do different stuff, guitar-wise, and then also kind of relying on the old tricks as well. It’s kind of a fine balance between the two. One thing that did surprise me is I ended up experimenting with a lot of keyboards and synthesizers, which I hadn’t done much with before. That was one element of the recording process that kind of surprised me. I didn’t think that we’d end up with a keyboard player in the band, but we’ve got one now ’cause it’s all over the record.

FGPO: Do you consider CRX a going concern?

Valensi: I intend it to be, absolutely. The Strokes is still my main thing, and it’ll always be my main thing. But the Strokes don’t do as much touring a we used to; we mainly do kind of one-off shows, festival shows. And there’s all these Strokes side projects and different things going on. So as a result there’s a lot of down time, and I wanted to have a project that during Strokes down time I could just pick this thing up and take it on tour whenever I wanted to. I can go do a charity thing if I want to, whenever I want to. If my cousin asks me to play his bar mitzvah, sure, I can do it. I don’t have to be at the whim of this big machine that is the Strokes.

FGPO: What are the Strokes up to now?

Valensi: The Strokes are always kind of passively working on something, always. There’s always material floating around. There’s a Drop Box that’s constantly being edited and fooled with, and every couple of weeks we all reconvene in New York for writing session that last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. We’re slowly but surely working on an album. I don’t know when it’s gonna be ready, but we’re working on stuff.

FGPO: Is that frustrating? Do you wish the group was more prolific?

Valensi: It’s not a frustration for me. I am a very, very admittedly slow person. I’m very methodical. I think a lot about what I’m doing. It’s held me back in a lot of ways in my life, but it’s helped me in a lot of ways. It’s just how I am. I don’t like putting things out willy nilly; even this CRX record, up until the final day of mixing it I had it in the back of my mind that if this doesn’t come out the way I want it to, if I’m not proud of it, if I’m not satisfied with it, if I don’t feel good about it then I’m not gonna release it. I’ll shelf it and keep it on a hard drive in a close for the rest of my life [laughs]. It might be frustrating to be a fan of someone like that because there’s just not that much being put out, but I guess I’ve found a process that works for me, and it kind of translates over to the Strokes as well. We’re all pretty methodical about how we create. We’re sorry it takes so long.