Interview: Rob Aston of Transplants - Page 2

It was just one of those things where it happened and it came together like that, and it ended up being one of my favorite songs. That was the first song that we recorded for that record, actually.

How’d you end up meeting Tim Armstrong and eventually forming Transplants?

I used to work for a band called AFI in the Bay Area. Rancid’s also from the Bay Area. So through mutual friends, I became friends with Tim and Lars and Bret and Matt and everybody, and when I moved down to LA – which is where Tim lives… I grew up in Fresno and moved down to Los Angeles around ’99.

Tim and I were already homies and I moved about a mile away from him. And, you know, we’d just be hanging out all the time. He got a Pro Tools rig for his home studio and he learned how to use it. He’d make tracks and shit, and he’d hit me up and I could write lyrics for these songs. I’d never done that shit before but I came up on Operation Ivy and Rancid and shit, besides the fact that this was my homie, you know?

What’s the song writing process like for you guys? How do you end up getting together to come up with new stuff?

It’s usually spontaneous. There’s never an agenda or list of songs for me to write or topics, you know? A lot of the time, Tim will come up with a skeleton of some music, maybe a chorus idea or something, or I’ll come up with a chorus and we’ll go from there. Travis will come up with a drumbeat, and Tim will write off of that. And we’ll base the rhythm off the music Travis has created… all kinds of shit. Anything goes with us. All of our ideas are accepted.

How do you deal with the busy schedules of Tim Armstrong and Travis Barker? You see those guys all over the place nowadays.

Yeah, it took us about two years to make this record. It definitely wasn’t two years of studio time, you know what I’m saying? Sometimes it would just be three days in the studio, and then we wouldn’t see each other for a month. Then we’d get back in for a couple of days, and a couple of weeks would go by and we’d be in Tim’s basement for a week.

We’d get together whenever we could, because everyone is busy. You know, I’ve been doing solo shit, Tim’s been doing Rancid stuff, Travis was in Blink [182] back then.

What do you think of your man Travis doing a reality show on MTV?

Article Author: Eric Berlin

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