Credit: Jeff FarsaiSlightly Stoopid is currently on tour with Dirty Heads on a trek dubbed the Everything Is Awesome tour. Given that the tour's title borrows the mantra from last year's The Lego Movie, was Slightly Stoopid singer and guitarist Miles Doughty a fan of the film?
"I grew up playing Legos -- what boy didn't play Legos? -- and the movie was actually really funny, so it kind of seemed fitting for the tour, just finally have the two bands getting together," Doughty tells ABC Radio. "The fans have actually been asking for, like, 10 years for us and Dirty Heads to do a full tour and not just festival dates, so it's really cool to get us together, and I think that the name worked great for the tour."
Doughty went from playing Legos to playing in a band, and now Slightly Stoopid a year away from celebrating the 20th anniversary of their debut album, Slightly $toopid. In those two decades, Doughty found that as they grew as people, he and his band members evolved musically both in the studio and on the stage.
"We were those kind of pissed off kids at society, your parents, the law, whatever, that's what punk rock kids were back then," Doughty says of Slightly Stoopid's younger days. "As you get older, you have so many more different influences in music, it translates in our writing. Now we have seven guys in the band where we used to be a three-piece, we have horns and keyboards, percussions, and it opens up the window for us to just kind of experience so much more with our music."
On the Everything Is Awesome tour, Slightly Stoopid is supporting their latest album, Meanwhile...Back at the Lab. The record features the lead single "The Prophet," which Doughty had originally written as a collaboration with the late Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell.
"Honestly, I hadn't even had a plan to revise the song," Doughty explains. "But I was sitting down on my couch and just playing acoustic guitar and I just happened to play that song again. But the other chorus idea came up -- 'I never thought too much on wealth, to let me keep it for myself' -- that was rolling and I was kinda listening to it and it seemed so fitting just for the way that we are as people."
Those lyrics replace "The Prophet's" original chorus, which went "I thought to myself, I'm gonna marry into wealth."
"Where the original song was me as a kid living in the middle class back in the day, dreaming of that joke fantasy of marrying some rich girl and be the one who takes her for everything instead of the opposite, which was kind of juvenile at the time," Doughty tells ABC Radio. "The song was cool that way, too, but I felt like [I wanted] to rewrite it and to mean something of value of today of how we are."
The Everything Is Awesome tour continues tonight, July 17, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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