In a Rolling Stone cover story last fall, drummer Fabrizio Moretti was touted as the “deep thinker” of the Strokes, the band most responsible for sending modern rock back into the garage.
No one ever said that about Ringo.
“I wish I had a deep thinker answer for that,” Moretti says when pressed for a nugget of intellectual wisdom. “I guess it’s an honor, but it’s just one person’s opinion, and we’ll have to wait to find out. I could have been called the skinny, frizzy-haired drummer.”
After falling over their thesauri to praise the band’s “Is This It” debut, rock writers reacted less unanimously to the band’s sophomore “Room on Fire.” The follow-up unfolds with a more deliberate pace, and several songs strongly echo the formula on the first album.
The Strokes profess not to care about the hype. “If you pay attention, it can sway you in both a negative and a positive way,” Moretti says. “You can get a big head, and it also can knock you down. So the intelligent thing to do in a case when you are being spoken about is not to pay attention.”
Moretti confesses he is mystified that someone would love the first album and dislike the second, because they’re similar.
“We are growing as a band, but not necessarily in leaps and bounds,” he explains. “I’m very proud of the songs, not at all uncomfortable about the fact that we chose to produce it in a similar fashion.”
There’s an undeniable sameness to “Room on Fire’s” “Reptilia,” with the churning guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. forming the foundation for singer Julian Casablancas’ nicotine-stained howling.
Yet there’s also a bluesy tint to the guitar solo on “Between Love & Hate” that takes the band where it hasn’t been before.
“We’re in a different place rhythmically, melodically, lyrically,” Moretti says. “We worked really hard on developing that. It’s not that straight-ahead rock that the first album was.”
Although Moretti defends the band’s music enthusiastically and articulately, he still is adjusting to the insatiable glare of the media spotlight.
Columnists have reported on his romance with Drew Barrymore. Moretti stops talking when asked about the relationship, but he does clarify that the couple isn’t engaged, as some publications reported.
Moretti, who doesn’t carry a cell phone and doesn’t particularly enjoy interviews, is smart enough to know that it’s not good if even unwanted attention goes away.
“The only downside is trying to maintain this kind of mystique,” he says.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
