Motion City Soundtrack

"There's a big building in New York behind us instead of a very small building in L.A."

That's how Motion City Soundtrack guitarist Josh Cain summed up the difference between life on an indie label and a major record company.

Cain's poppy alt-punk band defied the odds in today's befuddled music industry and made the jump to Sony-owned Columbia Records for "My Dinosaur Life." The highly charged new album follows three previous records and eight years with the celebrated indie/punk imprint Epitaph Records, during which time Motion City became a consistently popular mid-level touring act (seven summers on the Warped Tour might do that) and sold more than 600,000 discs.

Talking two weeks ago at an Uptown Minneapolis coffee shop with his electric-socket hairdo hiding under a knit cap, MCS singer Justin Pierre described the new album as the band's "all-in" moment. While the quintet's members are still young and eager enough, they opted to at least try to break through to Top 40 radio and other mainstream outlets that their old label simply doesn't reach.

"Anything you do and believe in is worth doing all the way," Pierre said.

Friends since before they formed MCS in 1999, Pierre and Cain talked up the new record deal as a significant move, but it's one they have been inching toward for a decade.

Here are some of the big steps Motion City took along the way to get into its current, comfortable position.

Back in 2003, MCS already had numerous disaster stories about driving past pieces of Space Shuttle Columbia, being in Toronto during the SARS scare and touring right after 9/11. It proved how the band had already aggressively crisscrossed the continent.

"It became the only way we were able to survive and do this without having to have other jobs," Pierre said.

Before signing with Epitaph in 2002, Pierre and Cain shuffled the MCS lineup several times and went as far as Richmond, Va., to find drummer Tony Thaxton and bassist Matt Taylor. They also picked up keyboardist Jesse Johnson locally.

"The band was just a mess," Cain recalled. "There were points where I was dragging Justin by the coat to keep him focused on the band."

"I said, 'Only 1 percent of bands get to this point to get signed, and 1 percent from there really succeed. Do we really want to shoot for that and really find the right people to do this with?' We made the choice. That's how we wound up with Tony and Matt in the band, and without them I don't think we could've done it."

Another test of dedication came when the guys made the decision to pony up funds to record with a reputable producer, Ed Rose, who ultimately completed MCS' 2003 debut, "I Am the Movie."

"I said to Justin, 'It's going to cost us like $7,000. Let's just take credit cards out and do this,'" said Cain. "Three weeks later, we walked out with 'I Am the Movie,' and in that time we wrote [our first hit] 'The Future Freaks Me Out.' It's like everything fell together right after we made the big move."

Eight years on, the band can laugh about a would-be breakthrough gig at New York's Mercury Lounge, with reps from Warner Bros., Epic, RCA and other labels in attendance.

Said Cain, "My guitar kept going out of tune, Tony's drum-kick got caught in his pants. Weird things like that happened to all of us. The show was so bad, they all just left. It was like, 'See ya!'"

Why was this a good thing?

"Then the smaller labels came after us, the ones that couldn't compete with the big ones -- labels more about letting bands develop," Cain said. "That's what we needed. [Epitaph founder] Brett Gurewitz came at us a thousand miles an hour, the best thing that could have happened to us."

Also the guitarist in mainstay punk band Bad Religion, Gurewitz became MCS' tattooed father figure. The band got into a similar relationship with Blink-182 singer/bassist Mark Hoppus, who produced its second album ("Commit This to Memory") and was brought back to produce "My Dinosaur Life."

Said Cain, "It's easy to be yourself around Mark, just because he's so funny but also because he's a musician, too. He'll call us out on whatever BS we might try to pull, and he knows what we're going through. Having him aboard helped ease the tension of this being our first record for Columbia."

Early in its tour life, MCS got hooked up with another young band for a few shows that wound up being lousy and could have created bad blood. "The sound guy didn't show up to one show, and nobody else showed, either, so we wound up doing karaoke" with the other group, Cain recalled. "We really broke the ice and became friends, and drunkenly, we're all like, 'If we ever get big we'll take you on tour with us.'"

That other band was All-American Rejects.

"Like three weeks later, they're getting hits on the radio and are like, 'We're going on tour in two months -- come out with us.' That was huge."

Other pal bands that took MCS on tour include Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, Blink-182 and -- before a bus accident last month -- Weezer.

All along, Motion City has operated with its members living in different cities. Thaxton resides outside Los Angeles, Taylor remains in Richmond and Johnson is in New York City (Brooklyn), while Cain (now married with a baby due in May) and Pierre still call Minneapolis home.

"We see each other so much when we're touring, we like being far away from each other after the tour," Pierre said. "But then when we come back together, we like that, too."

After teetering on alcohol and drug abuse for years, Pierre fell off the high wire right after making 2007's "Even If It Kills Me," an album he describes as "a premonition." It presaged a bad romantic breakup that also led to Pierre entering rehab. His bandmates rallied around him.

"Her breaking up with me was the worst thing that's happened to me," Pierre said. "But if she hadn't, I'd probably be much worse than I am today."

The band showed similar dedication last year when Thaxton broke an arm. The other guys insisted he play all drum parts (sometimes one-armed, Def Leppard style). But they didn't spare him any ribbing. Said Cain, "He never told us exactly what happened, but he had a bad fall and it was on New Year's. ... You can pretty much fill in the rest."

9. CHALLENGE YOURSELVES WITH NEW PRODUCERS.

A sharp contrast to their pal Hoppus, ex-Cars frontman and Weezer producer Ric Ocasek recorded half of the band's last album. Before making its new one, MCS tried recording with Twin Cities-reared sonic guru John Fields, who has struck gold and platinum working with the Jonas Brothers.

Pierre said they "partly loved and partly hated" Fields' methodology, which is to spend a whole day ceaselessly working on one song (and only one song). Fields' commitments elsewhere didn't allow for an entire album's sessions.

Pierre said, "I read a lot about filmmaking, and there are movies where the people say the experience of making it was awful, but onscreen it wound up being amazing. So would you rather enjoy yourself, or do you care more about the end product? We've gone both ways, but in the case of ["My Dinosaur Life"] we wanted to enjoy ourselves."

"We're a fully functioning band," Cain said. "We make our own business decisions and don't need to ask the label for money, because we're already making it on the road. We have our own plans, so when we talked to labels we told them what we're doing and said, 'That's our plan. It'd be great if you can help out.'"

Having that self-reliant experience gave MCS the upper hand in contract negotiations. The band refused to sign a 360 deal, the music biz's new standard, in which a company controls all facets of a band's career, including merchandising and touring.

"Everyone wanted us to sign a 360 except Columbia," Cain said. "It probably would have hurt us financially in the long run, but we were most afraid of the complacency that could come with it. We still want to fight the fight and earn our own way."

Another offer they're glad they turned down: "Band in the Bubble," an MTV-backed online show in which a band lived inside a contained hovel with cameras 24/7 for 31 days, working on an album. The show was later filmed with Cartel. Said Pierre, "Our drummer said he'd quit if we did it."

The one thing MCS' members mostly brag about doing right all these years -- something they pledge won't change -- was to make a point of having fun, and taking themselves far less seriously than their music.

"We've only ever played music we believed in," Cain said. "That sincerity in the music -- and really just enjoying ourselves when we play the music -- I think that really led to other people liking our records, and just liking us, period."