Chantal Claret and Pedro Yanowitz of Morningwood are sipping bottled water at the Hard Rock Cafe, about to do their last interview of a two-day promotional tour in Toronto.

“I’m bleeding,” Claret says. “I’m bleeding behind my ear.”

“How’d you do that?” asks Yanowitz.

“I don’t know, but I’m bleeding,” she says, as she wipes the blood away with a napkin. “Is that firecrackery enough for you?” She begins talking in a voice a little less scary than Gollum in Lord of the Rings. “It’s the legend of Chantal. She starts bleeding at the table. It’s stigmata but just wrong.”

I’ve been looking forward to interviewing Morningwood because the band’s lead singer, the small but feisty Claret, has been described as a “firecracker,” as I have pointed out to her.

Call it a curse or a blessing in disguise, but if there’s one thing in common with all new rock bands, it’s that they all must do countless interviews to promote themselves and create a buzz (more on that later).

Singing along as Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” is played over the house speakers – this is only cool, Claret tells me, if it’s played in a Hard Rock Cafe – they don’t appear winded, and I imagine they’re just as talkative and alert during this interview as they were during their first.

Having read almost everything there is to know about Morningwood, the NYC-based rockers who released their debut self-titled album in January, I don’t need to ask them the obvious questions that they’ve heard over and over from the lazy journalists. I wonder aloud the types of questions they hate, and Claret begins a list.

“What are your influences? Hey so the ’80s really influenced you. It’s not even a question; it’s a statement. Tell us about your band name and how you met.”

“Yesterday we got interviewed by somebody who didn’t even know who we were,” says bass guitarist Yanowitz. “They thought we were The Stills.”

“Even if we were The Stills, which he had done his homework for, he said he listened to one song on their Myspace page,” adds Claret. “If I was The Stills, I would still be offended. He’s like, ‘I didn’t think there was a girl in The Stills’.”

She continues, “I don’t like answering things where it’s like we’re repeating ourselves. It’s in our bio. It’s not like I’m going to tell you some crazy news part of our story that’s never been heard before. Be like, ‘wow you really broke the seal with me. You really got me. I’m going to tell you the hidden truth now’.”

“So how’d you guys meet?” I ask, fighting back a smile.

Without missing a beat, she fires back, “We met at your mom’s house.”



The Beatles helped bring Morningwood together, not necessarily as a musical influence, but through their offspring.

Claret and Yanowitz were at a birthday party for Sean Lennon in 2001. Lennon asked everyone to sing a song for him. Claret sang a song she wrote when she was 16 and blew Yanowitz away.

Yanowitz, who was the Wallflowers drummer before turning into a bassist, asked Claret to sing back-up on some songs he had written for a solo project. She had never been a member of a band before, but fell in love with his music. He noticed her passion for the tunes and invited her to become part of his band. But he soon found himself doing the back-up vocals, as Claret took most of the leads. Morningwood was erected, err, created.

A rep from Capitol Records, home to artists like Coldplay and The Beatles, saw them perform at a showcase and they were signed not long after.

The band, which also includes Alfredo Ortiz on drums and Philip Shouse on guitar, enlisted the help of Gil Norton, who worked with Foo Fighters and The Pixies, to produce tracks for their album. Actually, he enlisted them. He heard some of their demos and invited them to work with him.

They left New York City and headed to London to record.

“Chantal lives on a six-floor walkup,” says Yanowitz.

“Honestly, the visualization of going home after a huge day of recording and walking up those stairs was the most depressing image to me in the entire world,” she says.

“I seriously think if you had an elevator?”

“I would have been like, let’s record it here!”



Make sure you wear clean underwear if you ever go to a Morningwood show.

When the band performs “Take off your Clothes,” Claret invites people onstage to undress, and without fail, someone always undresses.

The band isn’t trying to be provocative, Claret says, but some of the lyrics happen to be sexy.

“I see them as honest lyrics,” she says. “Some of them, like ‘Take off your Clothes,’ yeah it’s a sexy song. But do I consider myself sexy?”

“New rock is sexy,” says Pedro.

“That’s funny that you say that, because I was trying to think, what’s the theme of this record really, and I would say passion and frustration,” Claret says. “New rock is frustrated. I’m an incredibly frustrated person. I think you could see that in my performance. That’s how I vent my frustration.”

“Sexually frustrated,” says Yanowitz.

“I’m incredibly frustrated. I’m constantly frustrated. I’m a neurotic New York Jew. So what am I not frustrated about?”



Claret, 24, has her mother to thank for her outspoken, out-there attitude.

“She was a firecracker too,” Yanowitz says of Claret’s mother, Monique Goldstrom, who passed away two years ago after a long battle with cancer. “The original firecracker. Dynamite.”

“If I am a firecracker, she was like an atomic bomb,” Claret says. “I’ve never met another person like her in my entire life. If she wasn’t my mother, I don’t think I would like her because I would be like, ‘this woman is fucking insane.’ She was a force to be wreckin’ with, a tornado.”

Her mother was an art collector and dealer. Three days after she died, her friends and family gathered at an art gallery. An obituary by a friend, an artist, read, “she was known for her grandiloquent flattery and blunt criticisms which she could say to the same person with the blink of an eye.”

“If I’m even an ounce of what she was, then that’s fucking awesome.”

Claret spent much of her childhood surrounded by artsy people. Claret constantly attended dinners, which were attended by the likes of filmmakers and painters. When she was tired, she’s fall asleep under the table. She was never unwelcome from gatherings because of her age.

“Constantly hanging around adults, must have been incredible for you,” Yanowitz says in Claret’s direction.

“It was great.”

“Were there kids around?” he asks.

“There were kids. I had a lot of friends but it was a lot of adults, artists. I was constantly being around artists. I lived in a museum basically. I forget that I know things then I’m walking through a museum, and I go, ‘oh that’s the Liechtenstein.’ It’s just second nature. I’m smarter than I think.”

Claret thanks her mother for inspiring her much-celebrated showmanship on stage.

“She was a performer. She treated every person like they were special. She taught me that be it a homeless person or a prince, you treat every single person like they’re the fucking King of England. That’s an important quality. She was a showman. Always, eyes were on her. She was talking all the time. She wouldn’t shut the fuck up.”



Morningwood won’t settle for anything short of what they consider excellence. “The mediocrity that eats through” is what Claret hates about the music industry.

“One of the saddest things hearing about was how radio works in the music industry. They call people up and say, ‘do you like this?’ If they say, ‘yes,’ then it gets to move on, and if they say, ‘no,’ then it doesn’t move on; but if they say, ‘whatever,’ then it moves on. This explains why music is whatever. The whatever mentality pisses the shit out of me.”

“But it’s a pretty awesome job,” says Yanowitz, making sure I realize they are not bitching about their jobs. They love where they are at as a band, but improvements can always be done to anyone’s place of work, whether it’s in a cubicle or on a stage in front of 10,000 people.

“The industry is fucking retarded,” says Claret.

“It’s run by fucking douche bags,” adds Yanowitz.

“Well, no, it’s run by antiquated assholes who have no concept of how to do things right, and they’re just trying to get their fingers in to every piece of the pie that they can from these artists. And I’m not going to paint artists out to be fucking angels either, but I can’t believe the audacity that some of these labels have to try to ask of their artists.”



In February of last year, Claret told the Montreal Mirror that she loved not having buzz around her band. The buzz factor – where suddenly, everyone has heard of a band, seemingly over night – can help a band become a success. On the other hand, too much buzz can lead people to question why a band has become famous, and just as sudden, the band can lose its chance.

“We’re the least-hyped band in the entire New York City scene,” she said at the time. “We’ve never been buzzed or anything, and we like it that way, because people have no expectations. And when they have no expectations, you can’t do anything but be awesome.”

A year later, they are hardly the least-hyped band in New York, they have the buzz they apparently didn’t want, and people suddenly expect big things.

“I still think we’re not hyped,” Claret says. “But I’m living in a bubble. The only way for me to possible gage it is by how many Myspace friend requests we get. I get a couple hundred a day. That’s my gage.”

“No,” says Yanoqitz, “I think we are hyped.”

“But I think we put out,” says Claret.

“Like you said last night, and I love that you said this, we try not to believe our own hype,” he says. “And every night it’s like, who are we? We try to define ourselves every night.”

“Ya, I want the hype for that night to be what people are talking about the next day,” she continues. “I don’t want it to be from last year, ‘we heard you guys got someone naked.’ Ozzy Osbourne bit a head off a bat once and he’s living on that 20 years later. I want it to be like what did you do last night or what will you do tonight?

“I don’t want to believe my own fucking hype. I don’t.”






Related Stories: