Formed 20 years ago in Southern California, Cold War Kids are celebrating life in a rock band

Making the band

In high school and junior college, Willett played guitar and listened to music obsessively, believing that somewhere over the horizon he’d find his rock and roll life.

“I had almost a weird, almost ill-fated feeling about music,” he says. “I had friends in punk bands that went on tour and burned out very quickly. That was a very, very, very Orange County and Southern California type of thing that was happening around us.

“I had even been asked to join bands and I was always so reluctant to play with certain people because I just didn’t feel like it was the right thing,” Willett says. “”My brother and my best friend growing up had this band, Death By Stereo, and they asked me to join. It was kind of more like a thrashy punk band. I was just like, ‘That’s not who I am.’

“At the same time, it was so painful to let something pass by. I was like, ‘Maybe this is my only shot at ever doing music.’”

Then Willett transferred to Biola University for the final two years of college, and suddenly, to his surprise, he found friends from which Cold War Kids would eventually emerge.

“I was going to this Christian college out in this weird little zone between Orange County and L.A.,” Willett says. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna spend two years here and I’m not going to really meet anybody, and that will just be like a tiny footnote in my life.

“And, of course, the thing that happened there was this big group of friends, all these kind of art-school kids that I had never been exposed to before,” he says. “The range of music that they were listening was all this stuff that I had kind of known, but didn’t really have anybody that really openly celebrated such obscure music like the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart to the Smiths and all this blues and gospel and punk.

“It was just like, ‘Oh, these are my people.’ It was a huge shock to me.”

Still, Willett was 24 and working toward a teaching credential before he, Maust, drummer Matt Aveiro and guitarist Jonnie Russell formed Cold War Kids in Russell’s apartment above the Mulberry Street restaurant in downtown Fullerton.

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