ANAHEIM, Calif. — Singer Nathan Willett says he rarely ever paused to think about the history of Cold War Kids, the indie rock band he and three friends started in an apartment over an Italian restaurant in Fullerton in 2004.

There were albums to make, concerts to play, and publicity to do – like this phone interview before a recent Cold War Kids show in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Strangely, I’ve spent so little time looking back,” he says. “But this 20 Years Tour, I’m spending more time working just on how we did it.

“We played a show in Austin at Stubbs, and I was reminded,” Willett says. “We were that story where we went to South By Southwest and found our booking agent and our lawyer and our first label. Like, it all happened right there. Those people are still in our lives. It’s really wild.

“So yeah, that was just like a totally electric time that was very special. Like a total shared vision and all this stuff.”

Cold War Kids‘ 20 Years Tour comes home this month for a pair of shows at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood and a third night at Pappy & Harriett’s in Pioneertown.

There’s a terrific recent record, the band’s 10th studio album, which, oddly, is the first to be self-titled.

The title, Willett explains, is reflective of a rock band that’s reached middle age. While two of the original members left years ago, Willett and bassist Matt Maust have been Cold War Kids throughout, and the current five Cold War Kids, who have been together for the last 10 years or so, continue to feel right, he says.

“I think the record in a way, even the reason for calling it self-titled, a lot of it was just being able to kind of embrace that renewal or full circle,” Willett says of an album that sounds as powerful and fresh as the band’s 1996 debut, “Robbers & Cowards,” or 2014’s “Hold My Home.”

“To be where we are now, and to be on this 20 Years Tour, it’s really special,” Willett says. “We’ve had just a tremendous fortune.”

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.

“I was substitute teaching and it wasn’t until I kind of hit the point where I was like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do this at all,’” Willett says. “‘I don’t want to do anything else other than, like, we just need to start a band.’”

Family lives

For most of the past decade, the Cold War Kids lineup has been stable. Drummer Joe Plummer and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Schwartz became full-time members with Willett and Maust around 2014. Guitarist David Quon completed the current lineup when he joined in 2016.

For Willett, changes in the band over time were necessary if not always easy.

“The changing of the lineup over the years has been some of the toughest transitions,” he says. “For me, becoming that kind of leader that makes those decisions about what’s going to work, and how it’s going to work, and keeping it all going has been some of the toughest things.

“You’re in a place where business and friendship and art are all just deeply tied in a way that I haven’t really seen in any other type of job I see anywhere else,” Willett says. “It’s all in the blender.

“So now, the five of us, it’s almost come full circle in that we have this incredible chemistry and great understanding and appreciation of each other.”

The band is a family with all the responsibilities and rights the term implies, Willett says.

“You can’t have tension where you’re against each other or an awkwardness where you can’t talk about certain things,” he says. “You have to get those things out in the open. And at the same time, you know it’s not perfect. You live with a degree of just understanding in the way that you’re family.”

At 44, Willett also has a family outside of his work, a home life with his wife and three daughters between the ages of 3 and 9.

“To have this life and that life, there’s not a lot of people I can think of that I can go, ‘Oh, I like how that person is doing this thing of having a family and being an artist,’ and it looks like something I really want.

“You know, you don’t see VH1 ‘Behind the Music’ and see a story of a really successful group that also has a really successful personal life, and such a rich kindness, grace and love, and that’s the end of the story,” Willett says, laughing. “How boring would that be? It just never goes that way. There is a reason.”

Same but different

“Cold War Kids,” the new album, reflects the maturity of a band, and in Willett, a songwriter, that has worked to balance life and work.

The album opener, “Double Life,” finds him singing about gender roles in a family, a reflection of his understanding of the sacrifice his wife makes when he’s on the road, and the work he wants to embrace when he’s home with their children.

“Another Name,” one of Willett’s favorites on the record, is a different kind of breakup song, written after his therapist of many years told him she was leaving her practice and would no longer be able to see him.

“Runaway With Me” is a joyful soul-funk number with a huge chorus, a song that Willett says incorporates influences such as Sly Stone and David Bowie, while not losing its essential Cold War Kids-ness.

The album was made with the intention of shaking things up in the studio, he says. Longtime producer Lars Stalfors stepped aside as Willett sought out a variety of different producers from different backgrounds and genres.

He also slowed down the pace at which the band has worked, taking time to make one of the band’s most cohesive albums yet.

“I like to move fast and I like to keep music coming,” Willett says. “I think I’ve always resisted being the kind of artist that has three years between records, and he’s always kind of trying to paint your masterpiece. I realized pretty early on that I don’t have an ‘OK Computer’ [the classic Radiohead album] in me. I don’t think that’s going to come out.”

The eclectic team of producers Willett pulled into the studio included Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, M83), Ethan Grushka (Phoebe Bridgers, Weezer), Jenn Decilveo (Miley Cyrus, Hozier) and Malay (Frank Ocean, Lorde).

“I wanted to find these people that were not necessarily known for this genre or that, but had worked on records that I really liked,” Willett says. “A lot of that for me was just going, OK, good, and having to go in with a producer like Malay, who’s done Frank Ocean and stuff that I put on the highest shelf, and feel like I’m going to get the best from him and I don’t have to be afraid it’s going to be something that isn’t right for Cold War Kids.”

“Knowing that we haven’t done these kinds of things before, and that it’s very new sonically, that’s the stuff that makes this really exciting and surprising,” he says. “Like, wow, there’s still ways to make songs that I can feel that first feeling again.”

Cold War Kids

When: March 20-21 and March 23

Where: March 20-21 at the Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles. March 23 at Pappy & Harriett’s 53688 Pioneertown Road, Pioneertown

For more: See Coldwarkids.com

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