Motion City Soundtrack frontman Justin Pierre spoke to the Creightonian Monday from his Minnesota home about music videos and memories of Omaha. Pierre and his band perform at Sokol Auditorium co-headlining with Say Anything Oct. 24.

NA: It says on Twitter that you’re looking for empty pools for your new music video?

JP: Yes, we are going to be shooting a music video on the evening of the 9th, most likely overnight. I just found out that we have to have a concrete pool because vinyl pools won’t work. Most of these newer pools are designed such that the water inside keeps them in tact. So it’s a big road block and we’re trying to figure it out. We’ve been at it for a week so I figured I would post it to Twitter and Facebook and all those things to get real fans to help us out.

NA: You’re filming the video for “A Lifeless Ordinary” on the 9th. Do you know what the concept is going to be?

JP: Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that if we do our job correctly, it will hopefully have the…how do I put this…the stupid slash cool factor of some of the better Weezer videos. I don’t know if you can print this but it will have the uh [weirdness] of a Flaming Lips video. And perhaps the non-chalantness of a Pavement video and or performance. So if we do our job right, that’s what it’s going to be. And it will be a lot of fun and it will be kind of ridiculous and hopefully it will leave people scratching their heads and going “I don’t get it.” If that happens, then we’ve done our job correctly. I’ll leave you with that sort of ambiguous outline.

NA: What was your music video that was the most fun to make?

JP: I have different ones that I’ve liked for different reasons. I feel like I had a lot of fun doing the music video for “Her Words Destroyed My Planet” because we were in and out in less than a day; the smoothest run and it was so much fun working with the kids. The director Issac Ram totally reminded me of a Spike Jonze kind of guy. Like he was really funny and really into it and knew what he was doing and knew what he wanted. That was a lot of fun. I would say in the past, in doing the videos sometimes the actual doing wasn’t as fun as the end product. I would say “Hold Me Down” was a really hard video to shoot, because it was cold, but I really liked that video of all our videos. I think that one is a really good one because it creates a mood that doesn’t necessarily have to do with the song, but it definitely fits the song. I had a lot of fun shooting the video for Disappear with Josh’s (Cain, guitar) brother, Jesse Cain. And being in the woods, working with the actress in the video was fun, yelling, shouting words at her. I’ve worked with her a couple times with different movies that I’ve shot.

So I’ve had a lot of fun with it, it’s always something I’ve wanted to do. When I was younger I wanted to make movies and I’ve made a couple short films. I enjoy the process; I enjoy it a lot more when I’m not needed, it’s very hard to do two things at once. I prefer to be on the other side of it, the creative side.

So for this video I’m working with my friend Shane Nelson. He’s like Minnesota’s best-kept secret. And he shouldn’t be. He’s an amazing director. He’s written seven treatments for Motion City Soundtrack and he’s gotten none of them done. We’ve always gone with somebody else. This is the first time we worked on something together. We have absolutely no money to do this music video so it’s basically us pulling favors from everybody we can to make something cool happen. So it will be this very ridiculous sort of romp.

NA: So you went to school for film for a bit, but did you have thoughts of another college major?

JP: I had none in mind, but I think I could brush up on my English a bit. If I were to go to school now in this day and age, I would definitely want to focus my attention on languages. I would probably just take classes to learn languages. I’ve been trying to teach myself Japanese for the last two years, but it’s very slow and hard with just finding the time to sit down and do that stuff. I think it’d be great to have a teacher. I feel like Spanish would be the most useful language to me, you know, living here in the U.S. But my goal was to learn Japanese and then learn French, but at this rate we’ll see if I get through the Japanese.

NA: Speaking about Japanese, I saw a video of your band playing in Japan with these kids playing wind instruments. How did that happen?

JP: That band is called the Ore-ska band and they’re a six-piece all-girl ska band from Japan that we met in the U.S. on Warped Tour two years ago. Super nice, super awesome, super happy, just really cool kids. I guess they’ve grown up a bit now. When I first met them they were teenagers, and I’m not a ska music fan by any means. When I hear the word “ska” I just kind of go ‘ehh,’ but when you see and hear their music live it’s an experience, and I would urge anyone to check out their music.

NA: Is there any difference with being on a major label now after signing with Columbia Records?

JP: No it’s not that different at least in our experience. We did the same thing on this last record that we’ve done on all three previous records on Epitaph. We write songs and send demos in, and people give us notes and are like, “We like this and we like this and, uhh, I don’t know if I’m feeling this one.” Then sort of we listen to them and ignore all of their comments, and we just kind of do the record we want to do and they’re like, “Yeah that’s pretty cool.”

NA: What is it like having a well-established band, Saves The Day, open for you?

I think it is really weird, to be perfectly honest. I mean, like, I’m trying to be an adult about it, but I just don’t think it’s right, you know? But you just have to deal with it. Hopefully in the future we’ll be so fortunate as to open for them. It’s going to be hard to do, but hopefully people will stay.

NA: Your band is coming to Omaha on the 24th. Do you have any specific memories of the city or the venues?

JP: Well, my memories aren’t so good, so I’m not going to go into that. I don’t remember any of the names of anything – but when I hear Omaha, I think of Saddle Creek. And I think of the music and that one band – I have to think for a second. Cursive. Cursive is like the main band I think of when I think of Omaha. I know we’ve gone through there many times, and I think there was a venue we’ve played a lot that might have been a bowling alley?