Can you tell us about where the live shows for this record takes place, and also did it add any pressure to your live performance, knowing that these shows were going to be for a live record? We recorded two nights of shows at Chain Reaction in Anaheim, California back in March. Of course there was pressure to make sure that these shows went well, and pressure to make sure the setlist was exactly what we felt that fans would want, but the good thing for us was that the venue was a place we had played plenty of times in the past and we knew going into the shows that they would be crazy and packed full of NFG fans, just like we would hope for shows that were going to be recorded and released to the public.
Chad Gilbert got electrocuted on the first night, so what was this crazy experience like for you guys, and also what kind of pressure did it create for the second night, because we've read that you ended up taking a lot more material from that night? The whole Chad electrocution thing was insane, because at first none of us knew what happened...in fact, some of us thought he was joking because it was extremely hot in that club, and we thought he was "pretending" to fall down and pass out from the heat. But, after he had to leave the stage, and mind you, he was yelling at us the whole time to continue to play and not to stop the show just because he couldn't finish, we knew that something was wrong, and that unfortunately we wouldn't really be able to use the audio from that first night. Luckily we had already scheduled the second night, so we did have to use most of that show, although we were able to take the first few songs from the first night.
Other than the two live shows you did for 'Kill It Live' what other shows have really stood out to you in 2013, and why? For me, I think my favorite shows of 2013 have to have been the Reading and Leeds festivals. Besides being massive shows, we got to share the stage with bands like Green Day and Deftones, and that's something that I'll definitely be able to tell people for a long time to come!
Can you tell us about the three new songs that are on your album? We like it when people read the lyrics and make their own interpretations of the songs. Although many of our songs are based on specific situations and things that we go through in our lives, we like the listener to be able to take the lyrics and song and form their own opinions about what they mean to them.
So how did these songs come together, and also what was the recording process like for these tracks? These songs started with musical ideas that Chad had towards the end of 2012/beginning of 2013, and he and I got together in January and recorded some rough demos. We then sent the demos over to the rest of the band and had Steve and Jordan start working on lyrics. We went into a studio a few days after the live CD shows and that's where we finalized everything: lyrics, song structure, and parts, and the recording process was actually pretty quick and smooth for us.
The video for 'Connect The Dots' is really cool, can you tell us a bit about how it came together, as well as what it means to you guys? The video started as an idea Chad had...it's actually the first NFG video where we aren't playing instruments at all throughout the whole thing. The idea was to take American football, a sport that's very rough, but spin it around so that it's basically telling the story of a guy trying to get to and impress a girl. That's why there's no actual ball in the video, and the girl is in the end zone, representing "winning" the game. Of course, Jordan comes up just short at the end... The video was real fun to film, and we had a great time suiting up in all of the pads and stuff and "pretending" to know what we were doing! Plus, the fact that a lot of the video was filmed in slow motion I think helped to make it look even more epic than it actually was, because none of us are really that athletic.