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t’s been a while since you released your previous album, Tracing Back Roots. What did you guys take from it to carry to the next record? We’ve noticed that the melody that we had on Tracing Back Roots went over so well with our fans and it was our most successful record to date. Whatever influence stuff to take other stuff into that direction and explore a little bit more creative. I think we really got a lot better at writing melodically as well on this record. What does challenge you the most while writing songs? On this record, we had to write about 35 songs in order to get to 10 [songs] that we thought were great enough. That was really challenging and learning how to write a song in the right way was really difficult too, and we tried to write songs in different ways to just to push ourselves. I think the biggest challenge was to make sure that this record was better than our last and showing that we became better musicians and songwriters, and showing people that we progressed as a band. I read that writing the new record with David [Bendeth] was a very intense process. So, what can you tell us about that? What was awesome was we actually had a long time off just to write the record. We never had time off writing. It has always been written in the studio as we were tracking them or on the road in the back of a bus. This record was awesome, because we actually took a lot of time off to write it. It was cool because while we were writing it, we were travelling to different cities and that was also really different. In every city was a different vibe and different songs came from each different city and that was really different as well. We wrote all the heavy songs in Detroit. We wrote a couple of alternative songs in New York. We wrote a couple of really epic kind of sounding big rock songs in Los Angeles. It was cool to just travel around, writing these different styles and just really pushing ourselves. 50
music&riots
Summer Issue
It seemed that David pushed yourselves to the limit and that turned into something quite positive and motivational for the band. Would you do this kind of process over again? Absolutely! We all came out of it being much better songwriters, much better musicians and even though it was really difficult and very challenging, I would definitely do it all over again. We play better live now and we are more unified as a band than we’ve ever had, because through the process, we were all there picking each other up and helping each other through some difficult days. There were days that David Bendeth was really coming at me and I left the studio feeling really sad. And there were days that Kyle [Pavone, vocals] felt like that, that Eric [Choi, drums] felt like that... But we were there to pick each other up and keep moving forward. This record really changed us in a good way. The track “The World I Used to Know” was the first single of this new album and it’s sort of an anthem to nowadays. What was the inspiration behind that song? When we were kids, we had this mutual spirit and we were really oblivious to this world that we’re living in and some of the bad things that are happening in it. We weren’t scared of change, we weren’t scared of anything and as we get older we knowledge a little more, we see more and we realize more like how upside down everything is. That song is an example of how we’re getting older and we notice a few things. We just see the world much differently than we used to, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t go back and do it that way and that there’s not any hope or anything... it just means that we have to search a little harder for it than we used to when we were kids. “Savior Of The Week” is probably the most pop song of the album. What can you tell us about the writing of this one? That was one of the last songs to be written for the record actually and we have written so many rock songs, so many metalcore songs... we certainly have written everything and so we said “Let’s just try something completely different. Let’s try that one out of the park. It either gets completely shot down and it’s going to crash and burn, or who knows? It can end up being a
single, we don’t know.” So, we just waited for it on this one. We didn’t really mean for it to come out the way it did. We actually started it with a song title, that’s it! We were like “We’re going to start writing off with a title.” We came up with the title, “Savior Of The Week”, and then starting words for it along with the a basic vocal melody and then we wrote the music to it. What’s funny is that the only things that stayed the same through the whole process of that song were the title, the lyrics and the melody. The music got completely overall from what originally was. Originally it sounded like an electronic song, it was so weird [laughs] and then it ended up sounding like a rock song and now to me it sounds like a Fall Out Boy entry kind of epic pop rock song. It was just crazy to see that song just continually evolving and what was cool about it is that we kept tracking the vocals in the studio, because the song’s vibe kept changing. The track “12:30” has this creepy sound feel mixed with electronic and hardcore. What about this one? That song is the “Frankenstein” of the record. [laughs] It got written in pieces in so many different sessions and it didn’t really come together until two days before we were supposed to actually track the song. We came into the studio, we had the nine songs picked and it came down between this song and a very like bad rock song. The rock song just wasn’t really doing it. It was a good song, but it just seemed like there were too many of those on the record, so we wanted something darker and heavier and we thought “12:30” had the potential to be that. We took a gamble not even knowing what the song was going to sound like. Basically off a riff, a breakdown that Lou [Cotton, guitar] wrote. We worked through that for a while, we tried to make that a chorus, we moved that to a verse... We were going over that for a long time until we finally found its place. We put it as a bridge and then Joshua [Moore, guitar] did a completely new chorus guitar part and we messed with the lyrics that I had and my lyrics weren’t working, so Josh ended up writing different lyrics off the idea that I had and then we finally got a chorus to it, which was pretty sweet. Then Kyle steps up big and did all the programming in the verses. We were kind of envisioning