What’s going on with Jarrod, did he quit the band?
No, he just can’t tour… he’s got a job and just
got a promotion.
And how’d you guys meet Nick?
He’s from the same area as Jarrod, he used to
play in a band that used to open for us quite a bit back home. He’s been our temporary drum tech… playing
random shows. We’ve known him for a couple of years.
Is he picking up the songs pretty
easily?
Pretty good, yeah. We only had 3 weeks to try to get tight… tight enough to open for Sevendust anyway.
(laughs) We’re trying, we haven’t gotten there yet.
Do you guys produce your own albums
independently?
Well, we worked with a producer named Tim Patalan… but with no label, we basically decided to team up with our management and go 50/50…
kind of just do it ourselves. So we kind of just got rid of Atlantic… or they got rid of us... mutually. (laughs)
How is everything going with the
Sevendust tour so far?
This is only our second show tonight… we did a show in Louisville a few nights ago, and that
was a disaster-piece. (laughs)
What happened?
Oh, just technical difficulties… first day of touring, new crew, jitters; it was our first real show
in a couple of years.
When it comes down to an opening gig such as tonight, how do you condense your act?
It’s kind of tough
as far as the setlist; now that we have four albums, you don’t want to cut out all of the old stuff. Right now
we’re playing about ten songs; so I figured we could do three from the newest album, three from the album before, and
then two-two from the previous two… at least no one can complain that we didn’t do anything off of an album.
That included, then there’s also a certain amount of singles… it’s basically just a big disaster.
And
you guys are also doing a little bit of headlining between shows?
We’re hoping to do more after the Sevendust run, but I think that
last night is the only one that we have until maybe November. But we’re hoping to head out in November to hit
the places that we don’t do with Sevendust.
What’s been the biggest struggle as a band, and how did you guys overcome
it?
Addiction. (laughs) I don’t know, nothing big. Every day is a struggle. Not having a label
and trying to do it effectively and smartly… just trying to make money or break even, whatever it takes to keep doing
this.
Tell me about your latest CD.
Our Long Road home came
out a week and a half ago, it’s a cool record that we got to do just down the road from home… back in Michigan.
It was a cool experience, growing up in Michigan we knew of Tim Patalan as a local producer because he’s worked with bands like Sponge and some big bands that had
commercial success and still did stuff locally. So we worked with Tim and made the best record we could; I think we’re
thinking that this is our best record so far; which I don’t think we’ve said immediately after recording.
I don’t know; it’s good… it’s a good record… check it out.
What does the name of the
CD mean to you?
I think there’s multiple meanings overall, but I think we’re kind of all on the same page…
we’re just back to our roots instead of going to Las Angeles and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to
make a good record… this was our first time since signing with Atlantic that we actually worked on it with family and
friends and did it the way that we would want to do it, but without having the time schedule and trying to work at it as opposed
to just trying to be creative with it. So, I think that’s the basic meaning.
