Haste

(This interview took place on July 11th, 2001, outside of the Hanover House after their set. Nick plays the guitar, Kelly screams and Chris sings. I'd like to thank the guys for taking the time to do it.)

Josh Nacho: What was it like going in to do "When Reason Sleeps"?

Nick: That one was different than "Pursuit" simply because "Pursuit" was a lot of older songs- some of them were six or seven years old. I was only in the band to help write one of the songs. When it came to "Reason", we wrote that over a period of five months, as opposed to six or seven years. All the songs seem to fit a whole lot better, it had more of an album feel than just a whole bunch of songs we had been playing for a long time. It felt a lot better to us.

Kelly: And everybody had more in a hand of writing other than just Nick coming in and just learning the songs. The entire thing, we all had to do writing, so it was more of a group effort that way.

J.N.: Tell me about Century Media, is that your label?

Nick: Yeah, we're actually signed to Century Media. They treat us pretty well, they'll a cool label.

Kelly: They do what they can. They're don't have endless resources and everything, but we heard horror stories about this and that, but there's been a line up change in people that work there since we got there. The people there really seem to care about us to be behind us, and most are truly fans. They do what they can.

J.N.: Do you ever look to going to a bigger label like Victory, Equal Vision or Trustkill?

Kelly: Who knows really.

Nick: It's a matter of who wants to express interest really. I guess you're always looking for something better than what you have- the grass is always greener on the other side- but it's not like we're actively looking. Century Media is a good label, but they're an odd label in the sense that it's such a metal label. We're kind of an oddity with that- they're a big European label. In that sense, it's kind of weird. But they treat us well. We're happy with Century Media. We're not ruling out doing something else, but it's not like we're searching for something else.

J.N.: This is bound to come up sooner or later, so let's get it out of the way... What's the scene like in Alabama?

Nick: It's actually cool. It's not nearly as big as up here, in the Northeast. You can see the same kids at every show, as opposed to up here I notice it's hardcore kids go to hardcore shows and punk rock kids go to punk shows-- it's not like that in Alabama at all. Everybody goes to one show, we don't segregate in the South at all as opposed to the North where you segregate.

Kelly: Can't really afford to... Talking about the tables are turning. We've been playing down there for so long and there are kids that have been coming to our shows for literally as long as I can remember. You can talk to some of the kids in bands and they'll talk about the very first show we ever played. That's really something to appreciate, when you got people that are that loyal, supporting you for that many years. And our stuff has changed somewhat through the years, and they're still always right there at the shows.

Nick: And people also tend to say, yeah, we're from Birmingham, Alabama, there's a real big stigma to that. But, there's a lot of really good bands down there. A lot of our friends are pretty much in bands down there. It's everything from punk rock to hardcore to even college rock and stuff like that. Everybody's real supportive of each other, and everybody's really cool. It's a good scene, but it's small. But, like I said, it's not nearly anything like this.

Kelly: There are a lot of bands people don't even realize got started in our area, like Hot Rod Circuit.

Nick: Yeah, they actually have roots in Alabama.

Kelly: It's pretty much the same as any where else. It's home. We love it... We really love it. We definitely appreciative of what we have.

J.N.: Are there any bands that you're friends with that you want to plug?

Nick: Oh man, there are about a million.

Kelly: Gainer.

Nick: Yeah, Gainer's about there. Catchfire, they're a newer band.

Kelly: Long Cold Stare.

Nick: Numb But Burning. Even like in college rock, there's a band called Wayne that's extremely good. It's radio friendly but it's so good. It's incredible. There are a ton of bands.

Kelly: Everybody down there we know is in a band practically. If they're not in one today, when we get home they'll be in a band. There's people in six or seven bands. It's actually a pretty big scene when you think of the ratio of people who are in the scene as to who's in the band. And they're all super supportive of each other.

J.N.: What are you listening to right now?

Chris: Steve Brodski.

Nick: Yeah, we just got that last night and it's so incredible. I've been listening to a lot of Killswitch Engage, Armchair Martian.

Kelly: Radiohead. The new Radiohead, and older new Radiohead- "Kid A". The new Drowningman.

Nick: Anything from Sweden also. That whole country is incredible, they can't do anything wrong. They're great.

Kelly: Cave In.

Nick: The list just varies so much.

Kelly: It depends what mood we're in.

Nick: The taste is pretty varied in the band.

Kelly: The music we play, we probably listen to less heavy stuff than you'd think, but we're playing this so much and everything I guess you just kind of have to relax.

J.N.: What do you think of the reaction that you get when you come up to the east coast, or when you go over to the west coast?

Nick: It really varies from city to city. In the east coast we'll do-- we did pretty well, I guess. We're still growing and everything, this is only the third or fourth time we've been up here. The west coast is the same thing, there's some cities we'll do really well in and there's some we're still really growing in. It's kind of hard to say, "Well, this is better than this is", and I guess definitely for this style of music, the scene is a lot bigger up here.

J.N.: On the east coast.

Nick: Yeah, the east coast. It just really depends city to city. We do well in San Diego, then we do pretty well in like, Worcester, is a good city for us.

Kelly: Any place when everybody's paying attention- whenever somebody's paying attention and stuff- pretty much goes in the win column for us. The number of people varies, and of course it will, depending on what part of the week it is and everything. We're having a pretty good time so far.

J.N.: Are you going to come back to the east coast soon?

Nick: Actually hopefully in September we'll be back. We'll be out 'til August 3rd, when we go home for Furnacefest and then stay home for a month and try to work and build up some more cash and hopefully be back up here in September to do another full U.S. thing. So, yeah, hopefully we'll be back soon.

Kelly: Yeah, I'm sure we'll be back up here again.

Nick: And it's fun 'cause the drives up here are only two to three hours at most.

Kelly: Yeah, that rules.

Nick: As opposed to out west where everything's eight to nine, something like that. Everything's real condensed up here, that makes it a little bit easier.

J.N.: All the shows are right next to each other.

Nick: Right, exactly.

J.N.: Like, you were in Worcester last night, and that's maybe an hour from here.

Kelly: I think our drive was 99 miles. Something like that. That's like a joke.

Nick: Yeah, 99 miles doesn't get us to Atlanta. So, it's nice.

J.N.: What else was I supposed to ask you?

Kelly: Yeah, we'll start interviewing you now. So...

Chris: It's pretty standard, the two singers thing is another question we get.

Kelly: Yeah.

J.N.: Why do you guys have two singers, and what do you think about all the other bands that have two singers and what about the bands with only one singer, why don't you guys just have one singer?

(everyone laughs)

Kelly: We started the whole two singer thing.

Chris: It was all my idea.

J.N.: Did it really? I heard it started in Germany with Waterdown.

Chris: Actually, with us, it wasn't even a conscious thing. A band that I used to be in shared a practice pad with these guys, and so after we practiced I would stick around and we did a couple songs together just for fun. Then over time, it was just another and another and another and it just kind of happened. It wasn't intentional like, "We're gonna start a band with two singers and it's gonna be cool", 'cause they played tons of shit before they ever had another singer. It just kind of happened.

Kelly: Yeah, and it was three of us lived together, so it just seemed kind of natural and it just stuck. That's about it, as far as the singer thing goes. What else is there? We're not very interesting people.

Chris: Oh, the reoccurring riff. On the record, I don't know how people don't catch it, but the same riff shows up like, three or four times throughout the entire record. We just changed the vocal melody and the drum beat, and the guitar melody or whatever. If you listen close enough, you can hear it.

Nick: That goes back to how this record has more of an actual album feel than "Pursuit" does, because we actually had the time to sit down and decide it'd be cool to put the same riff down several times and write around that. It definitely gives it some kind of continuity.

Chris: And plus Willie Nelson did it too.

Kelly: Not saying we're in any class with Willie Nelson, but it was just something we wanted to do. We had more time in the studio to work these kind of things out on this album. On the first one, we basically went in, put all the tracks down, and we were done with it. This one we had a little more time 'cause we worked with the guy who recorded our album. Two of the guys in Wayne actually did a lot on this album as far as engineering and stuff. We just had a lot more time to come up with ideas and see what they would turn into before we just put something out.

Chris: I think, too, we were just more comfortable with writing a record. The first one we went in, it was like, wow this is the real deal, and it was still coming new other than just doing demos and shit like that. But, we had already done it once, and gone on tour and just been a little more comfortable with what we knew we could pull off every night live and kind of incorporate that and keep it real, for lack of a better word. We were just more comfortable, I guess.

Kelly: Oh, we get the singing and screaming- why we have the singing and screaming in what we do. A lot of bands and a lot of heavy stuff has singing, everything in it now, but it's not something that's new to us. It's just that we've had more time. But we've always listened to and loved melody. But, for Chris and I, I don't think we were comfortable with, "Well, could we do this?", so a lot of it was getting the confidence to try different things. And, heck, we're huge Frank Sinatra fans, it's not like we just listen to heavy stuff, so all of a sudden we got a record with melody on it. It's just something we've always enjoyed, and with our writing, I guess we were more comfortable putting that in with the songs we were doing. Probably a lot more of that on the next record too, but we'll see.

J.N.: Have you started thinking about recording again yet?

Chris: Oh yeah. We're already in the works, writing new stuff. The first record came out, we were like, we're gonna start writing songs, we're gonna go into the studio, with thirty songs so we can pick the best ones, and of course we dicked around 'cause we're so half assed band... And ended up writing the whole record in five months, and it turned out well and we got really lucky as far as them being quality songs- or we think they're quality songs. This time we're really going to write in advance. We already got one song written now, and we're just going to take it three or four songs at a time. Write them, record them, decide if we want to change them or keep them... So this should be a much longer process.

Nick: Plus we weren't really sure after that first album if they'd want anything written or not. It was just practically nothing, there were maybe two songs and we had no idea what was going to come out- we didn't have a real direction. But now I think we're more comfortable as a band with actually writing songs. And we know now what we want to do, and how we want to do it, and what we can do, and now it can just progress from there, as opposed to just "Oh God, what's about to come out?" Now we're really starting to get in the groove of what we like.

Kelly: I think we get not really tired of our songs, but we play 'em and hear 'em so much, as soon as we get something done, we'll have it for a little while and it'll sit with us, and then the next thing we're doing- you're always your own worse critics- is like, "We could do this" or "We could have done that to it".

Nick: Plus there's six fucking people in this band. So trying to get something past six people that everybody likes is such a problem.

Chris: Yeah, it takes us two hours to decide where we're going to eat lunch.

Nick: Yeah, exactly. Much less write a song...

Kelly: And that's if we've got two choices. If we've got more than that, you can count it out, 'cause somebody's going to be mad. Somebody's going to say "Screw it, we're going here". But I think the cool thing about that is too, it's not just "Well, this is what this person in the band can do" This is what all six people in the band have an input in, which is what made this album so much better than "Pursuit", I think. This is what six people's input produces, and we had time that this album didn't come out until we were happy with it.

Chris: Plus, this record we experimented more. Pretty much everyone in the band plays more than one instrument, so we would all six go up there and sit in the practice pad for hours and just try to hash out something. Certain nights it would happen and it would be great, other nights we wouldn't get anything done. So two of us would go up there, I would play drums and somebody would play guitar, and we'd come up with something. It would just develop like that. It was more, not really laid back, but we were just more experimental and we didn't exhaust everyone at the same time night after night. So there are songs on this record that everyone sat down and had input on lyrics, and then there are songs I wrote by myself, or he wrote by himself. There were times someone would come in with a whole song written front to back, music-wise, and then there were songs all six of us did. It was a lot of different input, which was just not on the last record.

Kelly: Inspiration kind of comes in waves I guess and you're not going to have all six people there at one time going, "Oh, I got this"... A lot of times, it would be one person going, "I wanna work on this" and the rest of us going, "Let's go get beer" But I think we've had enough years now as a band and friends that it works. Hopefully that will continue on through the next album. Which it seems to be so far, the one song that we got, it's just in its first stages, but I think everyone's pretty psyched about what it could be.

Nick: We also know not to get to the point where we have to go up and practice three nights a week, and someone has to be writing something constantly. We know how to work with each other better.

Kelly: We procrastinate so bad. We'll put stuff off 'til the last minute, if it's at all possible, and I think we're going to avoid that at all costs. I guess we do pretty well under pressure, but it's just not a good environment... You should check the web site, it's HasteMusic.com- it has MP3's, all of our emails, tour dates, all of that kind of stuff. We update it regularly, we have a tour diary up there. We love letters from people.

J.N.: That's it?

Kelly: Unless you can think of something else, we're tapped.

J.N.: Can somebody give me two final words?

(everyone laughs)

Chris: The end.

Kelly: Come to the shows.

Chris: That's more than two.

J.N.: That was four.

Nick: Thanks a lot. See ya soon.

Kelly: Visit us.

Chris: I think the end is probably the best.