So how are the plans coming along for the new album?
We’re trying to book it. We want to book studio time for March or April and we’ll try to do the full-length then. We have this tour (with Strike Anywhere), then we have a month off to write and then we have a tour with Converge and Some Girls in November. The rest of the way we’re just going to devote to writing songs and working on the new record. We’ll record in the spring and it’ll be out by next summer, hopefully.

How many songs do you have guys have so far?
We have five right now. We played one new one tonight. The lyrics, (I am) still working them out. I have two of them down solid and the other three are still in the works.

Are you guys going to work with Kurt (Ballou-producer of Witness and Converge Guitarist) again?
We’re not sure yet.

Are you guys going to work with Deathwish again?
We don’t know about yet either. We had a one record deal with Deathwish for Witness. So, we’re not sure. Everything’s up in the air right now.

How do you approach all the label stuff? Did anyone approach you after Witness came out?
A bunch of different labels approached us. It’s fucking confusing. You don’t know how things work somewhere until you’re there. Everyone blows smoke up your ass.

Has anyone given you advice on how to approach the whole thing?
It’s really cool now because when we started, we didn’t have any friends who had done a tour before, or recorded a record that was going to be on a label. We were fucking clueless. Looking back, we could have made huge mistakes. We always just listen to our guts on everything. It’s worked for us so far so that’s just what we’re going to do. We get a lot of different advice from different people now but when it comes down to it, we’re just going to listen to our instincts. Sit down, just the five of us in the van, talk to each other and see what we think.

Any specific thing you are looking for in a label?
At this point, we want to become as big of a band as we can without becoming very polished or poppy or dumbing down lyrics. I want to become as big of a band as we can, honestly. We all do. We’re not going to sacrifice what we do and who we are. In that way, we kind of just roll the dice. We want to do as much as we can, take the biggest tours possible to us. If we don’t play small shows and we don’t play small towns ever and all we ever do are these package tours that hit up New York, Boston, Philly and Chicago, that’s a betrayal to us a little bit or the way we came up or started going to shows.

In terms of status, you want to make it more of a full-time job?
Right now, it’s crazy. Some people think we’re a really big band and make money. We have all have part-time jobs every time we go home from tour. I paint houses and I work at a diner. We kind of pay bills, almost, barely. Sometimes we do and then most of the time, I have to get a lot of hours otherwise I’m not going to be able to pay bills. It’s overtaken our fucking lives to the point. We can’t get good jobs and it’s hard to have a steady relationship or anything. You can’t have nice things. We would like to make a comfortable living; being able to pay bills and go see a movie, buy a new skateboard once and a while. We’re scraping right now so we’d love to do a little better then what we’re doing right now. It’s all perspective because people see tonight at CBGBs and are like ‘This band is fucking huge!” and then you see us; we’ll play to five kids. We still do that a lot. A lot of places no one knows us and a lot of people don’t care. We’re a really, really small time thing.

Does anybody recognize you when you go back home?
Back home is really cool because we don’t get big shows and there are not a lot of big bands. We played in so many bands before this band. We all put on shows [so] you kind of know everyone. People know that we’re in this band and that we tour and that we’re kind of a big deal, but when we play a show in Marshalltown, it’s little skater kids, it’s guys I work with, it’s my mom and my dad, someone’s uncle and the guys who work at Pizza Hut with John and Chris. People don’t care, we’re not celebrities in any way. “Oh yeah, you guys play in that band, right? That’s really cool that you guys do that.” They don’t understand anything about it.

How do you balance developing as an artist, sound wise, while staying true to your roots in the scene? How do you think you can do that with your music?
There are definitely those tendencies to become much more professional and polished. I don’t think the substance of our music or the substance of our lyrics is going to change just because we wouldn’t even know how to go about writing a commercial record. I don’t know how to. On the same token, when we write, someone will bring in a guitar riff they think sounds good and then we just start from there. I just don’t think we’re the type of people that could even be like “let’s write a commercial record that’s going to sell a lot of copies.” We just always ending up writing whatever comes out of us, at the time. As far as all of the business side of the band, we want to do as well as we can like I said. We want to get as many people into our band as possible and make as much money as possible. My favorite band of all time is The Clash and if The Clash sold 4,000 records like we do then I never would have heard the fucking Clash. Once again, small town vs. a big city. The only place we could go buy a record was at Sam Goody at the fucking mall or Best Buy. We don’t have an indie record store that we can go and buy the Global Threat 12-inch record.
Dude from Global Threat: 14-Inch!

Do you think that brings a deeper appreciation to the scene?
Yes and no. I love going to little record stores and I loved playing at CBGBs. I hope people that get to do shit like this on a regular basis, you have a local record store that carries vinyl and carries small bands, I hope those kids don’t take that for granted. If you get to come to a club like this or you have blocks of touring bands coming through, I just hope people don’t take it for granted. When we go through places I don’t feel like people are taking us for granted so I wouldn’t really say we’re spoiled or anything. A night like tonight blows my fucking mind, it’s awesome.

You’ve got this literary side to how you approach music and lyrics. In terms of writing songs, how do you take what you’re reading right now and write a song? (Elona)What are you reading right now?
On this tour right now, I’m reading John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charlie.” It’s John Steinbeck after he had done “The Grapes Of Wrath” and became a famous writer. He basically said that he felt like he was bullshit because he was writing about America and he’s supposed to be a quintessential American writer. He had been in New York City and he had been in California and had taken planes in between. He was just like “I don’t know what this country is like anymore.” So he special ordered a truck and a camper and brought his dog along and his goal was to be anonymous. Just go and take highways and just stop where people were gathering and just look and listen. That’s what I’m reading right now and I recommend it.

(Elona) Do you think that parallels with you being a tour band?
I’m definitely not anonymous but the cool thing is that people always talk to us about going on tour and say, “Oh you guys went to Paris! Did you see the Eiffel Tower?” No, I just saw a shitty neighborhood and I saw the inside of a club and then I saw a corner store. To me, that’s kind of cool because anyone else goes on a vacation to France, they see the fucking Eiffel Tower and stayed in a motel with other American tourists and that’s all they see. A lot of times we get to see how people live here. We’re staying in Brooklyn tonight with our friends and that’s how people live in New York City. The type of place we’re staying is the type of place where Puerto Rican immigrants stay. That’s really cool to me. I like to think about that a lot. Watch people in the places where we go and not necessarily as much at shows but just like at a corner store or hanging outside a building. The things that influenced me were finding writers that talked about life in a way that really wasn’t romanticized. It’s not sci-fi, it’s not a love story and it’s not an action-thriller or a mystery. It’s just gritty like ‘this is how life is as I see it.’ On Witness “The Long Distance Runner” and “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” by Alan Sillitoe were probably the two biggest books during that time that I liked. I read those books and I was like ‘I want that.’ That’s what I’m into. Poignant writers that I feel speak to me in a way. It’s not making life this outlandish romantic thing. I think there are a lot of bands that do that too like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, The Clash and Dillinger Four. None of those are really hardcore bands but I think that’s kind of cool. Those are lyricists that I look up to in a major way.

Through touring, do you think the new album is going to be taken in a different direction?
[In] this band we always feel like we’re headed somewhere to some point that we’re trying to get to but we don’t know what it is but we’re going there. It’s not going to sound like Witness but it’s going to sound like Modern Life Is War. That’s all I can really say. I can’t really say ‘it’s going to be more rock!’ or ‘it’s going to be faster!’ We are trying to get somewhere with our music and our words. We’re making it up as we go. We don’t have a master plan. We’re just trying to listen to our instincts and do what we think we want to do. If people dig it, then that’s great. If we dive-bomb, then we dive-bomb.

What was it like growing up in Iowa and how did it affect your music and you personally?
That’s what I talked about a lot on Witness. When you’re growing up, you don’t know any different and you don’t know what anything else is like. It’s just your life and you don’t think about it. When we were writing Witness, I started to think about that because I got to go to other countries and started to make friends from different places and talked to them about what shit was like for them. That’s why I talked about stuff like that so much on Witness. I had a pretty good family and neither of my parents had a college education. To them, that was the key to happiness and success, which I have a fundamental disagreement with. I went to school for my parents and got a degree for my parents and went right back to what I knew I wanted to do. I don’t regret it and it wasn’t that bad but that was something I did for them. With their experiences, they felt that’s what I needed. They know more then I do about life and what’s it like. A lot of Witness is just about being in a small town and getting into punk, getting records, riding my skateboard, listening to those records and hanging out with my friends. Trying to emulate the things we were reading about on those records and the lifestyle that they talked about. Just to hang out on a corner downtown, we went and did that. You are supposed to go to shows and play in bands and that’s what we did. We had no frame of reference and there weren’t older kids to show us the way so we just started bands, started shows, got skateboards, hung out downtown, listened to music and that was it. It was no big deal and now we get to go on tour.

Where did you go to school?
University of Northern Iowa. I got a BA in Sociology.

Do you ever see yourself using that for anything else?
I don’t know, maybe someday. I use to think about my future incessantly. I never planned on this band lasting very long or doing very much till a year ago. Now, honestly, I’m really happy doing this and I am making enough money to get by. I really like the guys in my band and we have a good time together so I am just not really thinking about what I am going to do after this right now.

(Elona) What bands did you look up to?
My first punk band was definitely Rancid when they put out “Let’s Go.” I just thought the shit they talk about was so cool. “Salvation” is my favorite Rancid song. It’s a poppy, catchy, awesome punk song that you can just shake your fist to. That was my first band so we got into Op. Ivy and then we use to see pictures of those guys wearing Minor Threat shirts, so we got Minor Threat records. We didn’t know that was hardcore yet. We got into hundreds of different bands. We some how found out about Dr. Strange records. They had a mail order catalog. Me and all my friends that were into punk would get together and figure out all the different things we wanted out of that catalog and we all put in a big order and get that stuff. After those couple bands, it was just super fucking random for years and years and years. The first couple hardcore records I got were Trouble-Crime In Punishment 7-Inch in New Jersey when I went to go visit my aunt. I spotted that on a whim and that’s been one of my favorite records and still is to this day. I got Gorilla Biscuits because I think someone was like ‘oh, you need a Gorilla Biscuits record.’ So I got Start Today.

Why do we think people into punk and hardcore fall away from it with age? Why do you think that is?
I feel like I should have an answer to it. Atleast in hardcore, there is so much anger and pent up energy and rage. How long can you sustain that level for? That level of anger, frustration, rage and rationale. That’s stuff I am well aware of. I think that’s a part of it. You just can’t sustain that level of fucking anger and energy into your old ages. I think a lot of the bands once they get to that point in their lives where they are not so angry anymore and they are not so frustrated and they don’t have all this teenage angst or post-teenage angst, and then they just call it a day. I don’t feel like I’m an angry adolescent right now but I still feel like I have a lot to say and I have a lot of passion about life and a lot of passion about music. Let our music change as we change and let our words change and I change. If people want to say ‘they’re not a fucking hardcore band anymore ‘cause they play slower songs the last four minutes,’ then, we’re not a hardcore band to you anymore but to me we are.

If you take one of your fans and have them get one thing from your music, what would it be?
We’re a small drop in a big ocean of music and words. To us, getting to play at CBGBs, getting to tour the world, getting to play with some of our favorite bands, just getting to do all the things we do. This was totally out of the question of something that we were going to get to do. Being able to do this, like tonight, we would have laughed because it was so beyond the realm of possibility; for us to play in a band from Marshalltown to get to play CBGBs. I hope the thing that people take is that anything is fucking possible for your life. It doesn’t matter where you could from and you can do it from where you’re from. You don’t have to go to New York City. You don’t have to go to California or Hollywood or anywhere else. You can be what you want to be and you can do what you want to do and you can do it right on the ground I am sitting on right now.

What is the significance of the Ramones in D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S?
I choose the Ramones because we were on a tour and I am kind of a magazine junky. I always read Rolling Stone and MOJO and Thrasher. I have all kinds of magazines; I try to read as much as possible. There was a point where three of the Ramones died in a couple months and so every time I’d get a magazine, there was a tribute to one of them. It was a sad thing to me because they are one of my favorite bands. I was just like, ‘they are dying and they were the original American punkers and we are this half-breed from Iowa. Small-time thing, but we’re still out here playing punk rock, so I guess we’re dead Ramones now.’ People try a lot to read into that song and I always say it’s a silly song. The title is kind of goofy and some of the words are pretty goofy. I don’t take it that serious but I have a world of respect for the Ramones and those guys that died and the guys that are still living from that band. It’s a tribute to them. I always think it’s making fun of us. I read somewhere and someone was like “they should be fucking shot for writing that song” and I kind of agree. It’s sacrilege but I did it anyway.

Tags: Interview, Modern Life Is War //