AFI

AFI just released their eighth studio album Crash Love and amidst a hectic world tour they stopped in Edmonton to play some love songs from the album. Before the show I caught up with Jade and Hunter and talked about the album, touring and their fans.

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Bobby: Tonight you’re kicking off this short, three day Canadian tour – the Jingle Bell Rock – are you excited to see how it goes?

Jade: Yeah, we’ve played most of these places before. Actually, we’ve never played Victoria but we’ve played Edmonton and Calgary a bunch of times and they’ve always been great.

Bobby: This is of course a Christmas themed show. You guys are no strangers to Christmas shows; you did the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas last week. Do you do anything special to mark the occasion or just go out and rock it out like you always do?

Hunter: We just play.

Jade:  Yeah, I keep forgetting it’s about to be Christmas. I don’t think we have any Christmas festivities planned.

Bobby: In the New Year you guys are kicking off a World Tour. First you’re doing US with Ceremony then Japan, Australia, UK with Sick of It All, and then Europe ending with the Goezrock festival in Germany. What else do you have planned for this world tour?

Jade:   That’s about it for now, I guess. That’s a lot for us though. We’ve already been going since like August or something.

Bobby: So you’ve already played most of the big places already.

Jade: Yeah, we’ve done a lot of touring already.

Bobby: All this touring is in support of your most recent album, Crash Love, which came out in September. It was your first time working with Jackknife Lee and the first time where Joe McGrath produced instead of only engineering. What was it like working with those two?

Jade: It was great. It sort of just seemed like working with Joe. Even though he had a different role, it was still just Joe – he’s an old friend. Jackknife was cool; he’s just kind of like a wild maniac. Very smart though, a great musical ear.

Bobby: You were originally supposed to work on the album with David Bottrill but then you ended up switching up; what caused the change up?

Hunter: It didn’t work out.

Bobby: I read that you had started recording stuff with him before you switched. Did any of that material make it to the album or what?

Hunter: Nah, we scraped the whole thing.

Jade: It was all the same songs though. It wasn’t like different songs; we just re-recorded the same songs.

Bobby:  On Crash Love you actually had a lot of people on the production side of it. I think you had a total of seventeen different people working on producing, engineering, mixing and mastering the entire album. Why did you decide to work with so many people and did having that many people involved kind of affect the recording process at all?

Hunter: A lot of the different studios we went to had different house engineers; every step of the process there’s three or four people involved.

Jade: Those aren’t people that we choose; those are just people that are there you know? But you’ve got to credit them because they are involved.

Hunter: They are working hard.

Jade: It’s not like we sat down and said “let’s find all these people to work on our record.” I think we went with Joe, Jackknife and Rich Costey for mixing and the rest were arranged for us.

Bobby: Okay, this was the first record you guys did since the passing of Jerry Finn, who you dedicated the album and produced Sing The Sorrow and Decemberunderground. What was it like not having him there, in the studio, with you guys?

Jade: It’s sad. I kind of feel we would have recorded this record with him had he been around. We used a lot of his gear, so his presence was there for sure in a lot of his equipment that we used, we made sure his name was on it. You know, we worked for years with him because those two records that he worked on, that’s a couple years of our lives. So he was definitely very much a part of the band’s sound for a portion of time.

Bobby: Some versions of the album came as a deluxe version with an extra EP with four songs on it. The EP was rumoured to originally be released in 2007, then it was supposed to be released in 2008, then it finally came out with Crash Love. Why was it constantly being delayed and pushed back?

Jade: It wasn’t really our fault. It was…

Hunter: Label politics.

Jade: Yeah. Whenever they’re trying to do something, they make it harder than it needs to be. We were like “let’s put it out! Put it out!” At one point it got so close to when we were going to record the album that it got kind of pointless, because then the album was going to be coming out. You don’t want to put out an EP and then have an album come out right after – it just sort of defeats the purpose; but those songs have all been released now.

Bobby:  That’s one thing I wanted to ask. You guys obviously do have a lot of bsides. You had those four songs, and you released another eight songs on iTunes – bsides and demos and stuff like that – and I know for this album you guys had originally written over sixty songs, so you probably have some other bsides lying around. Do you think you’ll ever release a b-sides CD at all?

Jade:  Those didn’t actually get tracked though. We wrote a lot of songs but they didn’t get recorded. There’s actually only one b-side left and that one’s actually from Decemberunderground. Oh! And there’s one from this one. There’s one from Crash Love and one from Decemberunghderound.

Hunter: So not really enough for a CD. We could release like a b-side single.

Bobby: Or I guess just random compilations, you have songs just sitting around to throw on those I guess. The first single from Crash Love was for Medicate which you released a music video for. The day after you released the music video, you released a re-edited version of the music video. Why did you decide to re-edit it?

Hunter: I didn’t know about that.

Jade: I wasn’t aware of that. *laughs*

Bobby:  Yeah, it was released and then the day after we got another press release saying “here’s a re-edited video.” It’s basically the same video but slightly different.

Jade: I honestly have no idea.

Hunter: Yeah, I didn’t know that happened. You’ll have to ask somebody else I guess.

Bobby: The album itself is a lot more guitar-heavy and rock-oriented, particularly when compared to Decemberunderground which had some electronic elements to it. In between the recording of Decemberunderground and Crash Love you (Jade) and Davey did Blaq Audio. Did having that record and touring on that kind of help get the electronic need out of you to go back to the guitar driven stuff?

Jade: I don’t know. I mean, Dave seems to answer that one that yes that’s the case but not so much for me. I don’t think I’ll ever get the electronica out of me. For him I think it did work that way and for me I think it’s just more of a case that I didn’t want to repeat Decemberunderground again.  Going back to being heavily driven by elecotrnics would have just been going back to that formula.

Bobby: Which is one thing you guys do which is often changing your sound a bit.  You went from straight out hardcore to more alternative rock to slightly electronic and now more straight forward rock. Was it a conscious decision to kind of go and write a straight forward guitar driven rock record?

Jade: I definitely had a certain idea that I wanted to do that early on but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that would’ve happened. But when we sat down to write the record, it actually came out that way. I didn’t go to everyone and be like “alright dudes, let’s write a rock record and this is how it’s going to be.”  That happened to be how it came out. It could’ve came out anyway really but it sort of came out to be more [rock].

Bobby:  With you guys constantly changing your sound and evolving with it, you always get the fans – no matter what band – who always say “they were better back in the old days, they were better back then.” Does any of that ever come into play when you are recording? Do you think about that or do you just completely ignore it all?

Hunter: We never sound better than the first CD that you heard us, that’s just how it’s going to be. So our goal is to make this CD be the best for the people who are listening to us for the first time with this record.

Jade: That’s a good point, I’ve never thought about it that way. I’m like that too and I should know better, but you know, bands that I listened to… just the first time that you get into a band, that’s always going to be the best for you. It doesn’t matter if the next CD is better.

Bobby: Which is very true, like take NOFX. My favourite CD by them is probably War on Errorism because that was one of their first CDs that I got full blast, but then there’s like Pump Up The Valuum and So Long And Thanks For All The Shoes, those CDs are amazing but since War On Errorism was the first CD I got, it will always have that connection.

Jade: Like Bad Religion *looking at my Bad Religion hoodie* Suffer will always be my favourite Bad Religion record because it was the first record I listened to when I was a kid.

Bobby: Speaking about fans, you guys are always very in touch with your fans. Like last night you did the in-store signing at West Ed, you guys have the Despair Faction, you post YouTube Videos, you use Twitter and you even run a blog called ShyBoyWin to keep people updated. Do you think it’s important to have this connection with your fans and keep in touch with everybody?

Hunter: I guess it is kinda of important. That’s not the reason why we’re doing it. Fans have always been a part of everything we do throughout our career, so just because we’ve been doing this for fifteen years or because we play a larger venue doesn’t mean that it should be any different.

Bobby: One thing I remember reading about you guys back in 2007 when you were promoting Decemberunderground, you guys were running this very cryptic mystery hunt called “The Charlotte Mystery” where you had people go and search in newspaper ads and talking to the Bleeding Through merch guys to get clues and stuff like that. I didn’t find out how that ended, how did that promotion end and what was the idea behind that entire cross-country treasure hunt?

Jade:  It actually started in 2005, so it was pretty early, before the record even came out. It didn’t really end. It was a cool thing but I kind of felt a lot of people started doing that; not that we invented that necessarily but it kind of became the in-thing. Like an on-line mystery treasure hunt thing, so for us to keep doing that… I don’t know, it got a little played out.

Bobby: Yeah, even with Nine Inch Nails when they released Year Zero, he was dropping USB keys in all the bathrooms at venues they were playing for people to find.

Jade:  Yeah, there’s so many similar things. You don’t want to do something that becomes the sort of “thing,” you want to do something that hasn’t been done.

Bobby: Of course the biggest fan interaction you guys have, in my opinion, is the fact that you had five fans come out and sing on your record on “I Am Trying Very Hard To Be Here.” You started with a contest called Begin Transmission where you asked all your fans to submit a video and you watched them all and narrowed it down to five people to come into the studio. How hard was it to narrow it down from the thousands of entries down to the five?

Hunter: It was really hard. A lot of really great videos. By having to just pick a few, it’s almost like you’re picking your favourite fan which isn’t the case because we love all our fans; and every single video that was submitted was great in its own way. But we did have to pick a couple though. It was fun.

Bobby: Was it interesting to see this other side of the fans and kind of get to know them on a slightly more personal level in the quick two-minute videos?

Hunter: Definitely. We only ever get to see the fans when we’re doing a signing or while we’re playing or sometimes after the concert and it’s always sort of on our turf. We don’t go to our fans’ home so this is as close as we get to see what their lives are like and what they do and it’s really cool.

Bobby: I believe you had some people from your fan group the Despair Faction come sing on Decemberundergound too right?

Jade: Yeah, people forget that. It’s weird, like nobody remembers that we had people come. It wasn’t like a big contest; it was more of a pretty casual thing but yeah, they came into the studio. It was really fun though.

Bobby: So who’s idea was it to have fans come out and sing on the record in the first place?

Jade: I don’t remember. We were sitting around in pre-production talking about having cameras in the studio to document the making of the record but then we quickly realized that every band does that. It’s so common. Go into the studio and have video diary entries thing and we didn’t really want to do that. We were brainstorming…

Hunter:  And somebody’s like *in a high-pitched voice* “let your fans sing on the album!” and we’re like “yeah, that’s a great idea. Who was that?” and the door slams.

Jade: Yeah, I think it might have been a fan that was in the building.

Bobby: You guys are also no stranger to the Rock Band and Guitar Hero, you guys have quite a few songs on those. I know I have played your songs a few times on the Rock Band platform. You guys also just announced that your song Girls Not Grey is going to be in the Rock Band: iPhone format. Now, Rock Band itself is a lot of fun but fundamentally flawed because so many people practice for hours on these plastic instruments instead of the real thing. But now you’re doing Rock Band: iPhone where there wouldn’t even be instruments at all…

Jade: I think they’re making a guitar shaped iPhone.

Hunter: I’m just waiting for our songs to be included on DJ Hero. I played a little bit of that last week.

Jade: How was that?

Hunter: It was actually kind of cool.

Bobby: How does that work exactly? I’ve seen the adverts but I haven’t played it.

Hunter: It’s the same thing with any of those games where it’s unrelated to music; it’s almost just hand-eye coordination. But you’re actually, depending on what level of difficulty, you are using the cross-fade and you actually have to do little scratches and hold one button while you’re doing another thing.

Bobby: Sounds more complicated than just the five buttons.

Hunter: Yeah. But then everyone around you is like “oh, what’s he doing in there? Is he dj’ing? That sounds good.” And you’re like *He pretends to scratch a record* “yeah, that’s all me.”

Bobby: I gotta ask this out of my own personal interest. Like I said, my favourite NOFX CD is War on Errorism and on that CD they have a song called Mattersville which is all about an old punk rock retirement home; and in it he says “at the end of my cul de sac, Davey Havoc’s house is painted black.” So I gotta ask, what color is Davey’s house actually painted?

Jade: Umm… I think it’s like a light brown.

Hunter: Yeah, I don’t know.

Jade: An off-white maybe. It’s definitely not painted black. That would be a really ugly house. I think Dave has a little better taste than to have a house that was painted black. It fits well in the neighbourhood. He had to rhyme with “cul de sac” though; you can’t rhyme “off-white” or “light brown” with “cul de sac.”

Bobby:  Yeah, it doesn’t have the same hook. I guess that’s about it, thanks a lot. Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Jade: Thank you, if you’ve gotten this far, for reading our interview. Suckers!