Alkaline Trio

Alkaline Trio were one of the first punk bands that I heard way back in the day, so I was extremely excited to see them live and sit down to talk to them before hand for an interview. Derek was a really nice guy, went on long rants and gave complete answers. He was really into the interview, which made it a lot funner to do. Thanks a lot to Derek for doing it and to John and Gavin for setting it up for me. Read and enjoy 🙂

---

Bobby: You guys have been on this tour with The Lawrence Arms for a few weeks now, how’s that going so far?

Derek: Great. They’re really good friends of ours and we’ve toured with them several times before but it’s been a long time. So it’s nice to be on the road with friends.

Bobby: Has there been any really memorable moments from it so far?

Derek: Nothing that really stands out. I mean, if you’ve ever seen the Lawrence Arms you know that aside from being an amazing live band they’re also extremely funny. So there’s been a few moments of just comedy on stage from just watching them that stands out. But mostly just inside jokes that wouldn’t make sense to most people, but they’re extremely funny guys so it’s blast to have them on tour.

Bobby: I haven’t seen them live yet…

Derek: You will tonight.

Bobby: Yeah, I’m looking forward to tonight. Of course, this tour is called “Occult Roots Of Alkaline Trio: Early Songs For Eerie People” why did you guys decide to name it that?

Derek: Well, we’re coming up to the tenth anniversary of the band and we felt it would be appropriate to revisit a lot of the older material. So we’re playing slightly longer than we usually play in order to accommodate all the songs. What we’re doing is playing the first album, which is called Goddamit, we’re playing that from front to back and then we do some acoustic songs, and that changes every night; and then we do another thirty to forty-five minute of music that is mainly requests from The Blood Pact, which is our fan club and of course we play some songs off Crimson. So it’s a good mixture of new and old stuff, but a lot of old stuff and some songs that the band hasn’t played in five or six years.

Bobby: Like you just said you’re playing the entire Goddamit CD, how have the fans been reacting to the older songs? Have they been enjoying hearing them again?

Derek: Yeah, it seems like the majority of the people are really excited to hear the stuff. Looking around the audience you can see people that might not be too familiar with it and those are usually people that react more to stuff off Crimson and stuff off Good Mourning. Again, we try to mix it up so that nobody gets too bored; or at least if you’re not familiar with Goddamit, it’s only thirty minutes long so it goes by relatively quickly. And hopefully people will enjoy it and then maybe they’ll go and listen to the album afterwards.

Bobby: In a recent interview you said that you guys are planning on re-releasing Goddamit with some bonus material and other vintage stuff, why are you guys going to do that?

Derek: Really, I guess the motivation for that came when we were putting Crimson together. Originally Crimson was supposed to be released… There’s a deluxe release of Crimson, that was supposed to be the original release of Crimson. We wanted it to be two discs, we wanted it to have the demos and videos on it and for a whole myriad of reasons that couldn’t happen. There wasn’t enough time to put it together, sometimes you know, it was a budgetary reason; like there’s not enough money to put it together right now, to do this deluxe edition. So we had to wait a while to do that, but in doing so we kind of got the urge to go and… Originally it wasn’t anything more than to re-release Goddamit with maybe some more artwork. Expand the booklet, maybe have the three members that were in the band at that time, Matt, Danny, and Glen, have them comment on the songs and have them write anecdotes about what they remember about being in the studio and writing those songs. And then we came across the master tape for the demo the band had done prior to Goddamit; and there’s cassette copies that have circulated, but they don’t sound very good. They’re copies that the band made themselves and some of them have the beginning of the first song cut off. So we found the original tape and we were like “why don’t we throw that on there and that’ll be bonus material?” And then the whole thing kind of snowballed and it turned into this thing where we’re trying to put video together to add to the re-release, we’re listening to remixes of the album to see if that’s a possibility, maybe we can get the album to sound a little better now that everybody has gotten more experience. So we’re trying different ideas but we’re not one hundred percent certain what’s gonna happen but it definitely will be re-released. There will definitely be enhanced artwork and some sort of video content and some extra songs. And it will be on Asian Man. A lot of people seem to be concerned that we’re gonna release it on Vagrant or we’re gonna release it on a different label. But we’d never take any of those albums away from Asian Man; Mike Park, who runs Asian Man Records, is one of our best friends and it means a lot to us to continue to work with him.

Bobby: Yeah, Mike Park is a good guy.

Derek: He’s an amazing, amazing person, yeah.

Bobby: He just did that bike tour across California playing shows.

Derek: Yeah, he’s a crazy, crazy person as well; but he’s got a really good heart.

Bobby: Like you just said you re-released Crimson as a deluxe version in December; and lately, a lot of bands have been re-releasing CDs pretty soon after the original one was released. Like you guys did, Coheed and Cambria, Senses Fail, Atreyu, a whole bunch of bands. Why do you think so many bands are re-releasing CDs so soon after the original release?

Derek: It’s really simple: you sell more albums. It sounds really crummy, but that’s unfortunately the thing that record labels are interested in now. Everybody wants to be successful, there’s nothing wrong with that. Any job that you do in life, whether it’s working at a restaurant or being a musician, you want to do the best you can. So there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. But what’s happening in the music industry now is people put so much stress on where you chart and how many albums you SoundScan, which is sort of the gospel of album sales. Even though there’s thousands of independent record stores that don’t do SoundScan, and of course there’s lots of albums sold on the internet – digital downloads – so they’re still trying to figure out how they fit into things. Right now, there seems to be an obsession in the music industry where people like to release… like “here’s our new album, there’s four different covers.” Or “here’s our new album and next week we’re gonna release a double disc version of it and then a month later we’re gonna release one that comes in a box with a t-shirt and go and buy them all because you love our band so much. And we know you’re gonna buy everything that we put out so we’re gonna put all of this out and you’re gonna buy six different copies of our album.” And if a couple thousand fans do that, that amounts to higher SoundScan numbers. Fundamentally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to sell more albums. Like I’m a sucker for deluxe editions. I buy, not so much for punk or rock bands, but there’s a lot of jazz albums that were recorded in the sixties and seventies and now they’re being re-released and they sound better than they did before, and they put all this extra content on it. So I think it’s a cool thing for people who like that kind of music. But in some cases it goes too far and it’s just greed basically, it’s what it amounts to; just praying on the fact that you expect people to buy anything that you put your name on.

Bobby: You just mentioned how people are trying to figure out the digital sales into the recording sales figures and of course the internet and iTunes have become massively important over the past few years. How do you think all of that has affected the music scene in the past decade or five years?

Derek: Well the internet itself has advanced the music scene in so many ways and it made it so much easier for bands to get their names out there. You can get a MySpace account for your band and it’s infinitely better than any resource that we ever had when our band started. So there’s a lot of pros to the internet. But the cons to the internet are that your music can be readily downloaded anywhere. It’s not that hard to find music on the internet for free and some people argue that that’s again a great way to get exposure. Like somebody might download an Alkaline Trio song from whatever Napster type of peer-to-peer network. They can download something from there for free and maybe then they’ll be a fan of the band and go to iTunes and download the rest of the album and pay for it; and I can’t argue with that. But I definitely think the future of the music industry lies in digital downloads and the unfortunate part is that you’re gonna lose the tangible factor of buying albums. I like being albums to read the liner notes and look at the artwork, and even though they’re starting to do that on the internet where you can get a PDF of the booklet, it’s not quite the same. I suppose they’ll be a time in the future where everyone can afford these amazing printers where you can print out the artwork that they download and it would look just the same as it would if you bought it in the stores and that would be cool; but until that day I think people are going to be missing a vital part of the record buying experience. And then there’s albums like the new Tool album, I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it comes with these glasses and you look at the artwork with the glasses and it’s something that you could never replicate on a computer. So I think there’s other people that are like minded in the fact that album artwork and having something in your hands when you’re listening to an album is important. But we’ll see what happens.

Bobby: Yeah, so many bands are putting a little extra into the artwork so that people go out and buy the CD, like the Tool glasses. And that’s what makes it interesting.

Derek: Sure, sure. Like I think some of those things… If you can make an album look interesting enough where people actually want to look at the artwork, where it excites people to look at it. It’s not just like “hey, that’s a cool photograph” or “this is a cool font” or “somebody’s really good at Photoshop,” but you can make it different and unique like Tool did, I think people will want to go to the store and buy it.

Bobby: Going back to that interview where you were talking about re-releasing Goddamit, you also said that you were gonna record some of this tour for a DVD. Is this going to be a live DVD or more of a documentary type of thing?

Derek: Well, right now, the DVD, everything is still up in the air. We film everything. What we were shooting for is to record one of these shows. In order to do a DVD, you typically would record with five to seven cameras so that you have as much coverage of the show as you can. We have been having trouble organizing that aspect of it, and there’s only another week and a half left in the tour, so that may not happen. But footage from this tour, be it live footage, backstage footage, interviews with us, whatever, will surface in one form or another. Maybe it’ll be a part of the Goddamit reissue, maybe it will be on a DVD by itself, maybe it will be on a DVD in the future, we don’t know right now. We’ve got so much stuff going on and so many things that we’re excited about. We’re starting to write songs for the next album, working on the Goddamit reissue, a couple other things that we’re working on. So we’ve been so busy with a lot of this stuff so the DVD aspect of thing hasn’t really been a concern yet. We know that we’re filming stuff right now, and once we finish the tour and have some time off, then we’ll look at all the footage and work on editing something together and we’ll just go from there.

Bobby: You’ve said many times that after this tour you guys are going to go into the studio and start recording your follow up to Crimson, are you excited to do that?

Derek: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we just started writing and we spent a year writing material for Crimson. So by my estimation, if we finish this tour in a week and a half and start really actively working on songs, I wouldn’t want to go into the studio until the very end of the year. I think anytime before that is too soon. But yeah, I’m excited to start working on new songs. Some of the ideas we have so far, stuff we work on every day at sound checks, sound really cool. I’m having fun working on these new ideas and trying to figure out… since we’re playing a lot of the old material, there’s definitely been a little bit of the influence. Like this is the stuff the band was listening to when Goddamit was recorded and maybe now there’s more of an interest in those bands that the band was originally inspired by. So its gonna be interesting to see what happens after this, to see what a combination of new influences and old influences add up to.

Bobby: I love going to concerts, I try to go to as many as I can, but of course, some are always more memorable than others. So thinking back, what are some concerts that you’ve been to that were really memorable for you?

Derek: Memorable concerts that I went to as a fan?

Bobby: Or played at, either or.

Derek: We’ve played some amazing shows. We played some festivals over seas where we played with Marilyn Manson and Iron Maiden and those were pretty memorable, for both reasons. It was great to be on the same stage playing with those people, but it was also great to finish our set and go up front and watch Marilyn Manson in the middle of England somewhere. Or to see Iron Maiden, who were the band that I was really into when I was younger; and here they are right in front of me playing this amazing show. So shows like that have definitely been inspiring and stood out. I guess when I was younger, I saw Jawbreaker at a really small show in Michigan and that was great. The first time I saw Rancid was really good, as far as like punk shows goes. But yeah, I’ve seen a lot of concerts and some of those are like rock bands from the seventies. I’ve even seen N*Sync. I saw N*Sync in concert, and while it wasn’t like awe-inspiring, it was very interesting to see this gigantic tour with all these lights and stuff. I could admire it for what it was. It’s hard to pick one over another.

Bobby: I guess that’s about it because we’re out of time.

Derek: If you got another question, I’ll answer another one, don’t worry about it.

Bobby: Okay, I have a few more that I like to ask at the end of all my interviews, just completely random but kind of interesting. First off, if you were the member of the opposite sex for a day, week, month, however long you wanted, what would you do and why?

Derek: If I was the member of the opposite sex… wow… I would shop. I often find myself more interested in or attracted to women’s fashion. Like I can walk into a store, I don’t know what the local equivalent would be for some of these stores that I go to, but if I go to a store with my wife and I go shopping, chances are that I won’t be able to find anything that I like in the men’s department but I find all kinds of stuff in the women’s department that if it were in a man’s style I would buy. So I guess I have some sort of jealousy when it comes to clothing, so I would go shopping.

Bobby: Now, if you guys, as band, were stranded on a desert island, with no food and nothing to eat, which one of the band members would you eat to survive and why?

Derek: Wow… um… I’d probably go for Danny first. Because… I don’t know, I think he’s in the best shape of the three of us. And Matt and I are vegetarians, so we tend to be… I guess as far as live stock is concerned, you would probably want something that’s fed meat or something a little beefier.

Bobby: Can you tell us something about the band or one of its members that not many people know about? Like a little quirk they do on the road or something like that?

Derek: It’s not like we have any secrets or anything, so I’m trying to think if there’s anything that’s terribly interesting. What would be something… Danny’s favorite movie is Con Air. How’s that?

Bobby: That’s good. I guess that’s about it, thanks a lot for doing it, do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Derek: No, just thank you for doing this, and thank you to anybody who’s even remotely interested in our band, we appreciate it. It’s been ten years of pretty amazing experiences for everybody and hopefully they’ll be another ten.

Bobby: Alright, thank you.