Senses Fail

It took seven years for Senses Fail to finally make it up to Edmonton for a show, but when they finally did the floor was packed and waiting. Before he took the stage for the show, Buddy Nielsen took the time to sit and discuss some of the newer things that’s been happening in the band and the music industry. From bands that he considers to be offensive garbage to his new side project, Potential Fight and everything in between, Buddy shared his two cents on everything that has been going on in the past few years.

All pictures were taken from their MySpace page.

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Bobby: Starting with the basics, this is the third date on your Western Canadian tour – how’s that going?

Buddy: It’s going really good. Vancouver was a little weird because we played a nineteen plus show which was dumb; but last night was great. It was fun. It’s been good. We’ve never headlined Western Canada.

Bobby: Yeah, you’ve only been here on Taste of Chaos and Warped Tour. It’s about time you get out here and did full tour instead of just thirty minute sets.

Buddy: Yeah, exactly. The show tonight, I think, will be really good.

Bobby: For this tour you teamed up with Circa and Union Events, the promoter, to do giveaways where people win tickets to the shows, Circa gear and meet and greets. Is this a one off thing or do you often do meet and greets before the shows?

Buddy: I usually just hang out at merch anyway, so it’s not really a big thing. Most people who come to the shows will probably meet me if they want to meet me. You know?

Bobby: Yeah, if they want to meet you they can. You’re not hiding anywhere.

Buddy: Yeah, exactly.

Bobby: After this tour you guys are doing a European tour – are you excited for that?

Buddy: Yeah. Some people are freaking out about it just because it’s a lot different than touring North America. The language barrier… everything’s different. We’ve already been on tour for about a month and a half and we’ve got another month so it’s kind of one of those things like… I don’t know. Europe always drives bands crazy. It’ll be really good because it’s the spring, it’ll be real nice over there. In the winter it’s really depressing, like Germany and some of those places are really depressing. But it should be really nice because it’s coming up on good weather.

Bobby: Before this tour you were on the Saints and Sinners tour with Haste The Day, Hollywood Undead and Brokencyde. There were some controversy with that because during every show you were very vocal about how you didn’t really like Brokencyde. Why did you decide to be so vocal about it?

Buddy: Because I really, really, really, really think that what they do is terrible and offensive. I never openly talk shit about bands. There’s a lot of bands that I don’t like, but I don’t openly talk shit about them. This isn’t even talking shit, it’s just making people aware that there is this new trend that’s terrible, that shouldn’t be allowed because it’s just offensive. It’s just disgusting to see all these little girls be into this band that’s just degrading and disgusting. It’s different. It’s not hip-hop. I mean, hip-hop is one thing. It’s a whole different thing. This is garbage. It offends me, that’s why I think.

Bobby: Since you guys were the headliners of that tour, why did you decide to have them with you or was it just a package deal?

Buddy: We didn’t know they were going to be on it. I didn’t even know who they were until they were put on it. It wasn’t my decision. None of the bands that we toured with on that tour were our decision. It kind of fluctuated between this band, that band. It was supposed to be this band, then it was supposed to be that band.

Bobby: It was a pretty varied tour. There was you guys, Haste the Day, a Christian hardcore band, Hollywood Undead, a rap rock band and then Brokencyde.

Buddy: It was supposed to be like that, it was supposed to be a mix of everything.

Bobby: Do you like doing shows like that? That are more of a mix?

Buddy: I don’t know. This was the first time we did it. It was sometimes awkward, sometimes good. I’d like to do it with a real hiphop dude and try something like that. Tour with Atmosphere or that guy P.O.S.. That, I think, would be more respectable.

Bobby: Something more drastically different instead of just slightly different within the same genre.

Buddy: Yeah, exactly.

Bobby: You saying that Brokencyde is complete garbage kind of reminds me of an article I read in Kerrang Magazine almost six months ago. It was the singer of Slipknot blaming the labels for just putting our pure shit, putting out garbage. He said that’s why CD sales are declining, because labels aren’t looking for good bands, just putting out crap. You compared Brokencyde to the “musical equivalent of a snow cone” so do you think it is a problem that labels are just putting out shit?

Buddy: Nah, I just think that’s the music kids are making. It’s not good. The labels don’t have a lot of options because people don’t have as much of a music scene anymore because it’s all online. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of local music scenes. Kids putting on their own shows. There are in certain places but I don’t know, it just doesn’t really seem like that much anymore. People have this different take on music. They have this MySpace take on music. The music reflects the shallowness of the internet.

Bobby: There was another thing that I was reading from the guy from Steven’s Untitled Rock Show. He put out this theory called The Good Enough Theory. Saying how there’s so many bands out there now that you don’t need to be great, you just need to be good enough to stand out. Do you agree with that?

Buddy: Yeah, my whole thing is that there’s so many bands now because it’s so easy to be in a band that that’s why shows don’t do as well and records don’t do as well. Five hundred kids will buy one band’s record and five hundred kids will be another band’s record when ten years ago, those thousand kids would all buy one band’s record. Because there’s only a certain amount of bands and only certain amount of bands touring too. Now everybody is always on tour. I mean, kids aren’t going to go to, maybe, more than two shows a month, I don’t think, for the most part. Even if they want to go to one. I don’t go to more than two shows a month, I never really did. Actually, in high school I used to go every weekend to like two. There was a whole local music scene, it was different. It wasn’t like going to the club to see the band. It was going to people’s houses and churches and stuff like that.

I think that there’s just so many bands that you just need to be good enough for five seconds to stand out and then they’ll blow up and go away. You know what I mean? It’s like that band Cute Is What We Aim For. They’re like a perfect example of a band that just kind of blew up and now…

Bobby: You don’t hear anything about them.

Buddy: Not that they’re bad or anything. They’re just one of those bands. Like you hear about The Academy Is. I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re so many bands that went like *raising his hand up higher* boom, boom and then they’re gone. Whereas we always wanted to be a band where it’s just like…

Bobby: A steady incline?

Buddy: Or just a steady string. We just want to have a career and have people that appreciate what we do and get into music more so than it being a shallow sort of… I don’t know.

Bobby: One thing I was always curious about was why you guys always re-released all your CDs. It made sense for From The Depths of Dreams because ECA only put out 300 copies, so it made sense to get more copies of it out. But then Let It Enfold You and Still Searching, you re-released those like a year after they were originally released.

Buddy: Yeah, it’s just the record label trying to make more money on it. It’s just the record label being like “hey, we can throw on some extra shit and maybe we’ll sell some more records!” But I think it’s cool too because we put a DVD on it. I like the DVD that came with Still Searching and then we added a song or two. I think it’s cool. I don’t think it’s bad. But that’s why the record label does it.

Bobby: It’s just so that they can get a little extra income.

Buddy: Yeah, that’s why they do it. But I think it’s cool. I like when bands release DVDs with their records, just a little extra, I think it’s cool.

Bobby: On top of that, you’ve also often released numerous different types of each release. You always have the general UK import that makes sense but for Still Searching there were five different types of it. There was the regular one, the Best Buy one, the Target one, iTunes and then the deluxe version. Why did you have the five types?

Buddy: I guess in 2004, the music industry wasn’t as shitty. People were still buying records but everybody knew it wasn’t going to last. So every retail was like “I want an exclusive. If we’re going to carry your CD, we want an exclusive thing and we will help promote it at Best Buy, at Target,” you know what I mean? They wanted an exclusive track or artwork or something because that’s how it was. Now, on our last record, nobody cares because nobody buys records. So everybody was like “whatever, fuck it. Just put it out.” But Still Searching in two-thousand… Wait! 2006 it came out. Yeah. People were still kind of buying records then I believe.

Bobby: Right now you guys have Jason Black from Hot Water Music filling in as a temporary bassist, but he’s always just the temporary bassist. Will he ever become permanent?

Buddy: It’s pretty permanent as long as he wants to keep playing with us. *laughs*

Bobby: Hot Water Music’s style is quite different than yours. How does his bass playing fit into the Senses Fail format?

Buddy: He’s a great bass player so he can fit into anyone’s format honestly. But I think that we’re a little bit heavier so I think he has fun maybe doing something he didn’t do with Hot Water. But I love Hot Water, so it’s cool to have him in our band.

Bobby: I read that he just one day called you out of the blue wondering if you guys needed a replacement since Mike had left to do other projects.

Buddy: Yep. He did.

Bobby: That’s how it happened? Just a random call?

Buddy: Yep.

Bobby: That’s pretty good luck then. Back in October you guys released Life Is Not A Waiting Room. Once again you decided to work with Brian McTernan, why did you decide to work with him again for that CD?

Buddy: I just like the way we worked with him. I think he’s a good dude. I think Still Searching came out really, really well. We don’t want to work with big time producers. While it would be cool, maybe there are a couple producers that might be cool, we’d never get to work with them. They cost too much money. There’s all those mid-level guys who do all those radio bands, I’m sure we could have work with one of them to try but it’s just like I don’t want to work with somebody who’s not involved in putting out good records because he likes to make them; not because it’s a paycheck. McTernan does it because he loves to do it and he’s done so many good records and he’s a great dude. We knew right after Still Searching that we were going to do our next record with him. “We’re going to do our next record.” You know what I mean? We didn’t actually sit around and…

Bobby: Think about it, it was obvious that you’d do it with Brian.

Buddy: Yep.

Bobby: In an interview with Ultimate-Guitar, Garrett was saying that for Still Searching there wasn’t much room for Brian’s input. You already had all the songs written and recorded in Garrett’s basement. You went in, put a few touches on it and got it out whereas for Life Is Not A Waiting Room, Brian had a bigger input in it and did have a more pivotal role in the record. Why did that happen?

Buddy: I don’t know, we just couldn’t write any songs at home. It just didn’t work. We tried and we got some songs. I think the best songs are the ones we ended up writing at home actually. I don’t know, we tried something different. I don’t really like the way we did it so we’re not going to do that again. We were just in the studio and it sucks, it’s hard to be clear headed about everything when you have twenty songs and you’re trying to figure out what’s going to be on the record and what’s good and what we need to change. It’s just a mess, it’s too much. I think next time around we’ll write all the songs, go in and then Brian will be like “that’s cool, that’s not.” That works better, I think, on his end too because everybody was just really overwhelmed. But I think it comes out on the record which is cool because it has a feeling. I think the record feels a little overwhelming, at least lyrically. I thought that was cool. That was the whole point. To try something different to create some other thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you don’t.

Bobby: In the same interview, Heath and Garrett said that you guys wrote the songs thinking about the live setting after a few songs off Still Searching – like Even The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues – didn’t transfer over live as well. What made you decide to consciously make that effort? To make sure that they’d all transfer over?

Buddy: Because that’s all we do is play live *laughs* All we do is go on tour. There’s a couple songs on Life Is Not A Waiting Room that we’ll probably just never play live because they’re just not live songs. People don’t want to hear them. We have so many fucking songs now. We have four records and then all sorts of bsides and shit that we can play; so it’s not like we’re not not going to play Can’t Be Saved. And we’re not not going to play Bite To Break Skin. There’s certain songs that we have to play every time. You know what I mean?

>Bobby: Those are the songs that people really want to hear, like Irony of Dying On Your Birthday.

Buddy: Yeah, songs like that we’ll switch out but then there’s songs that people, I think, would be like “ah, you now, that’s cool but I’d rather hear this song.” So you try to mix in as much of your new stuff with a good balance of all your old stuff.

Bobby: On March 26th you guys posted a phone number on your MySpace page telling your fans to give you a call. Why did you decide to do that and have you got any interesting phone calls from fans?

Buddy: Yeah, it’s for a thing that’s called SayNow. It’s basically kind of instead of Twitter and MySpace and that stuff. You get people to call you up and you get pretty much their contacts and you can send out mass text messages to them and everything. It’s pretty cool, it’s pretty cool.

Bobby: Back in 2007 you mentioned that you were working on a solo project that had elements of Screeching Weasel, Bane and Propagandhi in it. How’s that going? Do you have any plans for a release?

Buddy: It’s called Potential Fight. We’re actually going to record when I get home, probably early June. I don’t know when it will come out because I don’t know what record label it’ll be on. I have no idea. It depends. Vagrant gets to see if they want to put it out because they get to check first if they like it or don’t like it or whatever. And then we’ll see, I don’t know. I’m sure we’ll tour whenever Senses Fail isn’t on tour, we’ll go out on tour.

Bobby: Is it just a solo project or do you have a band?

Buddy: It’s a band.

Bobby: I guess that’s about it, thanks a lot.

Buddy: Cool man.

Bobby: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Buddy: Nah, thank you. Thanks for the interview.