(by Kevin Stewart-Panko)
Dead To Fall has endured a wholesale transformation over the course of 2006’s The Phoenix Throne and Are You Serious?, from their early years as an At The Gates-obsessed metalcore act to a thrashier prospect playing from the heart and funny bone. Are You Serious? continues pushing quirky edges and metallic angularity while simultaneously finding a voice with space-age sounds and hypnotic textures.
Damn you, “the Internet!” As an unabashed fan of Dead To Fall’s previous album The Phoenix Throne and new platter, the quizzically-titled Are You Serious?, it’s only natural that, as a person who spends his days writing about bands he likes in hopes that readers might take a similar liking to said bands, I would look into the possibility of writing about this particular band. So, with editorial blessing and the former Chicago-based band’s highly entertaining latest album accompanying many recent public and private transit journeys and at-home listening sessions, I rustled up a bunch of penetrating and incisive interview questions to pose to the band during an afternoon of record company-sanctioned phone conversation. On the designated afternoon in question, I figured I’d wander over to the band’s MySpace page, just to see if I missed anything in preparation. Located in the blog section of their page was a continuing series — at the time of this writing, they were up to #13 — of self-produced videos titled Staying In The Fade that not only show the band in all their drunken wisecracking glory, but more-than-adequately, and far more humorously, answered any possible interview question you could hope to ask someone you’re only going to be talking to for half an hour before never talking to them again. Damn you, MySpace for making it so easy for bands to post home videos for fans to watch them raging at benders, writing songs, recording albums, playing shows, filming videos, drinking, smoking weed, touring and so on. Then again, I guess I didn’t have to wait until an hour before my phone chat with guitarist Logan Kelly to finish the research process.
Kelly checked in from a San Francisco tour stop to talk about staying in the fade and why, even when he’s homeless, every night is the best night of his life.
Metal Maniacs: I just finished watching all your web episodes and because you guys basically seem to have cameras on around you all the time, it’s like I don’t even have any interview questions for you anymore. Everything about writing and recording the new album, filming the video, all the crazy shit you get yourselves into, what you guys like to drink and smoke is answered in the videos.
Logan Kelly: [Laughs] Yeah, those are definitely super-informational and extremely entertaining. We get a lot of positive feedback just because they don’t seem to be the standard, boring, “we have to do this” video. We just have a good time and [bassist] Chad [Fjerstad] would be making those videos whether we put them up on the Internet or not.
MM: How long does it take to edit and add the music and everything for one of those episodes?
LK: He usually spends about a day on them. When we were in the studio, he was throwing them together maybe once or twice a week, taking about five or six hours each time.
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MM: What’s it like having cameras around and on all the time? Have you learned to ignore them?
LK: Well, for me, it’s hard because I’m camera-shy. You’ll notice that I’m not in the videos as much because I’m not super-comfortable in front of the camera. Everyone else in the band seems like they’re pretty ok with it and they all do hilarious stuff once the camera gets turned on them. For me, I’d rather be up on stage or shredding or whatever.
MM: It seems that as time as gone on, Dead To Fall has become better at balancing humor with the music and, with new songs like “Stupid?” and “Major Rager,” incorporating that humorous side of yourselves into the songs.
LK: That’s come with road experience. We’ve become desensitized to all the stuff that bands normally take very seriously when they first start, thinking they have to be and act a certain way. It seems like we’ve done some serious stuff and it’s gone over well, but the best reaction we’ve ever gotten from a song would be “Chum Fiesta” and that’s a song along the lines of the whole Are You Serious? album; it’s a song about getting attacked by a shark and it was written really quickly. It aims right for what people want to hear, but it kind of makes fun of itself for doing that and being conscious that we’re writing for a certain type of crowd. It seems like the crowd we’ve got now are the weirdos, the potheads and people like that. We’ve got tons of views of that ridiculous video we made for “Chum Fiesta” and lots of positive responses to the fact that we did something different that stands out and catches people’s attention. We’re humorous dudes, joking around in the van all day. So, are we going to write about the kind of people we are or the kind of people we aren’t: Brutal metal dudes who talk shit and hate life?
MM: With the idea of being more stoked about playing stuff that’s more you in mind, one of the observations I made in the first two episodes of Staying In The Fade is that when you guys play older songs live, there are moments when you don’t seem as into it.
LK: Some of that is stuff we have to play because Dead To Fall has been a band for so long. There are certain songs people want to hear in the set. We really like playing them because with a new drummer and a whole different lineup from the first couple CDs, we change it up a lot and make the parts fit how we want to play them, accentuate the heavy parts, speed up the fast parts, that kind of thing. But yeah, it’s always entertaining to play the fresher material and the stuff that we wrote as a band. The main nucleus of the band has been here for the last two albums. [Guitarist] Phil [Merriman] came in between this one and The Phoenix Throne and that was the smallest lineup change we’ve had since the first CD, pretty much.
MM: Was the song “Stupid?” really written in an afternoon?
LK: Pretty much. We wrote a bunch of stuff that was really cool and we were all really stoked. [Co-producer] Mike [Schleibaum, also of Darkest Hour]dead_to_fall_2.jpg was like, “I’m really glad you guys are writing all this stuff, but what do you think about writing some real party songs; some ragers and some real thrashers?” The last album had some pretty thrashy stuff on it and we wanted to keep going with those. People responded really well and we all love thrash anyway. So, we made a plan to get a bunch of beer and booze, as you can see in the episode, get to the studio at 11 in the morning and just start drinking. We went outside, shotgunned some beers, came inside and I picked up my guitar in a drunken haze and just tried to come up with a riff while headbanging. The main riff for “Stupid?” came out in a minute; we strung a bunch of riffs together, wrote a breakdown at the end and it actually turned out to be one of my favorite songs on the CD. It’s all intense before it kinda blows up at the end. It’s definitely a funny concept for a song — it’s basically about how we wrote the song and how stupid it is that we just threw it together.
MM: There’s probably a lesson in there about the immediacy of songs. Y’know, how people say the best songs were written in 15 minutes or whatever.
LK: Exactly! Going by gut instinct and your first reaction is the best way to do things and you hear it in any application. The songs we’ve written like that have generally turned out pretty solid and I’d tend to agree most times, unless we have some sort of writer’s block that day.
MM: Obviously the song “Major Rager” is about a party that goes out of control. Is it autobiographical in any way or more observational?
LK: That’s just the whole vibe of Dead To Fall. Any night that we can, we’re pretty much partying; we’ll go out of our way to drink, unless something is going on or we’re ridiculously tired. It’s kind of a theme song for us about showing up in random places and how every night for us is like the best night of our lives because we’re raging hard. The lyrics are like a culmination of little things that have happened, not necessarily at one party, but at a bunch of different parties. It’s pretty funny for us to listen to a lyric like, “the party has started/I’m already naked.” [Vocalist] Jon [Hunt] went through this phase where he’d get naked every time we had a party and he’d end up in the bathtub throwing apples at people or ripping up bibles or something.
MM: I read somewhere that Phil [Merrimam], your newest member, doesn’t come from a metal or hardcore background.
LK: No, not at all. When Aaron [Nelson] quit we were looking for guitar players and we used a good friend of ours from Chicago who worked out, but it didn’t seem he fit with the band as much as the guy before him. We wanted to make sure we tried some other people out. It was four or five days before we left for a tour and we were still looking. A friend mentioned this dude, who’d I’d always known a little bit because we were in the same school district or whatever, but I’d never paid much attention to him because I thought he was some weirdo. But my friend mentioned Phil could pretty much do anything on a guitar. He’d done some session stuff at a local studio, so we tried him out and he picked up pretty much everything. As far as his background, he was mostly playing straight finger-style acoustic for two years before playing with us, so he has a lot of different influences he can bring to the table. He plays classical, jazz, blues and he’s really into classic rock, but he also really likes metal from back in the day and he’s picking it up really fast.
MM: Now that I’ve seen the online videos and talked to you for a bit, I can say that some of the initial vibes or impressions I got from the new record totally missed the boat. My thoughts and interpretations had more to do with hypnosis…
LK: Well, there’s definitely some trancey sort of stuff on there. I lived in a pretty fucking crazy house last summer and got myself into a lot of things that were a little over my head [laughs]. I was just really into weird, crazy, trippy-sounding stuff and I’d just sit in my room, all fucked up and write these crazy ass riffs. Those are the kind of things that struck me a lot more than the fast shredders and breakdown stuff. I’ve always wanted to do stuff that’s atmospheric and airy and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it, especially with [co-producer] Brian McTernan [Converge, The Explosion, Cave In, Snapcase et al] on board.
NOTE: DEAD TO FALL HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
Just before press time, Dead To Fall vocalist Jon Hunt issued the following message on the band’s infamous MySpace page: “Dead To Fall is no more. After nine years, it’s time to say good-bye. There really isn’t an easy way to say this, but the Dead To Fall machine has broken beyond repair. I guess the financial, personal and emotional strains wore some of us down and lead us to collapse under our own weight. After a show in Wisconsin, Logan and Chad [chose] to quit. I won’t go into the whole Behind The Music band breakup scenario but it was a night filled with retarded actions and words. The rest of us don’t want to go through yet another major lineup change and really are just ready for a new chapter in our lives. The Super Massive Fist tour with Impending Doom, Arsonists Get All The Girls and Sea Of Treachery [continued] on without us. We have no idea if we’re going to play a last show or not, but at this point there is nothing planned. It’s all so surreal. I’ve spent a good portion of my life touring in DTF and life without it is going to be…interesting. It’s like breaking up with four girlfriends you work with the day your place of employment burns down. I’m going to miss it for sure. Keep your eyes open for future projects from all of us.”
