You’re currently on tour in the USA – how’s the tour going?
We’re just getting started and things are great – we’ve toured with Flyleaf before and they’re really great to play with. They’re just a great group of guys and girls! We’re basically touring constantly for the next year, and even on our days off we’ll go onto radio shows and play acoustic sessions – it’s what we all love doing!
What’s your favourite song to play live?
Ummm… That’s a tough one, I love ‘em all! I still love playing Bodies, because everyone just goes crazy every time we play it. It’s always a rush, whether it’s twenty people or twenty thousand people! Somebody’s always going crazy for it, I’ll play it five times a day if they’d let me.
You’re heading over to the UK in April – how do the crowds in the UK compare to the crowds in the USA?
There are awesome rock fans in the UK – I love playing over there! You just feel like you’re with like-minded people who love rock music, so I can’t wait to play in the UK. We can’t wait to hang out with Fozzy too – we’ve got a lot of mutual friends and have hung out a little in the past, so I’m looking forward to touring with those guys.
Your new fifth album Resilience is released in April – was it easy for you to write and record?
This time around it was the easiest writing and recording process I’ve had in my career. We’ve known Jason for years and he’s a singer-songwriter, so it’s great to just have another guy in the band who you can bounce ideas off. If you find someone who’s as passionate about writing music as you are you know it’s gonna end well! We also recorded the record with the same producer as the last record, so we kinda knew his methods and style. It came easily!
Do the new tracks fit nicely into your back catalogue or have you changed your sound at all?
Honestly, having Jason as a singer (with his huge vocal range) just brought us back to the days of when we had our original singer, Dave Williams, in that there were no limitations. You don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to playing in one key or anything, which is nice. I’d say there are a lot of songs on there that sound like they could be from our first record.
What’s your favourite song on the album?
Aw man, that’s a hard one! We play a song called Die For Nothing, which is always fun to play and reminds me a lot of our first record. There’s another one called Anytime Anyplace, which is a little more aggressive than what we’ve done in the past, so it’s always fun to play. I love playing Life of Misery live too, it’s about the situation we had with our last singer… It’s just a release song for me!
What made you want to start playing music?
There was always just music playing in my house – my father was a rock fan, so he used to listen to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and I kinda grew up around bands like that. He also played bass and sang in a band, and my whole family were just into rock music. Led Zeppelin were definitely a big influence on me as a guitarist – they get the credit for starting it all off, so Jimmy Page was just a huge inspiration for me.
One of the great things about Led Zeppelin was the way they went from writing soft little acoustic tracks to these massively HUGE rock songs – would you guys ever consider recording an acoustic album?
I would absolutely love to do it. We’ve talked about it, and hopefully we can fit it in between this record and the next one. I’ve got a lot of songs written on acoustic that haven’t made it onto a record so far and we’ve got a lot of songs that would work on acoustic guitars, so who knows?
What’s your favourite Drowning Pool song?
You know, when you have so many songs it’s hard to pick one – you love ‘em all! Bodies has done so many great things for us and it’s really put us on the map – it’s fun to play so it’s definitely one of my favourites!
You guys spend a lot of time together on the road, but which member of the band has the most annoying habit?
They’d probably all say I was the annoying one, but everybody’s got their own little things. We fight like brothers but we all tend to make up pretty quickly and we don’t hold grudges. When we argue it’s usually about the music, so if we’re gonna have a fight at least it’s productive! We don’t do petty fights.
What’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to the band – it could be on tour, in the studio, anything!
We’ve had a lot of fun times over the years and it all still feels pretty crazy! One thing that sticks out was that when we started working with our last producer we didn’t realise that he was a pyromaniac, so every now and then we’d take a break from recording and blow stuff up before we got back to work! It was productive and fun, and it was a great way to get rid of our old monitors and computers.
Describe yourself in three words?
I’ve got two… Extremely dedicated. We all work hard for this, but dammit do we love what we do.
