Garza Podcast - 227 - ATREYU: Metalcore Riffs, Sushi Guitar Rundown & 10 Year Rule for Creativity

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Garza sits down in-person with Brandon Saller & Dan Jacobs from metalcore band ATREYU. New Album “The End is Not the End” out April 24th! https://instagram.com/atreyuofficialSPONSORS: DistroKid - https://distrokid.com00:00 Intro06:55 Bands Hanging Out11:11 First Time Smoking Weed14:56 Sevendust18:12 The End is Not the End19:57 Writing Music in Tokyo22:40 How Atreyu Writes New Songs27:32 Writing “Death” & “Ego Death”28:47 Brandon’s Hand Injury35:15 Songwriting Career37:53 The Time is Now44:57 Dan’s Kiesel Guitar57:07 2000s Metalcore1:03:39 Riff: Lip Gloss and Black1:09:07 Early Demos1:17:41 How to Record Ideas1:20:24 Early Jobs & Being Entrepreneurial1:29:18 Self-Managing a Band1:38:16 Pluginz1:39:35 The 10 Year Rule for Creativity1:44:38 Becoming a Frontman1:50:04 Relationship with Alex Varkatzas1:53:37 Married Life & Family1:58:32 Which Bands Shaped Metalcore2:04:37 3 Albums To Check Out2:07:40 The End is Not the End Out April 24th

What's up, everybody. This episode wouldn't be possible without Distro Kid. If you're an independent artist, this is for you. Distro Kid makes it easy to distribute your songs to all major platforms. We're talking Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. You also get unlimited music uploads for one low yearly price. Keep 100% of the world teams from the songs you wrote, no commission taken. And your music goes live on streaming services quicker than any other distributor. Check it out at DistroKidD.

That's distro kid.com. Link in the description below. And now let's get to the podcast. New record time, dude. Yeah, bro. Brush. And it never ends either. No, we just keep putting shit out.

Like, I didn't, without realizing it, we just keep putting shit out all the time. And someone else was like, you guys are busy. I'm like, oh, I guess we are. Like, too, by the time something comes out, it's been so long. We're like ready to, you know, like this record, we started writing it two years ago. Oh, really? Two years ago. So I mean, it's not even out yet.

You know, we're like, man, I'm already ready to write two more. Yeah, move on. Yeah. It's been a while, but for sure. Isn't it a kind of trip for you guys where now you're, you're very busy, but, uh, there's a time where you guys weren't even like a band. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Why did you guys even decide to take a, uh, hiatus? It was like, burning. Yeah, it was burnout. It was like, uh, I think even just there's where our career was at, too. It was like, we'd kind of hit this peak and then where the music's, you know, it's, industry and everything was kind of shifting was not really in the favor of the style of music that we were playing and it just it started shifting into you know like scrylicks and and hip hop and country music was kind of getting the limelight and we could feel like the the wind taking out of our sales and we're like

oh man this is instead of this being like this kind of thing there started being a little bit of uh going down and ticket sales or things like that were like oh boy maybe we've time to like we've never had that before so maybe let's just take a break for a second it was the era huh what was it 2014 10 2010 to 2014 you're right it makes sense like the like the dub set was kind of fucking taking it was taken over and i think too it was just like we were at that point we were rinse and repeat album fucking tour album tour album tour album tour for a decade you know a little of a decade so it was like a little burnout you know i mean you start getting fucking a little bitchy at each other and you know like yeah then that and then you know that whole process

starts sometimes for sure yeah but it was cool it was it was an opportunity for everyone to like do something that wasn't at right you for a minute. Yeah. I think in the big picture, it made it all over life's more fruitful by taking that time, get to focus on some other things and kind of learn more about ourselves,

you know, outside of the band. Yeah. For sure. It's funny how you learn a lot when you're in a band, but sometimes you learn something else about yourself to be, and you had to separate yourself sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah, it's cool to figure out who you are not in a band. You know what I mean? Kind of rounds off who you are. Yeah. It allows you to understand that, you know, otherwise you wouldn't without that experience of doing other things or yeah change it out you know

absolutely it's like it's like what happened to those kids from bernardo yorba you know what you know what what happened those guys right dude because freaking got lost in the world of rock and row that was your junior high right yeah yeah that's where that's where we met was in at bernardo nice yeah he was in seventh grade i was in eighth grade they met my brother first and then him and alice were in a band And like the drummer sucked or whatever. I'm like, we need a drummer. He's like, my brother's a drummer. I was barely a drummer, but barely.

Good enough to fucking. To come hang. It wasn't just good. He was good enough. Good enough. Yeah. If, hey, if you're a drummer, oh, you guys, be good enough, you know. There it is the fucking Bernardo Yorba matador's, dude.

Matador's? Matador alumni. Dude, and you know, actually, it's not Bernardi Orba anymore. Oh, he's not? It's not. I drove by the, like, a couple weeks ago and was like, what? It's some other. like adult learning center thing

or something. That's why I couldn't find it because I was typing it I was like I can't find it. Yeah it's gone. I mean it's there it makes that makes sense. Orange County School of Computer Science That's what I found that's what it is. Fucking lame posers. That's what it is now. It's not the OG shit. You know what dude? Fuck that's cool. That place was great to skate though. It was more of it was a

better skate park than it was a school. Yeah. Look at it right there. Look at it right there. Look at that fucking four stair stair. The rails that fucking like little dude I haven't seen. There's like a five stair back over there. I haven't seen the grounds of this school in probably 25 years. That's fucking crazy. It's just all pretty accurate. Yeah, the entrance of the school is right over there. I had my my history class where the one of the reason I started playing guitar was in sitting in a class next to this dude who played drums and was like dude I play drums I just started

playing like you should play guitar yeah. Hmm like oh maybe I will. Yeah it's a maybe I will really skates a box yeah oh shit yeah no yeah it did his name is Brian Kelly maybe I will like I will and I did oh there you go yeah I used to eat lunch on those steps yeah so like the back left corner there were those two like garage door things that was the cafeteria do those stairs to the right there that's a prime fucking look at the look at the leeway and dude that's like such a good like a do that rail was great it was a good like learning like entry level rail to learn how to like do skate moves on yeah so you guys were big on skateboarding sounds like do you yeah I was big on skateboarding while

being terrible at skateboarding oh yeah it was it was so cool in the mid 90 skateboarding was just fucking yeah It was so big, yeah. So it was like you had to skate as part of it. Dude, I did not see this coming today. Just going fucking memory laying on Bernardo Yorba. That was me, dude, with the kick drum, dude. I was in the marching band.

You're in a marching band? Yeah, that was holding that big drum. That's probably a photo of me. Oh, wow, dude. That's cool. It sucked, though, because that was better than other dudes and drums. Same with jazz band, but they were like, here, hold this big one, kid.

You're big, hold the big drum. I'm like, this sucks. I don't want to play this one. I don't want to play the big drum. I mean, would that be like a kick? Yeah, big fucking kick drum, yeah, bass drum. Okay. But you're just kind of walking around going,

boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, there's nothing fucking to it. So it's boring as shit. Yeah, what do you do? Just get, that fucking, dude. And all the fucking marching things and the competitions we do are all like in the spring and summer. So it's like, cool, put me this wool fucking costume and give me the big heavy drum to carry around the street. Oh, perfect. Dickheads.

You must have a six pack. Dude, I was ripped back then probably. Dude, you should have, you should have requested a one-man band get up and just, done at all. Yeah. I should have. That's where I blew it. Yeah, the symbols and the stomping and the... Dude, this is the best thing I've ever witnessed of any podcast ever, where you just got that the real-time shit we're talking about. Just examples of stuff on the TV. It's fucking great. Of course. I don't know if I'm breaking forth wall right now and I shouldn't be talking about it, but that's fucking sick. No, it's fine. Yeah. Brandon, Dan, from Atray you, thank you for your time. Thank you for being here. If I don't see it right now, then we're just going to keep going. Yeah, so I appreciate it. I'd stop it for a quick second, man. Yeah, sure, yeah. One of the

those uh you know we're from a i i don't want to say we're from the same area but we're we're basically neighboring towns and kind of one of those uh classic uh bands where we just never crossed path so it's nice that we go it took this stuff us to sit down and finally just talk and hang i'll see you every like once in a while yeah i've kind of talked to you dan like a like a last month yeah the nam show yeah i saw you and i was like confused i'm like is that is that dan oh it is okay what's up dude yeah I was like, because now you're kind of like scatterbrained a little bit. So it's kind of actually, you know, sit down and hang out with you guys.

For sure, yeah. And it was cool to, you know, sometimes, dude, like, and even like you don't cross past, but you ever have like, I never like just sat down and it's like listen to this band. And like, and I learned about their history because you're so busy doing like your own thing or like your own, your own lives or you're following your own dreams. And like, you know, I was, oh, then like the history of. a tray you was oh that's why they're still a band you know you see seeing all the different avenues that uh that you guys took it was for sure it's really uh really cool that's awesome man

thank you thank you yeah it's it's wild how like you can be so sort of genre adjacent and not connect you know what i mean like there's well there's a lot of bands like that that you know uh kill switch is another band like that or we've like we've only maybe played a handful of shows in more recent yet within the past like 10 years and everyone's like You're not homies with Kill Switch? We're like, no. It's so weird. See, it's this way.

It just happens. Yeah, yeah. It just happens that way. It's like, yeah, you guys should be the bands tour together. Yeah, exactly. But we're like ships in the night, you know, like just. It's so weird. Never at the same time.

Never. Because there's so many fucking, I keep saying this people, you don't realize how many bands there are. There's so many different styles. It's endless. It's endless. Well, we were coming up, too, I think, as well, like, it's a lot less today. But, like, specificity of genre was a more important. thing like if you like fucking metal core like you maybe didn't listen to a lot of death core and vice versa or like

metal death metal whatever so it was like our bands too were just different enough where it was like we might play some festivals together but it was that was maybe it where now like everyone just likes everything yeah you know i think there's no i think the genre is blurred yeah yeah very very blurred huh yeah absolutely yeah it's cool i should be friends i remember that when i actually talk to uh brandon chepetti i was like oh sure we're actually talking it's like like a few years ago yeah he's like Yeah, we used to be enemies. Yeah, and now we go finally hang out and be friends and texts. Yeah.

Did I love it? It's great. I love, uh, I loved the day where I got to drink a beer with Brans for Petty. It's great. Oh, yeah. It was a great day. I was like, this is cool. I never thought this thing.

You never thought, you know. Yeah. It's great. Till the day I'd death. No. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Nope. No. No. No. No. It's cool, though. It's good. It's okay, though.

You know, it's fun. I appreciate it. I have a couple of friends that are still straight edge. You know what? I respect it. I respect it. I have one. We've got a few. I have one, but it doesn't count because he's literally never done Kyle.

He's never, never smoked, drank, nothing. It's 43, 42. At this point, he's like, not only he's not of interest, but he's like, not gonna fucking do it now. Like, I've come this far. Yeah. Like, it's like my little badge of honor, but. Yeah.

So with some people, like, Brandon is actually a good example where, uh, when he drinks, he turned into a better person, which is rare. Real chatty. Yeah. Dude, we were, uh, we were watching fucking, And a while back, Avenged did that show at the Observatory. See the Deathbats Club show at the Observatory, maybe like a year or so ago. And Death by Stereo played as well.

And they actually played after Avenged. Because it was like to keep it like time specific, like Avenged opened. Oh, yeah. But it was like me and Matt from Avenged and Brand Shepetti just like drinking beers on stage, like partying for Death by Stereo. And I was like, this is not something I ever thought I would do. This is fucking awesome. Some alternative reality shit. Yeah.

Fucking great. No, it's fun. You never know. You never know. Yeah, never fucking know. There it is right there. I was there. Yeah.

Yeah. And Dan's just been smoking weeds since he's been 14, correct? Yeah. Wow. Long time, yeah. Long time. How old are you now? I'm 43.

I'll be 44 in June. Oh, nice. Yeah. So we're going on almost 30 years. Most of my life. Congrats, dude. Just like music, most of my life. And you've written every riff high, correct?

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much every like a Trilly Rift that we all hear. Yeah. I mean, I can remember specific moments of certain ones where I was, you know, sitting in a room or whatever. And I'm just like, you know, stone and just connected to the whatever, the riff gods. And, you know, you just, you smoke weed and it just like plugs you in. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, creativity is my brain. Let's start, you know, whatever.

Yeah. And off you go. Weren't you taking lessons and then you, uh, and then you smoke during like a class and then you went off into your own world? Who knows when you went? That was the actual first time I ever smoked. smoked weed. Oh, was it? It was the very first time. Oh, sick. Like my, you know, buddy, I decided these two neighbors that lived on the next street over for me, both named Dan and Daniel. So it was Dan, Danny and Daniel. And it was strange because we were, I was the shortest. The

middle one was the middle tallest. He was Danny. The tallest one was Daniel. Dana was also the oldest. Danny was the middle age one. I was the youngest one. Oh, wow. The order that we moved there was like, it was super strange. But, uh, they hooked up some weed and we got like a, I didn't know how any of this worked. You know, I became like $10 and we got like a, a and you dent it in and you poke some holes in it yeah because my dollar can yeah i'm like i don't i don't even know what a pipe looks like you know and i put a little weed in there smoked it and got all stone in my backyard and i was having a great time and ate some carls junior and it was like the best thing i ever had in my life i'm just wandering the streets with my friends like stone all

something like my mom pulls up and i'm like what like mom what are you like what are you doing here she's like you're your guitar class like you're supposed to be and it's like a group guitar class too like and i'm just me about myself it's like this thing called like the rhythm and groove class or something like that where you learn how to play as a band there's like several guitar players several drummers several singers bass players keyboard players so i got into this class and i'm high as shit because i forgot because i was stone i completely forgot that i had to do this i was like oh no i'm like way too high to do this but i remember going into the class and like first get in there and i didn't bring all my stuff i just had my guitar and i'm standing there in the corner like just staring in the

corner and the teacher's like hey dan i'm like what he's like what are you doing oh i don't i'm looking for I'm looking for a cable. And he's like, there isn't one there. Like, there's not, I'm just staring at him. You know what's funny is he probably fucking knew.

He's like, God, yeah, but yeah, plugged in and like, I was just like jamming over stuff for the first time in my life. I was sitting there just high jamming over things.

I'm like, why does everything sound so good? Yeah. And I've never stopped since. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, you just found what,

for some people it works. If you're under the influence of cannabis, some people just hits them different and it makes them more creative. and you go like lock into some more i'm the opposite dude yeah same i'm just like fucking but not live though not live i won't smoke weed and go on stage i don't ruin my day like i cannot do it but i can write high interesting man there all these people are looking at me yeah yeah it's funny though because when you're playing a show it's like duh yeah or should they be looking totally but but

if you're in like another state you're like yeah fuck i did uh i did one uh show where i took like a hit up like a joint and like the strings started to feel different i looked out it was uh it was at the uc berkeley and i was looked out i'm like what the this is weird yeah i don't know if i like this oh dude i forget what i'm doing what are you doing you know you start forgetting the rest and you're like oh man i don't even know what song we're doing right now that's not that's probably not good i forgot how to play guitar yeah what is guitar yeah it's not it's not a good combo no on stage oh totally not. So new gotta talk about about the new record.

April 24th. Just so you guys know, this drops April 6th. Sick. So they have plenty of time to push the record. Awesome. Very cool. And you're touring with seven dust. Yeah, bro. I got jealous. That's gonna be sick. Yeah. That's another band

that we've never toured or really played shows with her. No. I did one thing with Hellar High Water. We did a festival tour with them on it, but never a trade. They're sick, though. They're fucking like the nicest. dudes on earth too yeah yeah it's gonna be fun one my favorite bands ever dude it's one of those bands too we're like there's like yeah they're so fucking heavy and like it's like it's funny because it's lost on people if you unless you like really pay attention mm-hmm and you're like fuck this

band is so fucking heavy it's nice it's gonna be fun oh it's heavy yeah they're they're having a moment right now on a tic-tok mm-hmm with a jump yeah the fucking there's like a video of the fucking of i think clint like it's like the biggest oh defying gravity jump it's like It's so funny the fucking things that go viral. Yeah, I mean. I don't, yeah, we, yeah, me and Jay been talking about it. I'm just watching shit now. I'm up reacting to the whole, I don't even know what's going on anymore.

Yeah. Like, holy shit, dude. Yeah, there's no other. Yeah, fucking, that's the jump. Yeah, I'm on. It's funny as fuck. It's, it's so weird, though. They're having a crazy moment, though, where, like,

they just did, like, a bunch of shit with, like, creed and, like, all these, like, touring with, like, very much, like, an older sort of thing. And then, but still are putting out, like, a fucking gnarly heavy record. So it's dope that like they're kind of having a moment as like an adult like you know playing with creed is very as like a grown up as you can be. I feel like but then they're like still putting out heavy ass music. It's fucking cool. It doesn't leave you man. I feel like I'm a three weeks sober. I'm getting more pissed. It's like man. Things are getting worse. Yeah. Things are like rips are coming out more. I'm like oh, it would be like the opposite or you're you're mad at sobriety so the riffs are pissed or more pissed. You're just fucking pissed dude. Awesome. Yeah. Alcohol went, went backwards on me.

And made me all brain fogged. No, it does. You can do that for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. I mean, I feel like none of us are really, like, crazy anymore with drinking. Like, what did you call yourself?

A cocktail princess? Oh, yeah. He's like, we're just like, like, less interested in, like, getting hammered, more interested in, like, having some really nice cocktails. And a nice evening, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but, yeah, it can definitely focus.

yeah i mean our guitar player Travis has been sober for almost 14 years and so like that yeah so it definitely doesn't work for everybody for sure but he's definitely as sharp as attack now he's fucking is ripped and wow and is sharper than ever on guitar for her for sure really did you notice like a change where oh he's yeah he's yeah i mean also i think he went away like he's he stepped away for a band for from the band for about a year oh yeah yeah and uh i feel like I think he had like proving ground. I was like, when I come back, I'm fucking coming back. And so like, even just when he first came back to the band,

he was noticeably a better player. And you could tell he just like cares more about guitar. I feel like he's always like learning new shit. And like he's the view that sits at home and just like learned new shit all the time. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. How was it right into this record?

We guys said earlier it took like two years. It was great. It was funny because I don't think we plan on it taking so long. But we like started, we decided that we were going to write the record like in different locations. and like not just do the typical thing. So we started, we played a show in Indonesia and Dan had the idea, like, that fight's really long. Why don't we stop in Tokyo for a week and write?

Oh, really? Yeah, so we went and brought our producer and got like a little Airbnb and we're just like right during the day and then go out and do Tokyo things at night. So fun. And it was the first fucking thing. Yeah. Writing in Tokyo. It was so sweet.

It was just the best. Even just during the day, we're just at this house, like just ripping fricking Asahi's and eating Wagu meat from down the street that's like $6 a pound because it's so cheap It's a great idea Dude yeah It was so fun

We were talking about You guys were doing videos In like random places Yeah and we just did them Some in Iceland Yeah You guys are on some crazy tip right now That's a great idea

To stop somewhere Like a little bit And it's right Because if you're gonna play a show It's like your flights are paid for Yeah You're doing whatever You just like take a little piece of the budget

And just like Rent an Airbnb You pay for your food and shit And like Have an experience you know And sanity purposes too I mean like if we were to just bang bang bang and fly down there like we're just exhausted the jet lag oh totally but we fly to japan which is in the same like kind of hemisphere as where we were going in

Jakarta so it was like we go there stay there for a week acclimate right for a little bit and then when we're ready like now we can go down and play a show and not be like exhausted and uh and you know feeling like crap from all this crazy flying and traveling yeah yeah i'm sorry i'm trying i'm trying to focus right now because i just looked at your guitar oh yeah i lost focus i just realized that it's It's made of sushi. There's a lot going on here. Yeah, it must have been cool for you because you have obviously a connection

to Japan. I love Japan. It's my absolute favorite country on the planet. It's just, for me, it feels like this adult Disneyland when I go there. I just, I can't get enough of it. There's just too many fun things and too much good food and entertainment.

I just love the culture. Like, everyone's so nice and sweet, and it feels, it's so safe and clean. And, I mean, it's just, I could go on for days. It's just, like, just gush about it. It's just such a cool country. When did you first go there? 2005.

Okay. On our first world headlining tour. Oh, shit. Yeah, it was us unearth. Was Norjean on that? Like of it? Yeah. Yeah, which was super fun.

I mean, it was really, really fun. And ever since, we're like, this is the coolest place. I just cannot go here enough. Took my brother there for his bachelor party. Oh, sick. I'm sure. Nine years ago, whatever it was. I'm sure.

He loved that. Loved it. We were there for a week. It was, I mean, took him in, like, four or five of his friends. None of them had ever been to Japan before. Oh, wow. I'm like, dude, you can walk the streets and drink. And, like, it's just perfect.

I knew. I forgot. Yeah. I mean, there's, it's not like, it's not like New Orleans, but they don't care. They don't, you're not supposed to walk and eat. That's not really, they don't really like that. It's kind of rude. If you get your food, go stand somewhere, eat it, and then continue walking.

But, like, technically, like, no, you're not going to be, like, arrested or anything if you're walking and drinking a beer. It's more rude than it is illegal or anything like that. Interesting. Yeah, I was jamming, because the record's not technically out yet, so I was jamming those three, three songs, death, ego death. Oh, this is pretty cool. What songs did you write there? Dead, which was the very, but it was actually the first song. You wrote it in Tokyo?

Yeah, that's the first song we wrote. What the fuck? Yeah. You're running in Tokyo, dude. Yeah, it was meant to be. I'm going to rip that off from you guys. Yeah. Go somewhere else in this.

Wow. It's great, dude. Yeah, we did that. We did all for you in Tokyo. Are you serious? Yeah. We wrote six. Yeah.

Six songs. A lot of the first half of the record was written in Tokyo. In a week. Yeah. Yeah. And we would do like, you know, we'd get like, you know, skeletons have, you know, some of the songs it was like, oh, we finish them. They're done. Some of them was like, we have a chorus, first verse.

It's for the most part done. Do a demo. But, yeah, for the most part. Like, that's kind of how we've been writing. Like, yeah, what is it? We did dead. We did All for You. Wait, My Love was Japan.

Break Me was Japan. Children of Light was Japan. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, man, it's just, it was just, you know, and it was funny because we'd like wake up in the morning, have some coffee, like breakfast. Everyone would kind of throw out their ideas they had and we'd just start riffing and by usually by like three or four. Be like, cool, got a jam. Let's go.

Let's go have something ready. Did you have like some like rips in your back pocket? Yeah. We usually, everybody usually has something that they come with. There's several things. And then we're like, all right, we sit down. we're like, all right, who's, everybody play something, or let's share what we have.

And then we go around and everybody play something, we're like, okay, what is, you know, initially anybody really excited about, like, oh, we really, that one and with that one, but like, let's maybe start with this one. And then we'll get through that process, hash the song out and then be like, okay, now let's work on that one. And then go, go, go.

And it's a certain, I mean, sometimes, I mean, we work pretty fast, especially over the past, you know, several records. We've gotten really fast at writing songs. We can pump things out pretty quick. Once we have an idea, structured out real quick, get the meat and potatoes of it, you know, get the lyrics and everything. And then we just demo it real quick and scoot it off to the side, move on to the next one.

Trying to overthink too much. You know what I mean? Oh, totally. I feel like we write our best shit if we don't. I think in our minds, this isn't for every band, but I think in our minds, like, if it's something we have to sit and like fucking just like slave over and like, fuck, the song took fucking days. It's like, well, that's not the one.

Like, I think that if it falls out of the fucking sky, it's like, yep, this is meant to happen this is the song it's meant to happen today okay so so before uh so before the week in tokyo do you have so you did you have riffs at home that you're working out or did you write the riffs some riffs yeah we're like spot spot on honestly i think i think i think most of most of the tokyo shit was written like in like break me was an idea that Travis had like part of a demo yeah um but for the rest of it like even like like all the dead riffs and everything were on the spot in Tokyo all for you all for you i had i had the chorus idea like the melody and stuff and the like the lyric all for you and some of that but like didn't

have a riff for it yet or anything was more just like i have this chorus it was kind of like idea it's on my voice notes or something like yeah exactly i had a voice noted and the chords and stuff we always worked that way too where it's like like he'll have the thing for the chorus right and we'll have like that's really great we'll kind of write the chorus and it's like what happens next and like whether it's me or or Travis or him whatever it usually just come to where it's like like I think there it was it was either me or pauling we're that just started fucking riffing the verb ban the riff thing in the verse and it was like that feels right like let just let it kind of guide itself oh wow you know um but yeah I mean and then I mean

I mean other one we went to Samone Island which is off the coast of um Washington and for the for the other bit we did there for a week as well and like I have like a sort of family relative friend that has like this insane house on the water and it's like the opposite it's quiet beautiful on the water like trees everywhere um and then we probably did what sit about six songs there too yeah yeah usually like yeah at least about a song a day without like pushing ourselves too hard sometimes we get it up to we can get up to like three songs a day for like we start early and we really kind of crank on it but then we end up in situations like we had you know a record or two ago where might even been the last one where yeah we wrote we i think we were like hit like

28 songs and our producers like do you guys need to stop like just stop writing songs we're like but we have more you guys have plenty just there's there's enough good stuff here just just you just like i'm not recording 28 like we're doing I'm not recording all these. We're like, yeah, all right. Fuck.

All right. We were trying to get better bang for our buck because we're like, we can pump out songs fast. We can record them quickly. Like, we can get this done and, and,

you know, for the same amount of money, get a lot more songs, but it's like, yeah, it doesn't work like that. Well, damn. Too bad.

Well, it should. Yeah. That'd be awesome. Like, same amount of time. I know. I'm fucking paying money. I know. All the fucking songs.

We're all fucking 28 of them, dude. Wow. You see, guys work really fast. Huh. Yeah. Is there like a vision for the record at least or do you guys kind of start from like a blank slate or is Yeah, I feel like it's usually pretty, it's always pretty blank and like this record is the first record. I think maybe since the curse that we actually had like conversations about like what is it going to be. Yeah, yeah. What do we want it to be? Like it was more so like not what do we want the record to be? It was like what do we want to be moving forward. So it was like, what do we want to be moving forward? like figure out the sort of like the good pieces of our DNA as a band and like what are the things

we want to ditch and then what are the things we want to lean into harder what are things maybe have been missing you know things like that so um we've never really have that kind of conversation and we did on this before we started this like pretty heavy um so it definitely like at least let it in a direction that it was supposed to start you know and then i think starting with dead like dead for us was like oh this is fucking wild yeah like This is like, these are like faster, gnarlier metal riffs than we ever did. We don't usually do. Like there's a breakdown heavier than we've done before.

Like it kind of had all the pieces that we liked. So it was like an inspiring start to kind of like open the floodgates a bit. Yeah, it's actually, dead it. Dead and Eagle Death are actually on my riffs to, uh, to do a checkout. I have dead. I dead for the intro into the verse and Eagle Dead for the intro into the thrash. That's right. What are those rifts?

I mean, fuck. The dead one is, was, uh, fuck. The Dev one was just fucking, we wrote that in Tokyo. The ego death, that was written in, at Pauling's house. Yeah, we had started, ego death was like another song we started in San Juan. And it kind of didn't make it.

And then Porter had this idea for essentially the intro, kind of like jangly, me of ego death. And he had an idea for a song and it just like sparked in me that was like, like, hold on, I got it. And then we just, there's a video that we just posted of like, this idea of the riff does this and then it goes to the kind of the same riff on drums and then it's like this big sort of like Madonna like

a prayer part and then there's like a crazy breakdown and then it's over and it was like okay like she'll run with it but it was all just like that riff was straight up inspired from having that fucking baritone in my hands like it was one of those things where it's like this sounds so heavy and this is the riff that came out of that you know

but it's all just that fucking song is just straight up like it's like hardcore real like you know it's like old school hardcore rists to me yeah so So Brandon, your first show is a booty close cause, right? In Riverside. Okay. How did you, what's the term?

Like, you could play multi instruments. Why did you do that? I think it started with playing drums. And then, like, we were going to have, like, a pop punk band at the same time of, like, early at Treu. And. Dreaming in Blue is what it was called. That's pretty horned up. Yeah, super horned up.

And we dressed like, it was funny, like we dress like Weaser and shit. It was like, oh really? Yeah, nice. Sweaters and stuff. But we randomly, it was like a friend of Dan's had like a 16 track recorder or eight track recorder. So we're going to do demos one day at his house. And then like I had a song that I wrote for Dreaming and Blue. And our singer at the time couldn't come that day.

So he was like, just record the vocal. And then it was, damn. I was like, why don't you do this in our, not only in Dreaming and Blue, why don't you just be the singer, but why don't you do this in a train? you like at the time we didn't really have much singing involved like on the first kind of demo ep um so i was like why don't you just do this as well but from there i started playing drums and singing and then obviously wanting to like write songs as well like you just had i had to learn how to play some sort of guitar yeah i've never been like i'm not a shredder at all like i've

fucking hurt my hand a few years back so i can't barely play guitar anymore but um what you do i fell on a wine glass and like almost died it was sick what yeah stupid but but But, um, super just like freak accident, but I have like nerve damage in my fingers. So like, I can pretty much only play like mosh riffs. Like these two fingers are good for playing guitar. Wait, so you fell on a wine glass. I assume I cut, like, cut myself basically from like here to there and like severed my nerves and my owner nerve and like my tendons and everything. That's a fucking nightmare.

That's actually what the last song on the record is about that. Yeah. It's called break the glass. Yeah. There's a little, right where the broken wine glass is on my arm tattoo. So what so was it like a pretty like gnarly cut? I have a photo. It looks like I got you like look at it.

It's yeah. It looked like someone. It looked like someone fucking hit me with a machete. Yeah. Like someone fucking hacked my arm with the machete. Like from here to here was just wide open. Yeah. Like instant out or some.

No. Surprisingly not. But like like my wife like grabbed a belt and like turn a kid my arm. So like I didn't bleed out. But it was like one of those things that it wasn't like, oh, I'm bleeding. And there's blood everywhere. It was like blood. Like it was like instant like pull.

pool of blood it was gnarly yeah the pictures are this conversation yeah the pictures are just yeah i'll show you the picture later if you're into that kind of thing it's fucked up yeah it's fucking gross so you were intoxicated and fell no that's the most fucked up part so i had it was literally uh january 2nd of 2021 uh during christmas and new years of of 2020 i had covid so i was just like walked it i was like you know in our house for like two weeks and whatever got the clear um so my wife's dad used to have a house in uh camberia like in kind of central california on the beach so i'm like we've been locked in our house like let's go to fucking cambra so we went to camria literally was there for two hours and it was my i had want my first glass of wine and uh i was like

i'm gonna go downstairs and like grill up some like sausages and shit just to like have some food went downstairs had like the empty wine glass from the first glass of wine i had and a plate of food in my other hand and went to like step over like a baby gate because of the time uh my kids were like really young so we had a baby gate top of the stairs and uh i actually fully i should actually blame um the shoe company at trayu for this uh trayu uh tray shoes you have you ever heard of that no there's a shoe company called the tray you running a running shoe company but they sent it it was funny because we were like we've had conversations and we're like at least you can do it's send us some shoes yeah but i'm used to wearing like chuck taylor so like they're like a thick

you know like padded running shoe yeah and i caught my shoe on the baby gate and i thought they're there look i think that fucking solace and uh whoa and i thought i was gonna i thought i was gonna go like head first into the oven and that's what I was concerned about but I fell I fell before and like it fell on the wine glass and the whole thing just like broke into one a piece and just fucking slice my home arm oh yeah yeah but uh yeah so there was you know I don't play I mean like I said I can play guitar like riffs but if there's ever like certain chords or cool things that I want to show Dan or Travis I have to just mouth it to them and and tell them whatever but Can you like really abilitate that somehow?

Maybe. I think I would have to have another surgery to try and like reconnect my owner nerve. Because I think, I mean, it was like in San Luis Obispo. What's it called again? I'm sorry. Owner nerve. It's like the nerve that it's from essentially like your elbow all the way to end. Controls like all the feeling your fingers, the side of your hand.

It's your funny bone nerve. Like when you hit your. Oh, yeah. You know, when you hit your funny bone and like your whole fucking arm tingles. Yeah. It's not so funny bone. Yeah. It's running like through your whole arm.

But I think if I maybe try to get that reconnected, it might. you something but it could also go the other direction too yeah so i'm like don't know if i want and the reality is like i'd love to be able to play guitar well again but i don't play guitar for a living so it's i'm less inclined to like go get a major surgery oh my god i don't know that dude yeah it's fucked up but yeah i mean so back to the long story long from the beginning i just started learning guitar as well so i can write songs yeah um but yeah worked out i really just kind of just by everything every incident i ever learned was just sort of by like chance that i like oh you're the You sing in the band now.

It's like, I should probably get better at that. I'm like, oh, I want to play it. I want to write a song, so I should probably learn how to play guitar. You know, that kind of shit. That was a pretty sick weave. Yeah. I was the whole week. Yeah.

What just happened? I know, yeah. Okay, how did you get into, it's called sync? Yeah. How did you get into that? I had a friend that I met, a dude named Dave Litchens, who's an incredible, like, writer, producer, that I met. when I when a trade was on hiatus like randomly and um I started writing with him that's a photo

of me in the ambulance um but uh but yeah um then my daughter got fucked up oh there it is here it is yeah yeah it sucks yeah someone's got to give me CPR I'm saying like I just don't you unless you want that yeah yeah it's pretty brutal uh my daughter cut her foot open too that sucked Oh, yeah Wild But no, but I met this dude Dave randomly started writing with him And he introduced me to what sync was

I was like I was like what do you mean like You write songs for TV film I was like yeah, we just write songs And we started this project called Hounstooth We released like a record and a bunch of songs And through him I met another Another dude named Chris Umana He goes by C4

He was more like an R&B hip hop producer And then we started Sort of like a project together called American Gentleman that had a lot of success, but we just were writing music all the time and just our publishing company would just pitch it, pitch every song that we ever wrote, and ended up, you know, songs in like car commercials

and movie trailers and movies and fucking sports. And yeah, it's wild. So holding a world. Yeah, dancing with the stars, like everything you think of. But it was, when I was doing it, it was a much less kind of crowded room, you know. Like over the last probably five, six years, maybe a little longer everyone like my wife would always be like you need to shut the fuck up about what you do

like because there's going to be too many people at the party you know um i mean now like the sink world's crazy there's so many people that do it that it's like in some it's hard to get shit landed because there's hundreds and hundreds and thousands probably writers that are doing the same thing yeah yeah yeah okay so we just fucked up by talking about i mean it's i i don't to be honest i don't do it all that much anymore i still i still submit music and stuff but it's like you might get a couple things a year but more so shifted the focus on doing writing with like artists and bands and shit again yeah just more validating like usually happens faster you know what i mean like you'd be right with the band they usually put out the song within a year and you kind of know what's happening with it and

yeah it's more fun i mean that's what i like to do anyways like yeah the sync projects are cool because it's like it was able to sharpen the blade of like different genres like i learned how to write so many different types of music and learned how to like rap and do like different shit that I would have never focused on. So it was like getting better as just like a more overall like kind of well-versed songwriter. Yeah, what did you,

what was your main takeaway from that? What did you learn? I mean, just I learned that whole business, but I mean, really, like I said, it was just like, it was just an opportunity to learn how to write different songs. Because I mean, you know,

it's like, we write metal, hardcore songs. So it was like writing shit that sounded like, you know, from like black keys or like the hives to like writing like shit that sounded like gorillas or like full, like hip-hop songs like I've written like songs that sound like straight up like

90s like Fresh Prince style hip-hop shit like it's across the board so it's just like learning how to be a more well-versed writer. It's the biggest I think the biggest takeaway. Obviously financially was pretty fucking sick too but oh course yeah so did you

I'm sorry I'm forgetting to your record but like your most like your biggest song like time is now yeah so you approached the guys hey let's to a sing song yeah give me an hour is this yeah is this is this true yeah like i mean i felt it was like the kind of thing where it was like i'm stupid if i don't try to put this in my with my band like if we don't try to have these opportunities yeah but it's metal though so so how did

how did it uh how did it translate how did you like you i think i knew that there was certain ways we could do it where it could still sound like a tray you but at the same time be accessible and pretty much it's only like a sports song but it got used for fucking and every sport. Like it was, I remember getting an email. Remember the email was like,

hey, here's the list of arenas and stadiums that they're playing the song in stadium like during games. And it was just like, yeah, literally it was every basketball,

baseball, football, football, hockey, you name it, every sport. Like in the world. It was crazy.

NFL, all the majors, everything was, it was everywhere. Yeah. And it's funny because like the, in the sync world,

like sports uses are usually the smallest financial use. And obviously you're on a record label too, so they own the master's, so you're not like making a lot of the money.

it was cool to like for our to recoup you know like our advances and shit but it's more so just like in our wake yeah in our wake was a record the uh 2018 record yeah it's more so just like a perception thing because like you get calls and they're like dude your songs on the fucking cowboys game and automatically people think they have your songs on it a sports thing like your band's fucking huge so like it was i think during the time it helped the record a lot because perception of what that was is is big i mean it is it's i think it was cool what did you think when when the uh idea was was uh was uh brought to the table because out because when you're like a in a metal band you're like huh like what

i mean for me i'm excited i'm a lot of times i'm the weird out-of-the-box guy that comes with the weird ideas that everyone's kind of like the tree's always been that fucking left field band oh you guys always done that for sure yeah i like i like the uh i like the weird stuff i mean i don't if weird's even the right way to put it but like i just have a colorful way of of thinking so something like that to me it was like yeah cool let's try it yeah i mean you're just high anyway. Yeah. Whatever, man.

What's funny because usually that's not how we write to it. There's never like a moment where I'm like, yo, give me an hour and I'll, whatever. It's like, we just write songs together. But I knew if I was like, I got this thing and there's like a, like, it's like, the course is like, the time is now. But then I didn't have anything else. Like it would, I don't even know if it probably would have like made its way across the table. But it was like, no, no, just let me figure this out slightly. So you can understand what this is.

And it was like, oh, sounds cool. And then we kind of, you know, we finished it all. together yeah I liked um it definitely explains a songwriting a lot I found a quote from you Brandon I was which it makes sense because because you have you have conversations about talking about songs it makes it's like it's dumb yeah in the end it's dumb because like it's gonna sound completely different and I was like oh yeah but Brandon put words to it um I want to show you what I'm thinking because I can't tell you what I'm thinking yeah you really can't you have this crazy idea but you

I mean for sure I mean it's even it's the same thing too of being in the room with like with the five of us being in a room like it can't it's it's harder to be like I got this root that's like but ba ba ba ba and then it's a course thing let me show you the riff and then you know you can it's like that sounds like shit yeah yeah like that doesn't sound cool at all fucking yeah like but it's true it's it's I mean I feel like writing songs is a language you know and if the only way to for people to understand the language is if you can just show them what you're thinking you know what I mean so did you already have a rip like stocked up or what uh i just had for that song i had i had time is now

man ma ma me hey ha me an an an like that was it and then i had man man man man man man all that explains that riff yeah that was it so it was like all the like i think even like the little like click click click all that shit was you even a lot of those ideas were like were like the sound effects and shit were a lot were dan and like obviously we ended up writing the kind of rest of the lyrics out and everything together yeah just went there a day or did the drums and boom literally it was like let me get drums the chorus uh riff that riff and then like the whatever symbols simmons of a melody i had for the chorus and was like that was enough to say like this is what the song sounds like right cool that makes sense so is there like

an element to where you're just not like you really can't like overthink anything you're just like i have this there it is don't fucking touch it is it or what i mean there's always the with our band at least there's always the the open open table to be like because I think within our band too, we have very, very mutual respect for each other where all of us know that each of us is better than something at something than we are. You know what I mean? Like Dan, everyone's like, it's like everyone in my band's better at something than I am and vice versa. So it's like all the ideas are, it's like it's never like my ways of I got an idea and shut the fuck up about it. Like the same thing with time is now.

If the idea didn't mesh and dudes were like, this is fucking lame. Song would have never happened. It's true. You know? So like, it's very much like, but. sometimes you do have a I mean ego death was a similar sort of thing or I was like I think I have a fucking an idea and I think if if anyone in the band is so passionate about a thing where they're like no no no like this is going to be fucking awesome let me ride like we'll let you everyone

we'll let up you know let the idea flush itself out because usually if it's someone in the band's that excited about it it's going to be totally yeah is that kind of a trip where like you spend I'm not saying you spend no time on it but you spend such little time on it and then see what it does when it's actually out in the world yeah like kind of makes you like, oh, wow, like the little thought to put into that. Yeah. I think the, I mean, the best songs we've ever written. Like, I think there's one song that we have that's like popular drowning off of our last

record. That's the first song in a long time that we, I think that we wrote, it was like a 10-hour day. And we sort of like, we had some, we had to like, we had to find it. You know what I mean? And it started totally different. Yeah. I mean, it started completely, some idea that I brought in that was, I mean, completely different than how the song turned out.

And it just happened sometimes. It just kept evolving and evolving. And as new parts came up was like, well, now this one doesn't make. sense with this and it just kind of morphed into this other song which then ended up being the biggest song of the record you know um that's really that's the the only instance i can think of where we really like had to fucking search for it um i think the most of our best shit just like i said just sort of like falls out of the sky sometimes which i love like i love that we're not a band that overthinks it i think it's like when you're making art you know how you make the art

is so unimportant it doesn't matter if a song takes an hour or fucking three weeks to make like people aren't going to like it or dislike it because of the time you you took to write it you know what i mean so it's like um i think we try to just sort of live in the moment when we're writing for sure yeah yeah i keep regating man like just don't stop overthinking this fucking right yeah write a song a day have fun yeah exactly and then not everything will make it not every riff will make it but it's like if you just kind of that continuous flow like a lot of good shit will come from that you know regardless of what band you're in you know yeah okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay

Okay, dude, this guitar is distracting me. Can we talk about real quick? Sure, yeah. All right, so this is a Kiesel, right? It's a Kiesel, yeah. It's the model is called a Hyperdrive. It originated when I came over to Kiesel in 2019. I was playing, I was with ESP for 17 years.

Yeah, it was a while, huh? A long time, yeah. And I had an EX model that was my signature kind of shape and had blood all over it, I had a bunch of wacky things I would do. Yeah. But when I went over to Kiesel, they didn't have a shape like that. And Jeff Kiesel is an absolute legend at, you know, everything that he does with the guitars.

He's a super talented guy. You know, he's third generation Kiesel, you know, building guitars and instruments and stuff like that. I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah, he's, I mean, their whole family, everyone works on the guitars and does stuff. And they're all super talented. Yeah, it's really neat. I didn't know that.

Yeah. And they're based in Escondido. It's like a full, you know, American-made. everything's made in their shop. Every guitar is essentially a one of one. That's essentially your new guitar. That is a V, isn't it? Yeah.

I have a, I have a new one that's actually that color. That's Kiesel Racing Orange. That's like one of their V shapes, whatever. I can't remember the name of it. But this one, this one is inspired by I love sushi. And I came to Jeff and I had this idea where I was like, I want this guitar. It's going to be like blue and it's going to have sushi pieces on it and all this stuff.

And he's like, what if we put sushi like actually in the guitar? And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. What? Are you serious? Are you like, are you joking? Like I kind of didn't, you know, I didn't know how to the temperament of it.

I was like, oh, sure. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. So then like fast forward, I came down for my blood guitar and I had to, I handpainted this actually myself, the blood guitar. So he came down. He was like, I want you to, I want you to paint the first few ones. Then people buy any of them, um, you'll hand paint the first ones that people buy. I was like, that's super cool.

I love that. You know, those are my. fingerprints and stuff on there and whatnot. So when I went down there to do that, he was like, before I take you in here, I have a surprise for you. And I was like, sure. He's like, check this out. And he brought this out.

And it wasn't painted though yet. It was like raw wood. And it didn't, you know, the neck hadn't been like done or anything really yet. But it was the pieces were in there and everything. I was like, what am I even looking at right now? I'm like, holy crap, dude. There's like, there's like sushi pieces in the guitar. I'm like, this is incredible.

And he's like, oh, now we're going to. I'm going to paint it that blue that you want. I'm like, oh, no, no, no. This is something different now. I'm like, this is a bento box. I'm like, it's a bento box. I want it red on top. I want it black on the sides in the back.

And I wanted a volume knob to be a sushi roll so you can roll the volume. Yeah, it's like a bento box, right? And then you can roll the volume up and down. Fun and pun intended. You know? What does that? Your sushi guitar talk just blew my hat. sick the the inlays are cross chopsticks you know as they should be oh course there's

there's ginger and wasabi in there i mean it's it's no joke and then my guitar picks that i use for this one are little sushi rolls so i can toss people's sushi rolls while i'm playing fucking dan jacobs yeah that's how he rolls you know it's does you know what sucks though i dropped this guitar the other day and i cracked the shit out of the paint on the back of the neck and i can see this Look at this thing. I was looking at my I was like Is that a crack?

It is. It is like full on I don't know if I can flip it over. He swears it's just the paint We're all afraid that it's not. Oh, you idiot, dude. Dude, look at this shit. Oh, an idiot.

Hung it up and like, I was like half sleep like hung it up on a like rack in my room and I just put it just kind of, ugh and like just turned around and here, just to chung,

tongue, tongue, and I look over. I'm like, oh my God, what just happened. And I run over and I pick it up and see the back of the neck

is all cracked. I'm like, this is like a gazillion dollar guitar that's of one of one like oh my god what the hell just happened luckily it still plays though it didn't break it's just the paint is so thick that it just cracked as like piece of the paint off and this little and this little chunk over here which is not rad either but but it still plays I still plays good stays in tune yeah stays in tune that's why I brought a backup my blood one I brought the blood one as well just in case this one didn't work or it like exploded while we were playing or something what are the

what are the woods um it's black black black Mamba, whatever it's called. Okay. And that's, and then, yeah, like a little roasted maple vibe. Okay. And this is all, it's mostly resin. I mean, it's a lot of resin. This particular model, too, I don't know if it's the first guitar to ever do this, maybe.

I like to be sold on a line. But the other ones, when I first was developing the guitar with Jeff, like the shape and everything, he kind of drew it out, gave it to me and was like, right, try this thing on. And like, just let me know what you think. So I was trying it out. I'm like, this thing is so cool, but the necktive is terrible. Like no one's going on to play this thing live We gotta figure something out

He's like what do you do you have any suggestions And I'm like I mean I don't know much about that kind of stuff But I'm like let me mess around So I was mess around with weight and stuff like that And I was trying to get the minimum amount of weight That would make it not have neck dives Because I don't make it too heavy So I kept kept adding weight to it

And then see if it neck would fall down So I'd add a little bit more And not even like special weights I was just grabbing things that were heavier than this And it was eventually like a guitar pedal Or something like that I put that on there And that was what it did And I'm like okay so I weighed that

It was 1.3 pounds So it was like, Jeff, he can get 1.3 pounds In the back of that guitar, no more necktive. So he came up with this concept where you route out the back of it and you get this machine, like cut out. It almost looks like a weed grinder, like this round kind of thing.

It's a solid piece of metal that slides into the back of the guitar and has a little lid on it. So if you want to take it out, you don't want it to be as heavy for, say, a home player or something like that, you can do that. But if you want to play on stage

and not worry about the necktive, put the weight back in. And that's now extended to this shape because he's made bases that are this shape. And some of them were like six, seven, eight-string bases that are so heavy. The necks are so thick that you have to have two of those weights in the back to keep it from balancing or from having the neck dive.

Oh, my goodness. Super wild. So this one in particular, though, because the resin is so heavy that there is no weight in the back of this one. It was enough weight to make it not fall over. It's resin? It's resin, yeah. It's all in resin.

And the pieces are from Japan. They're not real pieces. He found, like, the nicest display suit. you could find. You know Japan? Like all the foods in the window? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Like they use the fake sushi pieces. Yeah. So we got some fake sushi pieces. They're not cheap either. No. No, every, I mean, Jeff in particular was the one that like hand did all this stuff. I mean, he builds some,

a lot of the guitars are built a key, so he has a hand and actually physically, he touches him. He's working on him as well. So, uh, this was his, uh, his genius,

uh, mixed with my weirdness. Mm-hmm. I was like, look at it. I'm like, let's talk about it now, so we can just move,

move on. I keep looking at I'm like Is that there's a little salmon A little tuna? No I mean What's the egg called? Dan I've seen a lot of

Sago Massago I've seen a lot of gear in here man This is by The weirdest one Yeah Our band is definitely like Dan's always had like a thing

That was like Oh you're the band where they Like it was like Oh like your guitar player Was the Japanese head band We're like yeah They'd be like oh like your car player As the Mohawk

Like yeah Like your guitar player has the blood guitar Like mmhmm Yeah Now it's like, the guitar player has sushi guitar. Like, yes, that's also him. Do you want to tell him the one you've been working on or is that under wraps? The fish tank?

Yeah. A fish tank? There's a fish tank guitar that's, it's been in the wraps for a little bit. Like Jeff Kiesel's also working on it himself as well. And we have some of the fish picked out already and whatnot. But the idea of it is going to be same kind of thing like this. But we're going to have like rocks down here and like up here, a couple plants. We're going to have the fish tank backgrounds.

You can buy it, like the fish tank. story to make it look like it's like coral reef whatever put that there so it has that um then we're gonna put a light at the top here they can turn on so you can turn on light the fish up have a couple fish in there swimming around yeah why not okay i love that shit why not you know fish tank guitar that's sick dude yeah it'll be all in resin though so there's not like sloshing around or anything like that there's no there's not dead fish in your guitar not dead fish not this time at least yeah we might uh i don't want to pita getting upset or something like that so i don't know yeah i heard uh do anything too real i heard uh

Taking care of fish, it's like a, it's a lot. It is. I used to be a fish guy for a while. I used to have, did you? I had five fish tanks at my house at one point. Five? Five. I was obsessed with fish for a while.

I really liked them. And then it was a pain to ask to take care of them after a bit because I started, you know, getting older and wanting to do other things with them just sit at home and take care of fish. I actually had a really bad experience one time with a fish tank where I had a reptile tank, which I didn't know is not the same as a fish tank. But you could put a plug in the bottom of it to add a little water. I initially had some frogs that were hanging out in there in this 40-gallon, reptile tank.

And then I decided all the frogs died. And I'm like, I'm going to put this fish that I have upstairs in one of my tanks that's really big now and it's in a really small tank. I'll move them into the big tank. So I filled this tank up. I saw this was like something out of a movie.

I fill the whole tank up, 40 gallons of water. I put the rocks in there, some plants. And I go, and it's all nice now. The filter's going. And I go and grab the fish out. And I drop him in there. And when he starts swimming around,

I take a couple steps back to like admire what I just done. And then I hear, tink, tink. Boom. And the whole bottom of the fish tank explodes. It's like Deuce Bigelow. 40 gallons of water just come rushing out at my shins. Like the fish is on the ground flopping around.

I'm in like complete, like, I don't know what to do right now. I've not prepared in life for 40 gallons of water. Literally. Yeah. This is like what happened to me. This is straight up what happened. So much water, fish all over the place. Like my parents were gone at like Disneyland or something like that.

I'm like, of course they were. Oh, I had to call my friends. Yeah. It was put it like everywhere Like the wave of water that came And hit me in the shins And like I had to call my friend And him and his mom came over

And like help me clean it up It was all on the carpet Like ruined the carpet Oh No more fish tanks after that Well I might have had more after that Dang five Yeah at one time yeah

He doesn't have to do anything Yeah As you could tell Yeah I just I needed it for whatever reason Yeah It's tranquil It was nice

I like the sound Of the running water From the filters Oh sure yeah It's just super zen and like I like chill stuff, you know. Yeah. So weed. Weeds chill.

It's chill and fish or chill. Weish chill, man. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty chill. Hey, Brandon, you're, I've heard you say that your, that your father is your biggest inspiration. Yeah, for sure. Growing up, he was, yeah, I mean, my dad was in, like, bands in high school and stuff, but nothing beyond that. But, like, he played saxophone and, like, sang in bands in high school.

school and he was just always the one that like thought it was like he was you know very both my parents very supportive but like from a young age like we used call my dad mr radio because like every fucking song came on the radio he knew every word and you know like brought us up on you know tom petty and the willberries and like roy orbson and fucking fleetwood mac and shit so like i think my general interest in music for sure came from that early on and then like the second that i wanted drums you know it was like cool I'll take you to pawn shop get your drum kit for your birthday and then from there it was just always like super supportive like he's always thought what we did was fucking cool he thought it was cool that I was like just went out and fucking went for

it you know but yeah I mean as a kid that was the first kind of and really only person in my life that was like just loved music too so like kind of in in uh introduce me to to music in general It's cool when people cite their, like, parents is like, oh, this is like my biggest musical inspiration. Yeah, it's cool. My dad has a fucking tattoo. Like, my dad's only tattoo is like a, my other, I was in a bank with a Hela High Water for a while. It's like a Heller high water lyric. You know, like he's got lyrics tattooed on him.

Oh, wow. But, yeah, he's a ripper. My dad is just like an old rad stoner, hippie dude. Just chills and listens to music all the time still. Still, huh? Yeah. Wow, that's dope. For sure.

Dude, okay. 2000 is metalcore. dude what was it like for you guys it was a good time yeah it was exciting what would it like man there was a lot of cool bands that were kind of like floating around and you know i don't think any of us saw it happening until it was like oh this is kind of fucking big yeah things were like i mean you you could feel it i mean there was this transition where even for us i mean we were a punk band you know called retribution just playing you know kind of thrashy street punk kind of stuff and that's uh yeah we were doing that yeah for all the way up until 98 99 or whatever and then uh

We started just kind of going to hardcore shows. Like I can't remember. Maybe it's even initially, so the guys from Death by Stereo, there were some of them were in a band called the Decons. They went to our high school and whatnot. And they just had such great taste in music. They were like tastemakers to us. And anything that they did was just,

they were like our cool older brothers we never had or something. Oh yeah, yeah. So we just loved it. That sounds awesome. The whole band, they're so cool. I mean, and they're so talented. Like they were just world class musicians

that we didn't realize at the time, like they were insanely good. Even then they were so talented. but the there was like this kind of thing in orange county was mostly like you know throw down 18 visions beach bands there's these band they were very like very heavy there wasn't a lot of melody to it it was very just you know punch the ground heavy mosh stuff which we love but we also at the same time we were all really big fans of like saves the day and the get-up kids and wezer and like we liked the melodic side and then even like myself I was big fan like the 80s

like glam hair metal kind of anything 80s melodies and vibes is just big over the time stuff and collectively we all had just had different flavors that we wanted to all somehow fit into one band because we're like a tray is the one thing that we're doing that has the most legs to it so if we're gonna do it with you know we're gonna do all these different things has to fit to this so that's where we sound heavy that's where we sound soft and sound everything in between so we started doing this partially even inspired by bands like even kill switch engage when they first came out around the same time or poison the well from from uh from uh automob

ashes. They were all kind of doing this where they kind of dip in their toes in it. But then you also had like the other side of it where you had like the used and taking Mac Sunday and bands that were like were Finch where they didn't like we were a band that screamed a lot had a little bit of singing. They sang a lot and had a little bit of screaming. It was like the other side of it. So there was this wave where you could feel like thrice coming in and avenge sevenfold and then the other side of it were like the used and taking back Sunday and this kind of just different blend of music. All these bands had this. They were like a mix of things as opposed to.

to sounding like a thing you know i mean you listen to a band like throw it on you're like that is a hardcore band period you know that's that's it just is what it is but then like bands like us and these all these other bands you could feel this like thing happening or was you could feel this evolution of melody and just more intricate you know kind of ways of writing songs coming in and even the style where everyone was dressing started to change and oh yeah i think the funny thing at the beginning too is like you had like like i said like the beach bands like everyone from like huntington Newport were cool yeah it's like throw down Adamantium uh even like wrench bled into that show of hands all the bands were kind of like from the beach were cool now avenger was from

huntington beach also and we're friends with those people but like they weren't in that mix they just so happened to sort of like be in the scene too I think at the beginning like us and avenge were the two bands that were like absolutely out like outside thrice as well thrice were just like on the outside like we would play some of the same shows but like we weren't it was pretty made pretty evident Like we weren't in on the cool circle at the beginning, which is funny because I think it's, it's, the three of us arguably are the biggest bands to come out of like the hardcore scene in Orange County. But, I mean, at the beginning, it was definitely like what we were doing wasn't like the norm in Orange County at all. Yeah. Hey, I mean, I guess, I mean, I'm a, maybe I'm a, you know, a living example.

Yeah, I was listening to like the, what was like the heavy, heavy stuff? Yeah. So maybe I, maybe, I just kind of realize that right right now. Maybe guys weren't included in that circle. For sure, yeah. And, like I said, we'd, like, play, you know, we'd play with bands when they came through and stuff. But I think most of our success came when we've really started touring.

Like, we had our first, like, fucking really awesome Orange County shows, like, when it was, like, the first time we came back through. You know, and, like, you know, it played, like, Hoggy Bar-Michaurs and Costa Mesa or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And it was like, oh, this fucking show sold out. Then it was, like, we'd come through Showcase and sell it out. And it was, like, it didn't happen until we, like, started left and came back again, you know? Yeah.

Wild. Yeah, it was cool to be like a, like a fan. Yeah. And just go to the shows and it's not, you know, not be a part of like the competition or something. For sure. I mean, that's how we grew up. And we grew up just wanting to do this, you know? Yeah.

We go to every fucking hardcore show that came through, every punk show. Like, it was every weekend, whether it was a show at Chain or showcase or coos or some shit. We were just going to shows every fucking weekend. And it's half, I mean, half of it was obviously for entertainment purposes. But the other half was like, for educational purposes. Like we wanted, I mean, for me personally, I'm a short dude. I can't see anything at a show. And all of somebody's back is in front of me, you know,

and I'm like, this is not the way to, or if I'm in the front, I'm getting squished against the railing. I'm like, I just need to be on the stage. You know what I mean? I think that would be better for me. I could see better. So I really just came down to my whole path. It was because I just want to be able to see better.

Yeah. So next thing, you know, here I am. I had to learn guitar now and all these things. Yeah. Just to see. Dude, at Trey, you at Kuse Cafe, November 24th, 2001. Oh, damn. We're in San Anna right now.

Yeah, dude, right down the street. Coos, dude. I don't know what's there now, but it's, uh, I don't know. I think, I would assume the 99th cent store is still there. It's like right down the street from the mall. Really? Yeah. It was a house.

It was a little coffee shop like house. I didn't know. You play in the living room and it was, I mean, the, the, the, oh, not on Main Street. It was as big as this room. Yeah. Maybe even, maybe even smaller almost. Yeah. I've been there once.

Yeah. Yeah, about, yeah, about, not as wide as this room, but a slightly deeper. And that was, that was the whole thing. You just set up on the floor and fucking off you go. There's no room for anything else. Just a little kind of shit PA. I didn't know it was in Santa Ana. Yeah.

Sanana has so much history. It's weird. I keep learning. Like I just keep hearing like Santa Ana, the street, any street or some. Oh, yeah. There's so much here. Oh, yeah. But yeah, it was either that or showcase or chain reaction.

Yeah. Which used to be public storage. Public storage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, uh, that video guys said it showcases made, made its rounds. Oh, yeah.

That's how we all, kind of like saw like what what you guys were doing you know what a sign of the times too like we're gonna is like our first like real they're gonna do a cool video it was good we did uh ain't lab grand but it was like we're to showcase we're gonna get a bunch of people we're gonna have fucking like people hardcore dancing like a slow mo like we're gonna have a pit like it was like the ultimate hardcore video you know what I mean yeah it's cool and ironically our now bass player slash singer Porter uh helped film that video before he was in the band and it's actually in it stage diving.

Oh, really? With no, none of us knowing that in the future that he would eventually be in the band. Yeah. It was only like, what, four years later? Two years later? Yeah, not even like that. Yeah, two years later, once we started recording The Curse,

that's when we parted ways with our bass player at the time. And that's when Porter joined the band. Yeah, that, uh, that song, uh, lip gloss and black, that just made, it just made its rounds. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, Dan, I was trying to put you on a spot, dude. What I was like, I was like, what's that, fucking tapping riff, dude.

It's actually Brandon. Brandon actually came up with it initially. You with that tapping roof? This is actually really funny because if you, I mean, you'll show you the riff.

Yeah, it's not hard at all. So it was the tapping riff that I could actually play. Yeah, it's tapping 101 for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like when a drummer

you know what I'm just, it's just, it's just, it's basically, shit but it but it just it sounds cool and when you put the right things on it on it off you go yeah how did you guys make that a song it's so simple yeah yeah it's sick yeah i mean what you hear you i mean on anything once you get the the chords going under it and stuff it starts to carry itself and then it just you know rolls from there it's an iconic song now

now that i look looking back on your bam oh yeah people forget dude yeah these are these are these are iconic songs now and that was our i was like listening to me oh shit i remember this fucking tapping rip I gotta learn it I got it real it's gonna be a quick one for you I know real quick dude

yeah it starts here on the seventh front and you got the the 10th and the 14th oh yeah yeah and then just

the string below it's below it yeah nailed it is that it it's funny it's like I don't even think

that's how you're supposed to tap like I don't even think it's supposed to like you wouldn't usually do it in that order would you i mean there's no really right or wrong way i guess just whatever sounds cool you know that's the uh but i mean there's some people might have more traditional ways of tapping as opposed to doing it other ways or what what would be the more like traditional way i mean i think it's like you think it's more like yeah it's just more like yeah yeah supposed to go oh wow yeah like top down or yeah yeah it doesn't sound as cool you know

Something about that pattern just sounds nicer. It is different. Yeah. Drummer. Yeah, when we're trying to learn, if he writes a riff, it makes it fucking hard to learn because he has just a weird drummer brain of a way of writing a riff. I'm like, I don't, we don't think of riffs like that. Yeah.

So did I, did I deal with the right way for the song? Yeah. Okay. Dude, I'm fucking tap. Yeah. It makes sense that I can do it because I don't know how to tap. either. So, so naturally I'm doing it how it's supposed to sound. For sure. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Simplicity. Yeah. Simplicity sells, man. That's the, uh, like, you say, if you get

too complicated, it gets, it becomes a lot of times it can be undigestable to the average. Yeah. Yeah. Simplicity sells, man. That's the, uh, like, like, you say, if you get too complicated it gets it becomes a lot of times it's a lot of times become undigestable to the average human ear yeah you know so sometimes less is more thank you for it teach me that a tapping rip yeah it's awesome it explains a lot not doing it right actually created

the uh the uh uniqueness yeah for sure like it didn't sound it doesn't sound as dark if you kind of just tap down the neck like you usually would yeah I've thought about that till now and also having like a tapping riff that uh

anyone like myself can play. People that can't do something and they can do it. There's like something to it. I mean our band has always been like a gateway band for people getting from softer music into heavier music or heavier into softer. But even guitar-wise,

like if you're, our guitar playing, most of it's not insanely insanely advanced. I mean, there's some stuff that can get a little advanced. But like a lot of it is like you're an entry-level guitar player and you're trying to learn how to play solos, we have a good amount of stuff at our repertoire that's like digestible and kind of can be inspiring.

We're like, oh, I think I can actually learn that. That doesn't seem like too much to digest. And I can take that and work off the back of that. Interesting. What about right side of the bed? Same. Right side of the bed was actually a riff, a song essentially that I came up with for our other band,

Dreaming and Blue. And that band, yeah, when that band, well, basically when a tree got signed, that was the end of Dreaming of Blue. Because it was like, well, we don't have time for that now. Oh, yeah, yeah. We were betting on two things,

and it was like, whatever landed first, and a tree you landed, so we went with that. And then by the time it came to do, the curse in 2004, so probably around 2003, we were writing. This song had already existed for a few years. It was called the rock song. And it's completely been taken apart,

but the solo's the same. The main riff is the same. The whole, the... Yeah, just super simple kind of 80s riff sort of thing. I loved all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so what is that? So it was like, I have this idea if we take that riff and we do it, but we make it like heavy.

Like, just imagine screaming over the verses and, you know, having it like being really broken down with it. You know, just super rockin kind of simple stuff that kind of just carried and allowed the screaming to have something to sit over. And then back into the, you know, the chorus was the same chords and everything, same melody. What is it? Octave part and everything from the rock song, whatever. Everything was the same.

Other than like the verses, that was kind of the main thing. But if you go back and we have, I have the song somewhere. I'll have to send it to you. But it's on SoundCloud or whatever. You go to Yorba Linda Hardcore. SoundCloud. If you go to SoundCloud. You go to Orlando Hardcore?

One of our. One of our friends, like, uploaded, like, all this old shit and demos and shit that have, like, never even seen the light of day. Dude, dude. Dude, you got to have that one friend that uploads everything. You're like, fuck, yeah, dude. Yeah, if you look, there's, uh, under Dreaming and Blue, somewhere. Somewhere on there. In there.

Oh, you can see the, even that picture right there is from, if you go to the, yeah. And there we are. And there we are. So you guys? That's us. That's me in the middle, dude, Dan in front. That dude on the far right was the Treggie's original bass player. That's Kyle.

And then, he's our friend that's been sober his whole life. oh wow yeah andy on the left uh the girl in between uh they're on brandon's shoulder uh was one of his girlfriends at the time is the one that wrote and played our piano part on lip gloss and black oh i'm also wearing a master p shirt and i don't even know why yeah why never fucking cared about master p but i like the shirt apparently yeah it's good yeah yeah children things little kids yeah this is the is it is it on there um it's on there it's definitely on there it's in um you have to go to like uh you might have to kind of dance around a little bit to get to the dreaming of blue

okay and this is it's on the other dreaming and blue record this is the one where brandon's singing on it brandon's singing on that whole EP but the other one um

that's brandon's um your your 80s cover band or whatever 80s cover band yeah it was an 80s cover band called the electric youth and then the members of that it was Ian Fowles who was in original death by stereo and decons he now he went on to play for the Alquabats

and he jarred Wade and all shit Nice. And then it was Nate Willett, who is a singer of Cold War Kids. Mm. And just a couple of the friends, yeah. See, that cover photo with the, which is Esperanza, where it says Yorba Linda, whatever it, that, whatever that is a cover photo of in one way or another, that's the album that has those songs on it.

If you can find that somewhere in these collections. See, now we've got to find it. I know, click that photo, click the Yorbalinda bands, whatever. Is it that one? Yeah. Yeah, the little. Then that comes up? Okay, yeah, and you scroll down a long.

Or maybe go to albums up at the top of there. Or, yeah. Albums? Oh, see if there's a nightfall. Yeah, Nightfall was Porter's. That was Porter's other band. Is it just going? It's kind of sticking to the nightfall side of it.

It's weird. It's in there. I know it's definitely in there. No, we're going to find it. I pulled them all. I pulled them all the other day to to retract them and make them sound, you know, fresh and whatnot.

So I don't know there's something. man. There's a lot of bands, dude, a lot of, that's early atre you. That's like the early demos. Those are demos. That actually has a second singer on it.

Or a third singer, I should say. Joe Sarateli's on this. That's crazy. He's my brother's friend. Yeah. He had like a brutal like, like, uh, there it is. The rock song.

Oh, we got it. Bang, there it is. The rock song. All right. She's jamming, dude. Yeah. Crank it. What's people try.

Fucking ads. All ads. Taco Bell. Get diarrhea. Get it now. Guaranteed. apparently you guys have yeah

15 seconds oh do you got to sign up for a sound cloud no you should be fine just if you don't want to have Taco Bell thrown at you oh well I do want to talk about

yeah it's like maybe I want talk about Brandon used to work at Taco Bell oh really first job dude yeah I was a terrible employee

yeah a different intro I forgot so the main the dent dent part wasn't didn't exist exactly yet from it

Yeah. Does the riff that you play it ever come? That part's not in it, but it's the chorus is the same. The, the... And there's also a, like a... The octave thing. The guitar solo is almost identical. That whole thing is exactly the same.

The guitar solo is exactly the same. Yeah, the verses are the same, essentially. Just not that heavy. It's not as heavy, of course. And then listen to the music and the chorus. Right side of the bed. Note for note. If you fast forward to the guitar solo.

Or the bridge even, the whole bridge is the same. Keep going? Back a little bit, yeah. If you go back, just a little bit. This is the same bridge. Yeah, right after this. Same bridge is right to the bed. There's the wind.

And I'm not through my lips. That's the same. Wow. And the guitar solo is note for note the same as well. And into the breakdown as well. And then... Oh wow. It's funny how you did make that a breakdowns cool.

Yeah, it's like it. Yeah. It's fucking crazy. Yeah, wild though. It goes in some random clean part. Then it goes into the exact same guitar solo note for note. Except I couldn't play it as good then because I was, you know, it hadn't been playing for very long.

There we're good. That it is. That a boy. Super attitude. Yeah, I think you read the wrong notes. Sick. Yeah. Just leave it on the record.

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. It's, yeah, it's just a, yeah. And it became one of our biggest songs ever. Yeah, super random. Yeah, that's cool. Wait, it's just part in your room, and it's like jamming on riffs, so I had, I had this thing.

Yeah, it was, it was, I think it was one of the things were, because we had this already when it came time to write material for the curse. We were like, you know, we were writing some new stuff, but also like, I'm like, I really like those parts from that song. I feel like, but there's something we could do with it. So we brought in and just kind of all chewed on it together and turned it right side of the bed, and end up being our first big single off of the curse. Dan's the type of dude, thankfully.

So, like, if he's got hidden gems in his pocket, like sometimes they won't make it, you know, it's like, oh, in the moment it gets passed over, he'll be like, still got this riff. Like next time through it's like, still got this riff. Thankfully so, because we've had songs that ended up making albums later that were like, oh, it's actually a big song later. I mean, I have some riffs that have been like in the back pocket for like 10,

15 years sometime where I'm like, I'm not letting this riff go. Like, it belongs somewhere. They finally just make their ones. Eventually, when the time comes, it's like, now it fits on the record at this time, wherever. Wow. Off it goes. What do you store your riffs? A lot of them are on my voice notes.

I have probably like 1,200 voice notes on my phone. Nice. I mean, some of them are just awful. Like, what the hell? Most are, yeah. Yeah, a lot of weird, like, even just, you know, the humming and drum beats and stuff in there. Not trying to wake up your wife. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. They are with my showers running because I'm in the shower and I'm like, oh, I got this idea. And I just leave the shower running and I'm humming whatever and doing it and singing. You can hear the shower in the back The moment the idea comes You have to stop whatever If you're jacking off It doesn't matter

You need to stop doing Stop spank dude And you need to get the seat out Yeah Have you ever woke up in the middle of the night When you're going to bed And you're like And you're like that's fucking sick

I'll just do it in the morning Yeah And in the morning you're like Gone Always gone yeah Every time you tell yourself I'll wait to the morning You're wrong

100% Absolutely it never stays Never just doesn't Because you're like laying in bed You like it up like oh no 8m I'm like oh shit Go back to bed Oh shit I'll go back to bed

Oh, the rift kind of pops in there. You're like, oh, shit. But, okay, you know what? This is pretty simple. I'll remember it. If I wake up, I'll remember it when 100% in time, never. Never. Never comes back.

Yeah. It's really good and catchy. Yeah. Should remember it. But, no. Doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work like that.

Dude, I had this riff that I, it would have been multi-platin. For sure. But I forgot it. Oh, yeah. Thousand percent. It would have gone 20 times platinum. It would have been the biggest song in the world. But I just.

I was too tired. And it was masturbating. All at the same time. all at the same time and i just you know there was too many forces working against i do like yeah you got to if you got if you're if you're spanking and you get a riff you must stop spank yeah yeah yeah no matter what yeah no matter what you're doing immediately it has to this yeah yeah okay this yeah it's gonna come out here instead of here turned to a song called blue balls to the wall uh-huh exactly yeah so i need you need to get out the the riff seed then then you get that then you

get that then you get tired and you know lay down and think about it. Boner's going to be there still. Yeah. The riff will go away. True. I mean? That's a lesson to everyone.

We're learning a lot here. Yeah. We want the boner and the riff to stay, not one or the other. Exactly. Okay. So this kind of circles back to how we started this conversation, doing a deep dive into your band. This kind of makes sense why they hear.

I didn't know all the different avenues that Buffy guys have made to make a trade what it is. So, Dan, your first business was a we growing business, right, with your brother. You were 16. I mean, technically, yeah. And that, and that has started to where, to where you're at now. It's cool, huh? Yeah. Yeah, it's my brother and I have are still in business together to this day. I mean, we have, you know, started other things and I have a merchandising company called Rock World merch that does, you know, stuff for a lot of like the Danny Wimmer events and we do stuff for, you know, limp biscuit and stained and Bloodywood and a tray, you always. That's sick, dude.

You know, energy drinks, all kinds of stuff, you know, just, but, you know, all, there's always kind of a business-oriented thing there. I think a lot of us, even Brandon himself, is always kind of out of business-oriented person as far as, like, wanting to kind of carve our own path and not follow other people's rules. Like, we were never really good at having bosses and people telling us what time to get there. I mean, when we worked at, uh, Dennis Uniforms, we worked, I forgot about Dennis. Yeah, we worked at Dennis Uniforms together, and I was the way.

worst employee that any place could ever have. I would just leave in the middle. I'd be like, Bradd, I'm going to be back in like an hour. I'm just going to leave. The best part is, not clock out already, I just leave. For anyone doesn't know, Dennis uniform sells school uniforms for private schools. Yep. So Dan would just go in the back of the warehouse, grab

a bottle of windex and like a shirt out of a box, like a fucking polo button up. A freshie. And at the time he had this like sick, like lowered fucking S-10 truck. It's probably photos on the internet. On airbag and he was sick. He was just going the back and like clean his truck. and then for like an hour and then he'd be like he'll be like I'm gonna go home

I'll be back in a little bit and he would just straight up fucking leave and like never get in trouble though like never once with someone like where's Dan I barely even like I like borderline barely remember the job because I just wasn't really there I just didn't I couldn't do it

you know I couldn't do it it was just not the thing we heard him and I worked a few jobs together we did the blow pens at the it was so blow pens at the mall yeah like it was like airbrushed for kids like blew in the back and like it would be like airbrushed filling stencils. And, uh, yeah, we found out that if we could, we could definitely just take advantage

to the financial situation of that job. And, uh, the, the dude that owned it was a fucking creep bag. So like, I didn't really give a fuck that we're little kids, right, stealing his money. Yeah. But one day he was like, yo, like, something's not right here. Like, something's not adding up. And I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Dan was like, all right, I quit. And I was like, fuck. Ah. So then I worked out for another like couple months, but. Yeah. We were making very much money doing blow pens. I mean even just I just remember when you left I was killing it.

Damn it. It was a cash business too so like you'd like sell blow pens and just like get cash at the end of the night so I just had like as a senior in high school like I have like fucking 400 bucks in my pocket cash like every day you're rich dude I was falling I was taking all my friends out to lunch every day buying all the CDs yeah so many CDs you can't you can't you can't afford to go to the show this weekend I'm like yeah let's go yeah shit was tight I was tight del taco after show I got you oh yeah I'm in or when you worked at Taco Bell or friends worked at McDonald's after show he'd roll in there and be like hey it's us like just pull through you just pull up and they just start filling bags of McDonald's and I mean every big

Macs and fries and all these things we just leave there with all those food and it was fantastic yeah yeah got hooked up we don't get up made when you we kind of follow like like your own path dude do you find and I have like I have like an entrepreneurial brain it's it's a different it's like or am I wrong there where it's like it's not even like you got to separate yourself from like like the artist like musician part of you and it's a whole other aspect of your brain yeah I think it's something I mean for me it didn't really kick until about 2007 my brother and I started a clothing line called rock clothing ROKK and it was something where my brother was working at Starbucks at the time didn't really have much going on he'd finished college and was kind of like I just I don't know what to do and he's like we should do something they're like because our band at the time it's like 2007 we're like at the peak of like things are going great so we're like oh I should start something like oh we can maybe do like a let's do like a clothing line it's like 80s rock inspired kind of vintage clothing looking thing and I'm like but it's going to work like it's like you're gonna you're gonna have to run the company I'm not all help but like I can help with money I can help with ideas

I can have with contacts you know but I can't run this I got my band so he's like all right I'll be like CEO guy CEO Joe and my brother's name's Joe he'll run it for the most part and I'll kind of help with all the other stuff. And it kind of started with Aaron and just as you start doing stuff where you know before business wise, it's like you have a manager that's taking care of anything that you need. Now we're stepping out and like my brother and I are trying to figure out on path and make contacts based off the people that we know through the industry and start to grow the business. I mean, we grew it and getting into like hot topic. We had like Chuck Liddell wearing it like fights and Kat Von D. was wearing on red carpets at the Bravo Awards. I mean, it was wild.

Like the thing was super interesting. And then we did a shirt for Monster Energy Drink and a monster inspired. We did several. I actually can see one of them's on there. We did several. The first one we ever does that bottom left corner on that. It looks at Def Leopards Asteria. We did that, showed it to them.

They were like, oh, we love this. Like we were going to order a bunch of these. And it was like the biggest order we'd ever gotten doing anything. We're like, maybe we should do more of this. And then we, that snowballed and we changed it to Rock World merch and we became a merchandising company. And it was like being able to do everybody's a merch as opposed to just doing our own thing. And that kind of took a back seat and we leaned into doing merch

and which just kind of opened up a whole other world of things. Wow. Both bands are always going to need merch. Yeah. Bands always need merch. They do. I'm a colorful mind of person. So this kind of stuff, I love this kind of stuff.

It's fun, you know, coming up with cool ideas. And, you know, at the time, the 80s thing was something I was really into. And it was really hard to find 80-style things, you know, like, or to find, like, vintage shirts, you know, they were really expensive or they're just hard to find. I'm like, I was going to make my own. Just make them look like that, you know? So we just started this whole line of like vintage thing, which is kind of wild. Like fast forward now, like this stuff would be really popular.

I'm like, why? Should it kept to go on. Should it kept going. Like there's plenty of brands that do exactly this now, you know, like fast forward 20 years later almost. Oh, yeah. I was way ahead of my time. That's dope. Story of my life.

Well, you came into that issue with the other company plugins, right? Yeah. As soon as you guys came out, the copycats started to pop up on. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. How do you handle that? You do and you don't all at the same time. I mean, my brother and who is,

he's not involved with the business anymore, but he was involved with plugins for a while. And him and Mike, the founder of plugins, went to China actually one time and scouted out where one of these factories was. And they went into there, and they had over a million dollars worth of fake Marshall Jackracks in there.

Are you serious? So we had got the... Was that bad? It's still really bad. We had a company come in to try to help. us like find um all the all the bootleg ones and when they said they did their research they're like there's like over 10,000 different like entities ripping off your stuff we're like that's like

millions and millions of dollars and we don't know how to stop it so we've we've shut a lot of them down but it's so it's it's so aggressive that we had to just pivot to making a newer models we started in stuff with bands and we also make like other types of merchandise for like guitar center if you go to guitar center anything that's fender um cutting board anything fender related that's merchandise we design and produce it um we've started doing that with prs uh working with mesa boogie am peg like a lot of the majors gipson we're starting to do some stuff with where we're making all this merchandise and trying to bring more merchandising to to guitar center in particular as well as just in the world there's not enough merchandise that's based off of music

guitar you know guitar companies and amp companies there's just not a lot like you go to guitar center you're like there's like a Gibson hat and like bunch of fender stuff and then like a PRS item and you're like why isn't there like more yeah there should be a lot of stuff like I remember when I was like when you were talking about early about being really into skateboarding you wanted to like rep that you were skateboarder by wearing all your favorite brands and I wasn't like I'm just a birdhouse guy I'm like I want you know alien workshop and birdhouse and you know like you know world industries like I wanted all of them you know and to go there not have that seems not that out. So we are working with Guitar Center, working with a lot of these brands and now licensing

with a lot of, it started off a lot of metal bands, but even doing Ozzy and Oasis and Slare and Megadeth and Anthrax. And we get to work all these management for these bands and stuff. It's just like, it's really neat being on this different side of the music industry and getting to see it from a different perspective. Convierte your passion in a new business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of Pago with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of the best.

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perspective. When you're doing something else, yeah. Oh shit. Which is even eventually led into our band managing itself. And then because you guys manage your own band? We're self-managed now, yeah. What, two years?

Yeah. I mean, it was one of those things like from me doing a lot of this stuff. Like I, you know, we were kind of at a point where like, you know, financial, like, I think, you know, like, we're on the fence. Like, do we want a manager? Like, do we need this? And I just, I could see how business is run. And I'm like, we have people within our band. Like, we collectively have the right minds and the right type of people to do this.

I know how this works. I'm like, some bands don't have that. Not everybody has that kind of brain. Not everybody wants to do that, you know. But we do have that. We have those brains. We're like, let's just do that. And it's been really rewarding because now we have full control over our career.

We have, there's not like that filter of, if you have management, you know, the things get filtered through management. There's a lot of opportunities that we don't even see. And even if we wouldn't want to do it, we still just like to know. You know, it's just interesting just to see what kind of stuff comes our way. But there's just this energy around our band. to managing ourselves that makes it feel more exciting and more like we can have what we want finally or something and when you accomplish something too it's like we well yeah we did this not like no one no one got the we got this yeah no one else can take credit for anything not that people are always trying to take credit or anything but like that could be a thing you know so it's like there's we did it you know what's uh going through that transition what's like the hardest part as far as managing ourselves yeah figuring out all the odds and ends you know i mean like like you got to figure out what the moving parts are when you're not taking care of it in the first place like there's the obvious things where it's like you know the rolodex of like dealing with the right of contacts like cool some we're doing the record label we got to deal with

our attorney like booking to like working with the agent to book tours and festivals like okay cool like now we got to talk about tour budgets like what are all the logistics for tour like okay finding bus companies get bus quotes like finding crew you know hiring people like all these things like booking lights booking production all this shit per diem for dm's like There's a lot of like figuring out all the moving pieces was like the hardest part, I think, at the beginning. But then once you kind of figure them all out, okay, cool, like this is like pretty cut and paste at that point. You almost have a list. It's like, okay, we're going on tour.

These are the things that we need to handle. You know what I mean? You fucking go down the. Yeah, and just knock them out. And even like touring now, too, like a lot of times in our past, it'd be like, oh, we're trying to book a headline tour in April. And you're like, it's the end of February. We're like, what? now it's like hey we're like we're already having conversations of like what 2027 looks like

you know like really trying to like we had the all of last year was booked aside from maybe a couple festivals all of last year was booked by November of 24 so we were like it was the first time in our career where we were like we know our entire year yeah before it even starts I mean I think working working with management can obviously it can be advantageous in the right there are great managers They're great managers stuff. But I think also too, you know, if you have a manager or managers that are working with a lot of different bands or a few different bands, like their attention get pulled in a few different directions and it can slow the train down a little bit where you're, if you're in the band, you only care about your band. So you're like, I want everything now, now, now, I want to know what's going on, what's taking so long. Where's the responses are like, you know, if things are taking a while to get booked up or like it's getting closer to the finish line of like this tour starting soon and we don't even have a guitar tech yet.

Like what's going on? I know you guys are busy. You have other things. But like, this is stressing us out. Like we would have just done this a long time ago, but we're like waiting, you know, for people to make moves and stuff. And we're able to just make the moves now when we want to and not have to wait. And we can just go, go, go, go, go. And it alleviates a lot of just kind of anxiety and, like, worry about, like, are we going to have the right components by the time tour comes?

Like, it's going to be okay. Like, all that stuff kind of slowly goes away when we have full control over everything. Nice. And do you guys able to lay out your whole year, that's based off, headlining correct like yeah for the most part like you can't really plan like a support tour no but but even certain things like you know like some of the stuff we're doing this year like you can really plan out pretty far um you know and like even with just like certain things like festivals like european festivals like a lot of those things are being starting to book like they're starting to book

shit for next summer already so it's like if we're on it with our agent and like they know that's what's what we want to do it's like okay we can start piecing together what that summer can look like and you know hopefully by you know third or fourth quarter this year we'll know what that next summer looks like and you can kind of start to build your world your year around it you know headlining is a lot definitely easier when you're like like last year was all cursed stuff so it's like we're going in australia we're going to fucking uh you know full u s full us was like nail it south america timeline yeah so it's cool it's nice it's Sites making that leap.

Yeah, it's cool when it's like successful. I think we're able to curate things for our band right now that other people, we've been through many different managers that a lot of other people never could make happen for us. South America. Went there for our first time last year in our entire career. Could just never get down the first time. For whatever reason, we just never got down there. It was all they come to Brazil, come to Brazil, you know.

we want to come to you. Yeah. And it just, it was always like logistically, it's not gonna work. We can't afford it or it doesn't make sense. Or there's, the promoters are weird down there.

There's always some excuse. And we're like, can we just go? Like, get us on a support something. Like we just, we don't even care at this point if we lose money.

Like, we just want to go. Like, we want the experience. Like, it doesn't even matter at this point. Like, it's just what we love doing. We want to go. And we know there are some fans down there. How many? Who knows?

But I know it's also feel like it, because it took so long, It kind of like kind of made me a harness a little bit down there. You know, we didn't, we didn't strike when the iron was hot. You know, we had to, we wait 20 years. Now it's getting hot again. So like, all right, let's go. Yeah.

But it was like, it was like, it was like, not even kidding. Like the second we started managing ourselves, like two days later, it was like, oh, got an offer to go to South America. And we're like, what? Huh? Yeah. How did like, like, it was like it needed to happen in order for like things to start going. Interesting. Yeah.

It was like one, we had to close one door to open other ones. Yeah. Interesting. It makes sense because it seems like you guys have like a you guys have the brain for it. Most, most musicians don't. A lot of bands don't, like you were saying, like a lot of bands don't have the brain for it or they just don't want to. I mean, I think that we're lucky because most of us, we want to be hands on and like want to make those moves. And it's the, it's the switching of the brain plus also now you, now you have a record out.

So it's doing well. So it's kind of cool to see from the outside, okay, it's actually doable. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Every little thing you kind of accomplish, you're like, okay, cool, we can do this on our own. Yeah. It's something to be proud of. Yeah, for sure.

We're stoked. Definitely stoked. Everything means a lot more when you've created it yourself out of, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's cool. Oh, yeah. Not to say that our, I mean, we have a great team. Our agents are great. Our attorney's great.

Label's awesome. But it's like the spearhead of all those operations is when it's us coming within the band. It's definitely cool. And that extra cheddar is nice, too. Doesn't suck. It makes a lot of things more possible. Yeah. Like a tour to South America or like, you know, certain production opportunities.

It's like where maybe that sort of missing piece was that money was going to management for. So it's like now we can do cooler things to grow the band. Yeah. I mean, you'd think most management typically takes X amount percentage off the top of whatever you initially make. So that could be the maker where they do the budget off that. And then they go, if we do this tour, we would make money with the band. wouldn't let's just not even tell them to do this tour it guys it's not even worth it we're already in the red let's just not do it but it's like man the only reason we're not doing this

is they're not going to get paid and doing wrong a lot of managers it's very common for managers to be like we're not to take commissions on this tour because like you know we want to help for the longevity of the band and stuff which you know like all of our management that we've ever worked with have done things like that and it's super cool and respectful but in the big picture there are opportunities that do get kind of squashed because budgets start becoming they can't you know eat the costs and and on every single tour you know they got to make some money so eventually they're like well we got to get paid on this one it's like oh man like they're getting paid that much and you look how much you're getting paid and you're like what but

we're the band we're getting paid like nothing why don't we can't even live off this like what this doesn't make sense like but we did the tour did so good like i don't understand but once we started doing this it was like okay like this is the missing link it's always like you always get home and like i thought we're crushing it yeah and uh i uh i own the band yeah where's where's where all the money yeah what that fuck it's like what

owner eats last founder CEO fucking bullshit dude yeah yeah that's true that's funny that's cool making that leap

man yeah it's awesome it's been it's been very fruitful for sure yeah oh and uh congrats on the plugins

oh thank you I'm always impressed when someone finds you found the loophole where you could work with you could take all the competitors and put it under one umbrella that's what I'm impressed me

the most yeah I want I want I mean I we tell them this too like we want them to all work together. Like we like the idea of like them all being in the same place at the same time and and leveraging each other to everybody win you know. It was awesome. I'm like don't even come. It's not even not competing. It's like you guys are all winning. Like let's all win together. Like if you guys do that it'll it'll be a bigger thing. You know. So it's a and it's also it's fun too like even just at this last NAM show. It was our second NAM that we ever did and we had a biggest boot that we ever had there and we had a lot of artists come by that was just so it's like so rewarding having people come by not because this. like I'm this dude in a band, but because I have this cool product that's completely unrelated,

that a lot of people don't even know that I'm connected to it. When they hear about it, I'm like, oh, that's, oh, that's, oh, that's, oh, that's, oh, that's, cool keychain, man, that's my company. And they're like, what? Wait, you're that guy? Like, yeah, that's my, I've been doing it for like 10 years. Wait, you're that guy? Yeah, it's like a, a wild thing.

But, yeah, I mean, so many people, I mean, yeah, a lot of metal heads coming through. I mean, a lot of classic, like, OG metal dudes at our booth and stuff. And it was really neat. It was really cool experience. Congrats, man. Thank you. So, all right, I had a curiosity. I heard you guys talk about this 10-year rule.

Yeah. What is that? We were making our new record. So when we started writing the new record, and it came from, and I always preface this, like, I don't want, we're not coming from the place of being fucking assholes. But our sort of opinion on a lot of the modern climate of our genre is that there's, you know, a handful of really great bands doing cool shit that is unique to themselves and then there's 5,000 other bands just trying to copy that thing oh that's always the issue yeah it's been it's

more recently too has just gotten like really boring and in order for us to make sure that there was no sort of influence from the modern like genre whatever modern scene of bands we said that while we were writing we could only listen to music that was at least 10 years old so it's sort of there was no even option to be you know even subconsciously influenced by like subconscious yeah like you look at our genre it's like you listen to songs on the radio even or just something's around and like to not even be subconsciously influenced by that shit so it was us it also forced us to kind of dig back into like the shit that we loved growing up so like for me it was like really leading into like in flames soil work fucking the haunted

arch enemy ink and dagger like arch enemy like even the old like you know more pop punk or punk records like fucking saves the day or the joy killer or like you know the addicts like that that I listened to and I was like a fucking kid and I think that it really really helped shape

the record and then also make it so that it didn't sound like fucking anything that's happening right now yeah but yeah everyone from what I couldn't say Yeah, like, I think we all, we all have, we all followed the rule. It was easy for Dan. Dan just listens to like 1950s jazz all the time. Yeah, okay.

And that, that ended up on the record. Yeah, there's a saxophone solo on the record. Is it really? Yeah. It's, well, the idea was, and that's what ended up being, is I was like, okay, I want like sexy saxophone. It's on in the dark. And then I want it, yeah, in the dark, and then I want it to go into a guitar, a little

sexy guitar bit, and it goes in another part of the bridge, and then the saxophone comes back in, and then the guitar comes in, and harmonization. is with the saxophone instead of two guitars harmonizing. I mean, there's guitar in there as well harmonizing, but I'm like, I just love the idea of the saxophone and the guitar harmonizing over. I'm like, that's fucking epic. Nobody in our freaking genre is doing that exactly.

I mean, there's a little saxophones going around here and now now, which is so weird. That's another thing that's weird. I started playing saxophone three years ago, right? I swear to you, a second I started picking up, not that it has anything to do with me, but just how, even just the way we're like music, like when like we came out all of a sudden at the same time

was like, under oath is coming out, and all these, you know, and Venn Semple, all these bands, are doing like the same thing at the same time like how does everybody do this like yeah how does that happen right you know yeah but it was the same kind of thing it was like I started playing saxophone all of a sudden like uh that uh saxil rose are popping up in different things or you got sleep token doing saxophone or like all these bands started putting saxophone and things I'm like what are the chances of that that I start learning saxophone and

literally like seeing like the thing with sleep token or like hearing bill murray and be like oh damn it's gonna be so fucking man yeah I thought I was like I was like dude I'm bringing some to the table that no one else has got like like like I was like I was like dude I'm bringing some to the table that no one else has got like I got something and all of a sudden I see other people doing it I'm like no that chick does I'm gonna rip oh she's incredible oh she's incredible I mean all these all these players that are they're playing saxophone out here and doing all these things are incredible I mean I admire all of them some of me I I'm saxo rose I was gonna try to take a lesson from but he was he was on the other side of the country but I mean I took a lesson from Eric from

revolution I took one from from uh what's his name um real big fish he's uh oh mad appleton Matt Appleton. He engineered our Lettsale's Paper Anchor record, and he played all the horns on the record. Now he plays in Goldfinger, and he plays in real big fish. Yeah, he's a legend. I took a lesson for him.

I just took a few, because I admire all these people, and they're super talented, and they're in the type of bands that inspire me to play saxophone and stuff. So did that, and then that ended up snowballing into putting saxophone on initially

the Pernoy sessions, our last record, which is us reimagining our own songs, making them more chill and on right side of the bed instead of guitar solo because the song was so slow and sexy I was like saxophone solo and it is sexy

that's just horny as fuck it'll get you you need to wear you need to wear protection when you listen to it because you will get pregnant 100% people get pregnant when they hear that song especially when the solo that solo is like the it's nice

yeah well that gets people a reason to look forward to the record because you were talking about I never heard it Always. It's not out yet. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They got to really listen. They got to get to that whole record. They got to get to fucking in the dark.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fifth. 10. 15. Okay. So two weeks. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Oh, it's fucking coming up quick. It is coming up quick. Yeah. It's nice. Brandon, what was the hardest part for you going from like the back to the front?

Like the, like the fucking, I'm playing drums. Okay. Now I'm just going to go now on the singer. I think it was just adapting to this, to like doing it in this band. Because I feel like it's very much like everything happens for a reason type situation. Trey went on hiatus. I started a band called Heller Highwater that I was in frontman. So being the frontman of that band, we went on tour with like, it was like Stone Sour and the Darkness and Avengers Sevenfold. And like me starting out to be a frontman, even Seven Dusts too, it was like I was like watching all these fucking really great frontman and being like, okay. that's kind of how you do this.

That's kind of how you do that. That's how you work your crowd. That's how you, you know what I mean? So I feel like, funny enough, I feel like you actually kind of look like Hoover, doesn't me? Like an alternate universe, John Hoover on the right there. Oh, yeah. But, like, it kind of learned how to do it

so that when it came time to do it for this band, I'd already been, like, fronting a band, but it was just kind of getting used to, like, the energy of these dudes on stage. Oh, sure. Also, like, really great. support system within our band, you know? It was like, everyone really sort of

building me up and, like, give me the confidence to do it. Um, definitely helped. But it's cool, man. Like, I feel like I've always been like, like, almost like a Lars where like, I want to stand the fuck up and walk around my drums and, you know what I mean? It's like, sometimes you're like, Lars, shit's fucking down, dude. But he's just feeling it, you know?

Yeah. It was like, I've always been that kind of drummer. Those, like, standing up on my fucking stool and like, I'm singing too. So people are looking at me more than they would, a normal drummer maybe. Um, So it was like, I felt like I always wanted to like be more active.

And being in the front, you're way more interactive with the crowd. And like you feel that way more than being way at the back. And it's fun, man. I'm, uh, I, I've had fun doing it for sure. Yeah. Did you feel any like, oh, I'm not in a band with Alex anymore? Like, oh shit, how am I, how am I gonna do this? Do you felt like, you felt like, like, like that's confidence?

It was more so just like, I need to make sure. I wanted to, I wanted to have it so that people wouldn't have a reason. to fucking talk shit. I wanted to present myself on stage and my voice in a way that people would be like, oh, I can't say anything. That doesn't exist. You know what I'm saying?

Especially on the internet, that people are just fucking assholes. Oh, yeah. But it was a kind of thing where in my head it was like, I just need to make sure that I'm going out there and doing doing something that I don't think people can talk shit on. Whether you like me or you like him better

or whatever, it was like, you can at least respect what I'm doing. And then even from there, it's gone on where like, now I'm screaming a lot more in the band too with Porter in the band it's like fuck he has an insane voice it was like yeah you don't need it but mentally it was like well I want to

I want to show people I can do this too like you know what I mean like um so it was a lot of that but I wouldn't say I worried about it because I was confident in my abilities but it was definitely in my head where I have to be fucking great or else people are going to talk shit yeah you know well people are always going to they're going to talk shit anyways inevitable I mean Alex hasn't been in our

band for like fucking what six years It's a long fucking time. And still, it's like, bring him back. It's like, bro. It'd be like one of your friends being like, man, I love your ex-wife more. It's like, dude, we've been divorced for six years, man. Like, move on. It's like, but there's always going to be that, you know, those 150 people that still will do that till the end of time.

I see, I see all the time is it doesn't go away, man. No. I had a situation happen to me because I'm very, I go to a lot of shows. Yeah. Like local shows and I went to a, today. Haven and come on a small show. Yeah, they're like that core band's playing. So obviously, I'm gonna, someone's gonna approach me.

Yeah. And then I met, I met this band. And yeah, I do you, big fan of Sula Sons. I'm so glad you guys are so going. And I connected with this one kid, I took pictures with him and his band, and then I announced my hiatus. For some reason, I don't know why.

Sometimes you like, you're like, it's kind of skim something. I'm, oh, I recognize his name. I clicked it, it was him. And I was saying how the band died with Mitch and they shouldn't be a band anymore. So motherfucker, I talked to you. You were too. I just talked to you.

So I was like, okay, this is what it is. People just say things. Yes. And this was recent too. But I was like, I can't let this. I can't let this one moment affect how I interact with every other person. Yeah. And person.

Yeah. You don't know. No. And it's a lot of time it's funny because, like, people will say shit on the internet as if it's fact. Yeah. We've gotten that a lot. It's like, book and band died with Alex. and we're like, well, we're on tour with Iron Maiden,

so it obviously did not. You know, it's like, or Bandai, what I was like, well, we just have the number one most added song at radio this week. Like, quite obviously not. But then it's again, it's like, you're just kind of one fuckhead that wants to do that on the internet. You know, it's like, no one fucking listening.

No one fucking cares. My favorite thing to do is when they, like, I'm very aware that I'm not your average lead singer type. I'm a big motherfucker that does, you know, I'm not fucking little skinny boy in, you know, cutesy fucking jeans. Yeah. My favorite, though, I don't ever.

respond to whatever but everyone's like someone's like you look a fat ass or whatever i'll i'll i'll respond with that's your move i will quote comment like that's what we're doing yeah that's what you're attacking like okay i'm gonna tell your mom she's gonna be very disappointed very disappointed do you guys still talk to alex at all oh no no um it was just kind of yeah wasn't yeah no i i i i understand man there's so there's so much history for sure sometimes it's just better just uh i think it's just better that way it sometimes yeah I mean there's I have I have had the the imagination gone wild where it's like I run into you at a show or I see you at the grocery store something like what would happen um someday would I love to have a conversation with that dude and you know what I mean like

talk about history and talk about everything that happened and whatever and not saying we need to be friends or whatever but like yeah of course I don't want I don't want negative thoughts with anyone in my life you know it's not a healthy thing to to live with um which we don't like i feel like i've i've always been very vocal about about uh everything he's done too like i fucking bought a dead iccarus shirt from his web store and i wear like it was like cool like you're doing that it's making you happy like make the shit you want to make and and live like i think it's i think it's important for everyone to be happy in life and i think that the the truth of the matter is i think that both parties are all are much more happy in the current situation

than we were before, you know? So, which nothing but the best for the dude. Yeah, we all do. Sometimes people just split apart or sometimes come back together. Yeah. There's so, I wish, you can't really,

I try to explain, like, the nuances of, like, band members. It's, uh, it's impossible. Yeah. It's because every, your relationship with each member, I'm still learning. Like, I'm like, oh, well, I thought I knew my band. I don't fucking know. And it's every, it's like every person has, like,

the nuances, you know, You don't really know if you split up, if you're going to keep talking. You don't know. I still talk to Alex, old drummer. Yeah. Because it's right. It feels right. So, okay.

Some, some you don't. For sure. For sure. And also, you're fucking older and you don't have any fucking time. No, dude. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, there is that shit, man. Like, I don't talk to people if they don't live on my street. You know what I mean? Like, dude, I was just having this conversation, man.

I feel so fucking bad. I have people all grew up with, like, lived three houses up. And I won't seem for years. Yeah. like they're so busy with their family i'm so busy on my family that we can't even you have a bubble man you kind of live within a bubble it's very real yeah i'm the same like we had we had like a family live across street from us and they moved literally to like the other

side of the neighborhood it is a it's a five minute walk we do not see them anymore too long yeah it's like too far it's not on my street you know far man yeah i've i've been trying something where like okay like i've been written down uh do i need to call this person like this time and like have like a list of people I want to text and call because you just or hang out with because it is it just like just stays there and then it just goes away and then you forget so i actually put it on like the paper like dude and it's like it's a long list oh i got hang on all these people because i just like it's just to rebuild and like the friendship yeah it's so sad it's a terrible fucking thing it's terrible fucking thing because it's my fucking dad my dad was in palm

springs i live in Nashville i don't see him often i'm so fucking consumed by my wife and my kids and you know managing the band now and fucking being in the band and writing and making a record to all these things i forget to do to talk to anyone so i literally i put reminders in my phone that's like call your dad like every week it's like call your dad you have to because it because you know my dad'll fucking call me and be like hey man where the fuck are you it's been i haven't talked to you in six weeks i get it's like what the fuck are you i'm like i'm sorry i didn't you know it's like i don't even realize the time's gone by you know i have to i have to do that it's like shit's not in your immediate orbit it's so hard to just what is that when uh you get coming

have you hit 20 years being with your chick? We're just about yeah. Okay nice. What is it about when you get into like a relationship it doesn't I don't know the word, it's not consume

but like you find like a priority like that's when you know like you this is love. I'm dropping everything I'm doing and everything I do even though you know music is cool my business is cool you know I try to hang on with people but for some reason, like, when you get into like a relationship, it is everything.

Yeah. And then even like your family will take a backseat. For sure. Like, and it's hard to even keep like, what, what is that? It's not, it's not like being, you're not being selfish because you're kind of, you're doing everything to support your relationship. Yeah. But that, it just takes up so much of your time. I think it's just a healthy relationship, to be honest.

Like, when you get to a point, like for me, I've been married for almost 20 years. I got, we have, I have two kids. and it's like two daughters yeah and it's like oh man crazy it's it's wild and uh there you you want especially doing what we do we're gone a lot so when i am home it's like you want to prioritize that time and we do the same thing like in national i think we have more friends in nashville than we did when we lived in orange county oh really so there's like and everyone hangs out a lot so there's weeks where like we're like dude like we went to their house for the barbecue on wednesday and we went to the fucking winery on saturday and hung with everybody like next week we

like we're at home like you know I mean, like, we're not getting our enough of, like, us time, you know? So it's like, we're really prioritizing that, even with, like, your regular friends, you know, like, Matt, who sings in 0936 lives three houses down for me. And then, uh, Kellyn, who plays guitar in Memphis Mayfire lives down the street. Oh, sick. And, like, we hang out all the fucking time, but it's funny because it's like, oh, like, I hung out with Matt for three days in a row.

Like, I'm going to not leave my house today and stay home because we just fucking, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, when we're hanging out, I'm not paying attention to anything else. Yeah. So it's like you it's just you prioritize Families are the most fucking important shit You know you find you find a woman and you get married

You do whatever you have kids It's like you know that ends up being the most important shit That that will outlast literally everything else No matter how good your other shit is Yeah like I don't doubt that this band Lives on forever because the dudes in the band We love doing it we love each other But like family outlasts everything

Yeah how long have you been married Dan It'll be six years this year Six? Six years, yeah. How was it for you? Like, is it like, it's take up all the year of time, or how does that work for you? I mean, yes and no. I mean, like, at home, like, we live, where I live, we live closer to my wife's family.

So I don't have, like, a huge network of people that I have. Like, I have friends, but I don't, like, actively pursue hanging out with people a lot. Yeah. Because once we're on tour for a bit, I come home and I'm like, man, I just, oh, I just want to stay here and do nothing. You know, I just love being at my house and just, I love just smoking some, We didn't write music and I got my two dogs. And yeah, it's super chill. I mean, my wife, she does little things here and there.

You know, she's a dance instructor and she also does like life coaching. And she's an artist or she makes like these ceramic like pastas that hang on your wall. She sells on Etsy and stuff. But none of it's like overly time consuming tour. It's like we don't get to see each other too much or anything like that. And we don't tour too too heavily these days. I mean, like we'll do maybe one or two big tours a year. And other than that, it's just sprinkles of things here and there.

So it's not like a beating to be, or we're gone, you know, nine months out of the year or anything like that. So it's so over that life. No, it's too much. It can't. It's just got to be worth it. Like, the state of age at our age with our families, it's just got to be worth it. Like, if we're going to go do something for six weeks or we're going to go on, even if it is, like, ends up being more than a couple tours a year. It's like, it's got to be forward motion for the band.

It's like, I'm not going to go out on some fucking shit tour for just for the sake of it. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. Just to keep the wheels moving or whatever. Yeah, that's bringing that fucking cheddar, dude. I mean, that is a huge part, you know? It is, dude. You don't make the money when you don't go on tour, so it's like a big part of it.

Yeah. I also don't want to take advantage of my relationship, because no matter what, you know, sometimes they'll support you no matter what you do, but I don't want to just take advantage of that. And I'm like, hey, I don't want to go on this tour. I'm not going to make any money. But, you know, it's just, it's more my band. I'm trying to really kind of keep, just not push it too much. Because it's already weird leaving. Yeah.

And leaving and not bringing anything back. It's strange now. Yeah. It has to be worth it. For sure. For sure. Absolutely. Yeah.

Having a relationship. Wow. Yeah. Still learning. You're always, you're always, you're always all. I mean, I've been my wife for, like I said, almost 20 years and still, still learning things and navigating through things and the relationship changes and gets better. And it's like, it's cool.

Yeah. It's fun. So you guys are a legendary medical. band so you are a band to ask this and you also came up in a very special time you probably like look back and like retrospect oh shit that was a pretty fucking sick time um what are some uh what are some uh bands or records that shaped the genre like really like made metalcore what it is i mean man i think for us coming up that the ones that i noticed i think really move the needle or like the early early stages like the from out the from autumn to ashes and

I mean, yeah, I think, I think, like, I think poison the well tear from the red. Poisonedwell tear from the red early on was a huge one to move the needle. I think even there, you come before you record was like, for me, the first time like a metalcore, a hardcore band that was like, that kind of did something different, you know? What about opposite of December?

I mean, opposite December was what started about, for sure. That's, for me, that's my poison the well. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, you know. Stretch Armstrong.

Stretch Armstrong was a big one. Yeah. Anybody that was singing and screaming, like, because we were already on that path, like we'd already started kind of doing it. So when we'd see other bands that were doing it, it was like, oh, they're kind of like us. They're doing something kind of thing. We don't sound exactly the same,

but it's like the same. They're kind of hardcore, kind of a little, baby, little metal. There's also some like, you know, board emo was not really thrown around or really a thing yet. Metalcore wasn't even a word yet. No. That was one of the things when people are screamo,

like these, none of these words existed. And all of a sudden, you're a metalcore man. And you're like, what the hell is that? I think it started, I think it pretty much it started when we invented it. Yeah. No. I think, uh, I like, I let, I let, I let the troll people and say that I invented death core, just a true people and people, and people take me. But I feel like in the same, in the same breath, we're like, I think we were very much, uh, you know, I guess in that first sort of wave, wave of metal, what metalcore was.

Like, suicide silence was most definitely the same thing in death course. Sure. Like, I don't think death core was even a fucking thing. It was just like hardcore bands that had wave. more death metal influence. Yeah. Of course. You know what I mean? Of course.

But like, no, I feel like avenged sounding the seventh trumpet. Or was it, or, that was the EP, was the record, the first big record. Waking the Fallen. Waken the Fallen. Waken the Fallen was, I think. Avenged at that time, because we were like, we didn't really know them back then. We didn't become friends with them until, you know, years later. But like, that record was one of those things.

We're kind of doing the same thing, except for they're doing it on, like, a muso like fucking like you know piano ballads like Brian's guitar playing was fucked like Jimmy's drumming was like fucked it was like oh these dudes are just like

better than it's better than everybody in the genre of what they were doing like man you're like worlds ahead of like levels of ability and stuff and some other records are I think we're fucking cool like honestly one of the best fucking I think records come out of like the scene I wouldn't call it metalcore but it is like

from like the time was the first Death by Starre record. It looks to kill. So ahead of its time, mixed hardcore and punk and metal, melody was screaming. And like, to this day, every fucking song is still great.

You know, AFI is another one, too. Yeah. AFI, we used to cover AFI. When AFI's shut your mouth open, your eyes came out, that was like, because for that band, it was like a pivot into like, oh, they just got like heavier all of a sudden.

Yeah. And kind of went into this interesting direction. That's, like, we started listening to this and then went backwards, listening to their other stuff, and then we'd cover some of their songs, and then moving forward,

just the way that they were progressing was just so interesting how they would put out, every time they put out a new record, it felt like they just got a little bit better, and it was just like, how is this band so good? How is every record, because you know, when you have a band that puts out a record, you're like, I fucking love this record,

this is so good, like, how are they gonna beat this? And they put something else, you're like, okay, like I like, I like, I'm really like, AFI was one of the few bands that just could keep topping themselves over and over, and you're like, like sing the sorrows and about the time we even got to that you're like how you're going to talk and bang they come out with sing the sorry and they're like this is just this band is

unreal their energy is unreal everything about them was fun to watch the music was cool nobody sounded just like them it's just really inspiring so like we wanted even you know a little sprinkle of that in what we were doing I think we're talking too with metal like if you're more specific to metalcore kill switch was definitely a band oh yeah like uh especially real early kill switch like when jesse was his first run of the first run um the guitar tone like my last serenade and all that shit i remember us being like you know you had the whole like east coast west coast thing oh yeah and it was like kill switch seemed like that band tour it was like oh it's on another level like even for us internally be like oh they're doing some shit that

we're not doing like guitar playing was just a little bit kicked up like the melodies were just fucking crazy the production of the records was fucking awesome their guitarist just sounded so good they were just it's still one of my favorite guitar tones ever is on those early records they're just so good yeah yeah there's a lot of good shit though man i I mean, we came in, I mean, even the next sort of wave of it with like, you know, like, Bullet. You know, like, Bullet was a band that, like, we took Bullet out on their first tour ever in the UK. They opened for us. And it was like, at the time where, like, this band is going to be.

You could tell. You could tell they were going to be big. Like, they already, they wouldn't even be a ton of people that yet there when they started playing. But people would be, ballette, ballette. And you're like, that doesn't happen for every opening band. You know what I mean? That's different. And then they were just, they were super tight.

And they kind of had this, like, almost like, like, what they're, matching flying vs and they kind of almost had this like metallic thing about them sort of but like different yeah they just they were just they were a they were a vibe yeah absolutely and they were all a bunch of wild animals at the time too they were fucking savages yeah not not so much anymore they're just mellow lads now but they were they had a good run yeah we all have our time exactly yeah oops my bad sorry mom and dad it's awesome Well, cool. This is how I like to close out each episode.

Is there anything I miss about, a trail you, anything that is a big, cool. Really fun conversation. Oh, yeah, cool. I think I already know the answer to this. Albums are singles. For us? Yeah. I mean, we've tried, our last record, we tried to, like, not the single thing.

We try to, like, break things up in EPs and try to get people. No, as far as far as, like, too, like, what do you guys, like, consume? Oh. I think I still listen to albums Albums you still Yeah a little bit A little bit Tends on what it is

Depends on what I'm like Like for instance The new Marriacci-all Bronx came out Love that And want to hear the whole thing Yeah But like if I'm listening Mariachi

Do you know the band The Bronx? The Bronx no Okay well they're a band That's been around Since like you know 20 plus years We toured with them in the U's

That's when we first discovered Them like Yeah That's kind of punk band Kind of a punk band And then in 2009 They release Mariachi Al Bronx

They released their first record And I was It is like It's Mariachi, but he sings in English. Yeah, it's Mariachi and they sing in English. And it's like beautifully orchestrated Marriachi. Like when you hear, not that there's anything bad about the Bronx, they're super talented, but you don't listen to the Bronx and then hear Marietta Bronx and think, this is the same thing. These guys did that?

Like, what? This is like world class quality mariachi. Yeah. Like it is. I mean, I've heard other Mariachi groups and like that are, you know, seeing in Spanish one. I'm like, they're better. Yeah. Like they do a better job at the music ass.

Oh, they're fucking blown up. Yeah, they've been around for a while. They do better than the, they are bigger than the Bronx. Yeah, they focus more on this than they do the Bronx in a lot of cases. Or both bands will play together. Yeah. Random a little promo for Maracci of Bronx, but I love them. They're one of my favorite bands.

I have every record. I just bought all their shirts and everything that came out with the new record. Well, this might be part of your answer, but I was going to ask you both, what are three albums to check out? It could be old, new, could be. Well, and I'd say it'd start with the first Marietelianchial Bronx, just to, Okay. Because you got to start there and work the way forward because they're all incredible.

But like I really like the idea of like, listen to the first one. If you haven't heard of Creeper, the band Creeper is incredible. Yeah. Their whole, and it's their whole catalog. You got to start with them to have. You got to start from the very beginning and work your way out because they do evolve. They started as like almost like an alkaline trio. Meets the Misfits meets A-FI.

And now it's like. My Chemical Romancey even a little bit. Like old my chemical romance. Now it's like straight up Billy Idol. Meat Loaf. Like. Yeah, meatloaf. It's just they're just such a talented group of humans. I highly highly recommend it. I would look up 0936 too

Very very good like metal core but he wraps too But it's like really heavy but wraps and super talented guy really fucking good Yeah sick dude well that's a solid three yeah check them out check to check check check check check check check check them out What was the record again? Uh zero nine 36 his new one is called they were always here Yeah, okay 2025 yeah so he got some some classic we got some cool shit yep and we got some current oh you guys hit it hit it all knocked it out of the fucking part guys i feel great about this yeah yeah yeah how that new new record out in uh two weeks yeah if you're if you're listening to this on april 6th uh april 24th the end is not the end it is not

when when is the end when you say it yeah you say it is it's always weird uh when someone passes away and like their song comes on you're like oh are are they dead the end is not the end yeah yeah it's are they up somewhere else and they just they just put the needle on and they're like it's it's weird like remember when van helen died i was like this it was all over like this tv so i would walk by uh i get my parents watching like the news and just in like the it's like faintly i was kept hearing van halen all day i'm like yeah he's like more on life than ever yeah it can a weird it's a weird way now go on my car radio banning hand it was like it was like it was like my first experience are sitting there i'm like he he feels more alive yeah now it's weird yeah yeah

yeah things go everything just keeps living on i mean not with art especially you you create something put it into the world like you could die but that shit keeps going you know i mean like literally forever yeah and then for whatever reason there's that that that weird thing that if somebody dies immediately afterward then everybody starts listening the records and And it goes number one all over again. It's like, why are you going to die to have that happen? It sucks, dude.

Couldn't you just wait until, you know, a little bit longer and then let them enjoy it? Let them enjoy it a little bit, you know. It happens with, I mean, with anyone, it doesn't matter what you are. I know, as soon as that happens,

bang the spike in sales and the spike and all the things. Yeah. It's so bittersweet. It's, it's just, it's just human nature, man. For sure. I do it on purpose.

I'll see that. I watch like a band, uh, especially older band. I'm like watching my, no, they're, they're legends now. Yes.

I'm watching a legendary band. Yeah. It doesn't matter if they're dead or not. They're literally, I'm watching it right. I'm watching corn right now. Yeah, for sure. It's just like if someone passes away, they're, oh my God, no, they're always. They were there already.

Yeah. Like shit. I try to like put myself in the headspace sometimes, you know. Yeah. Don't know what you have until it's gone. You know what I mean? People just tend to appreciate and celebrate things more after they don't have them anymore. Oh, totally.

It sucks, dude. Human brain bucks with you. Yeah. Where can people, where do you want people to go? The tour? Seven Dust Tour. Yeah, we're going to be out with Seven Dust, April May, all over the U.S. Sprinkle a couple headline shows in there.

We'll be on a bunch of the Wimmer Festivals. We're doing Sonic Temple, Rockville, Aftershock, and Louder Than Life. The record will be out April 24th, so you can do that. Listen to it, fucking wherever you listen to music. And we'll be pretty much pretty active up until the end of the year. Cool. We'll be out there. Cool.

Yeah. IG. Atrayu official. Cool. Everything. A tray official. Trade official.com. Treyumerch.com.

TreyuVIP. Yeah. It's all at Rayu. All the time. All the time. Time. Thank you guys for a time, man. I had a fucking pleasure.

Oh, yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Really cool to be your right time. It was dope. All right. All right. All right.

All right. Adios. Yeah.