Every Time I Die - Andrew

ANDREW: The tour definitely has been getting huge turnouts. Every show has been great, the kids have been awesome, and everything is going really well. It's been great.

ANDREW: It is a lot more of the day-to-day footage. The DVD is more or less just the lives of ETID. There isn't much of ETID playing live, more of just clips. It's not overrun with Every Time I Die. The DVD also has some bonus features in the studios and such that just emphasize the content of the DVD. They touch on certain subjects like that. You have to see it. The DVD is 2 1/2 hours. Most bands' DVDs are just an hour long and all live footage. There is some behind-the-scene stuff, but I can't remember exactly what because it's been a while since I last saw it.

ANDREW: For our DVD, it's just the audio that got leaked. There are a lot of people that download music, but there are also people who want the artwork too. Downloading the audio for our DVD is like downloading only the artwork for the CD and not the music. It's one of those things. It doesn't bother me really. It sucks because everything in the industry is taking a hit from the internet, but as far as our lives, it hasn't really affected us.

ANDREW: Write and record. We plan on writing a new record and recording it, hopefully with a release date around September or so. Jordan and I have shit in our heads as far as music with the new record, but it's just that we have to play it together.

ANDREW: No, that was purely Atreyu. The secret about this tour though is that all of us are on the same booking agency. It's one of those things where none of us had a tour going on so they just made a tour. They were just like, \"Well, ETID is going to do this. Atreyu is going to do this. Chiodos is going to do this. FFTL is going to do this. Wait, why don't we put them all together?\"

ANDREW: *laugh* That's kind-of how it is. We haven't had anyone explode yet though. Rick has come close. Our new bass player Rick used to be in The Chariot. We nicknamed him Uncle Rick. He's come close to exploding a few times. We stopped him right before. When he gets out of control, we throw him in the hole. You know when you stay at a double in a hotel? And you always have that gap between the bed and wall? We always throw him into the wall and push the mattress on top of him. That kind-of helps him from not exploding.

ANDREW: I grew up into metal, but I wasn't into metal as much as punk rock. I never went to Ozzfest until I actually played at Ozzfest. I had been to almost every Warped Tour. There's always at least one band that I want to see at each Warped Tour. It's awesome that we got to play on it this past year. The city where Warped Tour first played was in the city I grew up in outside Buffalo. I skateboarded at that tour.

ANDREW: I know there was a year where Sevendust played. Limp Bizkit played I think. I guess there's a tradition of weird bands on Warped Tour. I'm not saying we're like Limp Bizkit or Sevendust. I HOPE we're not like them. *laugh* I think you've got to have diversity. If all the bands were like Motion City Soundtrack, it would be the safest tour ever. They would have plush little things and safety nets on. You have to put the one dangerous band there and mix things up a bit.

ANDREW: Yeah, there's been like Sounds Of The Underground, Warped Tour, Ozzfest, and The Best Tour Ever Tour. We were used to going on normal tours in the summer in our van with friends. A few years ago, everything flip-flopped. The first year we were Ozzfest, it was us, Bleeding Through, and Unearth. That was the year it flip-flopped. Before that, it was all nu-metal bands. Finally, the industry realized all these bands on indie labels are selling records. What the fuck is going on?

After that, no friends wanted to tour anymore. You don't tour with them anymore. Now every band goes for Ozzfest and Warped Tour. Why not just go in a van and go? I think that's where things are going to go. Kids are going to get sick of paying $40-$50, sit all day in the gross heat and sweat. They are going to want to go to a club, see 4-5 bands, get blown away, and go home. I think Sounds of the Underground was my favorite because of all the friends we had on it. Poison The Well, Unearth, Throwdown, and a bunch of other friends were on it. Those bands were all bands we toured with before. All those bands started around the exact same time, like 1998.

ANDREW: *laugh* It was nothing on our end, man. We were just fucking doing our thing. One day, they played before us and had a great crowd reaction. We had a great crowd reaction too, but they didn't like the fact that we screamed our vocals. We heard through some kids that were like, \"Dudes, Less Than Jake just threw out your name like 7 times during their set.\" Well, good for fucking them, they are playing to like the whole crowd and we're playing to a third of the crowd, so go ahead and talk. It was just bullshit stuff. There was a time where I was going to call the guitar player over and cut his strings while he was in the middle of playing. Just shit like that. It was bullshit. It was all them. They are like 40 years old; why do they care? It's not like we're a ska band. If we were a ska band, I would understand. We're completely different though. Whatever, fuck them.

ANDREW: It's never changed. We didn't know what we were going to call our band. We didn't know all the way up to like two weeks before we left for our first show in Hamilton, Ontario. The guy who did the show was an old promoter from back then. He was like, \"Dudes, you don't have a name. I'm going to put Andy Williams Band down.\" We were kicking around the name Dead Heroes for a bit, and after that, we knew we needed something better. Ratboy said Every Time I Die, and we went with that. A couple years ago, we were going to change our name to The Dudes just so people would say, \"The band formally known as Every Time I Die is The Dudes now.\" That didn't pan out though because Ferret wasn't into that idea.

ANDREW: A lot of people ask us to play old stuff. It's like, you want us to play a song from when we were 19, and we're now like 29? It's just different. For example, I love Converge, but when they go up to play, they might not play Petitioning The Empty Sky. You have to look at it and see that they are still kicking ass as a four-piece. There's a reason why these bands play newer stuff. You have a set with eight songs, and you don't want to play a song from 9 years ago that nobody knows. That's it. It's not that we don't like the stuff, but it's the fact that kids here are like 15-16 years old. They were like 7-8 years old when we wrote that stuff. It's like, come on man, we'll play stuff off Last Night In Town but that was even 7 years ago. Kids here don't know that stuff unless they went out and bought the CD on their own. They obviously couldn't buy it when it came out. We were younger then, and we think we write better music now.

ANDREW: Hot Damn! for sure. Gutter Phenomenon was put together in like four months. I will never spend four months again on a record; that's way too long. Hot Damn! was like, the pressure was against us. All the energy and everything you hear on the CD was exactly what was on our minds at the time. The attitude is there and everything. We wrote it in a month and a half. We went in with one song and wrote it all in a month and a half. It was just pressure. I don't ever want to take four months on another record again. Pound for pound, there are better songs on that record than any other record. I think as a whole, Hot Damn! is a great record.

ANDREW: Well, as I said before, it's just riffs and stuff right now. With Gutter Phenomenon, we would construct it differently. We'd be like, \"Let's write a part where Keith can sing clean vocals.\" Now, it's completely different. Keith will sing on whatever the fuck he wants, and we're going to play whatever we want. It's going back to the same process as Hot Damn! Our current writing style is very influenced by Hot Damn!

ANDREW: The thing was that it was all Gerard for that. He was home at the time and asked to come sing on the record. Daryl knows all of us, and he had just had surgery around that time. He was like, \"I want to come down and sing on the record.\" We had to make sure he was alright about that, but he was like all for it. It's funny because tomorrow we're playing New York, and so is Head Automatica. It'll be funny if he comes and does vocals for that song. We've never done that song live like that. The other day, Greg from Dillinger did like three shows with us. He came up and sang different songs. That would be awesome though. We went on tour with My Chemical Romance in Europe, and Gerard did vocals like three times during that tour with us.

ANDREW: Converge is definitely our dream tour. They used to take us out for a week here, week there, weekend here, weekend there. We haven't seen them as a band in four years. It would be awesome to do a tour with them. You have the best live band in Converge and the band who wants to be the best live band in us. A few years ago, we toured with Dillinger. It was so awesome because we fed off of each other. It'd be like, \"Oh fuck, they did this last night. We have to step up and go balls out tonight.\" At the end of the tour, they said that it was the first time they had ever been intimidated as a band. That was amazing. They are a band that we all grew up listening to; they've been a band since about 1996. They came to Buffalo a bunch as we were just starting the band. Converge is a band I've been going to see since '95. It's a thing where I've toured with Black Sabbath, Slayer, but Converge would be awesome.

ANDREW: There are talks of headlining in February. I would love to. We headlined one with this record. It was with High On Fire, The Red Chord, and The Chariot. We would love to headline again soon.

ANDREW: rn Come see us, and buy the record or DVD. Come see us so you see what it's like. All the DVDs that come out today are about how the guys' home lives suck. That's all a load of shit; we're suburban kids who grow up doing this. Come see what it's like to tour. Buy the DVD.