Death Before Dishonor - Bryan

BRYAN: Well we had that huge snow storm hit up here so we missed the first show. We started out on Sunday. Tomorrow we have UMass Amherst area, then Pennsylvania, then North Carolina. It’s been good. The second show was cool. It was in the middle of Virginia, a little smaller but it’s cool. From there, it just picked up. Last night our tour played with the Comeback Kid tour in Long Island. That was awesome. Comeback Kid’s an amazing band. We used to play with those dudes ‘cause of Figure Four back in the day. I love Comeback Kid and love the guys. Awesome show to play.

I don’t actually think I had met the guys from the band before this…. I might have met one or two of the guys from Jacksonville from playing in Florida. Between them and Hour Of The Wolf, we never really met them. We just got an email from our agent saying “Casey Jones is going out for a week” or something like that and asked if we could do a tour. I like to see different bands touring with each other. You know, different styles. Hour Of The Wolf is like hardcore / rock and roll. Casey Jones is a straight-edge band with a lot of sing-alongs. It’s cool to mix it up like that.

It comes out May 22nd. It’s a full-length with twelve new songs. We did a cover on it. Buddha from Blood For Blood sings on the cover. We just got the artwork, and we recorded at the Outpost. I’m really psyched about it. It’s been a while. We put out that EP like two years ago just ‘cause we’ve been touring like crazy. I’m pretty psyched that it’s coming out soon on Bridge 9.

Yeah, we recorded Curl Up And Die. For us, we lost our original guitarist sometime back and got Dave-X and B-Roll. That was one of the first songs we wrote together. Bridge 9 wanted that on the re-release of Friends Family Forever, which was cool but it was just to buy us time. We wanted to re-record it, and I love the song. We also re-recorded an old song from a split CD we did like five years ago and never got a good recording of. It stands up to the stuff that Death Before Dishonor is doing now so we re-recorded that. It’s called Nothing But Agony. It was on a split we did with Nourish The Flame back in the day on Spookcity Records. It was on the re-release of like True Till Death or something like that.

Yeah, there are always shows in Cambridge and Brockton. To actually get shows like that in Boston is a great accomplishment. We don’t have The Rat like we used to have. There’s been talks of Lansdowne Street, but even when Lansdowne Street was doing hardcore shows, it still wasn’t up to par. To see a proper Boston show, we were pretty psyched. And to play with Madball too. When I grew up, seeing Madball in Boston was crazy. It’s cool to see that shows are happening in Boston. That show was really good too; a lot of kids came out and there were no problems. It was fun.

I think it was ’93 or ’94…. It was a Biohazard show in Boston. I used to listen to a lot of rap, then I got into metal and kids would be listening to hardcore so they told me this band Biohazard was playing with Stompbox. It was a little more metal, and they’re pretty well known in the hardcore scene. It was at the old The Axis before they changed. It was a totally different setup there. I remember going there and being like, wow. I remember it was super scary. It was like, kids would say that you have to watch out for this guy, this guy, this guy, that guy. I’m this kid and there’s all these huge dudes there back in the day in Boston. It was just wild. I fell in love with it. The dudes who showed me hardcore didn’t really go to shows that often so I found myself going to a lot of shows by myself.

Me and my drummer were in an old band called Incision. It was an old local band. When our old band was breaking up, my drummer left and things got fucked up so we ended that band. I got my drummer to play drums again, and we just started looking for members to start a new band. I knew Frankie played bass; I saw him at shows and knew he sang in a local hardcore band. I asked him if he knew anyone who could play bass, and he was like, “I can play bass!” He came up and was amazing. We started Death Before Dishonor and did out a demo, then our old guitarist left. We got Dave, who is Frankie’s cousin, and he worked out great. We wanted a second guitarist, and B-Roll, who was in a bunch of local hardcore bands like Have Heart, came out and worked out perfectly.

We play Metalfest and then the day after, we got out for three weeks with Modern Life Is War. Then we are going out with Black My Heart and Colin Of Arabia for the rest of the U.S. because the Modern Life Is War tour is only an east coast into Canada type tour. All together, we’ll be on the road for like seven weeks. All we do is tour. That’s why it took so long to put out this record. I mean, we live on the road. We’re out on this Casey Jones thing, and a week and a half ago, we were on that Madball tour. We’re supposed to go to Europe, and maybe South America ‘cause we’ve never been there. Mexico, Puerto Rico. We’re going to Europe at the end of the year. Just touring!

Man, Boston is sparking up with so many good bands. Colin of Arabia, great fucking band. Have Heart, which people already seem to know really well. Shipwreck, 40 SLS. There are a lot of bands up and coming up as well. Frankie’s got a band called Trust In Few that’s a more punk rock type feel to it. So many bands. Check out Energy. I could go on all night. What I want to see is kids going to shows, getting there early, sticking around for the whole show, and hearing bands they’ve never heard about. Before the internet took over, that’s what we did back in the day. I remember first time I saw VOD, it was because I was at a Madball show and VOD opened up. You never know. You show up early, see some bands, and you might have had views about them before or never heard of them, but you may be surprised and think they are really good. Go out to shows!