Music Banter - View Single Post

holdfasthope · 06-26-2006, 08:48 PM

If I'm reading you correctly, you're trying to shape guitar sounds to sort of emphasize lyrically and melodically what's going on. I've heard other bands talk about that process.

That's sort of what we tried to do. There's a song on the record, it's the last song.

What's it called?

It's called 'Rough Hands.' It's probably the slowest, I don't know if prettiest is the word because there are probably prettier songs, but it's definitely the moodiest song we've ever written. I didn't even use distortion for it. I just used my Fender Twin coupled with my JCM 2000 on clean with a classic gain button that I pushed just a little bit for a little bit of overdrive. I just used that with lots of reverb with my Telly for the whole song. And that's something that I never would have done before.

In some respects is it more difficult playing a part like that than when the gain is cranked?

I think so, because you have to be dead-on. You can't hide behind anything.

You guys don't use a click track?

We do. Now we do. We didn't on Watch Out! because our old drummer couldn't sort of cut it. But our new drummer is like a human metronome, so we did use a click track. That made the recording process a lot better because you know everything is in time.

How would you compare 'Rough Hands' to 'It Was Fear of Myself That Made Me Odd.' That's also kind of a ballad with those types of clean guitars.

I wouldn't say it's similar because 'Fear of Myself' starts out really pretty, but it has that kind of screaming lead riff that comes in. Then it turns into this driving sort of song with the bass drum breakdown in the middle. 'Rough Hands' doesn't have anything like that. It definitely gets loud and it gets big, but it's slow. The riff that I play reminds me more of a U2 song than an Alexisonfire song. When we first started playing it, we were kind of nervous because we didn't know what we were going to do with it. We're an aggressive band and stuff like that. But then we were like, "**** it. We're playing these songs for us and we really like this riff so let's just do it." And it's probably our favorite song as a band. I play the piano the whole way through it. We just didn't want to repeat ourselves, not for fans but mostly for ourselves. As much as this is a job, we still want it to be fun. I think that's what kids sort of like about us, is that we're honest and we play the music that we want to play. It enables us to give them our best performance.