holdfasthope

You bring up another interesting point. People may look at Alexis as this louder rock band, so for you to offer up a song like 'Rough Hands'… Some bands may not have done it. The fact that you did do that speaks a lot about the musicality of the band.

I think that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to change the world with our music, definitely not. I'm not saying that we're reinventing the wheel, because I leave that to Dream Theater. We just really love playing and we just want to keep writing songs that make us excited to play our instruments and shows. If we had not put 'Rough Hands' on the record because we were worried, then I don't think we'd be able to sort of call ourselves "us" anymore. Because when we started, we just wanted to play. I hope that's still why we're doing it.

Jumping back to 'Fear of Myself' for a moment, you talk about that lick coming in at a minute and a half, where it kind of gets loud and that breakdown with the drums and the bass. It sounds almost like it was improvised at the moment?

You know what? It almost was. That's Wade playing that riff. When we wrote that one, that was another one of those ones that we were iffy on because our first record was so immature, for lack of a better word. Just because that was our first eleven songs that we wrote as a band, so we really didn't have that point where we could write a batch of songs and go, "Okay, this is a good path we're going into."

There's a song on that record, the next song 'Side Walk When She Walks' that George doesn't sing on. Basically that was his decision because he said, "I'm just going to mess it up. It's good the way it is." He helped me write the lyrics, but he didn't feel like it was his place. So 'Fear of Myself' was like that sort of thing. I thought it was going to be pretty the whole way through, but like I said before, Wade had this riff. And I was like, "Dude, try that riff with this chord progression." And it worked perfectly. It was just one of the instances where he had been working on something and I had been working on something and it just kind of fit together.

'Side Walk,' it starts off with that clean delay guitar and then it goes into what I call the big lick. Then it ends with that low-fi section - it's almost as if you're strumming on an electric acoustically.

That was me in Julius' house, where he has his studio. His wife also has a salon down the hallway and that's me standing the salon. He put a mic at the end of the hallway and it's me just strumming my E333 not plugged in. It's me actually singing it in there, too. I was in this big, echo-y salon and it just worked out really, really cool.

You're singing this?

I do all the singing.

I thought there was a singer in the band. That's my stupidity.

No, there's a guy who screams.

When I thought it was the same person doing the screaming and the singing, I couldn't quite grasp the concept. When that singer was singing in the clean voice, it made the track pop - this heavy guitar band with the vocal over the top. The screaming takes away from the punch of the music. Help me understand this.

I'm the singer and the guitarist. Wade also sings a little bit, but then there's George and he's the screamer, and what we call, the professional hype man. If you saw us live, you would totally understand it. For us and for a lot of people, their favorite part is the way George and I sort of work off each other. It's sort of like I'm the calm before the storm. There are a lot of bands that do it, but most of the time they have that guy who does the screaming and the singing. He'll sing the verse and scream into the chorus.

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