holdfasthope

Help me understand why the vocal needs to take on that kind of a screaming, over-the-top quality.

Musically, when we started the band, Wade and I didn't want to sing. We were more concentrated on guitar playing and singing a little bit. We asked George to sing for us and he was like, "I can't sing." We were like, "That's okay, just come and yell over it." We wanted to just have this vocal overload, amazingly energetic feeling to the music.

So he's more an instrument than a voice.

Yeah. The problem there lies that George's lyrics are really great. The fact that you can't understand them as well as we'd like to sometimes is a bummer because he's a really good storyteller.

If the lyrics weren't on the CD, it would be pretty impossible to understand them.

Exactly. But we worked with that on our new record because George's screaming is a lot more audible. We want people to hear what he's saying. And it's not all the time, but when you hear it you'll definitely hear the difference in his screams. I think without George we wouldn't be as interesting.

Fair enough. You really do have a great voice.

Have you heard my solo record? It's just me and an acoustic guitar.

Tell me a little about that.

It's called City in Color. It's not out in the States or anything.

Is it you doing your Jeff Buckley, so to speak?

You could say that. I wouldn't say it's like Jeff Buckley because it's hard for me to say. He's such an influence on me. It's just me on acoustic guitar. Basically if you take all the melody from Alexis and take everything else away, that's what it sounds like. It's more so about my voice than it is about anything.

What about a song like 'Hey, It's Your Funeral Mama?'

There's a part of us that really likes to just have fun with what we're doing. We don't like to take ourselves too seriously and that song is a perfect indication of it. George had a nightmare about this place around our town called Prudhommes Wet & Wild, it was sort of like a tiny water park/amusement park. There were these really awful go-karts and George one night had a nightmare about the go-karts at Prudhommes. So he wrote a song about it.

That solo section has a pretty cool section, with kind of like a figured guitar lick. And then there's that other guitar doing that three-note thing.

That song probably has the most recognizable riff on the record.

And then the outro is also very cool. How does a part like that get built?

That outro was from a completely different song that we had been trying to write for like a year. There was a bunch of other stuff to that riff for that big crashy part that just didn't work in anything. We wrote that song without our drummer actually at practice. I was playing the beat on a phonebook with some drumsticks. I don't even remember writing that riff, to tell you the truth. It just kind of came to me.

Are you using pedals and effects?

I use the pedals more live than I do in the studio because I like to add little things here and there. Especially when you've been on the road for two years playing the same songs, I start to think of different stuff I could have done in the song. So I use a lot of delay. I use a DL 4. The Line 6 delay model. I also use the Boss RV5, was it? It was the digital delay/reverb pedal that they don't make anymore. I have two of them, basically because I'm afraid if one breaks I won't be able to find another one anywhere. But you can set them to this crazy, swelling reverb sound. On the outro of 'Hey It's Your Funeral,' do you mean that really instrumental type thing?

Yeah, it sounds like there are these little feedback guitars.

Oh, I'm sorry you meant something else in the song. That was sort of like an interlude in between the two. That was originally supposed to be an intro for 'No Transitory,' but we put it at the end to goof people around. That little interlude, I used the RV5 on this setting where you just put everything to 11, so to speak. You get this crazy, swelling sort of reverb sound.

Does it take some practice learning how to use delays and things like that in terms of timing it?

Yeah. I've always been interested in delay pedals since I was young, so I've been using them for a really long time. I like to think I'm getting a little better at it. I'm definitely the kind of guitar player that steps on it for a second just to make that one note go a little bit farther than I'd like, and then I turn it off.

What about 'Sharks and Danger,' with those clean guitars in the beginning? With the timing of that song, it sounds like you were dropping a beat or turning a beat around?

That song is definitely an interesting one. We didn't really know what we were going to do with it because it starts off in such a weird way. I remember coming up with that chord progression and just kind of going, "I don't know what we're going to do with this." The older stuff, we were kind of trying to do interesting stuff and maybe not worrying about a chorus. I really enjoy the buildup section of that song. I think that's probably the instrumental guy in me. I really like when a song builds and builds, and then it just explodes. That was a really happy moment for me that we were able to do a song like that. We were kind of worried because of George's screaming and stuff. That's sort of the sound we sort of developed. We didn't know if we should go that way and then we just kind of did it because we thought, "Whatever."
That's one of the songs that appears on the Switcheroo album that Moneen covers. Can you give me 25 words on that record and how that came about?

That's just us and Moneen being really good friends. We were each able to put a new song out because we were both working on new records. Then we thought, "Instead of us each doing our own little EP, why not add something a little fun to it and cover each other's songs to see what we could do with them?" It was a great little thing. It's funny because some people that review it are bummed about it because we have a similar sound. They're like, "Why did these two bands cover each other's songs. There's no difference!" We did it because it was just really fun and we're best friends.

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my band=www.myspace.com/wingsofthefallen