August Burns Red Interview

The Gauntlet: What’s going on?

JB: I am at the computer right now, Fantasy Baseball.

The Gauntlet: How is your team doing?

JB: I was actually doing frickin’ awesome until like four days ago. I made a big trade where I traded Evan Langoria from the [Devil] Rays to get Zack Greinke from the Kansas City Royals. It hasn’t been panning out for me. I have been dropping in the rankings for the last few days. More like a tailspin so I am trying to fix things.

The Gauntlet: That was your mistake, putting your hopes on the Royals of all teams.

JB: I know, I needed a pitcher. He was at a 4-0 start, but I agree with you, they are one of the worst. I saw this hilarious George Brett video on Youtube called George Brett has a Story to Tell. It is great, you need to check it out. (click here to watch). It is really funny. He is telling a story about shitting his pants.

The Gauntlet: I will have to watch that, I love a good pants shitting story. Have you had any pants shitting incidents while on the road?

JB: I can honestly say I have not and I am glad to say that. Ever since I have grown up, that hasn’t been an issue.

The Gauntlet: What about the rest of the band?

JB: I can speak for the guys in the band. We have had some incidents with the crew members though. No one in the immediate band though. We have had a bunch of emergency pullovers where someone has to go right then and there.

The Gauntlet: Shocked to hear adults need emergency pullovers.

JB: We tried to shoot some footage of our merch guy in a similar circumstance, but he was furious and wouldn’t have it.

The Gauntlet: The band leaves for Europe soon right?

JB: Right, we have some festivals out there. We also have like 5 or 6 headline club shows and then some support shows as well. For the most part, we are there for some big festivals.

The Gauntlet: Will you be playing a lot of new material?

JB: The album isn’t out over there yet so we will only be playing 2 new songs. We will be posting a new song on our myspace page while we are out there. The other song we will be playing was released in April. I don’t think people really enjoy listening to songs at shows they have never heard before. I know I don’t. You just want to hear stuff you know and enjoy it.

The Gauntlet: When you get back from Europe, you have a US tour.

JB: I am really looking forward to that tour. I love touring the states.

The Gauntlet: You recorded the album with Jason Seucof.

JB: He is an interesting character. He is very different than anyone else we have worked with before. He is extremely A.D.D. and a zany guy. There was a little bit of friction initially as we came in extremely prepared to bang this thing out and he was very chill and slow moving. He was taking lots of breaks and starting late in the day and all this drove us nuts. That is just the way he works. Once we accepted that, it went super smooth and we are happy the way things came out. We really like the guy, it was just the initial shock of it all. Good production is good production.

The Gauntlet: Weren’t you thinking of using Suecof for the last album?

JB: Yes, we ended up with Tue Madsen though. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to work with Jason [Suecof], our A&R over at Tooth and Nail got us really amped on Tue. I think there were also scheduling issues and we would have had to push back the record as well. Tue also came to us so we got to work with him in Nashville.

The Gauntlet: The new album sounds like you guys were more focused.

JB: We are two years older than when we did the last one. In the past, we were more focused on being as brutal as possible. I still think this album is heavy, but there are more clean guitar parts and slower moments; a little bit of chill before getting back into the heavy stuff. There is way more of a dynamic range than anything we have done before as we are more comfortable experimenting with different things that we wouldn’t have done in the past.

The Gauntlet: In the past, did you feel you had to be brutal with your sound?

JB: I think that is what we wanted to be doing. We got more into metal with our sophomore album. We just got into a lot of different stuff over the last couple years and wanted to change things up a little bit. We are much more diverse and have more of a dynamic sound now. We are still brutal, we just have more chillness now. Hopefully people will be stoked on it, we like it. It is a little scary changing the formula that has worked so well for the band. I guarantee there will be comments about this change. Out of like 25 comments, 1 kid will post that we suck and haven’t been good since 2005.

The Gauntlet: I love those kids. They are the ones that just follow the fad and don’t grow with bands.

JB: Exactly. I hope this album hits home with the diehards and brings in a lot of new people. I am confident that our old fans will think Constellations is a cool record.

The Gauntlet: What about a video?

JB: We just shot one for a song called “Meddler.” I hope it will be ready to come out around the release of the record. I haven’t heard any official word on how long it will take to get together. We just shot the performance stuff, but there are still more scenes that need to be shot. We want the video to be really dreamy and surreal and more themed to the album artwork than the lyrical content of the song. It is so hard to do anything remotely original in a metal video with just 3-4 minutes. It will have some really cool performance shots and more atmospheric and silhouette figures.




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Tags:  August Burns Red, Jason Suecof , JB Brubaker, interviews

Jason Fisher    June 05, 2009