Allele Interview

Hi Wally, How are you?
Hey, what’s going on?

Not much, where are you guys today?
We are east of Chicago on our way to Battlecreek, Michigan for Zombie Prom. It’s a festival that they put together.

You guys are on tour right now in support of your latest album titled Next to Parallel. Congratulations on the release. The album is incredible.
Thank you, that is nice to hear.

You have an amazing voice. That was the first thing that grabbed me. How long have you been singing.
Thank you, I started off singing to Lionel Richie back in the day. I sat there in the living room the first day I saw MTV air and I have been singing in the shower ever since. My mom is an amazing vocalist. She has the most amazing vocal control that I have ever seen in my life. She grew up around Egypt and she was really big into acting and music. She is an amazing writer. I picked up little things from her. It’s not like she ever showed me, I just kind of grew up watching. One day I said “I am going to start a band just like everybody else does.” I started off playing drums and my sister is the one who actually made me start singing. It was mainly around family and friends. My wife is the first one to get me to sing in front of anybody. We started dating and I told her I was starting a band. She looked in the local paper and found a band that was looking for a singer. She made me practice in front of her. I’m naturally shy, so it was really difficult to do. I got there and saw other musicians playing with me and it kind of took the focus off of me and I haven’t stopped ever since.

You had taken a break from the band Allele for a while. I’m sure that was a difficult decision to make. Did you feel that you needed time off to sort of regroup to be able to come back stronger?
We have had hundreds of questions of “why did I leave the band?” Everybody comes up with their own thing. It sucks, but it really came to this, it wasn’t that I needed a personal break and that I needed to go reach into my soul. I was just really sick and tired of the industry and what was happening. I was really tired of being around people that really didn’t care about music in every aspect and just cared about the forty-five minutes or hour and a half that we were on stage and that was it. As you know, there is a lot more to it. It takes every motor firing to keep the boat going. I left because I was just sick and tired of what was going on. Our last record was doing great, everything was going upward, it was positive in that aspect, the fans were great and everyone was picking up on it. I felt bad for the people that were following the band, but it just became too much to try and keep things floating. I actually wasn’t going to quit. I got in an argument with my then guitar player who is not with us now. We had just set up the 10 Year/Evans Blue tour and the week before we were supposed to leave, I just stayed home. An old friend went and sang. I think they lasted for a few months. I got the itch and let all that stuff go. We didn’t have a label or anything and had no intentions of getting a label because of the problems that you can encounter. We got together, wrote a really cool sounding record and if people like it that is awesome. If they don’t, then they don’t. That was really the all inclusive intent on this last record.

Were you still writing music during the break?
No, I mean every once in a while, but not really writing. I just turned everything off. I wasn’t online or doing anything for three years. Nothing. There was no communication hardly with anybody and I’m the guy that everyone always knows. It was me that communicates with everyone online and at shows I would actually sit with the merch person and hang out with everybody. I did a whole 180 and shut everything off. We started writing once I called everybody back up.

How long were you writing the songs for Next To Parallel?
A couple years, but it wasn’t two years of writing. We would write for one week in one month and then we wouldn’t get in a room together again for two to three months. If you culminate everything, it was maybe five months of writing. We had just got the music written. We played some shows and I was completely improving. We had no lyrics or any idea of what I was going to sing to the songs. Some bands will understand that singers will do that. I would just make things up, but while I’m doing that, I’m finding melodies and ideas that I kind of like and will remember. We got the music recorded and I flew out with Pete Charell from Trapt and did the vocals out there, but I had no vocals. I had thirteen days when I got there and in those thirteen days I wrote and produced every vocal while I was sitting there. There were times when I was actually reading off the laptop while I was tracking because I had just written the song. It was really stressful. I wouldn’t want to do it again, but it was cool. Everything vocally was literally written and recorded in a few days.

When you were writing these lyrics, were they inspired by things going on in your life at that time?
I like to think of friends and people I know and write from things of that nature. I’m not a self indulged person whatsoever. I’m as far from LSD (Lead Singer Disease) as you can get. I just look at a lot of things going on with my friends and family. My wife and my daughters are my new big inspiration. They have a lot to do with everything that I did. I think without them and without where I was at that particular moment, I could probably never pull that off again. A friend let me stay at his house for the entire thirteen days. I would wake up and their daughter would be playing dress up and singing out loud. That would normally be considered a non-conducive environment to write a record, but it seemed to work for me. I would drive down to the beach and the beach’s there in Aliso Viejo are just gorgeous. Being from Florida really blows when you go out to California. It was life, it was the landscape and that is how I wrote it. One song I wrote, I got pulled over by a cop because I was listening just to the music trying to get some ideas. I was in a rental car and he completely singled me out. He could tell I was in a rental car. He was like “You are not from around here are you?” I was like “Wow! Could you be any more of a ……..?” Anyways, it really kind of ticked me off, but it helped. It was a bunch of little elements, not any particular thing.

The first single off the album is titled “Let It Go.” I was watching the music video for it and it was awesome. Whose idea was it for the concept?
Thank you very much. It was my bass player and I. We kind of wanted to take that kind of American History X if you will kind of approach. My brother actually plays the big brother and a friend’s son plays the younger brother and that is his mom playing the mom. We have always been really message oriented when it comes to things. We really wanted to make an obvious story for a video. That is what the song is about and it really wasn’t that difficult. We had a bunch of different ideas but at the end of the day I think we were really happy with the idea and concept, especially on such a low budget. I think the media guys did a sick job pulling it off. We filmed the band performance part on my property and it was 113 degrees. That is why we all look like death while we are playing. You know you have to do it like twenty to thirty times. My hair is growing out and the same thing on our last video, it was right when my hair was growing out. My wife’s like “Your hair looks like crap, we have to do something with it.” She tried putting a straightener on it and she was like “Oh yeah, it looks cool.” Yeah, it looked cool until it started getting really hot and then it started looking like I was Chinese putting a toupee on. Whatever, it worked. My brother in law plays the killer and I think that my in-laws were really upset with me, having him portrayed like that, but I think he did an amazing job playing that part. It was a lot of fun. We shot it in three days. They are really long days but I was happy with it. We were on a tiny budget because that is all we were given by our label. We only had a few days because the company had to drive into Jacksonville to do it. We really wanted to do a video in Jacksonville because bands from Jacksonville never use Jacksonville when they do videos. We just wanted to get involved that way and keep it in our hometown.

I think that is really cool. This tour that you are on is nationwide. It is a really long tour. How long will you be out?
It could not wrap up any sweeter than with Sevendust, Eye Empire and Jannus on Thanksgiving eve. It will be so sick. November 23rd will be our last date and then we are going to take a break for a while. Maybe for a couple months because it is not cool being out on tour when it is zero degrees outside. It is such a long tour, if we were out for just a little spurt that would be one thing, but since we are going to pretty much cover every single base, we don’t want to burn people out. We will wait a couple months and then start doing a bunch of teardrops out of Florida.

So you'll be home for the holidays. What are the plans for 2012?
We have a lot of things in the works. We have a worldwide syndication deal that we just got with ESPN. They will be putting our stuff on game day, so people have probably already heard that stuff. We are going to really work on licensing the record like with video games. We used to do all that stuff before. We’ve got to do it in phases so that it is not so much at one time. We are going to try not to overwhelm ourselves because we have a lot of things we are dealing with. We want to get out, do this killer tour and let everyone know the band is back. We will take some time to push the licensing thing and then get back out on the road. We look forward to doing some ESPN events on the road and try and pop on some festivals. Our plan is to grab as many people as we can grab. That is any band’s goal really. We have been out a while, so I think we are a little more eager than normal to grasp as many people as we can this time.

Do you feel like it is harder now that you have come back? It seems like it is really hard to get people to hit the “like” button on Facebook anymore.
You know what is really funny? I’m not trying to bash or be that guy that once something gets popular, but listen, I can’t stand the whole Facebook thing being affiliated with a band. That crap, if I may, has seriously affected our booking because of the amount of likes we do not have. How pathetic has that gotten? People need to really take a step back and look at a band’s touring. People need to realize that they have the power to either keep bands alive touring or not. If people are going to continue to stay or start to stay home, stay online and that is their life for music, it will get to a point where you won’t see bands touring anymore. Who wants that? I think we are at a fine line right now. Get your butt off the computer, get out and go to a show. That is the message we are going to have to start telling people. I think everybody has noticed that bands do not tour as much anymore. It used to be six to seven straight months like we used to be. You will see Papa Roach out for four to five weeks. It’s like that’s it. I’m telling everybody that is the reason. People are shunning away from the live and they want to stay home and get on Facebook. It is crazy if people are going to let one single website shut down the rock touring industry. You can’t blame it on Facebook, we just have to be more proactive when it comes to that. It is so fun to be out, be at a venue or club, touch and sing. Nothing will ever replace that.

It’s the same thing when bands are shopping for a label. They will go to see how many “likes” you have. What happened to enjoying the music and not worrying about how many people have “liked” a band’s Facebook?
It used to be, when Myspace was gigantic, we had all the numbers you could ever want. We were #3 on Active Rock Radio and now it is like our band cannot get on the radio. I don’t know what it is. It is so ridiculous to me. It is all about the money. You have to throw ten times more than you had to five years ago or you have to have 700,000 likes on Facebook. It’s a joke to us and we are not saying that because we are at the bottom of the gene pool when it come to likes on Facebook, which we are because we have never really promoted it. In the last five weeks we did and it jumped up 1,000 likes from nothing that we had. We appreciate that from everyone. We are telling everyone, you want us to come tour, you want us to come to your town, which people do and we are so humbled and love it, but buyers and promoters are saying “They only have 1,500 likes on their Facebook page, so we are not going to book the band.” That is where it is at right now. On the road, we have played with a couple local bands that have 10-15,000 likes and they did not pull anymore than we did. It doesn’t make any sense to us at all. I think bands will start to voice out and the stage is a great place because people will listen. It is a great place to advise people of what is going on. In our world of touring, we need to start coming together and letting people know what is happening. I’ve actually started doing that. I have a personal campaign to let people know that they need to stop with this whole Facebook thing, they need to get off the couch and if you like the band, go watch them. The good thing is that ticket prices are coming down because of the economy. I think all of our shows are $5. Get off the couch, go watch a show and you will see the difference in the rock community because right now we are suffering. The strongest will survive. That is where we are at as musicians touring on the road. The good thing is I don’t drink when I am on stage, so everybody can tell it is not some drunk guy ranting on stage. It seems that at the last few shows people are listening, so we will see.

Thank you so much for the interview. I wish you all the best. Before I let you go would you like to add or say anything?
Absolutely, I’d like to thank you for taking the time and you are part of the reason that things get kept alive. We really appreciate it more than you know. You are part of the engine that keeps everything moving. To everyone listening, we appreciate you taking the time to listen as well. We hope to see you at a show and grab the record.