Never Sleep Again Tour awakens Montreal

Two of Victory Records most successful screamo bands were in town last week to play a show at the Spectrum. Ontario five-piece Silverstein has already sold more than a 100 000 copies of their sophomore release Discovering The Waterfront which came out in August, and the Ohio quintet Hawthorne Heights have been headlining the last couple of tours they’ve been on. Unfortunately, something tragic happened recently on the tour. One of the openers, Bayside, were involved in a road accident at the end of October which resulted in the death of their drummer. Though the tour was stopped for a little while, the bands have decided to continue playing but have evidently all been affected by the accident. Both Hawthorne Heights’ drummer Eron Bucciarelli and Silverstein’s drummer Paul Koehler took some time to chat with The Concordian the afternoon of the show.

HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS

The Concordian: You guys re-issued your record recently with a bunch of bonus material and earlier stuff. How does it feel when you listen back to what you guys used to do?

Bucciarelli: It’s kind of like, “wow, I can’t believe that the label was willing to take a chance on us.” When you look at where we were before, you become more grateful for where we are and that we got signed. Because if I were to see us, a band like us, where we were when we first started, I might not even give them a second listen. Obviously you can see that you’ve come a long way.

The Concordian: You guys are releasing a DVD early next year. Why did you want to do that?

Bucciarelli: It’s sort of just to generate hype for our next record. It has a lot of footage from this tour and Warped tour on it; it’s sort of the second piece of the puzzle where the DVD left off on our re-issue, and it’s a continuation of our growth. We play a couple of new songs live that are going to be on our next album, so it gives people a quick taste of what the new stuff is going to sound like.

The Concordian: Talking about that new stuff, how have you guys changed since your first record?

Bucciarelli: I think that obviously we are more mature songwriters and as people. I think the biggest change is that we were actually able to plan out the songs; we weren’t as rushed for this album as we were for the first album. I know that a lot of people say that the second album is always way more rushed than the first because there is no timelines before you get signed, but for us it was the opposite. When we initially got signed, we had a month to finish writing songs for our album. We had to write half of an album in a month and get ready to go record. This time, we started writing in January so we’ve had eight months of preparation. The biggest thing that fans might notice on our new stuff is that the transitions between parts of songs are a lot smoother but we’re not pulling any punches. There’s no ska song on this album [laughs]. It sounds like Hawthorne Heights, but it’s just a better version of Hawthorne Heights.

The Concordian: You guys have three guitarists in the band and have a lot of guitar layering in your songs. Is that something that separates you guys from other bands?

Bucciarelli: It adds to the fullness of our sound, especially live. I think that because a lot of bands will do a lot of overdubs in the studio, once they play live, they are not able to pull a lot of those parts off because they only have one or two guitar players, if you were to go watch AFI live and then you go listen to their record, you’ll notice that there are parts on the record that are missing live because they only have one guitar player so they can’t pull it all off. So with us, we are able to pull that stuff off, because there are three guitar players.

The Concordian: I have to talk to you about the recent tragic events that happened to one of the bands currently on tour with you. As the headliners of this tour, what have you done to help Bayside out?

Bucciarelli: We had a moment of silence for Bayside before Anthony and Jack came back out. Just because they had an accident, they didn’t stop being a band, so we wanted to make sure that their merchandise was still available for kids to buy. We and Silverstein are donating portions of our guarantee to them, and even when Bayside wasn’t out on the tour, they were still getting their full guarantee every night. For most bands, touring is their primary income. Some people think we’re a big band because we are on MTV or Fuse or MuchMusic, but really, our primary income is still touring. If you are not on the road touring, you are not making any money. So for Bayside to have such a tragic accident and tragic loss and to not be making any money would have really hurt them. We wanted to do everything we could to help them still have some income coming in and let them get back on their feet and let them play as a full band whenever they are ready.

The Concordian: How has this changed you?

Bucciarelli: It really makes you appreciate what you have right now and how fortunate we all are and how fragile life actually is. Not a day goes by that I don’t tell my wife that I love her now because you never know what can happen the next day. One of us can be in an accident and no longer be here. It really makes you appreciate what you have a lot more.

SILVERSTEIN

The Concordian: When we spoke back in April, you said that one of your goals with this new record was to make more of an indent in Canada. Do you think you’ve achieved this goal?

Koehler: Yeah. So far we have received a lot of video play for our video off of this record, our sales have way surpassed the first record in Canada and the touring has really increased and the shows have been out of hand; we’ve been able to sell out clubs nationwide in the country. So far there’s been great development and there’s a lot of stuff planed for next year to continue that and hopefully take it over the top.

The Concordian: There are so many emo and screamo bands out there right now, do you think the genre’s been overdone?

Koehler: It always happens. It’s like when punk got really big, you could go to a local show and every little band in every little town across North America was playing punk music. There’s definitely a lot of bands that are trying to do it, but it’s cool that everyone’s embracing it and has had some success on some level with this kind of music. It’s great for us because of the timing, it just happened to work out in our favour, so we’re really fortunate about that.

The Concordian: The music industry is constantly dying and rebirthing, so what if this style of music disappears? What will Silverstein do?

Koehler: I think that it’s almost impossible for it to happen at this point, and it’s mostly because there’s bands like ourselves who have two albums out right now, so we already have a fan base. Even if every new band of this style is rejected, we’ve already proven ourselves; we’ve already built something so we could still go on. We maybe wouldn’t be called an emo band, maybe we’d be just called Silverstein. We don’t want to be a part of a genre, we just want to make our own music because that’s going to create a life-long career and will be more lasting for us.

The Concordian: Do you think that’s what’s going to keep you relevant?

Koehler: Yeah. With every record we are going to take baby steps to try something new but we are not going to do anything drastic. We are going to work with our fans and work with what’s going on and make it the best that we can.

The Concordian: How have you changed since you found out about Bayside’s accident? What did you learn from that experience?

Koehler: I think, and again I speak for everybody, it changed everybody in our band. Personally for me, it made me see two things. I can be one hundred percent grateful at all times to be out here playing music because some people that even wanted to don’t get the chance, people don’t make it. I’m fortunate enough to be here so I can’t take it for granted; I have to appreciate it as much as possible. The second thing is that life is too short and you’ve got to live every moment to the fullest. Every night, even if you are not feeling it some nights, I have a totally different vision. Even if I am not feeling it I will go out there and play my heart out because I am given the opportunity and it motivates you to push yourself and enjoy everything that is going on.

The Concordian: Does that make you more scared now to go out on tour in a van?

Koehler: We’re actually on a bus on this tour but it was close that we were going to be in a van. There were a lot of debates about what we were going to do but one of the reasons why we didn’t want to was because there was going to be bad weather and I didn’t want to be in a van. If I were in a van, I would have done the same drive and who knows what would have happened to us. In fact, I’ve done that drive in previous tours and I’ve been in a freak storm in Wyoming, so I know what it’s like. It’s something we were easily scared of. From now on, I definitely don’t want to do a van tour, and hopefully we won’t have to. If we do, we are going to be as careful as we can. I am really hoping, you know there are so many young bands out there and so many bands that have to travel in vans, so I hope that this lets them know that if you see bad weather or that the road is slippery, pull over. You can get a hotel; you can spend the money even if you don’t have it because life is more important than any money that you can spend.

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