Ten years is a long time to be a band. Having just celebrated their anniversary, veteran punks Alkaline Trio are still rocking as hard as ever, despite broken arms and wrists, a split with their label, a Bush re-election and a handful of side projects – and that’s just the last couple of years. Before jetting off to Chicago to begin working on the band’s upcoming album, lead singer/guitarist Matt Skiba took a few minutes to chat with us via phone from his home in sunny L.A. and give us a class on time management, marketing, and making a positive impact.
You’ve released a compilation/DVD called Remains last January. I heard you’re about to go into the studio to record your upcoming album.
We are. We’re working on it, and we ended up pushing back the recording a little bit to give ourselves some more time to write. We’ve got a lot of new songs, and we’ll write a few more before we go. We’ll be in the studio until August.
Last summer you did a tour where you played a lot of old songs, going as far back as Goddammit. At the time you said a lot of those older influences may end up on the new record, just because you played much of the old material.
Yeah, it seemed like it was going to be that way, and then the more we started working on the record, [the more we realized] it’s going to be a more mature record. There will definitely be elements of the older stuff, since we spent so much time playing it recently.
So what’s it going to sound like?
It’s hard to say. We don’t really know until we get into the studio. We just have some very rough sketches of songs right now. But once we get into the studio, that’s when things really start to take shape. I’d assume it’d be due two or three months after August, or early next year.
Your last record, Crimson, was released in May 2005. It’s been over two years since you released a record that’ll actually feature new material. How has that been working in terms of a marketing strategy?
Well, the DVD is new material. We like to have something new to offer with each release; we don’t like to re-package the same thing. With the DVD, the idea was just having everything in one neat little package. [ed. note: Remains features live and behind-the-scene footage, as well as all of the band’s music videos and songs that are considered rarities.] We’re still the kind of people who like to buy records. I think it’s fun to have something to hold in your hand and read rather than look at on a computer screen or have in your iPod. I definitely like having all that technology, but I also love going to the record store. To us it’s new material and marketing-wise, I don’t really know how it’s done, but people seem to like it, so that’s all we’re really concerned with.
In the past you’ve contributed to causes like the Plea for Peace and Rock Against Bush records, the PunkVoter tour, and you personally are active on Peta.com. Yet Alkaline Trio isn’t exactly a militant band in any shape or form.
We love to use our opportunities to do the right thing when we can. I mean, playing Rock Against Bush wasn’t a completely selfless act. We made money, but we also felt like we were contributing, or at the very least offering a different point of view to people who might not normally think about how important it is that they be involved with voting, which is something really easy to do. But we felt like we could recruit a lot of people to vote against Bush, and I think we made a difference. We love what we do anyway, and then we do it to be able to speak out against something we think is wrong, and speak up for something we think is right.
But we don’t write songs about it. I have a fear of coming out and sounding really trite and corny, singing about the president and the government and stuff. It’s like saying that Hitler sucks. Well, no kidding! It’s kind of redundant.
Let’s talk about your other band, Heavens, which is signed to Epitaph.
I play in a band called Heavens, which just has this sort of post-punk feel to it. Danny (Andriano, bassist) has The Falcon; they seem to have alternating members. Brendan Kelly and other guys from The Lawrence Arms are also in it.
How do you work things out, schedule-wise?
We just happen to have time for it. We didn’t set out saying, “OK, we have to make time to do these side projects,” we just finished a record, and while we were waiting for it to come out, we worked on our own things. Scheduling-wise, I think it was just meant to be.
You have a song that says “God bless catastrophe,” which came out after you broke your arm and wrist while skateboarding. That’s ironic.
Actually, it came out before that happened. So it’s sort of a self-taught prophecy.
Do you still stand by those words?
Oh yeah! I mean, not in terms of actual broken arms or anything, but I do like that line. God bless catastrophe!
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