Ahead of the Soundwave tour in March 2014, Greg Puciatio, lead singer of The Dillinger Escape Plan talks to AU review reporter John Goodridge about life on the road and behind the scenes of the making of their latest album.
Hey Greg how’s it going?
John! What’s up man? How are you?
Yeah good thanks. You guys back in the States at the moment?
Yeah I’m in LA now, running through a bunch of these things.
Just looking at your tour schedule it looks like you spent most of last year travelling round the US and Europe.
Yeah we were in Europe for a bit there. We were in Europe for two months. We got back in the middle of November and we’ve been home since but we’ve had enough time off now I’m starting to itch. I wanna start playing some shows.
So how do you cope on tour? What do you do to manage the different days in different cities?
Oh man, that’s a tough question. There’s no easy answer man. Like everyone’s got their own thing. You find a way to just pass the time. I really don’t know how to say it. I guess just like any other job you find ways to compartmentalise parts of the day. I tend to sleep most of the day and wake up really late. Like a lot of times on tour I’ll get up at 7pm and stay up until nine or ten in the morning. I like that because everyone goes to bed around three or four and I’ll have four or five hours by myself in that period in the middle of the night until the sun comes up and I like it. I listen to a lot of music that I haven’t heard, write, try to keep in contact with people from home – make sure that you don’t completely lose touch with society, which is really easy to do. You know, you’re in this little cocoon, you’re kinda isolated from the world and it’s really easy to get to a place where you have no fucking idea what’s going on with life in the world except for your weird little travelling bus.
Yeah I can imagine that it would become like a little bubble in time and space.
Tours are the weirdest things when you start to do them for a very long time. It allows you to become very eccentric and you don’t have to really talk to many humans if you don’t want to, you don’t have to do much that you don’t want to do, your day is so weird compared to “normal” people’s days, you lose touch with people. You go on tour and come back and people have had kids. Your best friends don’t even live in the same city any more – shit like that. That’s the part that’s starting to become the weirdest , realising that the anchor on your normal life is kinda drifting at all times when you’re on tour, so when you come back nothing is the way it was when you left. You can go on tour, play fifty shows and when you come back your whole is drastically different to when you left.
So do you have highlights from the tour or does it all merge into one?
You know what makes that a little bit easer? Youtube. It kinda helps a little bit you watch a video of one of your shows and you go “Oh fuck yeah. I remember that! Oh yeah that was Sydney. I remember that”. When you’re on tour and you get to the point where you play like a hundred shows – we played like 120 shows or something like that in 2013 – so it gets like a complex blur. You remember little moments but you can’t necessarily remember what city it was in. A lot of times you don’t remember until you go back and you’re in wherever again and you’re like “Oh shit. This is where we were when that happened.” And then you realise it was like seven years ago. And you go “Fuck man I remember that show like it was yesterday.” It’s weird life.
Would you say you prefer the smaller club type shows or do you like the big stadium type shows?
I prefer the smaller clubs because there’s more of an immediacy of energy. It’s kinda more where we come from. We have a small energetic team. There’s nothing nothing like playing an enclosed room. Even if it’s a room of a hundred people or a thousand people, being in small room where the energy of the four walls and reach out and physically connect with people is a much different experience than feeling like you’re in a zoo or an aquarium which is what it can feel like when you’re on a festival. Some festivals are cool too, especially if there are bands that you haven’t hung out with in a long time. You check the lineup and go “oh shit, they’re gonna be here, I haven’t seen them in five years.” So you get to reconnect. Then the trick becomes: how do you connect with the audience when there are no walls around them and they’re thirty feet away from you? How do you manage to convey any emotion to them at all? The bad thing about spectating is that you feel like a zoo animal.
You played Soundwave in 2012 in Adelaide and I remember you jumped off stage into the pit and were like yelling into the audience. And that’s what make m think of that, that you’re a band that likes to connect with the audience.
There’s nothing like physical touch that breaks a wall between people. When someone gets physically touched it takes them out of their comfort zone – there’s something visceral, there’s something tangible happening that they’re a part of. They’re not just standing there. They’re not at the movies or the theatre. When you’re playing a festival it’s really easy to lose that and have it become a production. A lot of bands tend to treat festivals as if they’re sound-checking in front of a crowd. I want people to leave with something. I want them to feel like a connection was made. There’s no better way to make a connection than to physically break that barrier.
I actually took a photo of you singing right in the face of a guy in the crowd and to me that summed up the energy of the band.
Like I said, when you’re an inch away from someone there’s an actual direct line of communication happening.
You’ve been voted one of the greatest metal frontmen by Revolver magazine so having seen your performance I can see why.
That’s such a weird thing. That kind of stuff I don’t really know what to make of it you know. I try not to listen to much criticism of any kind, positive or negative. I mean it’s obviously amazing when somebody says something like that, but if you pay attention to it, it will corrupt you. The best thing is to follow your own instincts and not pay attention to too much of that kind of stuff, keep your head down, do what you do and not get too affected by praise or criticism really. There’s a lot of people out there who want to tell me I suck. If I wanted I could go read Youtube comments about how pitiful I was or something.
Your album One of us is the Killer which you released in 2013 has gotten really good reviews. You must be pretty proud of that album.
Yeah man! For personal reasons that album was a really pivotal record for us. When I think about our records in hindsight now it’s a little bit easier to say “Okay – this was like our adolescence and One of us is the Killer is kinda like a pivot point into adulthood.” That record was a massive changing point behind the scenes too. In a lot of ways people don’t really know about how our interpersonal relationships have grown over the last few years and it was kinda like by writing that record we were learning how to communicate again with each other in a way that was less protective and more open and I guess more honest and respectful of one another. You’re operating in a really aggressive fashion, which came out in the records, but it was also coming out internally as well. So like I said this record seems to be a whole interpersonal growth point for the band … It feels good for us saying “Okay that was the transition from adolescence into adulthood and now we’ve got another chapter ahead of us”
Is the recording process as brutal as the live performance?
I mean it’s gruelling man, that’s the thing. A live performance is very immediate, very spontaneous; it’s over in an hour. You let everything out in one burst. You don’t really have to think too much about it. But when you’re recording you have, for better or worse, the ability to look at every single second with as high powered a microscope, as you want. It allows you to go down a random hole of self-critical insanity.
It’s way heavier man. I mean playing a show is physically gruelling but mentally really invigorating, mentally cathartic and energising and you come out of it usually feeling like a relief. But the recording process you’re starting from nothing and reaching as far down in yourself as possible and trying to get things out and you’re trying to do that in tandem with other people and reach kinda something that you’re all happy with. There’s a lot of arguing and fighting along the way and a lot of self-realisation that might be uncomfortable to you. Especially when you’re writing lyrics and you’re “Fuck man! Where’s this stuff coming from? Why am I dealing with this? Why am I not dealing with this?” And you can’t look away from that.
Once you write it and put it in front of you, you have to deal with it. Like I said, going into this recording process there were relationships within the band that had really deteriorated and writing a record made us realise just how much they had deteriorated and we spent the better part of the whole touring cycle addressing those things, so artistically it achieved its purpose.
So the current line up is fairly stable at the moment?
Yeah man. This is the most behind-the-scenes stable that we’ve ever been. I mean even like the recording line up has been the same from Option Paralysis to One of Us is the Killer and that’s the first time that’s happened since Calculating Infinity and Miss Machine which was almost ten years ago now. We’ve experienced so many member changes. Ben and I are such strong personalities that within the band there’s been so much fighting along the way that we got to a point when we were writing this record that things were just so chaotic and now that we’ve kinda assessed that and not turned away from it and dealt with all these things that have been left unaddressed through the years. Like I said we’re in a pretty good place right now, and it’s good to know that we can move forward from this point.
Which other bands would you like to catch on the Soundwave tour when you’re down here?
Mastodon are gonna be there right? To be honest I haven’t seen too much of the line up yet. But that’s what kinda exciting about it when you get the line up. You go “Okay, these are the bands that I wanna see, these are the bands I’m already friends with.. “ You kinda hope you’re not playing at the same time as your friend’s band and the bands that you wanna see and that becomes the most exciting part of it – being able to check out a bunch of stuff that you want. It’s an opportunity to connect with all your friends and be exposed to a bunch of music in one day that you haven’t been exposed to yet. It’s the same for us as it is for the fans in the audience.
Thanks for taking the time today to chat to the AU review and I look foreword to seeing you in a couple of months.
Very good man – I’ll see you there.
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Don’t miss The Dillinger Escape Plan when they tour Australia as part of Soundwave 2014!
SOUNDWAVE FESTIVAL DATES & VENUES – FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014
SATURDAY 22 FEBRUARY – BRISBANE, RNA SHOWGROUNDS
SUNDAY 23 FEBRUARY – SYDNEY, OLYMPIC PARK
FRIDAY 28 FEBRUARY – MELBOURNE, FLEMINGTON RACECOURSE
SATURDAY 1 MARCH – ADELAIDE, BONYTHON PARK
MONDAY 3 MARCH – PERTH, CLAREMONT SHOWGROUNDS
TICKETS ON SALE NOW: http://soundwavefestival.com/
