June 2, 2008

Years of hard work finally is paying off for Droid. In 2007, the band’s self-titled debut album was the first release on Korn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer’s Emotional Syphon Recordings. They spent last summer on the Family Values tour and the fall on Korn’s Bitch We Have a Problem arena run. They have stayed on the road virtually nonstop since then, opening for the like of Ill Niño and Shadows Fall. It was on the last night of the two-week East Coast tour with Shadows Fall that vocalist James Buddy Eason sat down with Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki.


Live-Metal.net: This is the last show of the tour. How’s it going?

James Buddy Eason: Really good. The venues are pretty cool, the people. A lot of pretty cool kids that we’ve met on previous tours are coming in. We’re opening this tour actually, kinda got it last minute. We had a choice of sitting at home in Long Beach or going on tour. We’re like, “We’ll go on tour.” So a lot of people that we’ve met from previous tours—the Family Values Tour, the Bitch We Have a Problem Tour and we did a tour with Ill Niño—so now the fans are starting to really show up at the shows. So it’s pretty cool for us. Yeah, especially on the East Coast. We’ve hit the East Coast really hard.

Did you know these other bands before you went out?

No. Not at all. Showed up the first day—“Hey, how ya doing, man? Let’s go do it.”

Were you fans of them?

Oh yeah. Fans of all the bands, yeah. I’m a fan of people who pursue their dreams of playing music.

Is there a story behind your nickname?

That’s my real middle name. The story is I grew up in Florida. [laughs] That’s it right there. I grew up in the South—people don’t think that’s the South, but that’s the damn South right there—and all of a sudden you get names like Buddy. I don’t know if that’s a curse or a blessing. Some people like it, some people are like, “What? What the hell is that all about?”

So Emotional Syphon Recordings, the first band signed. Was it just as simple as you guys knew Munky and he liked the band?

The band has known him forever, pretty much. He taught the guitar player, Jamie [Teissere], how to play guitar when he was a kid. They’ve kinda kept in touch and been friends as Jamie grew up. Munky’s band, Korn, got giant and everything, and they were still really good friends and everything. He’s been watching our band evolve through almost 10 years now. It was where it needed to be and he just happened to catch the right show and he just happened to have left the office to sign his paperwork for his record label. In his own words, it was a no-brainer to him. He said, “I gotta do this,” and we were like, “We want you to do this.” To get a record deal and then have a record deal with a person who you know is gonna take care of you—it’s a family thing almost. Win-win-win.

Does any pressure come from being the first release on a brand new label?

Not from that, but there’s pressure just from releasing a record in general because there are a lot of people that don’t like it, a lot of people that like it, a lot of people are so-so, like, “Whatever, you’re not doing anything new, you’re not changing the world”—and all this good stuff. All we can do is write music, and a majority of people like it, so—

Yeah, it seems like it’s gotten a pretty positive reaction.

It’s getting more and more. It’s been out for about eight months now, the record has. Sirius Radio has been playing it a lot.

I haven’t heard the earlier Droid material, but from what I read it was more melodic.

I sang a lot more.

Yeah, so what inspired the change to where you are now?

We were playing music a lot and basically just evolved. I grew up listening to hardcore and metal and stuff like that through my whole life. We took a break, took a year off because I think we all just got burnt. We chased a record deal more than it chased us a long time ago and we did a lot of showcases for a lot of presidents of labels. It just wasn’t where it needed to be. Now it’s super heavy and now it’s there. I call it just going back to my roots and being true to who I really am, and now it’s where it is.

Who are some of those bands who influenced you?

Well, [pointing to Greg’s shirt] Mötley Crüe—who couldn’t be inspired by them as a kid? I’m a big Iron Maiden fan, Pantera fan obviously. I’m into bands like Gojira now, stuff like that. Metal in general. What’s so cool about it nowadays is there’s so many different kinds of metal bands. There’s so many metal bands that are unique in their own way that it makes it exciting again. It kinda got stagnant for a while, so now it’s like on fire.

You’ve gotten to do some pretty big tours already. What has been the best one so far?

Either Family Values or the Bitch We Have a Problem Tour. They were right after each other. We literally came home for two weeks, just enough time to wash my clothes and collect my thoughts. One was an outdoor festival tour and one was an indoor arena tour. I think I liked the indoor tour a lot better because you don’t really stand outside and sweat all day long, even though I like to go to festival shows. I think the Bitch We Have a Problem Tour—‘cause it was a smaller bill. It wasn’t like 20 bands on the bill. It was four bands, and HellYeah was one of the bands and one of my idols of all time plays drums in HellYeah [Vinnie Paul]. I mean, I look over on the side of the stage and he’s rockin’ out and I’m about to lose it. So it’s kind of a cool thing to meet your idols.

What have been some of your favorite places to play?

Favorite places? The East Coast. And at home in the L.A. area. Home’s always the best ‘cause it’s all your friends that haven’t seen you in a couple months that you’ve been on tour. But favorite show place? I don’t really have an exact spot. I really don’t. It’s probably anywhere. Where I haven’t played yet is my favorite place.

As long as you’re playing, right?

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Have you gone out of the country yet?

No. Well, we went to Canada.

Yeah, but overseas?

No, not yet.

Is that in the works?

I damn sure hope so. [laughs] Yeah, ‘cause a metal band, if you’re not over in Europe, you’re kind of defeating the whole purpose ‘cause there are big-time metal fans out there.

When you get free time out on the road, what kinds of things do you like to do?

Rest. [laughs] Every once in a while, I’ll watch TV in a hotel room and I get all excited ‘cause I don’t really get a chance to watch TV anymore. I don’t know. It’s lame. Watch movies. We started on this last tour before this, started going bowling every couple days just to release—you know, a band and you’ve got five guys in your band and we’re all strong-minded individuals, it gets exciting sometimes. So you have to go kinda release all that stress.

What about when you’re not on tour?

I’ve been skateboarding my whole life and now I really can’t do it as much. I mean, I can, but I risk a lot. When I’m at home, if I know we have a tour coming up in a couple weeks, I kinda take it easy ‘cause I like to skate cement parks and if I hurt myself, I could ruin the tour. If I’m on tour, I can’t even bring a skateboard anymore. It’s just like my one whole thing in my life I can’t do, but the thing I love the most. It’s really weird.

I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot of questions about [Deftones vocalist] Chino [Moreno] being on that song [“Vengeance Is Mine”]. How did that all happen?

It started off with my guitar player. It’s like friends of the family. You live in L.A. and you have different friends that end up becoming giant rock stars and they’re also awesome people. My guitar player asked him. This was before we had a record deal or anything. We were gonna do a demo of I think it was five songs, something like that. We were recording it and he just happened to be at his house and say, “Hey, do you want to sing on one of the songs?” And he’s like, “Sure, man, whatever, let’s do it.” How awesome is that, right? I already had the lyrics written for all the songs, pretty much, but we just gave him the blank four or five songs and said, “Hey, you pick the one you wanna work with us on.” And he picked one song and once I knew he picked that song, I wrote all the lyrics and everything to it. We kind of like freestyled at Christian [Olde Wolbers] from Fear Factory’s house. He’s a producer. He’s really good, actually. We kind of freestyled it in his studio out of nowhere and it was pretty cool. Came up with some different structures than I had, kept a lot of things I did have and completed the lyrics after that. All of a sudden, we got a record deal and we were like, “Hey, you still want to do it?” He was like, “Hell yeah, man.” We worked it all out and we went into the studio. It was probably like two, two and a half hours, and it was done. So it was really easy to work with Chino.

Who else is on your list of people you want to work with?

Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden. You wanna work with your idols from when you’re growing up as a kid. Anybody, really. I don’t really have certain people, other than like—I don’t know— Mötley Crüe. [laughs] I don’t know. Anybody.

Have you started working on any new material yet?

Yeah, we’re going home actually tomorrow or the next day and we’re heading back to Long Beach to start writing more. I have about 18 songs worth of lyrics written and structures and stuff like that for my part of the writing, so we’ll see what’s going on from there.

Is that how you guys usually work, like individually and then you come together?

Now. I think it’s gonna be different. It’s really weird ‘cause I usually get the songs. A couple guys work the songs out and then we come together and put it all together, make it make sense and then I would write lyrics to that. But this time I’m tour a lot and I get inspired by something pissing me off or something like that and I write lyrics. This time I’m gonna be able to put lyrics I already have to a song instead of having the song make me feel a certain way and then I write lyrics to the song. It’s gonna be interesting. I might need to scrap it all. I don’t know. I might be so used to my old way of doing it that I might be like, “What? What am I doing?”

Do you have a message you try to get across in your lyrics or does it just kind of vary from song to song?

Life. That’s it. That’s just it. It’s just releasing aggression. I don’t really sing love songs in metal. Some people do it and they do it really well. I can’t do it. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s metal. It’s not pillows and pretty things. It’s anger. I don’t know. For me it is, but who the hell am I? [laughs]

Do you have any long-term goals for the band?

Stay a band, make more records, get better and better, become a better musician and just evolve and never write the same record twice. That’s my goal. I want to have something that makes me happy at the end of the day but not think it’s the same thing over and over and over again, and burn yourself out and burn your fans out. I just want to be better. That’s all I want to be. Hopefully I can pull that off. [laughs]

Alright, I think that’s all the questions I have. Anything you want to add?

I don’t know. Take your balls out of your mom’s purse and listen to Droid. [laughs]

Related Links:
www.droidmusic.com - Official Site of Droid
www.myspace.com/droid - Official Myspace Page of Droid

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