Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Hail the Villian

Villains invade from the north; Live-Metal corners ringleader

An interview with Hail the Villain’s Bryan Crouch

“I’m from Live-Metal,” Greg Maki introduces himself, sitting down on a curb behind a small concert venue called Jaxx in Springfield, Va.

“I am from hard rock,” replies Bryan Crouch, vocalist of Hail the Villain, a band out of Canada whose debut album, Population: Declining, will receive a U.S. release June 8, 2010, via Roadrunner Records, as he takes a seat on the curb next to Greg.

Musically, Hail the Villain doesn’t break any new ground, and that was never the mission anyway. What the group offers, though, is more than music—an intricate, interactive website; animated music videos; a comic book they would love to see become a movie; and, in Crouch, a wildly energetic frontman who commands the stage, easily winning over crowds to whom he is a stranger. The crowds will get much larger this summer, when Hail the Villain takes part in the first-ever Uproar tour, featuring Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold, Stone Sour, HellYeah and others.

At a stop on the band's tour with Sevendust, Crouch and Maki sat down outside of Jaxx for a talk about his musical roots, the band’s origin and the story behind Population: Declining.

Live-Metal.net: Well, you’re out on tour with Sevendust. How’s it going so far?

Bryan Crouch: Probably the best time I’ve had playing music. These guys have been nothing but massive supporters of everything we do—wearing our T-shirts to standing onstage watching our sets. They’ve been awesome, super-friendly guys, and we’re learning a ton of things about playing music. It’s fantastic.

I know you’re from Canada. Have you done much touring here in the United States before this?

Once before, with CKY. We kind of stayed to the coast, and we went down to the west coast mainly and found very different crowds. This is sold-out crowds pretty much every single night. Unbelievable.

Floored more than anything. Surprised that we got an offer, and surprised that we actually got it. It’s gonna be killer. So far, they’ve only announced like nine bands on it, and if that’s the tour, that’s just amazing. That’s a lot of support and a great opportunity to get out there.

There have been the big metal festivals, but I don’t remember one more along the hard rock type of vein like that.

Yeah, I think Lollapalooza back in the ‘90s would’ve been the closest thing to that, and with that dying out and Taste of Chaos kind of covered more of the emo and screamo genres—I’ve always just loved rock ‘n’ roll. I would’ve loved to have gone to a festival like this when I was younger and watch these bands.

Mainly, bands like Guns N’ Roses. I’m into frontmen. I like watching a Steve Tyler, a Billy Joe Armstrong, Jacoby from Papa Roach. I like guys that want to entertain and have an amazing relationship with their fans. For me, it’s more that than it is the music. But if it was music, it is the GNR sound, just good rock ‘n’ roll. For other guys in the band, [guitarist] Joe [Stamp] is more into new metal. I’m also a lot into punk rock. I love stuff like Circle Jerks and Bad Religion and some So-Cal bands. Yeah, a big spectrum of bands.

When did you go from just being a fan of music to saying, “This is what I want to do”?

Right away. When I was in high school, I was practicing being a frontman in front of a mirror with Christmas lights. I couldn’t even play and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew that that was what I wanted to do, for sure. And it’s always been a dream to play music for a living.

I did a solo record. I dropped out of college. My parents gave me a loan or whatever, and I kind of snuck away ‘cause I was living on my own, and made a record instead and didn’t say anything. Next thing you know, I called my bass player [Chad Taylor]. I’ve known him since kindergarten. We’d been in bands together through high school. I said to him, “Do you want to have a listen and see what you think?” He was all on board right away. I went to a bar and met Joe ‘cause we had the same shoes on. We were like, “Let’s start a band.” That’s basically how it happened, really. And he brought [drummer] Drew [Dockrill] into the band. We’ve been the same four guys for the last six years.

I’ve done some research or whatever, looking around the website and stuff. At what point did this concept come in? Was it for this album or did you always see the artwork and the story?

This’ll be crazy and if you print this, it might look nuts. But I always see colors when I listen to music. So certain songs, like “Take Back the Fear,” remind me of primary colors—I see red, blue and yellow. It only relates in the sense of I think music is a visual thing; it’s a visual medium no matter what. For us, we were just sick of generic CD covers and stupid logos and things like that. We wanted to break out of that and make something that was a little bit more sensational. The comic book idea just came about by making a record, and one stupid idea led to, let’s make comic books for each episode, making each song an episode. And then, let’s take that idea and make a movie. That was just retarded, and then we found out really quick, oh, a million dollars just to make one episode was pretty crazy. So we ended up getting in touch with Rune [Entertainment] when we signed with Warner and Roadrunner. They were the company that made this all happen for us.

Oh yeah. We wrote the story, we wrote the movie to the record while we were still mixing it. So we were in Vancouver mixing the record, and we just started writing and we started creating these characters, and these characters started to take a life of their own. They started to become part of us. I was asked the other day about the lead character, Drake, does he have a lot to do with you? And I would say, yeah, a lot of his inner ghosts and demons and stuff that he does has a lot of reference to my life.

If you don’t want to give it away, that’s OK, but could you give kind of a basic idea of what the story is?

Yeah. The best way to learn about it is to search around the website. That’s hands-down one of the coolest websites I’ve ever seen for a band, and it really lets you search around that scene where Drake gets hit by the car. It’s a story of a lot of betrayal, and it’s a story of the lead character, Drake, and taking from things like Spawn and Watchmen and even Chronicles of Riddick, where there is a dark type of underworld, there is no heaven, there is no hell, when you die these parallel universes kind of run and it all comes down to Sire, the main villain, his daughter is sleeping with Drake to have a baby. You’ll see that in the first video. That was her job, to get pregnant to kind of create the supervillain, which is what we were looking for.

That’s really cool. I don’t really know of many other bands doing anything like that right now.

Yeah, Pink Floyd did The Wall, which was kind of one of those things. But that’s fucked up and if you’re jacked on acid, it makes sense. But if you’re not, then it makes no sense. For us, we wanted to do something that you could just smoke a joint to and have a lot of fun with.

Funny enough, we picked it out of thin air because we had a radio interview and we had to change the name. It was a big radio station in Vancouver, C-FOX, and we had to change it. We kind of just went with that. That was during the mix, too, and that’s when I think the whole idea for the comic books—everything kind of relates. The only thing that never touched was the songs. The songs just were creepy and eerie on their own. They didn’t really need any help into that direction. They kind of fed the fuel for the name and everything else.

What is the songwriting process like with you guys? Do you take the lead or is everyone involved?

Completely democratic. Joe usually starts with a riff, and then we bitch and complain, and we listen to him write 70 riffs in a night and we sort through the greatest moments We trim all of the fat in songwriting. We’re not a band to stick out breakdowns and all this type of stuff that’s really popular in music today. We’re very interested in putting the best parts into the song, leaving all the chunk and fat out. Maybe we’ll get a little bit more into that as we go along into our career, but right now, we like to just have a straight-up hard rock sound.

This whole idea, with the story and all, do you want to continue doing that in the future?

I would say no, at this time. I think it’s got to be a bigger, better, smarter, stupider idea. I think that if people predict that we’re gonna be a band that relies on these characters, it would be really stupid. I think what would be the coolest thing is if Rune Entertainment does get a production deal with somebody to take these characters and make the movie on their own, where we still have the input, obviously. But we’d leave it as far as another record goes and come up with a new thing. And I’m sure it will be something stupid that our record company will look at us, going, “Really?” And for us, it’ll be awesome because that’s the great relationship we’ve had with both Warner and Roadrunner. It’s full support.

The smartest thing we ever did was never shop. We never looked for a record company, agent or management company. We just made this record in a barn and thought, “This is our last chance. We’re just gonna try. We’ll see what happens.” Literally, within weeks they started calling. Then I knew that it isn’t about making up press kits and EPKs and trying to surprise record companies. It’s about putting together a good record that you feel solid with and you believe in, and they’ll come. If they see dollars and cents, they’re going to find it. And if not, then you probably shouldn’t be on a label anyway, right?

I’m sure you see all kinds of things on tour. Anything really crazy happen out here yet?

Well, no, because we’ve been out for only a little bit. But the craziest stuff has just been the surprise, whether it’s [Sevendust singer] Lajon [Witherspoon] watching us onstage or whether it’s Papa Roach coming up to us. We played a festival with them in South Carolina and then we met up with them in Florida, and he took the time to come over while we were eating dinner and tell us how awesome he thought our set was and called us “snake venom.” He said we were like snake venom onstage or something. I was like, that’s really cool. That’s one of those things you’re really floored with.

For me, the strangest night was in Houma, Louisiana, and we played in front of the crowd and we were the first of four. I played in front of a crowd that just stood there in silence watching. I knew we were doing something right—I knew in my ears it sounded good—but I just didn’t know what the fuck was wrong. We got off stage and it was like the roof blew off and all these people came crashing to the merch booth. I was like, none of this makes sense. Normally, I’m watching people have fun and go crazy, and this crowd was kind of, “What the fuck am I watching?” That was probably the craziest thing I’ve seen so far.

But I’d have to say that the Southerners in the United States are some of the greatest people I’ve met in the country. I’m really liking this east, southern side. I really love it. It’s just been great people. They introduce themselves before they even know who you are. Just like, “How ya doing? Welcome.” It feels good.

I think that’s all the questions I have for you right now. Anything you want to add?

No, man, I just really appreciate your time, and thank you very much for finding us and doing the interview.