Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Killswitch Engage

How do you spend your summer when you’re one of the biggest American metal bands? Why, you join a festival tour known for showcasing punk rock, of course. The unorthodox move has paid off, as metalheads have followed Killswitch Engage to the Warped Tour. Those who caught one of the early dates saw the brief return of Killswitch guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz to the stage before his lingering back troubles forced him to depart and the band to continue as a four-piece. At the tour’s stop at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki caught up with Killswitch Engage bassist Mike D’Antonio to discuss the Warped Tour, the special edition release of their latest album (available Aug. 28, 2007), post-Warped Tour plans and more.

Live-Metal: Well, I guess the obvious question is why did you guys, a metal band, decide to play the Warped Tour?

Mike D’Antonio: For something new, to try something different. We’ve done Ozzfest twice, and it went really well, but it’s kinda like playing to the same kids over and over and over and over. Which is fun, but it’s all about branching out, seeing what you can do. [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman had been on us for about three or four years, asking us to do this. He came up to our bus, hung out with us, told us the whole vibe of the thing. Finally, it came down to this year and like, “OK, let’s take the chance and try it out.” And it’s been going pretty awesome, a lot better than we thought. Being one of the few metal bands on the tour, you stand out dramatically, and our fans are coming to the shows and brutalizing people, so it’s been all right.

I read where [drummer] Justin [Foley] said you guys are the “sweaty, hairy, old dudes on the tour.” Do you feel like you stick out that much?

I don’t know if us, personally, do, but our fans do.

What do you do all day long here, aside from doing a couple interviews and then playing?

I’m a graphic designer, so I’m always on my laptop doing designs. Right now, I’m working on All That Remains, the re-release of their first record. I’m working on their DVD . I just finished some shirts for them. Killswitch is kind of a constant workload, always stuff, always new shirts I have to do and stuff like that. So just constantly busy. And PSP. [laughs]

Are there any bands here that you didn’t know before that you’ve been impressed by?

Didn’t know before, let’s see … Yeah, Mike V.’s band, the pro skater, he’s in a band called Revolution Mother, and they sound kind of like a mixture of Black Flag meets Kyuss with Fu Manchu thrown in. I really love that style. I’m a super stoner rock fan, so I like it a lot. They impressed me.

It’s awesome, but he’s still not really taking care of himself the way he should. This is his first tour back since January, and he already started doing all the old stuff that he used to do. You just can’t do that anymore. He’s gotta calm himself down. So right now he’s actually looking to get another MRI ‘cause he’s not sure if he can make it to the rest of the tour.

It was his second back surgery, and whenever there’s a back surgery, there’s chance of paralysis, there’s a chance of being in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. So going through it twice, every time he’s going to have some sort of surgery, his ratio’s gonna go down, down, down, down till he is going to be in a wheelchair. So we don’t want it to get as bad as it did in January at all. We will send him home right away. Right now, it’s just kind of a nervous, like, I hope he’s OK, I hope he’s feeling right. We’ve done everything we possibly could. We don’t let him carry anything besides his guitar. We gave him a back room in the bus where it just has this big bed so he can kinda stretch out ‘cause he’s a tall guy, he’s like six-four or something. The rest is up to him.

I’ve seen a lot of it, yes.

I think it’s coming out in a few weeks, maybe a month.

I did all the new graphics for it, which I guess that’s probably the most involved anyone can get besides Adam just mixing down some of those extra songs that didn’t make it on the record, making sure that the mastering is done properly. It’s like four songs—the “Holy Diver” cover, the wrestling song that we did for C.M. Punk and then two songs that didn’t make it on the record. Also, there’s a bonus DVD with three of the videos that came out on that record and three of the makings-of of those videos, the first being “My Curse,” the second is “Arms of Sorrow” and the third is “Holy Diver,” which we just shot a video for about a month or so back. All members of the band kinda take on personas and actually act in this one, so it’s kinda wacky and funny. I played a knight and I had to wear a suit of armor for 18 hours in 95-degree heat, so I was kinda like suffering from heat stroke a little bit.

No, nothing at all. Totally.

Well, Kerrang had written us a letter and they wanted to do a compilation with a couple of their magazines, and they just sent us a bunch of different songs. They’re like, “If you guys feel like covering one of these, we’d love to put you in the magazine doing the cover.” And it was a wide range. Even though they called it a metal compilation, it was like Bon Jovi, Poison, Faith No More, Weezer and then there was like Dio and Black Sabbath and Metallica and Anthrax and stuff. We immediately went to the Dio song. “We Rock” was the song they wanted us to do, but “Holy Diver” has always had a soft spot in our hearts. So we asked them if we could do that, they said yes and that’s how it came about.

Holy Diver

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They contacted us. Myself and Howard have always been huge, huge fans of WWE . Well, actually I was a huge fan of ECW back in the day and only got into WWE because all the ECW guys went over to WWE , and now they’re kinda leaving again. But it had always kinda been a dream of ours to do something with that. The one guy who does all the music there sent us kind of a demo, a rough demo, and he’s like, “We want you to do this song for Randy Orton. We’d like it to sound something like this.” We all listened to it all in the same room together and felt really terrible about doing a cover song of that song because it just sounded awful. It was the most atrocious thing I had ever heard in my entire life. It would’ve ruined the band if we had covered it exactly, for sure. So we kind of put on our own spin on it. The rest of the guys weren’t feeling it at all after they heard the demo, but in about an hour we came up with the version that we used, gave it to WWE , they used it for Randy Orton for one day. All the fans wrote in and said they didn’t want it for Randy Orton’s theme song, they wanted the old theme song back. So they put his old theme song back, then we thought our song was dead. We didn’t think anything was gonna happen with it. The next month, they used it as the Judgment Day pay-per-view song, and then about four months after that, C.M. Punk took it over as his theme song. We met up with him for the first time—Where was that? Arizona . And he interviewed us and hung out with us, and such a nice guy. So not a wrestling persona guy, like immediately came up to us, he’s like, “Hi, my name’s Phil.” We’re like, “Phil? Who’s Phil?” But he was really, really nice, got along with him really well. He said, you know, the songs that WWE gives you are usually pretty awful, and he was dreading listening to it, and he was pleasantly surprised and very happy that it was our song that he was given, ‘cause he wasn’t told what he had on the CD when they put it in. One interesting story that he told me was the first time that him and Randy Orton locked up in a ring after he started playing the song, Randy goes in his ear, “I want my song back!” [laughs] That’s kinda cool.

Yeah, he’s definitely one of the biggest stars they have in that group.

As Daylight Dies is still pretty fresh, but are you thinking about the next album yet?

Not really. We’ve talked about actually doing a next album. That’s like a huge step for us. We had actually decided to stop doing albums after End of Heartache, but it’s gonna continue.

Yes. We have houses to buy. I’m just kidding. No, I’m not.

No. Things are working well. Better than expected. We’d like to go out on top at some point, so you never know when the last Killswitch album’s gonna come out, but we are definitely doing another one.

After Warped Tour, we are going to do a Scandinavian tour. It’s gonna be like three or four weeks. We’re gonna do Russia for the first time. We’re really excited. Moscow and St. Petersburg . After that, Lamb of God tour in December, co-headlining. We’re really excited.

Yeah, in the U.S. And it might be like a December, quit for Christmas, come back out and do a January run, as well, with those guys. There is a little talk about maybe Suicidal Tendencies being on that tour, possibly Every Time I Die being on that tour. So it could be a big one.