Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Seemless

May 27, 2007

Hold the sex and drugs—Seemless would rather have an extra helping of rock n’ roll. The music is what it’s all about for this Massachusetts-based band, which solidified its lineup in 2002 when former Killswitch Engage vocalist Jesse Leach entered the fold. Though it was far from their intention at the outset, the last year has seen the band crisscrossing the United States multiple times in support of their second album, What Have We Become, a powerful collection of passionate songs fueled by Leach’s soulful singing. When they recently stopped at Jaxx in Springfield, Va., while supporting Soil on their “True Rock” tour, which also featured Ankla and Ligion, Leach and drummer Derek Kerswill sat down with Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki to discuss the band’s origins, the new album, the struggle to succeed in today’s uncertain music business and more.

Derek Kerswill: It’s cool, man.

Derek: Yeah. It’s been a rough couple weeks.

Jesse Leach: People have expectations, and sometimes you’re expectations aren’t always met. That’s probably the best way to say it.

Derek: That’s the diplomatic answer. Hey, everybody’s really nice.

Jesse: We all get along really well, and that’s that.

Derek: Cool. Next question.

Derek: Fu Manchu.

Jesse: That was good.

Derek: Freakin’ amazing. It was a great show. Fu Manchu is collectively one of our favorite bands. I’ve been following those dudes for 10 years. It was almost like a dream come true for me to be on the road with them and to watch them every night and now to be friends.

Jesse: Yeah, they’re really nice guys.

Derek: It was a blessing.

Jesse: They’re really laid back.

Derek: And just so you know, there’s a misconception of those guys. None of them are stoners. They are just mellow dudes. Well, [Scott] Reeder’s not. He’s ADD guy, but he’s amazing. They’re super great guys. That tour was awesome.

Last year, you did the tour with In Flames and Lacuna Coil. How did you guys go over with that audience?

Jesse: We did well.

Derek: We were talking, and in retrospect, that’s been the best tour we’ve done. And not only that, there was so much mutual respect between In Flames, us and we toured with The Sword two times—that was the second tour we did with The Sword. And we are used to always being the odd man out, and Lacuna Coil, I think, was the odd man out on that one. Kids just loved us.

Jesse: Some nights we were a little, I don’t wanna say shocked, but surprised at the reception that we got from that tour.

Derek: Overwhelmed.

Jesse: And the In Flames guys, man, just so hospitable, wanting you to hang out with them. It’s cool. I really appreciate the bands like that on the road ‘cause not everyone’s like that.

Derek: They watched us every night. I mean, they’re fans. It was so humbling. I don’t know. I was just like, “Wow.”

Derek: This tour, you’ve gotta hand it to Soil, they’re fans of ours. They wanted us on this tour ‘cause a couple of them had wanted to see us. The same thing happened with Nonpoint. Nonpoint just really liked us. In Flames we got thrown into, but the guys ended up digging the stuff. The Trivium tour, well, it was what it was. It was cool, but—

Jesse: Different vibe.

Derek: Different vibe, totally. But, yeah, man, it’s just cool when you’re getting requested to come on the road because bands like you.

Jesse: Yeah, it’s cool to look over and see people from the headlining band supporting you and watching you play. It makes you feel good.

Jesse: [To Derek] You take it. You were there before me.

Derek: Basically, what happened was myself and Pete Cortese, who’s our guitar player who’s not actually on the road with us, him and I had written a record with another band called Medium, and we were getting ready to record it and we split with our singer. Things just weren’t going well at all, so we wanted to kinda revamp the lineup. We had basics for the foundation of the record we were gonna record. We kept them all and split, and then we said, “Hey, let’s take a little bit of time off and try to find somebody to take this to a new level.” I had two guys in mind, and Jesse had left Killswitch and we had a friend Jonah [Jenkins] from this band Only Living Witness, who is a cult favorite of all our friends, us as a band—huge, huge fans. And I said either we’re gonna get one of these guys or we’ll just call all our friends and put this record out ourselves and have each one of them sing on a song. The main thing was we just wanted to have fun again. We had had a lot of stress with this band, and in retrospect, looking back, Jesse had obviously had a lot of stress with the Killswitch situation. Everybody just wanted to do what we loved and not worry about anything more. We didn’t care about touring. We didn’t care about anything except creating music we wanted to create and appreciating what we were doing. I can remember when I sent [Jesse] a copy of the stuff with a letter. I said, “Dude, I have a wife, you have a wife. My family’s my priority. Please don’t worry about any high stress situation with this. Let’s just do this for fun.” And he called me, and he was like, “Dude, not only do I love this music, but that was the coolest letter I ever received.” And I was just being brutally honest.

Jesse: Well, the music blew me away, to be honest with you. It was exactly what I wanted to do, rock n’ roll.

Derek: Soul, this kid’s a soul singer, man. It killed me to hear him screaming all the time. I love when he uses it in a dynamic sense, but—

Jesse: It’s not who I am. I was raised on listening to the Allman Brothers and bands like that, so for me to go back to that, I mean, that’s the first stuff I fell in love with when I was a kid. So that just kind of came natural. I had never really tried to sing that way ‘cause I’ve always just been known as the screamer guy. Yeah, as far as a touring situation and a full-time band, I could never do it any other way.

Derek: So we got together, and I can remember—I’ve been telling this story a lot lately ‘cause for some reason the whole “How’d you get started?” thing has come up lately.

Jesse: Again. It’s resurged. [laughs]

Derek: It’s resurged, yeah. Man, I can remember being at our first rehearsal and just looking at each other with chills and [thinking], “This is so fun and fulfilling.” And I remember saying out loud, “Dudes, I don’t even care what we ever do.” We had no aspirations to tour. We never thought we’d tour.

Jesse: We just wanted to play on the weekends and have fun. You work hard all week, and you want to have fun on the weekend. That’s where we started.

Derek: When you think about it, it’s kinda crazy what the last year has brought us. But we’re still struggling, man. This isn’t easy at all, and we’re hurting.

Jesse: On a daily basis you miss your wife.

Derek: Yeah, that’s the hardest part.

Jesse: Yeah, I’d say that’s probably the main thing.

Derek: There’s some other downers, but there’s some other uppers. I just recently read an interview with Neil Fallon from Clutch—Clutch is one of my favorite bands—and they asked him, Hey, you guys have kind of had such an up and down ride between major labels, bumped, dropped, picked up, great records, critically-acclaimed records and critical failures. Did you ever feel like giving up? And he said, Man, if you go into the music business thinking you’re gonna succeed, you’re just doing the wrong thing. You have severe ups, the high highs and the severe low lows. But the balance is what’s most important, and I think we’re still learning that on a daily basis. But we keep each other in check. It’s been awesome, man. But that’s kinda how everything started. It was just the love of the music. That’s why I think we translate so well live. People see us and like, “Holy shit, this band loves to play!”

Jesse: Regardless of what you think in the audience, we’re up there—and I find this on shows that aren’t so great—we’ll turn it inward and look at each other and be like, “Dude, let’s just jam. Let’s just play.” And we’ll come off stage and people will be like, “Wow, you guys really played your asses off for 15 people.” We’re like, “Yeah, man.” What else are you gonna do? You drive 20 hours and you live for that half hour to 45 minutes on stage. You better like what you’re doing or why bother?

Derek: Oh, you did? Which one?

Derek: Oh, dude.

Jesse: Case in point right there.

Derek: That was the absolute worst show on the tour.

Jesse: Yeah, case in point right there, although I think I was a little angry that night, oops.

Derek: We drove 20 hours from Missouri to that show. Not only was it the ghetto of the ghetto—I was scared.

Jesse: Searchlight, helicopter, beatdown Rodney King-style.

Derek: And we got two songs cut. We were able to play four songs.

Jesse: To a crowd that, for the most part, could care less.

Derek: That was one of the biggest bumouts. That was one of those nights, I remember, we were like, “What are we doing?” I think we made that show still happen, and I think there was a lot of aggression.

Derek: That’s cool. Yeah, I’m never worried about how we sound, to be honest with you. We always throw it down. But there are situations sometimes that I think make it a brutal set or maybe make it, like, “Hey, man—“

Jesse: “Let’s just hang out.” [laughs]

Derek: “Let’s hang out, dude.” We contour to our emotional state, but it’s always 200 percent of whatever we have at that moment.

The first album was pretty much written before [Jesse] joined the band, right?

Jesse: Musically, yeah. There might’ve been a few things that I was there to hear, but, yeah, for the most part, I’d say that album was pretty much demoed before I joined.

Jesse: Oh, it was great, man. We had songs that we wrote and were able to play out for months before recording it, so they shaped into this beast. Sometimes you record an album and you play it out, you play it out, you play it out, and you’re like, “Oh, I kinda maybe would’ve done this better or I would’ve done that.” So we had songs like “Maintain” and “Jaded” that we played over and over again.

Derek: “In My Blood,” too. We had played that for a long time.

Jesse: And then a song like “Seven” and a song like “Things Fall Apart,” where a lot of that was on-the-spot energy between me going, “Hey, I want to try this, what do you guys think?” and them giving their opinion and it just happening in the studio. So I think that album’s a good example of half and half.

Derek: It was the most collaborative process that I’ve ever been involved in, in terms of music.

Jesse: It was great, man.

Derek: No one is any more invested in that record than anybody else. So it’s really cool.

Jesse: That’s why we’re out here touring, man. We listened to that album when it was done, and we were like, “We’ve gotta tour. We’ve gotta bring this to the people live.”

Derek: And our records are cool, but we are really old school. We don’t let any technology get in our way. Those things are tracked live. Dude, I did drums in a day, I think five songs, one take. Jesse was done in four days, tracking vocals. We were like, let’s just take this time and capture these moments and then move on. These moments are really important, but you don’t want to over-think them either. So it was cool to have that spontaneous aspect on some stuff but to have the solid foundation on a lot of the stuff before we even walked into the studio, so we could go, “Hey, I know what I’m doing.”

Jesse: Yeah, bang-bang-bang-bang, get it done. I also think that, all that being said, with all this touring, the new stuff we end up recording, you’re going to be hearing 100 percent where we are, and I can’t wait for it. We’ve grown so much, touring as a live band. It’s gonna really show on our new stuff. Our direction’s going to be a lot more focused.

One of the things I really like about the band is that the songs actually have substance, they’re really about things. What is the main message?

Jesse: Our lord and master Satan, crack, groupies. Stuff like that.

Derek: Occasionally, you sing about coke, but it depends how low you are at that moment ‘cause coke gives you that high.

Jesse: No, honestly, man, it’s really just about life. Period. My experience, the way I see the world, the way we see the world. A song like “Seven” was written by all of us. I was at a point where I was like, “Guys, write this with me. Help me write this stuff.” And “Things Fall Apart,” Derek gave me a couple lines. I was open to that, and, really, when we’re up there, sometimes I feel like we’re singing about sometimes even standing there in that moment. “In My Blood,” “Seven,” those are songs that I can sing and I’m literally talking to the audience at that moment.

Derek: “Parody.”

Jesse: “Parody,” oh, perfect example.

Jesse: It’s definitely rooted in—

Derek: It is inspired by a certain person.

Jesse: Yeah. I would say it’s more than one, but specifically, yes, one. But I think, in general, just people that we know or are acquainted with or see through the music business that start out one way and end up becoming everything that they stood against. And for us, it’s just like, “Man, how can you do that?” This life on the road does change you, but you only hope it changes people for the better. I was at a point where I was just like, “Man, we’ve gotta say something about this.”

Derek: I think that song, you can feel the disgust. We know a lot of people and we’re affiliated with a lot of people in this business and have been in a lot of bands—

Jesse: Or just been around.

Derek: Yeah. You could go play one festival and learn enough that’ll make you disgusted. Everything is just so typical, man, and we’re so atypical that bands are usually—

Jesse: They think we’re fake sometimes. We meet people that think we’re faking that we’re that nice, and we’re just like, “No, dude, this is really who we are.” Get the loose women away from us. Get the coke away from us. We’re not those people, and I think it’s important for people to see that. You go to a show and see a band play and you’re like, “Wow, these guys are amazing, rock n’ roll,” and then you go backstage and see the life they’re living behind the scenes and that’s when your eyes are opened. You’re like, “Wow, there’s a lot of crappy things going on backstage.”

Derek: We hear the word “refreshing” so much, and I’ve never said that about anything, so it’s kinda cool ‘cause I’m thankful that we kinda inspire people on a different level. And we’re sarcastic freaks, man.

Jesse: Behind closed doors in this van, people would be blushing.

Derek: They’d probably be mortified if they knew some of the stuff we say.

Jesse: But it’s a joke. [laughs]

Derek: We’ve gotta do something to amuse ourselves. A lot of times, we do shit to amuse ourselves hoping that people get it. And sometimes they do, and other times it’s just kinda like Andy Kaufman, like, “What do they mean?” I think some of the music is like that, too. We go over people’s heads sometimes.

Jesse: Live, if an audience is not being receptive, we’ll take one of a couple different routes. The other night, the crowd was just kind of not feeling it, so we started trading off solos and trying to get everyone really amped up. And at one point, people got really amped up, and I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Relax. Shhh. Calm down. It’s a rock n’ roll show.”

Jesse: Some people don’t get it, and other people are in tears laughing. That’s kind of who we are off stage. You never know if we’re joking or not. I’ll try to keep a straight face while saying something completely ridiculous.

Derek: We’re from the Northeast, too, and it’s a very cynical place.

Jesse. Bitter. Dark. Sarcastic. [laughs]

Derek: And we even feel out of place at home. We did this Fu Manchu tour and we got to Louisville , Kentucky , and the whole world opened up. We were all just in bliss. We got to Atlanta , and it was one of the greatest days of our life.

Jesse: People are really nice.

Derek: People are so genuine in the South, and we’re just not used to it.

Jesse: We really experienced Southern hospitality on that tour.

Derek: Yeah, and it fills our hearts.

Jesse: It’s like, why are we living in Northeast? Remind me again.

Derek: We were in Texas for five shows in six days, and it was one of the greatest times in my life. It’s incredible how different regions of this country are. Never mind other countries. That’s a whole other story. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Derek: I think this new album, there’s an element of desperation involved. Struggle and hope is the thematic foundation of a lot of what we do, but for the most part, we’re just trying to give something back to people that’s hopeful and positive, and that’s all there is to it. Between the mid-‘90s to now, there’s been so much negativity in music and in art in general and kids are just showered with negative imagery and sounds, everything. I don’t know, man. It’s so typical and just really beat right now. So we’re just trying to be real dudes making real music in really hopeless times.

Do you feel like you have a responsibility to put something positive out there?

Jesse: I think it’s just kind of who we are. Even if we weren’t out here playing music, in our own personal lives that’s who we would be.

[Ligion’s van drives by.]

Jesse: This is the great thing about tours like this: You make friends. These guys are fun.

Derek: And they wear makeup. They’re kinda gay.

Jesse: Which is also a really cool aspect of this particular tour. Every band’s different. Unfortunately, Ankla’s not here today.

Derek: Yeah, we’re huge fans. Dude, they are brothers. When we found out they were gonna be on this tour, it was like, “OK, at least those shows are going to be amazing.” And they’re coming here actually—

Derek: Yes, Monday, so they couldn’t play tonight, and we had no idea until yesterday. They’re one of my favorite metal bands. And they’re another band of genuine dudes, which is something we have not—

Jesse: No BS at all.

Derek: They had one guy in their band that ended up ODing on that last tour, and he had been hanging out with us too much and we were kinda like, “What the hell is this dude’s problem?” When this all went down, we all came together for them ‘cause we didn’t want to see them leave, and we ended up finding out he was the bad apple. We have this brethren and camaraderie now because of that. I’m glad that happened ‘cause we got to know them on such a deep level. I’m in touch with those dudes every two weeks since that Nonpoint tour almost a year ago. And then they ended up on this tour, too, and we were just so stoked. They’ve definitely made it so much easier. And then we met these guys Ligion. Forget their music—they’re definitely writing really cool stuff; it’s different from any of the other bands, like Killers meets Vast or something. It’s borderline theatrical, more poppy. They get out on stage, “Uh, yeah, we’re the boy band of the tour,” but it’s cool, too, and we just all came together when things weren’t so smooth. And the Soil guys are really cool, too.

Jesse: Yeah, real genuine people.

Derek: It’s been as cool as it can be. It’s just a real weird time in the business right now, man.

Jesse: For a lot of things.

Derek: For a lot of things. People are not buying CDs. Kids are able to go to YouTube and watch whatever band they want. They don’t even have to come out and see us. They don’t have to spend money on shows, they don’t have to spend money on music and we’re all struggling, man.

Jesse: I meet a lot of people who come to shows and they spend all their money on drinking.

Jesse: We’re trying to figure that out ourselves.

Derek: This is the first time in the history of the business that nobody knows where stuff’s going.

Jesse: We talk to people at labels, they’re all in the same boat. Nobody can really figure out what’s going on. People who were selling millions are selling thousands. People who were selling thousands are selling less than that. That’s where we are right now. There’s very few working bands that are feeling very successful. I think everybody’s feeling it right now.

Derek: I have always been the business side of whatever band I’m in. We have management and booking and stuff, but I’m still the liaison between the guys and them, and I started doing all the booking and management, and I’ve done that for every band I’ve ever been in. So I feel like I have pulse on a lot more than the guys might because I’ve dealt with the business side. And I always knew what was coming next in terms of what was blowing up musically, what was blowing up format-wise, what was blowing up web-wise on any level. And ask these guys, I have been pounding my head, I can’t sleep sometimes ‘cause I want to be on the forefront of something modern. I have a couple cool ideas I presented, but I’m not sure that they’re gonna be a sure-shot approach. But it’s definitely unconventional. The bottom line is stuff’s liquid right now. MP3s and YouTube are right there at any moment. It’s not a tangible product. It’s a liquid. It’s just there, and it’s gonna keep flowing. Stuff’s only going to become more available. So now, how do you generate income? And, I just feel like kids are so ADD these days ‘cause they’re fed so much information and they have so many options with frickin’ MySpace and all that crap that they’re inundated. They can’t concentrate on their favorite bands anymore.

Jesse: Or they just get an iPod filled with singles. So to go see a band live, why would they bother?

Derek: When they have one song from that band that their friend sent them on instant messenger for free. Or, “Hey, I’m gonna go to iTunes and listen to 30 seconds of every one of these songs. I liked that one, that one and that one.” “Things Fall Apart,” that is an epic song.

Jesse: Another thing we’re realizing is that we wrote an album. We didn’t go out and go, “Oh, this is our single.” This industry right now is so single-oriented. Everyone’s attention span has shortened, and most singles now are—what—three minutes something long. Go back 10 years before that, you could have a five-minute simple. It happened. Stone Temple Pilots, Tool, case in point—creative bands that were able to make it, and now that’s a shot in the dark if you’re able to do that. Now you’re faced with bands like Nickelback, where that stuff is so formulated and so precise and so calculated that you lose the natural energy of rock n’ roll there, man. It’s a commercial.

Derek: Did you ever hear the Nickelback mash-up? It’s two of their songs playing simultaneously and it’s the exact same frickin’ song.

Jesse: Yeah, you put the headphones on, the chorus kicks same exact time, same melody.

Derek: Same tempo, same everything. It’s a travesty, man. I love being underground, but Jesse and I have families.

Jesse: I moved back home with my parents. I just couldn’t afford to live on my own, which I don’t regret, but it shows you that you’ve got to be willing to make sacrifices as a band on the road to do this, and I think underground bands have to do it for years before they can get anything. For us, we came out being like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do this!” And there were some good tours and some not so good tours. So you’ve just gotta keep rolling with it, I guess. But yeah, we’ve got to figure out how to make some kind of a living off of this ‘cause it’s been pretty tough. [laughs]