Silent Civilian: Scary stories to tell in the dark

	Silent Civilian

June 29, 2010

It has not been easy, but Jonny Santos has persevered. Though he is the only remaining original member, Silent Civilian is going stronger than ever, with an amazing new album, Ghost Stories (review), in stores and, for the first time, an apparently stable lineup. He’s also completed a new Spineshank album that should be released in the fall. The rest of 2010 should include plenty of time on tour with both Silent Civilian and Spineshank. For now, though, his attention is fully on Silent Civilian, wrapping up a tour with Fear Factory and Prong, then playing a few weeks of headlining dates. At a recent tour stop at Jaxx in Springfield, Va., Santos sat down before the show with Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki.

Live-Metal.net: It’s been four years since the first album, and I know that when you were out on tour it got pretty rough at times and you went through a lot of band members. Was there ever a time when you didn’t think you’d get to a second album?

Jonny Santos: Almost. There was a very grim hour for this band. I think it was right around the time after we got off the last tour from the first album. The last tour we did was with Kittie and It Dies Today, and that was in the end of ’07. We were supposed to do a one-off show at home in December and [drummer] Chris [Mora] quit the band. So at that point, I was officially the only original member left. I had been touring two years straight on the record and I was just exhausted and was just kinda like, [sighs] is this really, really, really, really worth it? Then I got a phone call from [guitarist] Dave [Delacruz]. He was the first replacement when the original guitar player, Tim [Mankowski], quit the band. He had originally left the band due to personal problems at home. I got a phone call from him and he was like, “Hey, what’s going on? I heard you might need a couple of guys.” I said, “Actually, I would’ve given you a call, but I didn’t know if you got things sorted out yet.” He’s like, “I’m good to go, man.” So we got together and started writing a little bit, just to see how things would be. The first couple of songs that we wrote together were “The Phoenix,” “Feeding Time” and, I want to say, “Victim of Fear.” At that point, we were like, “OK, we’ve got something going on here.”

But at the same time, I had been approached by Spineshank to do another tour, and then it went from being just doing another tour to actually being, “Hey, let’s just get back together and do another record. Bury the hatchet. Everybody’s a few years older now, egos have deflated.” So I started working on that. Living in Portland, Oregon, I was working on Silent Civilian in Portland and then flying to L.A. once a month for a week to work on the Spineshank record that actually just finally got finished after two years of writing. So that was chewing up a little time.

At the same time, too, I had been on tour for the better part of the last eight years of my life at that time, so I was really trying to plant my feet somewhere. I moved to Portland, I bought a house up there, trying to do the whole stability kind of thing in my life. You get off tour and you’re like, where’s home? You don’t know. Something I hadn’t had in a long time, so that was important to me to get my personal life in order.

We probably had 70 percent of this record written at the time when I went out to do that Spineshank tour with Disturbed and Killswitch and Chimaira. I did that tour, which took about four months of my life, and then another Spineshank headlining tour, which took about another six weeks of my life. Finally got back into the studio in July of 2009, and Dave and I and [bassist] Robbie [Young] and [drummer] Ryan [Halpert] finished writing the record. The record was done in pieces. We wrote for six weeks, then we went out on tour ‘cause everyone was broke and we needed to make a couple bucks. Wrote some more, went out on tour, came home, wrote some more, went out on another tour, came home, finished it, mixed it, mastered it and we actually turned the record into the label in January. That kinda is what brings us up to date. So, yeah, it’s been a rough four years, man.

	Silent Civilian's Jonny Santos

Four years, I guess in some ways you look at it and it doesn’t seem like that long of a time, but in the music business it is. Things have changed in heavy music. The more extreme stuff is getting more popular. How do you see the way it’s changed and the state of it and how you fit into that?

There’s so many subgenres of metal at this point, and I’m very, very reluctant to latch onto to these subgenres because I just don’t see them standing the test of time, as far as actual metal’s concerned. I know that thrash metal, what I like to consider our band to be, has stood the test of time. Thrash metal bands—Testament, Death Angel, Kreator, Exodus—these guys have been around for 25 years and it’s never gone away. Not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but I am gonna stick with what I know is tried and true. Not only that, when you’re talking about all these subgenres of metal, they’re only catering to, I would say, one particular demograph of age. You take a band like Megadeth that caters to all ages. They cater to kids from 13 to guys in their 40s, easily.

I just think doing blast beats for every song is just senseless. You listen to one song, you’ve heard the whole record. I like to keep our shit interesting. Some bands are like, “Singing’s gay. We don’t do singing. We only scream.” And that’s cool. It works for some bands. But for me, as an artist, it doesn’t. I need more. I need that substance. It’s just really limiting, and I like to add so many different aspects of different kinds of metal into our music. I like thrash metal, straight-up metal, progressive metal, fuckin’ death metal—we’ve got blast beats on this fuckin’ record; people are like, “What the fuck?” We just wanted to write a really good, brutal heavy metal record.

Yeah, you really cover a wide range, going from a song like “Atonement” to “Let Us Pray” with the blast beats.

Yeah. And that’s the whole thing. I won’t put any boundaries on what we do. If I think it’s a good song and it’s something that everybody in the band—you know when it’s gonna stay, ‘cause everybody in the band goes, “Fuck yeah.” We need a song like that. Think about every Metallica record had its fuckin’ “Fade to Black,” had its “Sanitarium,” had its “One.” So it’s not like we’re any less of a metal band because one song has a lot of singing in it.

What kind of things inspired the songwriting this time? You sound really angry on this album, like you’re trying to reach out of the speaker and strangle someone.

You know, just like you had said in the review, I tried to steer away from a lot of the world affairs this time around because it really started to pigeonhole the band into becoming one of those just political bands. At the time, I felt it was necessary. This time around, I challenged myself. I actually wrote about situations that I was going through. I had a lot of pent-up anger from the last four years, a lot of different things that have happened in my life and people that have happened in my life that I really wanted to address. It makes a lot of difference when you’re actually writing and singing from your soul as opposed to telling a story about what’s going on in the world today. I think that probably had a huge impact on the lyric process and the actual just brutalness of the vocals on this record. When we finished the record, I listened to it and I said, “Shit, I do sound fuckin’ pissed.” [laughs]

Why did you go with Ghost Stories as the album title?

It was one of the first tracks we had written for the record. That was probably one of our favorite songs. We released that song on a demo version really early on, and it got a lot of good reaction. I don’t know. Something about Ghost Stories is just, ooooh metal. It all came together, being the title of the record, because then we were thinking artwork. If you open the CD, it’s like a book, it’s ghost stories, ghost stories being pretty much a metaphor. The song was initially I wrote about having a friend, having somebody close to you your entire life and then all of a sudden they just completely go off the deep end and you don’t know this person anymore. The person that you did know is a ghost now. So that was kind of the whole concept behind the lyrical content of the song. For some reason, everyone was like, “Yeah. That’s the album title right there.” Don’t worry, we’ll get to the self-titled record at one point.

[laughter]

Yeah, everyone’s doing that now.

I was actually thinking about instead of self-titling the record, naming the record Self-Titled.

[laughter]

Also, I think that song, musically, almost sums up the band.

Yeah, it does. It’s got everything that we do—the thrash, the guitar solos, the groovy breakdown in it, singing, screaming.

Now that you’ve made an album and you’ve done multiple tours, do you think this lineup is gonna stick?

This lineup has been solid longer than any other lineup in this band. We’ve managed to hold it together and everybody gets along really great. I think what it is, is just the chemistry. There’s four individual personalities that somehow come together. You don’t think that some of these personalities should work together, but they just do. Everybody does their job and does it well. We have a great time together, man. You always have that one person in the band that just doesn’t click with the rest, the "Debbie Downer," somebody that just can’t be a team player. And we just don’t have that person in this band. You get to hang out with your buddies every night, play music and get paid for it, drink beer, chase women.

What’s like being on tour with Fear Factory and Prong?

Fuckin’ awesome, because everybody outside of Thy Will Be Done—who are amazing dudes, amazing band, as well—everybody between Fear Factory, Prong and us, we’re all tied together in friendship in some way. I’ve known [guitarist] Dino [Cazares] and Burt [vocalist Burton C. Bell] for fuckin’ years. First Spineshank tour ever was with Fear Factory. I’ve known Tony [ Campos ] from Prong for years because he was in Static-X. He was the bass player for Static-X, so I’ve known Tony for 15 years. And who doesn’t want to watch Gene Hoglan [Fear Factory] play drums every night? I sit behind the drum riser and watch his fuckin’ feet go and it’s like, Jesus Christ!

So what’s next after this tour? Do you have some headlining shows coming up?

Yeah, we do. This tour ends in Pennsylvania, and then we’re gonna do about three weeks of headlining dates to get us back to L.A. Then at that point, I’m not sure what’s coming after that. I do know we are going to Europe soon. That’ll be cool because this band hasn’t been to Europe yet. I’ve been there six times with Spineshank but never with Silent Civilian. I think the guys are pretty excited, too, ‘cause none of them have ever been to—no, Ryan’s been to Europe ‘cause Ryan used to play drums for As Blood Runs Black. He was over there on the Terror tour. I know there’s not going to be very much idle time over this year because of the release and whatnot. If I’m not touring with this band, I guarantee I’ll be on tour with Spineshank.

You said the album just got finished. Do you know when the new Spineshank will be out?

We’re trying to get it out by September/October. We’re in the process of choosing a label. There are several offers on the table. Three of us are producers/engineers, so we just did the record ourselves. It makes it a lot easier for a label. We’ve got a finished product.

You produced the new Silent Civilian album, too.

Yes, produced and did engineering on it, as well. That’s what was really cool about Mediaskare is they gave me complete and total creative control over the process. The president, who’s also my manager, Baron Bodnar, he just said, “You know, Jonny, just go in there and give me a kickass record.” He’s like, “I trust you. Go ahead, go do it.” So that’s exactly what I did.

When the first album came out, Century Media wasn’t involved. What impact have they had?

Well, it’s good distribution, for one. Marketing’s obviously been really good. Obviously, my publicist, George [Vallee]—fuckin’ amazing. I can’t keep the guy from e-mailing me every day. It’s really cool to be part of that family. I know it takes a little bit of the pressure off our label, as far as having to hire a publicist, having to hire marketing. At this point, I have absolutely no complaints. People are buying the record. It’s not a bad place to be.

Kind of jumping around back and forth here. You’re playing guitar now in Spineshank. Was that part of a condition or something for you coming back?

I wouldn’t say a condition, but in a weird way, kind of it was. I don’t play guitar on every song during the set, but after being out of that band for five years and going back—I was the original guitar player for Spineshank. I became the singer on accident. I was always a guitar player first. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 7. I didn’t start singing until I was 19, 20. When I came back, I’m like, “You know what, guys, I feel kind of naked without my guitar. I’ve been doing this now for four years and you guys are gonna have to give me a break on this, especially if I’m coming back and I’m gonna be contributing to the writing process.” So we compromised. I play guitar on the songs that need two guitars, which makes sense and everybody’s happy. And it shows a different side of me to Spineshank fans who don’t know who Silent Civilian is. We gave it a test run on the Disturbed tour and it worked out fine. It worked out great. Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool.

Alright, I think that’s about all I’ve got for you. Anything you want to add?

Well, I want to thank you for the awesome fuckin’ album review, and I want to thank all the fans out there for supporting the band. I want to thank all the media out there that supports the band. Enjoy the record and come see us.

Links:
www.myspace.com/silentcivilian
www.myspace.com/spineshank