Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Straight Line Stitch

My family, my whole family, my whole background has just been immersed in music. My mom sang in the church. Of course, you’ve probably heard that a million times. My aunt was in a band, sort of like a Parliament Funk-type thing. My brother taught himself to play guitar. I’ve always wanted to be a singer. Ever since I was a kid, that’s all I ever wanted to do. I would just sit and bang on stuff and write stupid lyrics. I’m like, “I want to be a singer. That’s all I want to do.” But as far as getting into this genre of music, my brother, he gets the credit for that because he taught himself how to play guitar because he was influenced by bands like Pantera and White Zombie and Ozzy and Korn and all that stuff. I look up to my brother. He’s my older brother, so everything he wanted to do I wanted to do. So naturally I just wanted to follow in his footsteps, and I stuck with it because I developed a love for it. That’s pretty much how I got into it. But my family, my dad [plays] saxophone, he DJs on the weekend and my family’s just immersed in music. It’s in the blood, I guess you could say.

Yeah, it was just a typical rock band. It was my first real band besides Straight Line Stitch, and yeah, the music was totally different. It wasn’t as intense as Straight Line Stitch is.

That’s funny that you ask that question ‘cause I sit and I listen to those albums. I actually listened to it on my guitar player Seth [Thacker]’s iPod yesterday. I just know that we’ve grown a lot. It’s hard telling you how I think that we’ve grown, but I can just definitely tell by listening to the music. It’s good, but I can tell where the music has matured a lot. The old songs, the old records and stuff like that, it wasn’t together as finally as this album. There was a rawness and an I-don’t-care attitude, let’s-just-go-do-it to the older stuff, if that makes any sense.

He is a super-duper perfectionist. He’s like, “Get it right, get it right.” He wouldn’t autotune it unless you absolutely had to and I don’t think he did. He was like, “You’re gonna do it until you get it right ‘cause I know this is what it is. This is what the music’s about. It’s not about getting in there and autotuning it.” He was cool to work with. He was very cool to work with. He was passionate about what we were doing and that’s always a plus to work with somebody who has a love for it. He was a cool guy.

Our management, “Rage,” Dale Restighini, he’s been working with Jamey since way back in the day. He did a bunch of Hatebreed videos and they’re really good friends. And this song, I felt like when I wrote it—We were talking about guest vocalists and I was just like, this song would be perfect for him. This is like a Hatebreed-type song. I just pictured his vocals. I told Dale and Dale got in touch with him. Dale set it up ‘cause, obviously, they’re good friends and they go way back. So that’s how it happened. Working with him, when I met him, it was like, wow. He’s come a long way to be where he’s at right now. So I was sort of flattered and starstruck and shy, but he’s a cool guy, down to earth. He’s just very busy. He’s doing 50 million things at once.

Oh my god, when I was there working with him, he was on the phone, he was like talking about movie scripts, he was talking about picking up Randy from Lamb of God, he was doing all this stuff. I felt like, wow. But he was really cool. He was professional. He went in there and he threw down, and it was awesome to get to be there to witness that. It was awesome.

I do write all the lyrics, though I have to give some credit to Rob Caggiano ‘cause when we were doing this album, When Skies Wash Ashore, he helped me fine-tune a lot of the lyrics. But yeah, I do write all the lyrics.

I write all the time. I have tons and tons of notebooks from back in the day when I was in another band. I write all the time. Pat Pattison, my guitar player, he’s always writing 24/7. What they do is, they’ll get together, put a song together and [record it], and I’ll take the recording and I write by myself. And that’s how I write. I take the music and I listen to it over and over, and I just literally fill in lyrics. That’s how I write.

What I try to do is I try to protect my voice by drinking hot stuff and I put a scarf over my neck, even if it’s like sweltering, it’s hot outside. People look at me because I’m looking stupid with this scarf around my throat. I got a scarf from Dez from DevilDriver. He was like, “Keep that around your throat,” because I always get sick. I get sick at the drop of a hat. It sucks. I try to do everything possible to drinking hot tea to dribbling honey down my throat to sucking on lemons. I do everything to try to stay as healthy as possible and keep my voice protected, but sometimes you get sick.

You know what? I like doing both. I think it’s cool to be able to go from one extreme to the other.

Yeah. You have to trial-and-error to learn how to do it, but it’s fun. I think it’s awesome. I think it’s a cool art form.

OK, first of all, just let me say our band, we have a huge respect for that band, DevilDriver, because they were the first major band to pick us up and take us on a full tour—twice. And what we learned from them is that not every band at their stature are rock stars. We’ve opened up for several bands and some of them—I won’t name names—can be total f-ing rock stars, in that mindframe. DevilDriver and the bands that were on that tour—Snot, Invitro, Napalm Death, 36 Crazyfists, Instinct of Aggression—all those bands, they were just real cool and down to earth, what’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours—that type of attitude. We learned something from bands like that. You treat people the way you want to be treated because you meet the same people on the way up as you do coming back down. I just have a huge respect for all those bands.

Oh man. The bands I want to tour with, they don’t even exist anymore. Like Glassjaw, one of my tops. I love Glassjaw. But I don’t know what they’re doing. … There’s a lot of bands I’d like to tour with. I’d like to go out with All That Remains, As I Lay Dying. I think Lamb of God would be a good tour to go out on. There’s so many bands out there just really working, putting in the effort. Those are the bands I can think of off the top of my head.

Right now, there’s like a hundred billion riffs that they have, but nothing really put together. Nothing’s solidified right now. But soon we’ll start putting away songs for the next record. We’re really trying to concentrate and tour the hell out of this record right now. We’re trying to promote it as much as possible because other than the DevilDriver tour, we’ve really been just doing it ourselves. So there’s still people discovering us every day. So we’re just trying to pound the ground and promote the hell out of this album, and then when we feel like this is sufficient enough, we’ll go and put out another album right away. Our main thing is to keep working.