Life is but a Dreaming

	Christopher Hall of The Dreaming

September 24, 2006

Nearly five years after the break-up of Stabbing Westward, frontman Christopher Hall is ready to re-emerge on the national music scene with a new band, The Dreaming. Throwing the rigid electronics and programming out the door, The Dreaming is a down and dirty rock band, with influences ranging from punk to New Wave to metal and more. With the recording of its debut album nearly complete, the still unsigned band has taken to the road as the opening act on Cement Shoes Records' “Congress of Corruption Tour” featuring Ill Niño, Godhead and Ra. Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net sat down with the band—Hall, former Econoline Crush and Stabbing Westward drummer Johnny Haro, former Amen guitarist Jinxx and bassist Brent Ashley—in Towson, Md., on the day of the tour’s opening night.

Live-Metal: So this is the first show of the first tour for The Dreaming.

Christopher: Yeah, the first real tour.

So how are you feeling about that?

Christopher: Alright. Stoked.

Johnny: I’m pretty excited.

Christopher: Yeah. We’re all tired. We got here a couple days ago. We’re actually in the middle of making an album. We’re actually at the end of making an album. We’re almost finished. We have two songs with just vocals left to finish and then mix. So we’ve been in the studio for about a month. So it’s kinda weird to switch gears and not only switch gears to play a show, but then play six shows in a row for six weeks, seven weeks.

Why was this the right time to go out on tour?

Christopher: The opportunity just happened and we jumped on it. Ill Niño, Godhead and Ra are all on Cement Shoes, the record label, and the owner of Cement Shoes is one of our managers, as well. And he wants to help us, help spread the word about The Dreaming. They had extra space on the buses and we’re a very self-contained punk rock band. We don’t need a crew or a bunch of stuff. So we just said, “OK,” threw our bags on the bus and went. So they’re letting us open the show and play all the dates with them. There are a lot of Dreaming fans that have never gotten to see us play since we don’t play outside the West Coast. There’s also a lot of people who have never even heard of us, so we’re just hoping to get in front of some Ill Niño and Godhead fans.

What can people expect from The Dreaming live?

Johnny: High energy.

Christopher: Yeah, we’re pretty high energy.

Johnny: Definitely.

Christopher: We’re very hyper. We’re not really sure, ’cause normally we headline when we’re in L.A. , so we have a big stage, lots of lights. We’re the support band tonight, so it’s gonna be crowded, no lights. But that’s not really what it’s about. It’s just us singing and jumping around.

How did the band get together?

Christopher: Johnny and I were in Stabbing Westward together for a summer.

Johnny: I was a sub.

Christopher: For a summer.

Johnny: Yeah.

Christopher: Started with him. I called him a long time ago when Stabbing broke up. We just went through a bunch of musicians, wrote a bunch of songs, went through a bunch of producers until we came out with this bunch of miscreants. Brent saw us play when we had Nadja from Coal Chamber in the band for four shows.

Brent: Was it even that?

Christopher: I don’t think so. We did do four shows while she was in the band, but she wouldn’t play out of town.

Johnny: Oh, right, the San Diego shows.

Christopher: We did the two San Diego shows without her. And he’s like, “This isn’t going to last.” So he started MySpacing me, going, “I think you guys are gonna need a bass player.” And we stole Jinxx from a band that we cannot mention.

Jinxx: Nope.

Christopher: Amen to that.

[laughter]

Christopher: Yeah, he was friends with some friends of ours and we were looking for a guitar player. It all just came together in the last year, basically.

How would you describe your music?

Christopher: We’re just basically a three-piece band—bass, drums, guitar, vocal. And I don’t play guitar. So it’s really stripped down punk rock in some ways. It’s got a lot of New Wave, sort of circa Billy Idol, Missing Persons kinda stuff. Really fast. I think that fastest Stabbing song was 94 beats per minute. Actually, I think “Lies” was 120. But everything we write is around 160 to 210. Really fast. Really high energy. Really short, not epic. Lots of, like, metal kind of solos and heaviness, but mixed with, like, punk. It’s dark, but it’s not too serious. It’s serious, but it’s not too serious, if you know what I mean.

In Stabbing Westward, you had multiple songwriters. What’s the situation here?

Christopher: I write everything.

[laughter]

Christopher: No, I’m just kidding. It’s kind of the same situation, but in Stabbing, we had guys who would—one of the problems and strengths of Stabbing was that we had guys who could front their own band if they could sing, and they would write lyrics and whole songs. Sometimes, as a singer, it doesn’t always agree with you what someone writes. You’re like, “That a cheesy lyric.” Or “Sometimes it hurts so much to lose the one you love”—do I really have to say that? It’s stuff like that. In this band, everyone kinda looks after their own. Johnny’s written a song. He’s written some basslines. Brent’s written basslines. Jinxx has written a bunch of stuff. A couple songs I wrote in Stabbing, when the band was still breaking up. Everyone really contributes and then once we get a song kinda started, we all add to it. So it’s really a collaboration.

Johnny: It’s a collective effort, definitely.

Christopher: And no one even really sticks to their own instrument. Everyone is comfortable enough to say, “Hey, what if you did this, what if you did that?”

You said you’re almost finished recording the album. Do you know when we might hear it?

Brent: Next year.

Johnny: When the planets are all aligned.

Brent: It better be 2007.

Christopher: We’re coming home in November from this tour. We’ve got two songs to finish. We haven’t figured out who’s gonna mix it yet. We don’t have a record label. It’ll be on MySpace at some point, I’m sure.

[laughter]

How important has MySpace and the Internet been for you guys?

Christopher: I think the thing about MySpace—well, he [Brent] wouldn’t get laid without it.

Brent: No, probably not.

Christopher: Musically, I think MySpace has taken on a bigger role in the music industry than it probably should. A lot of record labels go to a band’s page and see how many friends they have. I think so much of it depends on how many of those friends actually care enough about your record to come see you play or to buy one or if they’re just adding up their numbers or they think that’s cute or—do you know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t think anyone’s done the research to figure out how—I mean, like, Tila Tequila couldn’t sell a record or get arrested to save her life.

Brent: Yeah, but on a different ratio, we’re playing in Towson and we have, like, 70 people or something coming tonight.

Christopher: Yeah, probably. We did a ZIP code search on MySpace last night. You can do that in your friends. We found roughly 70 people within 20 miles of here that are our friends and we emailed them all and roughly 50 percent of them actually knew who we were and are coming and bringing a friend. So it’s not a bad percentage, about 50 percent. It’s really hard to tell how it will translate. I think if you’re a signed band, MySpace is a great way to get in touch with your fans or to reach them. But if you’re an unsigned band, it could be a tool, it could a complete waste of time and a way to get laid.

You’ve done a couple digital EPs.

Christopher: Yeah, we do digital downloads.

Why did you decide to do those and how have they done for you?

Christopher: Because I did a thousand EPs on CD that I hand silkscreened and hand rubberstamped the covers and then numbered. And then I would have to go to the post office once a week with huge shopping bags filled with CDs and spend 70 cents per CD on shipping. It’s just like, they don’t sound any better than a download and if you buy it as a download, you get it instantly, you don’t have to pay postage, I don’t have to go to the post office, I don’t have to hand stamp everything. It was a lot of work and as much as you want people to have your music, you’ve gotta weigh how much time am I spending on this when I could be writing songs or in the studio. So it just makes more sense.

Johnny: They’ve done really well.

Christopher: Yeah, we’ve sold almost 25,000 EPs online. Not bad. And it pays the rent. Pays the rent for the rehearsal room.

You talked about the live show already. How is the band different on stage and in the studio?

Christopher: In the studio, you can play eight guitars. Live, you only get one.

Johnny: The drums are exactly the same, though.

Christopher: Yeah, basically.

Jinxx: Everything’s pretty much the same.

Christopher: When we first started, we had a producer who was a big fan. He was actually one of the guys who engineered a Stabbing Westward record. And he thought that anything you can’t play on stage you should just put on a backing track and play along to that. As offensive as that sounds to some listeners or readers or whatever, every band on this tour is doing it except for us. Every band at almost every show that you go to does it. They have keyboards, drum loops, extra guitars, backing vocals—stuff like that. We would put all this stuff on a little minidisc and play along to it, and there was a couple times when things went wrong. And there’s a couple times that the crowd started to know songs and sing, and you’d want to stretch that section out and have them sing along and milk it, and you can’t. You have to keep going. Song’s this long, guitars are gonna come in at that section—if you’re not there, they’re gonna come in anyway. If something went wrong, you’d have to stop the song. So we decided when the four of us got together that we weren’t gonna do that. Stabbing Westward was a slave to that the whole time we were together. We [The Dreaming] decided we would just arrange our songs so that we were a punk band, get ’em as weird and trippy and dreamy and ambient as his [Jinxx] effects pedals will allow and when the chorus kicks in, balls to the wall. I just don’t think that the average listener at a show—they’re not all musicians. I think that the experience is what it’s about, the energy.

Johnny: It was a natural evolution, I think, too, because when we started The Dreaming, there was some backing tracks and stuff like that. I think we kind of needed that just to feel comfortable with what the band sounded like. But as the band kind of evolved, it was like, “Let’s just get rid of that stuff.”

Christopher: We were a transitional band from Stabbing Westward when we first started, for sure. We had a lot of keyboards and programming. And then we just decided we don’t really want to be an extension of Stabbing Westward in any way, shape or form. We don’t even say the name of the band on the web site or MySpace page. We don’t play any Stabbing Westward songs. We are what we are and we want to judged and loved or hated on the merit of what we do now. Any pressure that we used to feel to try and bridge the gap between—it’s like, “Screw it. It’s just B.S. Fuck it. Life’s too short.”

Do you have any kind of message people should take away from your music?

Christopher: No.

[laughter]

Christopher: None. That’s entirely too serious. Each song is just an event in itself. I watch these guys live their lives. I used to be all autobiographical.

Johnny: Now everything’s good for you?

Christopher: Well, it’s just, like, you start to find yourself actually living a shitty life just to have something to write about. Like, “I’m gonna bang this really slutty chick while I’ve got a great girlfriend at home just so that I have turmoil that I can write about.” That’s just retarded. Now I watch them do it.

[laughter]

Johnny: His lyrics are based upon our lives now.

Christopher: Yeah, half the lyrics are based on those guys or just inspiration outside of self, which can be fun if you’ve spent 10 years writing about your darkest days.

[laughter]

Brent: That was really bad.

Christopher: So lame.

[laughter]

Brent: Are you recording this?

[laughter]

Do you have any goals for the band?

Christopher: Beyond getting him [Brent] laid tonight?

Johnny: Getting Jinxx an apartment, I think, is one.

Christopher: Yeah, getting Jinxx not living in our rehearsal studio eating canned ravioli.

[laughter]

Christopher: We want to make an album. We want to put it out and have people have a chance to listen to it and tour as much as possible. But I don’t think we feel any pressure to do much more than have a good time and make a living—well, probably won’t make a living, but have a good time and stretch it out. Just make music. We’d like to go to Japan .

Johnny: I want to go down to Australia .

Christopher: Australia ’s awesome.

Johnny: The Ill Niño guys were talking about South America . I’ve never been there.

Christopher: I’ve been to Costa Rica . That’s as far south as I’ve been.

Who are some of the other bands you’d like to go on tour with?

Christopher: Dixie Chicks.

[laughter]

Johnny: U2.

[laughter]

Christopher: I bet we wouldn’t get a soundcheck.

Johnny: I think it’s the whole Warped Tour kind of crowd we’d like to get in with.

Christopher: Yeah, I think we want to do Warped Tour this summer as one of our biggest goals, actually. If we can get our record together quickly enough to get on Warped Tour, that would be awesome. Get a 55-gallon bucket of sunscreen and dip us in it every morning. Yeah, I think Warped Tour is what we really want to do. There’s a bunch of bands we like. We like Kill Hannah, My Chemical Romance and—

Johnny: Muse.

Christopher: Muse. I don’t particularly want to tour with Muse.

Johnny: I wouldn’t mind it.

Brent: We’d have to practice a lot.

Christopher: Yeah, they’re really good.

From the time when you were starting out in Stabbing Westward to now, has it gotten better or worse for a new band?

Christopher: Worse.

Why?

Christopher: It’s harder to get signed, ’cause digital downloads, people are stealing music. The cheapest music to put out right now is hip hop because it costs virtually nothing to make. There’s no band, so when you tour, it’s, like, a couple dancers, two record players. You could literally do it without having any equipment. Rock music is expensive to make. It’s expensive to tour. If all the kids who like rock music download everything, there’s no money in it for the record labels and it makes them more hesitant to sign something that’s less likely to instantly sell a million records. So it’s harder to get signed now. But at the same time, digital music has also made it easier to reach a lot of people. We’ve already sold almost as many records as Stabbing in their first album, just on our own, unsigned.