Starting general, how’s the band treating you as of this second?
Great. The shows we've been playing have been awesome, nothing terrible has happened this year. I could get used to it.
You're working on a new album, right? Can you tell me any details? How will it build off/differ from the first LP?
It's getting louder, rougher sounding and there are points both slower and faster than any BL material yet. We're recording it with Kurt Ballou at God City in Salem MA, and we're excited to see what he does with it. Ideally, it'll be simultaneously sharp, loose and low in the ways we want it to be, and abrasive at the same time. He's known for a lot of metallic hardcore but has done some great records like Disfear, Nails, Doomriders, that are noisy as hell and not too polished, so we'll see how it all comes together.
I saw you mentioned on your blog that you'll be going on hiatus to record. Will this Silver Dollar show be the last for a while?
We came back from the US tour with Converge and cleared off all tour plans from summer until after the recording to be able to write and focus on it. Then we squandered our lead and now we're down to the wire and cranking out jams under great amounts of art-stress. There won't be many shows until the spring, so that we can go out and do it all properly when the LP comes out. Basically we're going to start saving up now to lose our shirts all next year.
I've seen you say that you wanted to purposely do something different with Burning Love than you did with Cursed. Did that bug your more "purist" punk fans? Is that starting to dissipate now that you've been doing Burning Love for a while and you're onto the next record?
That happened more at the beginning, and still does when we go to some places for the first time. Four plus years in, we have our own history with people and places now, we go back to places we've been through a bunch of times already. But it's almost always true that peoples' nostalgia for old projects hits after the fact rather than in the moment. It doesn't bother me, I'm glad any music I make connects with people at all. But the context is always staggered retroactively. Most bands have a set natural life span, after which you're just stringing it out, trying either to outdo yourself or trying too hard not to deviate from your own thing. Cursed got more mileage in 8 years than we ever expected, and more than was even healthy for us as people by the end. We started Burning Love during Cursed, and it was intended to be a different animal entirely. And Burning Love is 4 out of 5 other people that have their own histories in music. You mix and match your frames of reference and get what you get. People can take it or leave it, or talk about it in ten years, or take it for what it is right now in real time.
Burning Love seems to have some slightly more (for lack of a better word) mainstream influences than your previous bands. Do you see BL as a band with crossover potential, similar to what Fucked Up has managed to do?
It's funny. It's more tuneful and I guess "accessible" for sure. Compared to the really misanthropic shit, BL seems like pop music. But to most people from that world, it's really still hardcore punk.
Damn, we get that Fucked Up thing a lot. I've played with and known all those guys since they were younger hardcore kids. Fucked Up has worked really hard and overcome a lot of their own baggage to get to where they're at, created a really unique thing and left a distinct mark, and I'm proud of them for it. But it's apples and oranges from them to us. We're way less functional than that, and we don't have any elaborate designs on world domination. Having a solid label, challenging ourselves, being able to keep traveling and seeing friends all over, connecting with people anywhere and personally, stringing out my punk adolescence by an extra 2 decades - that's success for me. It's already been a surreal trip. So from here, I'd rather be able to consistently play clubs and DIY spots than "blow up". Maybe they'll be different rooms or fuller ones, but bigness itself isn't a goal for us, and doesn't really mean anything tangible. It's only useful in that it allows you to do this more with less financial stress. Your life is still one van or another, one label, one sound check, one practice space, one motel room or friend's floor, or another. Whatever happens, I wouldn't want to change the way we do it.
I've noticed the band slide onto some bills that aren't entirely hardcore. What's it like playing for a different audience? I saw you play at Tim Mcready's BBQ during NXNE and you seemed to be actively contending with the crowd, snatching people's phones when they texted, singing in people's faces, etc. Does it bug you to play for an audience that isn't 100% engaged?
We love playing shows like that, we had a blast that night. In terms of fucking with people, it's more like I like to force the engagement. I'm a fairly nervous person socially, and as much as playing this music is my remedy for that, I really hate the feeling of being on the spot "up there". I'm used to tight, dark, chaotic rooms where you're on the floor or basically sunken in to the room, so outside of that element it's natural to want to fuck with the comfort barrier between spectacle and spectator, regardless of the size or situation of the show. If I feel like a Musician Competently Performing His Numbers, I'll be out the back door in the alley or screaming at someone trying to go to the bathroom (if the mic cord goes that far) before I can stop myself. It just makes for easy targets that 7/10 people in any room in 2011 are going to be looking down at a phone at any given moment. Basically, if I'm going to feel awkward, you're fucking going there with me.
I've read you say that's partially what Miserable Sound is about.
Miserable Sound is pretty much about that, yeah. The trouble people go to socially to exude this painstaking passiveness, especially younger kids growing up post-internet and American Apparel values, where everything is played very safe and you seldom stick your neck out in any way that matters or reveal any part of yourself that isn't suave or presentable.
How'd you hook up with Southern Lord?
Greg contacted us and then came out last time we were in Los Angeles, and Southern Lord was a great option. I didn't know where we were heading label-wise, I just wanted it to be a label I actually own and listen to records by. Greg puts his all into his label, and is a nerd for the music he makes and releases. We talked on the phone for two hours mostly about Alice Coltrane, and it was on.
