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This podcast is being brought to you by WXAV 88.3 FM and WXAV.com. WXAV bringing the best podcasts to you. So, you guys have a new recording of Leveler coming out. How do you go about creating songs that you made 10 years ago?
Did you have anything in mind when going into it? Well, due to the pandemic, we had a lot of extra time on our hands. We knew Leveler was turning 10 and we said, let's dissect this record again and give it a good hard look in the studio and put a new spin on it. So, we took a couple months and dove in and just fixed up a bunch of stuff that would have changed now that it's 10 years later and we just operate a little bit differently now.
So, this is a cool opportunity for us to be able to not reinvent these songs but tweak them in a way that makes them feel more modern and relevant to us as a band and also to just give our fans a new take on the record. We were never super fond of the production and we feel like we got a really awesome recording this time around and made a lot of cool improvements and just modern updates to a record that's 10 years old. Absolutely, absolutely. How would you say that in the 10 years between the original release of Leveler and Now, how would you say you yourself have progressed as a musician or even how you guys as a band have progressed?
Well, we have grown a lot, I think, as individuals and just have a better understanding of each of those personalities and what we each require, especially on the road. And Leveler, when it came out, we toured really hard. I think we toured over 40 countries on that record in a pretty short amount of time. And that was the ambition of the band at the time.
And it was difficult on each of us for different reasons, just with relationships with the home and relationships with each other. But it taught us a lot about how we each tick. And I think 10 years later, we're all in a much better place just in understanding each other and what we each need from one another. So, I think if we had to go and do that same tour and cycle now, it would go a lot more smoothly with a lot less internal conflict.
But I'm also proud of where we've come and you know, you have to work through those relationship bumps in the road, I guess, and all the conflict that comes along with being in a band and being in such close quarters with other people for such long amount of time. So, it ultimately made us stronger, although it was a challenge at the time. Just going through all of that stuff. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
I also read somewhere that just self-reflection that came from being in quarantine also affected this record. Is that true? Well, making up the record itself, but just how we operate. And I'll speak for myself in that, you know, being stuck at home after many years of spending half the year touring.
Forcing me to kind of work through some things that I had been ignoring just because I've been able to because, you know, if there was conflict I could just go and tour and avoid it. So, in that regard, yeah, I think I've definitely grown as an individual and I'm going to continue to grow through what I've learned over the past 12, 18 months of being stuck at home. But with that being said, I'm still looking forward to getting back out on the road. And doing what we love to do, we all miss playing very much and I can't wait to get together and tour again.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think you guys have a live stream coming up. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, we're really excited about that. It's a bummer that we can't tour. We'd much rather play for a live audience, but, you know, we're releasing the Leveler 10th Anniversary Edition record on May 21st, and we wanted to do something cool to support it. So we're doing a live stream the following day.
And the plan is to really blow this one out as far as the production and the show goes like we're trying to go bigger than we've ever gone before. And I think that what we're doing is going to really be a lot of onto watch for fans. And it's something that would be really challenging for us to take on the road. So in fact, we're able to focus all of our energy into one show in one place in time.
It allows us to go a little bit bigger than we would have been able to go on a typical tour. So this shows to be awesome. People are interested in tuning in. Absolutely, absolutely.
In an interview from like a while ago, probably like two years ago, I think it was, you talked about how you don't listen to as much heavy music as you used to, and it sometimes finds a way into your guys' sound. Would you consider that an influence on the recreation of Leveler, or at least have some kind of effect on it? I think the biggest, I wouldn't say my lack of listening to heavy music regularly affected the Leveler record. However, just what I've learned in the past 10 years of how I go about writing and flushing out songs has changed, such that I'm way more into textures and layers in our music, whereas when we recorded Leveler for the first time, it was more of just two guitars based vocal drums.
And now there's so much more in our repertoire as far as what we can apply to our music. So we updated a lot of the songs with all kinds of new textures and background sounds and stuff going on. That are subtle to the listener, but I think it takes the music to a new Level. And I'm excited about that.
Absolutely, absolutely. What, I guess, chill artists do you listen to? What kind of heavy bands? Oh, no, more like the chill side.
Oh, on the chill side, I'm a big fan of like Death Cab for CUNY and a lot of the big indie staples. I really love the band of Loomineers. They have three records and I think they're all fantastic. There's a band called Tifun, that I love, a band called Holy Holy from Australia.
That's kind of an indie pop thing that I think is really cool. More recently I've been in a band called Michigander, which is just one dude who is writing kind of, I would liken it to Coldplay in their haydang before they went super poppy. Yeah. So now like indie pop rock kind of stuff.
Just more work still. Not to say that I don't like having music. I mean, I like a lot of heavy stuff. I still want to have music, but I want that band's drum church.
They're like a hardcore punk band from New York. I love that band. I love everything they're doing. Yeah, absolutely.
It's always cool that artists can pull from totally different and I guess like left field quote unquote artists for them and pull it into a sound even if it doesn't, you know, one would not associate it. Yeah. Melodies can work across all genres. You know, if you're influenced by a melody, you can apply it to metal we even came from.
From a folk song. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Are there any new guitarist or musicians in the scene that you particularly admire today?
You know, in the scene, I mean, there's a lot of guitarists that I admire, but that aren't really, I guess, all people's radars. I, you know, you can just scroll Instagram and see guys who just shred endlessly shred circles around me. So it's kind of a, there's a ton of amazing players out there. And I think at this point in my life, I, well, I think shredding is awesome and I really enjoy watching it.
I also, I think I'm more like focused on the songwriting side of things and making really what I consider to be cool songs. So I feel like more of my time nowadays is spent on working on becoming a better songwriter than becoming a better player itself. I know, I kind of deviated from your original question, but. No, it's okay.
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's, it's a way to have every note of yours means something. You know, it's like, you don't need to have tons of shreddy skills if the song doesn't really call for it, you know. Right.
I totally agree. It can just get a little over the top of ridiculous if you're trying to go 100 miles an hour all time. Yeah, absolutely. It's just how music is.
For sure. Do you have any non-musical influences? I interviewed Jake last year and he mentioned, correct me if I'm wrong again. I think he said that you were one who was like kind of into comic books and it influenced not quite, but it influenced the creation of the music video for Gardenians.
Why not release like a year ago? That's not me, but there are other topics comic book, comic book, comic book guy and he wanted to do like a comic book kind of theme video for a song defender off of a guardians, which was the lead single off of our most recent record. Yeah, I don't know what I would cite as non-musical influences that are affecting the way I'm like my sound or style, but you know, we, I like baseball a lot and would definitely done like a lot of baseball and sports kind of themed merchandise and stuff like that. I feel like outside influences would have more effect on other aspects of the band than our music directly.
More so like visual kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Did your label recommend doing a recreation of the album or was it more like your guys idea? And if so, did they at least have like a hand in any of the creative aspects of it?
We actually are in between labels right now and we fully are self-releasing, level or 10th anniversary edition. It's our first like fully self-released studio record. Nice. Kind of a brand new ground for us as a band.
Yeah, very interesting, very interesting. Yeah, it's always a weird time when bands are in between contracts, but still it's like, yeah, it's cool to like go back and you know, do something very on your own. Yeah, it's been a great learning experience for us because, you know, we've been a band for 18 years and we've been under contract since 2005. So this has been a long time time for us to have the freedom to do whatever we want with the music that we're creating.
And we wanted to take this, take advantage of this time during the pandemic when we're really stuck at home and use this time to do something different for us as a band on the recording side since we're able to and have that liberty right now. Mm hmm. Absolutely, absolutely. So being a musician and having been around for a while, what are some of the craziest, weirdest, coolest, or funniest band names that you have come across?
There's a band in Europe called We Butter the Bread with Butter. Yeah, I don't know. So we're a band name. There's another band from Europe that we see stickers of all the time called Itchy Coot Skid.
That's the one. Yeah, this is the two that come to mind right off the top of my head. Mm hmm. Yeah.
That question always gets like a little bit of a head scratch sometimes. It's like, oh, I don't know if I can think of any off the top of my head, but yeah, those are good ones. I'm glad I had answers. Absolutely.
Well, I'm not going to keep you too much longer. I only have one question left for you. And since we're WXAV, a college radio station, what does college radio mean to you? How has it affected your life, the way you see music, anything?
College radio has always been cool, especially for a band like August Burns Rep, because we're the kind of band who's not getting played on more traditional radio stations. And college radio has always been a place that's embraced us and played us over the airwaves, which is cool because generally it's really difficult for a band as unappealing to the masses as us to get regular radio. So we're grateful for all the college radio stations out there who cover our band and actually give us airtime because it's not coming from other places. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you calling in and doing this interview with me. Thanks so much for having me on.
Appreciate the chat. For sure. All right. Have a good one, man.
All right. Talk to you soon. See ya. Bye.