Featured Music Interview: Alkaline Trio
By Jordan ShroyerMonday, June 1, 2009
This December, Alkaline Trio will have been a band for 13 years. Their most recent album, Agony & Irony debuted at #13 on the Billboard album charts. Most bands would take that as a bad sign, but for the Trio - a band who surrounds themselves with dark, death infused imagery - it's luckier than a four leaf clover. I had a chance to talk to the band's drummer DEREK GRANT about his experience with the Trio and what we can expect from them in the coming year.
How did your career begin as a drummer?
D: I was around 15 years old living in Detroit and I heard that a band called Jack Kevorkian and the Suicide Machines were looking for a drummer. I had been playing in some other bands at the point and was looking for something a little more serious. Long story short, I joined the band and within a year we were touring. By the time I was 17, we signed a contract with Hollywood Records and it became a job at that point.
What lead to your departure of the Suicide Machines?
D: I had a falling out with the record label, and in '97 I basically told the guys I was going to split. I didn't want to hold them back. They had families to support and bills to pay and I didn't want to ruin it for them, so I walked away and wished them well.
How did you end up joining the Alkaline Trio?
D: Dan used to play in a band called Slapstick, who used to play shows with the Suicide Machines. We were the same age and came from the same backgrounds. We both lived in suburbs of big cities and had a lot of shared experiences, being 17 or 18 and touring. We had kept in touch over the years and I met the rest of the guys in the band when I was playing guitar for Face to Face in Japan and the Trio was the opening band. It was right when Maybe I'll Catch Fire [Alkaline Trio's second full length, released in 2000] came out. That was when it started to click. I liked Dan's new band and the other guys. I heard they were looking for a drummer after their original drummer Glen left and I tried to reach out to them but by the time I got a hold of someone I found out they had already found a replacement with Mike Felumlee, the former drummer of the Smoking Popes, so I figured I had missed my chance. Then, as luck would have it around a year down the line things weren't panning out with Mike and I got a call from their manager asking if I was interested in playing with the Trio. That was 2001.
In its early days, the Trio did a lot of touring with Saves the Day. How has joining up with them been after all these years?
D: Its been great. It's great for us to tour with old friends. A really good friend of mine from Detroit it playing guitar for them now. It sort of ironic that neither band is on Vagrant anymore. It's cool to meet up with people after so much time and it's great to see that the bands are still doing it since its become increasingly more difficult to be in a band. It's a terrible time to be touring.
The Trio are one of the few bands able to achieve success on the edge of mainstream music, yet still maintain street cred from the punk roots where it came from. How were you able to maintain that balance?
D: I think it has a lot to do with making good business decisions and not doing anything that would compromise the integrity of the band. Everything the band has done since day one has been very honest. We haven't done anything for the sake of success. We never thought, 'Let's write a song with Justin Timberlake and will have a hit single and then will have a lot of money.' Everything we have done has been a gradual progression and I think its allowed people to stick with us. There's no stark change where we started wearing clown make up or playing hip-hop. There's been no real drastic change in the band except for line-up changes, which bring new elements to the table, but nothing that's so jarring that somebody who is a fan of the band is going to be really put off.
For the past few years the band has had a very distinct style on stage: usually dress pants, button-down shirts, suspenders and ties, all red, white, and black. Is that how you look off stage or is it more of your stage persona?
D: There was a period of time - I'd say on Crimson especially - where we were going for more of a theatrical show. So there were more stage clothes. The look became a bit of a curse. It was a thing where you take a bunch of pictures and make a video with a uniform look and then every photographer that you work with after that and every video director sort of pigeonholes you after that and after a while we had to tell them they were getting the wrong idea about us. We're at a point now where it's more dress casual. There's the occasional Hawaiian shirt day, but for the most part, it's just whatever we happen to be wearing that day.
How much of the Trio catalog are you guys able to play at any given time?
D: I wouldn't say that we could play any song. When we sound-check, we invite people from our fan club [The Blood Pact] to come and we always ask them what they want to hear and we'll try to play whatever they throw out at us. If it goes well, sometimes we'll try it out during the set. We also have a section on our website where people can request songs they want to hear at each show. Honestly, after so many tours it seems people want to hear the same songs. They want to hear "Radio" and "Clavicle" and "This Could Be Love." The more material we have under our belts, the harder it is to rotate new things in when there are certain expectations to play the same 10 songs every night. We usually play 18 or 19 songs any given night - so if 10 are standards, that only gives us 8 or 9 slots to rotate in or out.
Many of you fan favorites seem to be B-sides.
D: On this tour, we're not really touring to support an album, there's no new single or anything, so there's no pressure to play the singles from the record so we made it a point to play a lot of material we haven't played in a long time. The set is actually heavily weighed in favor of songs from Good Mourning which kind of fell by the wayside for a while.
How has the writing process changed for the band over the past 10 years?
D: I think when the band started it was more, 3 guys in a room, whose got an idea, throw it out, work on it. Now we write more as individuals, bring skeletons of songs to the table and the other members put their two cents in. We live in three different parts of the country and a lot of our songwriting - or at least the idea - are conveyed though e-mail. So the writing environment has changed, but it's essentially the same process. Matt writes the songs that he sings, Dan writes the songs that he sings. I'll usually write a song or two an album and just hand it over to either of them and see what they come up with lyrically, and we'll all get in a room and work it out.
Are you guys working on any new material yet?
D: Yeah, we're hoping to go into the studio sometime in July and have another album out a few months after that. There was a big gap between Crimson and Agony and Irony, and we have no desire to do that again. It was all politics and label issues and all stuff that's very unpleasant to deal with creatively - but I think we ended up with a better album because of it. So now we have a wealth of material that's left from Agony and Irony and we've continued to write since then, so there's not shortage of ideas.
Will there be a different vibe or feeling to this record, or will it be more of a progression from the past?
D: Agony was really kind of a step backwards for us. Crimson was pretty ambitious; we were writing songs based around piano parts and whatnot. Agony and Irony was an attempt to get back to three guys in a room playing. There were a few songs on there was would have fit nicely on Crimson too. I think we're going to continue to strip things away to where it will be even more organic.
You guys seem to come to Orlando quite often. What keeps bringing you back?
D: We always have great shows there. House of Blues is always a great venue to play. The area around it is very convenient as far as having things to do outside the venue. Its become a staple of our touring cycle.
When you have free time in Orlando, what do you find yourself doing?
D: We're usually tied to that area [Downtown Disney]. They used to let us into the parks. It's a pretty surreal chunk of the earth. Sometimes we catch a movie, or go to the Virgin record store to pick up some CDs or DVDs. And the venue itself is really nice. They treat the bands very well.
You've recently released your solo work for free download on your MySpace page, will you be releasing any other material in the near future or playing any solo shows?
D: I'm constantly writing, and anything I don't think can be used by the Trio I'll put out there. I've got a lot of acoustic material I've written and if the guys in the band aren't into it, I'll go ahead post that and continue to do it for free and post them as they happen. I'd love to play shows. There was some talk on our last tour with the Gaslight Anthem that they would be the backing band for some of my solo stuff. So we'll see if that happens.
