INTERVIEW: Matty Mullins – Memphis May Fire
If it isn’t Broken, don’t fix it. Try telling that to MEMPHIS MAY FIRE as they welcome in their new era with their sixth album smashing expectations and showing the metalcore mainstays can bravely break their tried and tested formula. Frontman and one half of the band’s writing duo Matty Mullins lets Distorted Sound in on this risky new approach and their legacy on the road after twelve years.
How’s 2018 been for you and MEMPHIS MAY FIRE?
Matty: Everything’s been great, we’re just at the beginning of this tour with ATREYU, we’re super excited about it and the shows have been insane. Plus our new album just came out and I couldn’t be more happy.
How have the responses been so far?
Matty: We knew this record would be so wildly different from anything we’ve ever done in the past, we were fully ready for the backlash from people wondering what we were doing and disagreeing with the direction we’ve taken. I think that’s all natural regardless, whatever we put out, there’s always gonna be some sort of hate out there. The responses from our core fanbase, people who genuinely love and support us, has been incredible. We’re most excited about reaching a whole new audience with this record that we couldn’t have reached before with any of our previous records. The future’s bright!
It’s nice to hear something fresh because the metalcore scene is pretty stale at the moment.
Matty: If we’re gonna continue to put out music having been a band for as long as we have, we’ve gotta write records that we’re really excited about, records that feel fresh and exciting, something that’s not just the norm and I think we’ve accomplished that with this record.
How long has Broken taken to write? Did you start straight after This Light I Hold?
Matty: Absolutely. Usually once we drop a record, we immediately start writing again for another one so we actually wrote and recorded this record about a year ago and it took a while, we went back and forth on mixes and we tried to figure out the right time to drop it. We wanted to be on the right tour when the record came out and this tour felt like it, so we’ve been sitting on this record for a while and we’ve already started writing for the next one!
That’s the good thing about Rise Records, they keep you going year after year.
Matty: We’ve never had a problem writing or recording so we’d love to put out records every 12 months if that was what we’re asked to do, we love creating and giving to the world. Being inspired by our fans and being inspired by the bands we’re touring with as well as the constant surrounding changing every day from travelling day to day, there’s so much to hold onto and so much to write about.
Who’s on rhythm guitar for this album? Did touring member Sam Penner step in to write for the record?
Matty: For as long as we’ve been a band, Kellen [McGregor, guitar] and I have only ever been the two writers. Sam is just a touring member for us, we love him and he’s awesome and we will keep him forever but as far as moving forward with him as a permanent member or even having anybody outside Kellen and I writing, it just hasn’t happened that way.
Better not let go of Sam any time soon!
Matty: Sam really loves country music so I’m worried that one day we’re gonna lose him and he’s gonna be out there playing for Gareth Brooks or something like that…
So you’ve had Kane Churko producing for the first time with you on Broken. How did that go?
Matty: Kane is rad and he’s different to anybody we’ve ever worked with. One of his things is if he’s gonna work on a record, he’s gotta have a hand in writing as well. So instead of me and Kellen coming to the studio with finished songs, we came to the studio with ideas and concepts and basically wrote the record in front of Kane if he wanted to interject and say something about parts being any different, or if he thought something would connect with the audience better by writing something differently. That was our first time ever working with anybody else from a writing standpoint and that was cool, his studio in Las Vegas is really rad, it’s a giant beautiful studio and we lived out in Vegas for a couple of months and did the record there. When all was finished, we had Drew Fulk mix the record.
It’s a big risk letting someone else in to write alongside you when it’s been you two for so long.
Matty: It was but we learned through the process that you don’t have to take every idea that somebody has. We were nervous for so long about letting someone into our creative process, but I think that having someone else in the room, that has a different perspective and maybe sees things a little different, can actually be really healthy during the writing process. I think we’re going to continue to co-write with a bunch of different people in the future just to be sure we’re writing the best possible songs. Three heads are better than two, Kellen and I have two completely different writing styles and I think that’s what’s given our music the flavour that it has, the two of us coming from way different backgrounds and collaborating on something. If you can get a third person in the room that just knows how songs should flow and feel, it’s not someone who’s written anything so they get to jump in and say, “Hey, when I hear this, I wish it would be like this,” you understand that and work on it until it becomes something that everyone agrees on. It’s kind of a cool process!
That explains the slower tempo on Sell My Soul, that’s a nice change.
Matty: There’s a handful of songs on the record that are wildly different, You & Me has got kind of a twang to it. It’s cool to branch out and not necessarily prove to other people what we’re capable of, but prove that to ourselves. If you stick to one sound or genre forever, you lose out on creating something you could’ve loved.
You debuted The Old Me live for the first time a few nights ago. How has it gone down so far?
Matty: It’s the only song in the set from the new record and that’s just because we’ve put out six albums now, if we’re headlining, we have more wriggle room to add new songs in but with six albums, playing a 45-minute direct support slot, we’ve gotta make sure we’re putting in songs from every record to please everybody in the crowd. Adding one new one in there is still a good chunk of real estate in the set so it’s been going really good, people have been responding really well. We’re shooting a live music video for that song on this tour as well!
Are there any old songs that never make the setlist that you wish you could try?
Matty: There’s one song on The Hollow called The Abandoned, people have been wanting us to play that song for so long. It was a mistake the way I’d written and recorded it, that chorus is so hard to sing, I can nail it in the studio and I could probably nail it three or four nights on tour but getting halfway through a tour, sometimes my voice isn’t strong because I’m constantly singing and screaming because we don’t take a lot of days off out here, so instead of putting it in the set and playing it mediocre, we’ve just decided to never put it in the set. That album was a really big learning experience for me, in the studio you’re in your comfort zone and your voice is usually in good condition and there’s so much you can do in the studio that won’t translate live because you’re just using your voice so much every night. After that record, I was really careful to write something I’m able to pull off perfectly live. I always want our albums to be recreated live as best as possible so I need to write within a range that’s attainable night after night after night. Then there’s a thousand YouTube videos of you sounding awful and I don’t wanna do that! I think the song is a great song and it’ll live on forever whether we play it on tour or not, I just want people to remember it as good as it was.
You might come across a problem when you have a tenth anniversary tour, then…
Matty: If we have a 10 year anniversary for The Hollow, if it’s a headliner we can space out the dates, do two shows and take a day off, if I’m doing that then my voice will be in good condition. Whether you’re singing and screaming correctly or not, you’re still using your voice so much out on tour and I try to do everything I can to protect mine and do the best I can every night but some stuff is just out of reach. That pre-chorus in that song is part of that! If we ever do another tour with SLEEPING WITH SIRENS, I can get Kellin Quinn out to sing those choruses because his voice is more than capable of getting up in that register with ease!
You’ve toured with the likes of YELLOWCARD and KILLSWITCH ENGAGE over the years, but who’s been your best tour buddies?
Matty: We click with just about everybody we tour with, we’ve never toured with ATREYU before but already a few days into the tour, I feel like they’re going to be lifelong friends of ours. There’s two bands that have stuck out amongst the rest over the years and they’re bands we toured with early on in our career. ALESANA are the first, those dudes in that band are so fun to be around, they’re a riot. I love those guys so much, touring with them was a blast. Also this band from Japan we toured with called FACT. I think Japanese people are the most wonderful people in the world, they’re so kind and enthusiastic about the music so being around them was constantly inspiring and they’re so funny to be around. Those two bands have been incredible to share the road with but we make friends with just about anybody who we tour with, everyone becomes lifelong friends.
Despite the lyrics you write, you never have a bad word to say about anybody!
Matty: Music is a great outlet to release negative emotions. The one thing that’s so powerful about music is when you have a song you can relate to or express a negative feeling, that’s a great way to get rid of that. I don’t think negative thoughts, feelings or being angry in general is a good way to live your life, I think that’s miserable. Regardless, we experience those feelings just by being human, it’s inevitable. So if we can use music as our outlet to release those emotions or to satisfy them in some way, I think music changes the world.
What’s been your proudest moment with MEMPHIS MAY FIRE to date?
Matty: What’s crazy is there are so many highs and lows in music. We were playing Soundwave in Australia in 2013 and we woke up that day to an email from the festival saying, “For today, we’ve moved you to stage 1A.” The lineup on that stage that day was MEMPHIS MAY FIRE, SLAYER, LINKIN PARK and METALLICA – we were freaking out! We played that stage in front of 20,000 people that day in Sydney and that was so cool. But the next day, something that happens that’s not up to par with that, you get brought back down to reality. There’s all these ups and downs so the one thing that’s stayed consistent throughout our entire career, things that we always look up to as proud moments, are when anybody tells us they were affected by our music in a positive way. That sounds so cliche because it sounds like the answer you’re supposed to give as a singer of a band, but it’s genuinely the people that we meet that listen to our music and are inspired by us, that’s everything to us. That’s why we still tour, that’s why we still write music is because we are blessed to have our part in someone else’s story and that’s not something a lot of people get to do so we just feel really thankful for it. It’s unreal because at the end of the day, we’re exactly like everybody else, we’re just everyday people who get to tell our story through music and other people connect to it. We’re all human beings, we go through the same things and when someone else can connect to your story and make it your own, we’re connecting on a spiritual level at that point. It’s no longer just what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears, it’s something we feel with supernatural and it connects us and that is a massive honour.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in a MEMPHIS MAY FIRE crowd before?
Matty: German fans do some really crazy stuff. On our first time playing in Germany, I said on stage, “Show me something I’ve never seen before,” and this massive group of people sat down in the middle of the mosh pit forming the shape of a boat and people acted like they were rowing a boat. It was 50 people knowing exactly what to do at the right time to make the shape and row it, it’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life! People in Germany love rock and roll and love doing crazy stuff like that, it’s awesome. How is that even possible? It blew my mind, we almost had to stop the song because everyone was amazed!
That’s raised the bar for UK fans to up the ante now…
Matty: I think my favourite venue in the entire world is KOKO in London though. Usually a venue is very aesthetically pleasing for the crowd so the crowd sees all the production on the stage, but you rarely look out in the crowd from the stage and see something so beautiful. That venue is so aesthetically pleasing when you’re on stage and we love playing there!
Broken is out now via Rise Records.
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