INTERVIEW: Pallbearer
At the final night of the recent UK tour, at The Fleece in Bristol, Distorted Sound sat down with all four members of progressive doom juggernaut PALLBEARER for a quick chinwag. Here’s what went down…
Guys, thanks you very much for taking the time to speak to Distorted Sound today. Last date of the UK stretch today – how’s it been so far?
PALLBEARER: Good, really good! We’ll be back here in a few weeks to do Bloodstock and that’s the last UK date we’ll do until the near future.
DS: Is there something about the UK that you like every time you come back?
PB: We’ve got a number of friends over here so it’s always good to see them when we come over – even with the band [GODTHRYMM] who are playing with us tonight; Hamish is a really good friend of ours and he along with another member are in one of our favourite bands of all time – MY DYING BRIDE are the shit! So it’s really cool to hang out and get to know those guys. We actually met Hamish a few years ago when he was touring with his other outfit VALLENFYRE at the Decibel Festival in the US so it’s nice to have him on the road with us. Another factor to coming over here is that the people are really enthusiastic about this style of music as well.
Yeah, it’s exploded over the last couple of years here and I think that reflects the fact that [latest album] Heartless did so well over here is because the UK metal scene has tapped into that expansive, progressive genre. Along with you winning Best Underground Band at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods last year, did it feel that you had to carry that momentum on into this year?
PB: Yeah, well our kinda ‘modus operandi’ is that if we stop moving we’ll die, haha! The band’s like a shark, we just have to keep moving.
Is that also part of the reason why you release an odd single here and there outside of the album as well?
PB: Yeah, and more stuff’s coming out this year as well on the back of Drop Out; we’re always chasing the carrot!
Always good to know! Do you also like having those singles to look back on as snapshot, almost, of what you were like as a band at the time?
PB: Yeah, that’s definitely part of it, but also they’re fun to do – it’s just a quick little thing that doesn’t have to fit into a larger image. It fits the PALLBEARER idea and thesis, but we don’t have to think ‘How does this fit among six other songs?’ you know what we’re saying?
I do. It’s interesting that you are very much an ‘albums band’ – you’ve mentioned about PINK FLOYD being a major influence in the past who also fit that category – and yet you have this odd little songs that come out every so often.
PB: It’s freeing as well – you don’t have to have context for it or anything. There are songs on both [second album] Foundations and Heartless that were written previously but they didn’t fit the rest of those songs, so they eventually found their way onto a later album when everything made more sense. For singles you don’t have to worry about that; you can write whatever you want. In addition, even though we’re constantly on the road, we’re always writing new material and it’s nice not having to wait three years to get a song out – we’re not going to know if a song will fit when we get around to writing another album, so if it’s ready just get it out there.
And I imagine that if you’ve written a song three years prior, it might be getting stale due to regular live airings on the road?
PB: Exactly! Another thing is the recording process; when you go to record an album it’s a month long without taking into account the practice and rehearsals needed around it, but with the singles we can go in for a few days, have a lot of fun with one song, try different techniques that could then be used on a future album and if it fails then we’ll move on. We also have this tiny studio at home and we didn’t know if it would be adequate enough to record Heartless on so we tried it out with a single to make sure we were happy with it; it did and we’ll probably be there for as many albums as we can after!
Do you also take feedback at all? For example, if you release a single do you see how the fans react to it and then use what they’ve said to take direction for future releases?
PB: Honestly, we try to not pay too much attention to what everyone else thinks because it just gets in your head. Everybody’s got a lot of opinions and so it usually comes down to us; if we all agree that there’s something we want to do then we will, it’s the only opinion that matters!
[laughs] yeah, as long as you guys like it I guess it’s a good shout!
PB: Well, we openly challenge you to argue with us if you’d like!
DS: I will politely decline, but thank you for the offer! I also remember you saying that you all like your down time; I assume you’ll all find that touring is both a blessing and a curse?
PB: Oh sure, we’ve got about a month left on this cycle, including a week back in the States, then we have three weeks at home and then another three week stretch with TRIBULATION but that’s it ; we’ll be done in October and that’ll pretty much be the final chapter on the Heartless run aside from some smaller thing we’ll be doing in the new year. Touring can be fun when it all runs smoothly – when things are all going to plan then it can be fun and when they’re not it’s a fucking nightmare; the same applies if there’s shit going on at home the we need to take care of and can’t, that’s frustrating, but that’s what we do. We toured for nearly six months of last year and will have toured for about four this year. In fact, last year we toured for eight months and had two weeks off at a time; that was brutal and stacked up pretty hard, but you have to do it. So many people ask us when we’re going to this city or that and our response is ‘Well, we fucking tour ALL the time so we’ll be back round soon enough!’
DS: Exactly, and I guess that reflects on the industry nowadays that you have to put so much into it because there’s little money in actually releasing music; that said, in a world that is still largely streaming, you’ve sold a good few copies of Heartless on vinyl here!
PB: Well, metal fans are kinda like fetishists for physical things which is cool so I understand, but it’s nice that people are listening to it regardless of how they do; preferably legally of course, haha!
DS: Being an albums band as well, have you thought about playing a record in full on tour? Given that each one is an experience in its own right, it must be pretty painful having to chop it up into different pieces on stage every night.
PB: Yeah, coming up with setlists is hard sometimes! We have thought about it, yeah, but there’s a time and a place for that. We’re constantly writing and producing music so we’d rather play that than do a legacy thing, but I’m sure it’ll come around eventually. If we’re able to do something in a ‘reimagining’ fashion where we play an album with a load of new elements I think that would go down nicely. At present though, given that we play decent length sets, we switch out songs from tour to tour so if you watch us on two occasions that we come to your town, you’ll likely see the vast majority of the material we have to our name.
DS: And I imagine, with writing on the road a lot and so much going on in the world right now, that naturally seeps into your music and process, particularly with what’s happening in your own country.
PB: Yeah, it’s a nightmare. When we were practising the Heartless material pre-recording, we’d step outside the building for a cigarette and be confronted with this massive Trump billboard saying ‘Make America Great Again’ and we all thought ‘Well, MAYBE he’ll win but surely fucking not – there’s NO way this dude’s gonna win!’ We actually went to see BLACK SABBATH on Election Day on their final tour and during the final four songs we were getting texts saying ‘Are you fucking seeing this?’ We all thought people were fucking with us but by the end of the show he’d pretty much won; it was even more unpleasant the next day with the hangover! There were friends of ours in tears though, like ‘drinking and crying’ levels of upset’ because they’d woken up with the worst news ever. It was crazy.
DS: If it helps, it was the same with us leaving the EU…
PB: Yeah, it’s the same thing – the Brexit shit happened in the same way that Trump got elected: with a lot of misinformation. That said, never underestimate the voting power of very stupid people.
DS: On a much lighter note, do you have any favourite stories from touring?
PB: Too many! Although Devin [Holt, PALLBEARER‘s guitarist] started smoking again the last time we were here, in fact in the very courtyard outside this venue! We were opening for YOB, one of them rolled a joint and that was it. He thought it would just be for touring and that would be it but four years on and he’s still puffing!
DS: Anything particularly memorable in terms of a really good or really terrible show? To give you an example, I know of a band whose gear went missing and they had to use a tour t-shirt as their backdrop…
PB: Oh man! Well [PALLBEARER guitarist and frontman] Brett’s gear went missing at the beginning of this tour and he didn’t have it for five days so we had to cobble everything together last minute. In his defence, we left for tour a day earlier than he was expecting to so he had a shitload to do and didn’t sleep for nearly 48 hours. We ended up in Hamburg and his gear just didn’t so we were sat in the office there for ages waiting for his stuff! The other was the album release show for our debut record Sorrow and Exctinction; we played it straight through and the album ends with both Brett and Devin solo-ing and in the last few bars of the song Brett’s amp literally caught fire. Everyone thought it was intentional and praised us for a really good effect but it was nothing like that!
DS: I bet it looked good though! Finally, if you could sum up what makes PALLBEARER tick in as few words as possible, what would you say?
PB: Beer and weed, [laughs]! Substance usage, not abusage though! Seriously though, mostly we just get along, enjoy drinking and partying together and the relationship just breeds ideas. The four of us combine and it’s a productive thing – we’re all naturally inclined to create things and when those elements combine…that’s PALLBEARER.
DS: And it’s why we love you. Guys, thank you very much for speaking to me.
PB: No problem man, thanks very much!
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