Playing Music Until the World Ends: An Interview with Between the Buried and Me

22 Sep Playing Music Until the World Ends: An Interview with Between the Buried and Me

I recently met up with the progressive metal band Between the Buried and Me during the tail end of their Summer Slaughter Tour. The tour, headlined by Cannibal Corpse, stopped through the Grove in Anaheim on August 25th. Upon arriving at the Grove, I was struck by a unique culture clash occurring that day between the neighboring venues of the Angels Stadium and the Grove. Crowds of young people, generally dressed in black with an assortment of metal shirts, were crossing Katella Ave to reach the Grove amongst families walking to the Orange County-based Christian event the “Harvest Crusade” at Angels Stadium. When I arrived at the Grove’s parking attendant, I was greeted by a endearing hand-made sign which said “No Harvest Crusade Parking” and the attendant made it a point to ask “Are you here for the Summer Slaughter Tour?” Of course I was.

Founded in 2000, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based metal band Between the Buried and Me has evolved over the years from death metal into a more progressive metal sound. A hard-working and prolific band, they have a new album set for release in October called “The Parallax Part 2: Future Sequence.” The concept album carries on with sci-fi themes set forth by the 2011 release “The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues.”

I met with lead guitarist Paul Waggoner and bassist Dan Briggs in their tour bus behind the Grove while the band was just finishing up their summer US tour and getting ready to tour Europe, Japan and Australia for the next few months. We talked about everything from their tour, nail polish, Collective Soul, and the end of the world.

Interview:

How has this tour gone so far?
Paul Waggoner: Great. This is the last day of this Summer Slaughter tour and then we go tour again to Europe and then Japan, Australia, New Zealand… Then home for the holidays

Dan Briggs: Last year we did three tours, all headlining tours.  We probably did about 100 shows last year…. This is our writing year.

PW: This is our first tour of this year of 2012.

Do you do any writing on tour?
PW: Not really. It’s hard to get into that creative mood while you’re on tour because you’re in the routine of playing shows. When we get home we really get inspired to write. We all write individually…

DB: I can write on keyboard on tour but it’s hard to find a quite place to sit down and get into a head space to start something fresh.

PW: It all happens when we’re home and we send each other ideas and we expand from there. Everybody contributes.

How did this current lineup of Between the Buried and Me come about?
PW: Me and the singer (Tommy Giles Roger) are the core members. Dan, Dusty and Blake came on board in late 2004. Prior to that and there was a lot of shuffling around of members. This is the classic line-up.

I spoke with some of your fans who really embrace your band because of how much your sound has evolved over the years. What inspired your musical evolution?
PW: Once the lineup changed…

DB: Probably. You’re bringing in three dudes who have different backgrounds. Blake was a different kind of drummer than the other two… or three… or four, however many. Dusty’s got his set of influences and I’ve got a wide variety of influences. Just as you said, it’s just a progression. That’s the kind of musicians we are; we’re always evolving.

PW: When we started the band, that was the goal: to not be afraid to evolve and experiment and do weird things. That’s the band we always wanted to be all along. So that’s come to fruition. We stayed the course and stayed a band and so, over time, all these influences started to come together and the chemistry built. We have this thing that we do and we don’t know that thing is, but it’s pretty cool and it seems to work out on the record.

I love how diverse your influences are, compared to how strict some metal bands can be about what they claim to listen to.
DB: I don’t think of ourselves as a metal band, first and foremost. It’s just a platform for ever expanding influences and creative writing.

I appreciate that.
DB: I appreciate your nails.

Thanks!
PW: My girlfriend would appreciate those (nails)…

Tell your girlfriend they are these cool stick on nail lacquer decals…

May be I’ll try them. We just did these guitar videos and we were a little worried about how bad our fingers looked. Being on tour, we’re all gross. It’s a close up of our fingers. People are going to be like “I want to learn this song, but I don’t want to look at these disgusting fingers.” (laughs)

What originally inspired you to be a musician?
PW: I always played sports growing up and then at some point when I was 12-13, the grunge thing started happening. I had a couple of friends who got guitars, but I didn’t want to learn guitar, I wanted to be a singer. I saved up my money and I bought a microphone, but then a PA was really expensive. My mom was like, “just buy a guitar amp and sing through that.” It sounded horrible and just fed back the whole time. Then I thought, since I had a guitar amp, I might as well get a guitar. Then, I could jam with my buds. I really just wanted to make noise, I didn’t care. I was into the grunge thing, so I just wanted to play some bar chords, and play some Nirvana songs. It just evolved from there. Eventually I did get the bug and I thought I kind of want to really learn how to play. That’s how it happened for me. I was just trying to be cool and then all of a sudden… I got really fucking good at the guitar. (laughs)

DB: (laughs) …and that was your downfall. For me, my mom was a music teacher. I started playing guitar pretty young because she was a classical guitarist. Because it was the mid-nineties, she taught me Oasis and Nirvana songs and showed me the basics of what I needed. I was always involved in different groups at school… jazz groups and orchestras. I started playing the bass probably in 6th grade, soonly thereafter…

PW: Is “soonly” a word?

We can make it one.
PW: It all started with grunge but it evolved from there. We learned some theory and we got into more technical music.

DB: We’re kind of like sponges because we started in the grunge era and we got to punk really briefly, then hard core, and metal was sort of in there, and then that just exploded and we discovered Dream Theater in high school. But everything was in there, like the jazz I was learning in school and the classical I grew up listening to with my mom. So it’s all a part of us, instead of forgetting about it to just focus on one thing.

PW: Everything I ever liked I still like. I can go back and listen to a Helmet record and I still like it… or Pearl Jam… or…

DB: Collective Soul.
(all laugh)

PW: It was all a part of the DNA of who I am as a musician and, honestly, it all still influences us as songwriters.

DB: We have a record coming out in a couple months. It’s coming out the first week we are touring in Europe in October and we’ll be spreading the good word about “The Parallax Part 2.” We’ll be back in the States in January.

PW: Well the new one (the record “The Parallax Part 2”)… I don’t want to give to much away… spoiler alert… Well the EP (“The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues”) was like… the story evolves around two characters who exist in two planes. You have one that is on present day Earth and on that exists light years away and you have some time-traveller things happening. The first EP was really the introduction of the characters. You learn that they have some kind of connection with one another even though they are separated by all this time and space. The full length is where everything starts to happen. They connect, they actually meet through some sci-fi stuff. Then they task themselves with solving the problem that is humanity, the way that we destroy everything that we touch. Then there is an undercurrent of personal struggles that anyone can relate to, like making decisions and the consequences of those decisions and how you effect your loved ones. There are several themes, but it really centers around these two characters. Then something crazy happens. That’s all I will say…

Do you write the story together as a band?
PW:Before we started writing the EP and I came up with a vague outline of the story and then I shared it with Tommy and Dan and they were kind of into it, which surprised me. We put the ball in Tommy’s court from there and he wrote lyrics from it it and then expanded on it greatly and wrote these sub-plots. It ended up being really cool and fit the music we wrote. I give most of the credit to him.

Is there anything you miss in the music industry today that was around when you were a kid?
DB: I was watching a Metallic documentary and it shows record release day and it shows a line at Tower Records. I remember being absolutely psyched to go to the store and buy a record on release day. It was huge. It’s sad that it’s not that way anymore.

PW: Music is very devalued now in a physical sense. People still buy music but it’s so accessible because of the internet. The average kid nowadays doesn’t realize how big a deal it is for a band to release new music. At the click of a button they can download the whole thing for free. Not that we’re out there trying to grab money or whatever, it’s just not as big of a deal anymore. Nobody’s out rushing to the store on record release day to get the record, and that sucks. But that’s the way it is; we can’t fight technology. We just have to evolve and come up with creative ways to somehow getting back to that point. For us, it’s about selling space suits. You can pre-order the album and get a space suit or a lava lamp. There are different ways you can get creative to inspire people to get excited about the physical product.

DB: We probably should have made black light posters.

PW:  We probably should have.
DB: Something to evolve to.

What keeps driving you to make music?
DB: I had an interview the other day where they asked me what would make me stop playing music. I guess if the world ended. It’s just a natural thing. It’s a hard thing to describe. It’s when I’m at my happiest.

PW:  For me, it’s just fun to create music with other people; guys who are my friends. It’s fun to do and such a rewarding thing. At this point, I’m 33 and I don’t what else to do anyway and I like doing this. So I’m just going to do until my arms fall off.

DB: 2012, baby.  The worlds supposed to end.

PW: …or the world ends. I guess then we’ll stop.

Photography by Eric Stoner.