Q&A: Alexisonfire

Dallas Green: Thanks man.

Wade MacNeil: Seriously?

Jordan “Ratbeard” Hastings: Yeah. Twist that knife man.

George Pettit: My grandmother died a few years ago, you want to bring that up too?

That was my next question actually

George: [Laughs]

But seriously, how has it been going?

Dallas: It’s been great.

Ratbeard: It’s just a long one, you know?

Dallas: Playing in a parking lot every day of the summer, the shows are really good, but then it’s just like….

I feel like a lot of bands gauge their success and by whether or not they play Warped, but once they actually play it, reality strikes about how brutal it really is.

Dallas: It’s tough man. Thankfully we’re on a bus so we don’t have to worry about long drives.

Wade: It’s really weird to play before noon and then have breakfast after you play.

With power pop and neon rock taking over the scene, you guys have managed to do well for yourselves and keep your heads above water in a fading hardcore scene.

George: Woah! That’s a new one. Neon rock?

Wade: That’s what it is though.

Ratbeard: Did you coin that?

Someone else has probably already said that. I’m not clever enough to come up with things like that. But yeah, it’s called ‘neon rock’.

Dallas: What about ‘new found hardcore’? That’s what I like to call it. It’s bands that really love New Found Glory, but they also really love breakdowns. That’s new found hardcore.

Well those bands have begun to take over Warped Tour. How has it been going from playing with bands like NOFX and Bad Religion on past Warped Tours to playing with bands like Brokencyde and Millionaires who are met with so much criticism on this tour?

Wade: I don’t want to compare us to some of the bands you just mentioned…the sh*tty ones. But we were a new, ‘whack’ band when we got started and I think we are figuring it out a little more year-by-year. Everyone’s gotta get started somewhere. Maybe one of those ‘neon’ bands will eventually start wearing blue jeans and putting out some records that are a little bit more personal. I don’t want to right everyone off but…

Dallas: Oh I do, and I have.

Wade: Watch out!

Dallas: I don’t see how the Warped Tour can have bands that aren’t bands first of all and second of all a band that doesn’t even sing. It’s just a band that sings about not having talent, a band that sings about getting paid and getting laid to 14-year-old girls I just don’t see that as the Warped Tour. I realize the Warped Tour is a business just like anything else and it has to sell tickets but that doesn’t mean that I have to agree with it.

Well maybe that’s what it has come to after 15 years.

George: I’m sure every year there’s been a band that all the other bands said “f*ck that band!” about.

Ratbeard: This is my fifth time doing this tour and I can’t remember one year where there weren’t more bad bands than good ones…in my opinion.

So can you guys tell me about the new record? I love it.

Wade: Thanks man.

There’s been a bit of a sound change. It’s a little more melodic with a sort of new vocal style to it with Dallas singing a lot more. What was the thought process behind Old Crows, Young Cardinals?

Dallas: I don’t know. I think we just really want to do what we did before you know what I mean? It’s not like we go into making a record and say “let’s change everything!” We just do it. I don’t write guitar riffs that sound like guitar riffs I’ve already written and we don’t finish the song like we did before. As far as the singing goes, we’ve all been singing in the band for eight years now so we’ve all kind of gotten better at doing it and we figured out new ways to do it and new ways to sing together.

Can you tell me about “The Biker Song”? You recorded part of it and then decided it wasn’t very good at all?

Dallas: [Laughs] Yeah. Certain songs just don’t make it. We wrote a ton of songs for this record, which we had never really done before and we had a couple that just didn’t sound like us. There were a couple songs we wrote and then had to re-write because they didn’t sound like us. They were good songs but they weren’t us. When we first wrote Young Cardinals I just wanted to write a song that sounded like Kyuss so I did that. Then we said, “Yeah, this is Kyuss, so let’s re-write it and make it sound like Alexisonfire.” So we re-wrote it completely and now it sounds like us. So some things like that happened, but there are songs we just can’t make sound like us.

Wade: However there are songs like “The Biker Song” that just flat out suck.

Ratbeard: Hey, the riff was good though. It was neat. Maybe you’ll hear it some day.

Hopefully I can hear it some day.

Ratbeard: I’ll get drunk and do my impression of the song for you.

You guys have been around for about 7 years now.

George: 8 years in September. Creepy right?

Your first release went gold in your home country Canada, and the 2^nd and 3^rd went platinum. Can you guys explain why you haven’t quite managed to catch a break in the US yet?

George: It has something to do with the amount of time we all want to put in down here. We are an international band. There are a lot of bands from America that tour America constantly and spend all of their time focusing on it to try and make a dent in America and we’re just not that band. We would rather go to England and Europe and Australia and focus our time there. For us that’s just a little more interesting. We’re still going to come down here and work at it and still play all the shows we can but I don’t necessarily ever see us getting massive in America.

Ratbeard: No one has ever talked about us either though. We’ve never had an article written in a major magazine about us, we’ve never had our videos played, we’ve never been played on the radio. We get that everywhere else so a lot of people here don’t know who we are.

Wade: It’s kind of neat though. It’s humbling when we come to America and I kind of like it. I don’t mind playing in a smaller room.

Dallas: Our headlining shows in America are so fun.

Wade: They aren’t poor by any means, they’re just smaller.

Dallas, I heard that you are learning to play slide guitar.

Dallas: Yeah. I’ve played guitar for a very long time and I always told myself that I’d learn how to play slide guitar and I figure what better way to do it than on a tour where there are 60 bands that I don’t want to watch.

Is this something we can expect to hear on the next Alexisonfire record? Perhaps a new City and Colour record?

Dallas: No, I just like learning how to play lots of stuff.

Would you guys say you are fully or only partially influenced by fellow Canadian rockers Nickelback?

Wade: [Laughs] Fully!

George: Yeah 100%!

Wade: And by the way, it’s pronounced Nick-LeBack. It’s one guy, Nick-LeBack.

Ratbeard: You know they’re more popular in America than they are in Canada right?

George: Everyone always says, “Hey Nickelback is from Canada” and we say, “Yeah. But you guys bought all the records!” 80% of their fans are from America, so yeah.

Ratbeard: Way to go…

George: Chad Kroeger is on our five-dollar bill too, I don’t know if you know that.

So do you guys have only music celebrities on your money? Celine Dion and Shania Twain?

George: Actually its mostly ex-hockey players.

So what do you guys have planned for after Warped?

Chris Steele: Reading and Leeds immediately after this and then Europe for six weeks in October and November.

Are you going to do a US headlining tour?

Ratbeard: Hopefully we will be coming back to The States in the spring around April.

Dallas: Yeah. We’ll be back.