When Legends Become Dust

So I hear you finished the new album. What info can you divulge at this point? Any surprises in store?

Hah yeah one major surprise. I’ll get to that in the next question. But musically I’d say its a bit darker and heavier, but there are still the upbeat melodic parts we are known for. There is a much broader range of dynamics with my picking, I also switch from EMG pickups to passive Seymour Duncan distortions which are far more responsive to how I pick. Spencer from Embrace the End is a killer rhythm player (and lead for that matter) and his skills passed down on to me when I joined that band so riffs aren’t so much just notes over timing as they are notes at different levels of being muted or open or picked staccato and stuff like that. Whereas before that kind of shit was my weak point, I mean I had arpeggios for days, but now I’m slowly developing a right hand of doom. Basically there is more depth the the dimension of aggression to softness of playing. Also we used a delay pedal on a couple parts for some gnarly atmospheric stuff, but very sparsely.

I read on the CFTG MySpace that [vocalist] Lou [Tanuis] lives all the way in Connecticut while everyone else in the band lives in Sacramento, CA. How does this affect the writing and recording process? And speaking of the writing process, how does that typically go down?

Well it hasn’t been officially announced but its certainly no secret by now Lou has actually had to step down as our vocalist. We will be making an official statement on the situation as soon as a new song gets posted but you can read a statement he made with our buddy Anthony at Loudside.com regarding the matter here. Unfortunately his responsibilities as a father had to come first before the band and we wish him the best, there is no ill will between either him or the rest of the band. We already have a really killer replacement whom will be announced shortly as soon as he tracks his vocals and we can put a song up.

But prior to this we would just write the music here in Sacramento and send him pre-production recordings then he flew out to record with us and tracked. And as far as the musical writing process goes, we do shit mostly the old fashioned way: come to practice with a riff or idea you want realized and explain it, get it to work with drums, feel if it grooves or not, kinda get a general consensus on if we feel the part is good and fully realized to its maximum potential, then move onto the next part. I usually have a good ear for realizing what riffs should be repeated later and what riffs should be just a one time bridge piece. Sometimes we come up with second guitar parts in the studio just improvising and trying different things out. And then also, as much as we can, we try to record prepro before doing the real deal so we can listen from an objective standpoint and then suggest changes that might be made to make the songs better as songs, since sometimes its easy to get carried away while writing and go too far cramming too many ideas into one song or playing parts for too long. (Listen to With Passion‘s What We See When We Shut Our Eyes album for example, which the same core members of this band also wrote.)