Interview & photos by Rachel Jablonski
Relieved after a recent scare with the illness of guitarist Wayne Miller, resulting in hospitalization, Bleed the Sky has returned to the road. Playing temporarily as a 4-piece, I spoke with the band on their stop in Cedar Rapids, IA. Despite plaguing concerns, encouraging was the band’s passion and great sense of humor. The interview began with guitarist Kyle Moorman and we were later joined by vocalist Noah Robinson, bassist Daylen Elsey, and drummer Auston D’Amond.
Rachel: You guys have been through hell lately and I’m so glad you could make it here today! Your guitarist Wayne Miller has, of course, been extremely sick. You dropped off the tour for awhile to be with him. I’m really sorry to hear that. How is he doing now?
Kyle: He’s a faker. [laugh] He’s doing better now. He’s back home and he’s a thousand times better than he was.
Rachel: Do they know what was wrong?
Kyle: They still don’t know what he had. He’s not sick anymore. Whatever he got completely wiped him out, gave him pneumonia, made it to where his throat swelled up and he couldn’t breathe. He was on a ventilator for over a week. Whatever it was is pretty much gone and he’s just trying to recuperate.
Rachel: Well good. Do you have any idea when he might be back?
Kyle: Playing shows? He’s not allowed back! [laugh] Well we’re going to finish up this tour and then we’ll have a few months off from touring to write and record the next record. Following that, in February, we will be back on tour and he should be fine.
Rachel: Right now you’re the only guitarist. How are you able to compensate two guitar parts?
Kyle: Well we have two amps running up both sides of the stage so that kind of covers that. I’m still not 100 percent covering it like I’d like to be. I mean it’s hard to compensate for guitar harmonies and there are parts you just can’t do without two guitarists so you have to change the part. But I think Daylen and I just try to fill the energy as much as possible. It’s not 100 percent and it won’t be until Wayne gets back, but we’re covering the best we can.
Enter vocalist Noah Robinson, bassist Daylen Elsey, and drummer Auston D’Amond. We continue after greetings and introductions.
Rachel: Cool, you’re wearing a Spinebelt shirt! Do you know that band well?
Noah: We’ve played several shows with them on the East Coast. They’re good friends of ours.
Daylen: I love Butch!
Rachel: I haven’t seen them, but I have friends out East that have played with them often. I have their discs, good stuff!
Noah: They’re awesome! It’s just really cool shit.
Rachel: How has the Dope tour been?
Kyle: Fucking sweet.
Noah: Awesome.
Daylen: I’ve been drunk every day.
Auston: Look at the get up, can’t you tell?
Kyle: You can’t pick this up on tape, but Daylen looks like… I don’t even know how to describe it. Look at those shorts and that vest.
Noah: The Dope tour has been great so far. They’re great guys and have always taken care of us. The one area where we’ve really had to step it up on this tour is with merchandise. It’s the one area that we really expect to be challenged. These guys have like their own shopping mall with them. Other than that, it’s been killer!
Rachel: How are the other bands?
Kyle: We’ve been friends with Manntis for years because they’re from our neck of the woods. We’re from Orange County and they’re Riverside which is right next to us in Southern California. ANew Revolution, they’re cool as hell. We get along with them great. They’re cool guys, great musicians. All the Dope guys have been great. Even before we met them they let us stay at their house when we had a few days off in the middle of the tour. I mean they’ve just always opened their doors to us.
Rachel: Paradigm in Entropy is now about a year old. You have done a lot of touring off of it and are definitely making a name for yourself…
Kyle: Yeah we’ve been touring for pretty much the last year with maybe a week off here and there.
Noah: December/January we had about three weeks off for the holidays. It was the only chance we really had to recuperate from our trailer and all of our gear getting stolen last year. So during those three weeks we were able to get our stuff back together.
Rachel: Did you ever find your stuff?
Noah: Nope, it’s gone.
Rachel: Did you have to pay to replace everything out of pocket?
Kyle: A lot of it we did. But the good thing that came out of it was, because we are broke as touring musicians, we had to really push ourselves to find endorsements to help us out and give us free equipment. Without endorsements there is no way we could have done it.
Rachel: Are you ready to play some new tunes? What’s next as far as an album?
Kyle: Oh god yes. I can’t wait to get on stage and do something new.
Rachel: Are you getting sick of it?
Kyle: Some of these songs we wrote in 2003 when we were just starting. We’ll change parts up and there are parts on the album that are different live because they work better that way. We just try to keep it interesting for us without alienating the people who come to the show looking to hear the music they’ve heard on the album. We’re not playing different songs, but we’re playing them looking for a crowd response. We’re not looking to play them just as they are on the album.
Noah: We do open up the set with a riff from the new record. Just an eight bar jam.
Kyle: It’s more for us, just so we can play something new. It gets us in a good mood just to start the set off new and fresh.
Rachel: Do you have new songs written?
Kyle: Yeah, we have like five songs written, full songs. We have a whole bunch of just random riffs and ideas as well. When Wayne was in the hospital, we had all this downtime. We were just sitting in the hotel room and we didn’t want to waste time. We couldn’t be in the hospital with him 24/7. So we dragged some of our equipment into the hotel room and started writing and we got some material out of that. We try to make it so that when we finally get in the studio to record we can get the best possible material.
Noah: We were sitting there wondering from day to day if Wayne was going to make it and we were like ok let’s get our minds off this. So we started writing material and were coming up with stuff we probably wouldn’t have otherwise just being in that frame of mind. It’s good to try to find a positive out of something bad.
Rachel: I think it's cool that you guys took time off to be with him.
Kyle: Yeah, well originally they thought it was his appendix. The doctors said you guys can go on ahead; he’s going to be fine. They said it’s just like a standard thing. Then we got to Virginia and I talked to Wayne’s mom because we hadn’t been able to get a hold of Wayne and they told us how serious it was and from there we just drove straight back.
Rachel: Paradigm in Entropy means basically a pattern in disorder. What is this referring to?
Kyle: It’s one of those multiple meanings for us. To me it means there is a lot of chaotic music, but for us it’s not just music trying to be crazy or out there for the sake of being out there. There are reasons for it. It’s the kind of music we like and it’s not just a bunch of guys that listen to metal writing metal. It’s guys that listen to a lot of different stuff and experience a lot of things just like everybody else and hopefully that comes out through the record. I can’t speak for the other guys.
Auston: I’d like to add Jack Daniels.
Kyle: Actually cross that out and put Jagermeister. We are on the Jager tour. [laugh]
Rachel: The album is full of audio samples. Where do most of these come from and how do you choose them to tie into the album concept?
Noah: [laugh]
Kyle: Well the guy to ask is no longer with us.
Noah: Yeah, but we still did most of it. We get ideas from everything.
Kyle: Yeah, we have samples from video games, movies… we’ll just hear something cool that we think will work in a song and we just grab it and hope we don’t get sued for copyright infringement. [laugh]
Rachel: The disc was mastered by Logan Mader of Machine Head fame. How did he end up working on the disc?
Kyle: Originally we considered recording the album with him, but then we did the demo with Ben Schigel. So we kind of played the safety on that one because we knew what we were going to get production-wise and we would record in a place that we knew we were comfortable.
Noah: At the end of the session Ben suggested going to Logan.
Kyle: Yeah so it kind of worked out. We didn’t know that Logan actually did mastering too so that’s how it worked out.
Rachel: I haven’t seen your live show yet, looking forward to it tonight, but the video for "Minion" gets me pumped up and ready. What do you think the most important aspect of a live show is?
Kyle: For me it’s connection with these other guys because if we don’t have that we aren’t going to connect with the crowd.
Noah: Crowd connection comes naturally if we connect with each other.
Rachel: Do you have days where you don’t connect and what causes that?
Kyle: No never!
Noah: Last night. [laugh]
Kyle: Yeah, where we got half a foot of stage space. It’s only a bad show if you don’t learn from your mistakes. If we have a bad show like we did last night and we’re just sour about it and pissed off and don’t talk to each other and then have a bad show the next night for the same reasons, we’re not learning.
Rachel: What is coming up for Bleed the Sky?
Kyle: We get back home on August 20th and as soon as we get back we’ll probably take a week or two to get the fuck away from each other so we don’t end up killing each other. Immediately after that we’ll just be hitting it hard, writing material, and working jobs because we’re not rich. Every minute we have we’ll spend writing material. Hopefully we’ll have something by December/January.
Noah: We’ll probably start touring again around February/March.
Rachel: Is there anything else you want to talk about?
Noah: However you can put it in there call our guitar player Wayne a faker. We give him a hard time as much as possible.