Before their fantastic show in Glasgow, I had a chat with As I Lay Dying frontman Tim Lambesis.
Tim Lambesis
DistortedNews: Are you happy with the reaction the new album has been getting?
Tim Lambesis: Every album that comes out, no matter how much the band has progressed or how good the album is, there’s always going to be people who say “oh, I like the sound of their old albums” or people who just complain because it’s a new album. But overall, I think most of our fans agree that it’s our best release yet. We’re proud of it.
DN: How have the songs been going over live?
Tim: Good, when the album first came out, we took a little time and didn’t play too many new songs right away. We wanted to give the fans some time to get familiar with the stuff. This is the most new songs we’ve played on a tour yet.
DN: How was the writing process for the album?
Tim: Instrumentally, we all just wrote as many ideas on our own as we could. Because we all have a good grasp on recording, we’d just record our ideas and send them to each other. Once we narrowed down the best ones and started practising those together it became more of a full band project. Lyrically, I work on lyrics by myself, so because I wrote all the lyrics for this album in a two month time period, there’s a similar theme. I try to write about what’s most on my heart and what’s going on in my life in the time that we were working on the album, so I think the songs fit together pretty well.
As I Lay Dying
DN: Just recently you started your own clothing company, Modern Rebellion, what can you tell us about that?
Tim: A friend of mine is a great designer, and he wanted to start a company, he approached me about partnering with him and I felt like I didn’t really need to start another company or whatever, I make my living through music, but I told him I’d definitely be interested in being involved if we could put the money from my end of the partnership to different charities. So I came up with a list of different charities that I rally want to support and from there he started coming up with designs and we sent each other ideas back and forth. Now I get tons of free clothes for going on tour and I give charities lot’s of support, so it’s worked out well.
DN: Before the release of the album, we did an interview with Josh (Gilbert, AILD bassist) and he said “I think the bands that will make it are the ones that can take the redeemable qualities from the genre and make it fresh and interesting.” What bands do you think will be the ones that keep the genre moving forward?
Tim: I think the bands that are around now are the ones that will survive, I don’t think there will be any new bands that will open new doors in metalcore, but I think the bands that will survive long-term are the ones that have some of the more traditional metal elements, not strictly metalcore.
Last Action Hero
DN: Outside of As I Lay Dying, you’re quite well know for your side project, Austrian Death Machine. Are there plans for a third album?
Tim: Yeah, I’ve actually been trying to organise my schedule. This tour ends tomorrow night (30th November) and the next tour isn’t ’till February, so I’ve got a couple of months to work on some new songs.
DN: Will you still have guest guitarists on the next album?
Tim: Yeah, actually, on the previous albums I wrote all the main material myself and had guitarists come in and do solos. This time I’ve been talking about co-writing each song with a different legendary guitar player, wich will take the basic frame-work and idea I’ve had on previous ADM albums, but make it a little more interesting because the song writing will be a little more diverse because it’s not just me.
DN: As it is coming to the end of the year, people are beginning to talk about their albums of the year. What would you say is your favourite album of 2010? (you can’t say your own)
Tim: Haha, of course, I wouldn’t say my own album. That’s actually a really tough question. I haven’t really kept up, there’s a lot of albums I’ve been meaning to listen to, like, I’m not saying this is the best album of 2010, but a band I grew up enjoying called All Out War put an album out that i haven’t even had a chance to listen to yet, so i don’t know if it’s even a good album or not, but they were one of my favourite bands when I first got into the hardcore metal scene. As far as albums I’ve actually heard… I don’t know… I’d have to see a list of what actually came out this year. I really couldn’t say.
As I Lay Dying
Check out our review of The Powerless Rise here.
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