Lithium Magazine

Conducted Backstage at Uproar Festival

www.disturbed1.com

By Laurie Lonsdale
Photos by Scott McAlpine

Laurie: Thank you both so much for speaking with me today. I’m so stoked to see you play tonight.

Dan:  Thank you

Laurie:  So lets start with your DVD Decade of Disturbed.  Who’s idea was that and what was the purpose?

Dan: We’ve been carrying videographers out with us since the beginning so we had all this footage that was just catalogued and we always wanted to put something out and thought it would be a nice gift back to the fans after ten years of the bands success, to share it with them. We wanted to see if we could convince the label to include that without having to charge extra. So you can either download it for free or stream it for free, we were able to get them to do that. It’s just documenting everything onstage, offstage and into our personal lives too, it’s not just performances and stuff. It’s in our homes, at parties, backstage or whatever with other bands.

Laurie: Fans love that stuff, it’s really a good idea.

Mike: It was cool for us too, to see stuff that we had forgotten about over the years. I think the fans will be happy with it.

Laurie: Was there anything that you wanted to make sure you included in the DVD for the fans to see?  And, if there was so much footage, how did you choose what to use?

Dan: Just showing the growth of the band throughout our career, from the days when we were a local band in the suburbs of Chicago, and showing what it’s become over the past ten years. How, because of them (the fans), it’s grown to this level - just showing the evolution of the band.

Laurie: Like your previous album Indestructible, your new album Asylum is self-produced. What do you think the benefits are to that? 

Mike: I think that putting that kind of extra pressure on our shoulders makes us step up our game even more.

Dan: We’ve always come into the studio prepared; we’re always focused and know what our songs are going to be. We never go into the studio until we feel like the album is ready to be made. Anything that happens in the studio is just a bonus. If there is some magic that happens and it goes to another level then great, but we don’t go in unless we feel like ‘right now, we have the album’. We have enough respect for each other and know well enough how to work with each other and we know how to get the performances out of each other. Just putting that extra pressure of it all being on our shoulders makes us all just go in there and really deliver.

Laurie: So you get a better product out of it then, you think?

Mike: Yeah, maybe in the future we’d be open to working with another producer, but at this point I think we feel that we’re still evolving and we’re still getting the results that we’re looking for.

Laurie: What’s the song writing process like for you guys, is it a collaborative effort, does it start with a riff, or do you guys sit down with a concept idea?

Mike: It always starts off with Danny, he’s the riff master, and he’s always messing around with a guitar, whether it’s in a dressing room on tour or at home, he’s always got his guitar and he’s always just coming up with great riffs. We’ve got this library of stuff that’s either been recorded or is just floating around in his head, so it’s just a matter of us finding time.  It’s usually when we come off tour and decompress for a little while, get away from all the distractions, and then he just breaks the riffs out and throws them at me. I put a beat to it and we usually structure something musically, like a rough song.

Laurie: Does the riff usually speak to you as to what the subject matter should be?

Dan: That usually comes last, the lyrics come last. The music will dictate what the lyrics will be, whatever inspires David. Mike and I will spend probably a good month or two alone before any of the other guys even hear any of the ideas. We’re just kind of fine tuning the rhythms, the grooves and the riffs, just trying to get it to a point to where we’re happy with it musically. Once we give it to David, hopefully the music will get a reaction out of him. Then lastly are the lyrics, they will depend on what mood it puts David in as he hears the dynamics within the music.

Laurie: I see, so he actually writes his lyrics himself? Or do you all have a hand in it?

Dan: Yeah, it’s his lyrics. There might be some stuff here or there that we may make a suggestion for, or throw in a subject matter here or there. This far in our career, having as many songs as we have recorded and written, there might be an occasional, “Hey, what do you think of this subject, or that subject?” But for the most part we want to give him the opportunity to write the lyrics that he himself is going to be singing. So it’s got to be something that he’s ok with singing.

Laurie: So you said that you need your down time to write, does that mean that you don’t write when you’re on tour? Is it just too chaotic?

Mike: Well, Danny’s always coming up with riffs, whether it’s on tour our at home.

Laurie: But the majority of it waits until you’ve got downtime?

Dan: Yeah, I think it’s hard. Once we’re all out here on the road, we’re in touring mode, where it’s about production and the show and the press and everything else. It’s hard to switch gears and decide that between this interview and this sound check we should try to write the next hit song for us, it just really got to happen naturally. I think once we go through the whole touring cycle and we’re burned out at the end, we’re ready to come home and stop living out of a suitcase for a little bit. It doesn’t take long before we start missing it. We miss being on stage and performing, we know it’s time to get back into writing mode and that were a hundred percent focused on writing. And like I said it’s usually a short period of time before we want to get back together.

Laurie: So what do you do to unwind then on a tour like this?  Do you have your away time from each other at night after the show, or are there things you like to do on your days off? Do you ever sightsee?

Dan: Yeah, we do spend a lot of time together, were probably one of the few bands that after all these years we still enjoy each other’s company. On a night off, like the other night, we all went out to dinner. People find it shocking to see us even in the catering room we’ll sit at the same table. And there are some other bands that don’t even acknowledge each other.

Mike: We actually like each other

Laurie: That’s nice!

Mike:  We have a lot of respect for each other and I’m closer with Danny than I am with some of my own family members.

Dan:  We really are like a family, like some of the biggest moments in our lives have happened when we were together. This is a marriage in a way. It’s funny. We joke around that the most romantic places we’ve been to have been when we were together on tour and our wives are at home. We’re in a better position now though. I have my wife and kids out on the road when we do the U.S and Canada. Mike’s wife and his daughter who is nine months old now, will come out and visit. We’ve gotten to a point where we can share a lot of these moments with our family. But for our whole career it’s been just us sharing these moments. It’s just a great relationship. I think the key to it is the sense of humour that everybody has in the band; we’re able to mess with each other and joke around and everybody doesn’t take things too personal.

Laurie: I like hearing stuff like that though. For such a hard edged band it’s nice to hear that such sentiment exists behind the scenes, because you wouldn’t know it seeing you on stage.

Dan: Yeah, there is a crazy side to us too, but to try to have somewhat of a normal life to balance with the chaotic lifestyle can be challenging.  But, it’s what we love to do.

Laurie: What’s going to happen with the tracks that didn’t make the album? Do you ever hold them back for the next one and rework them, or is it a case of, once they don’t make it onto an album, you just forget about them and move on.

Mike: They usually see the light of day somehow, whether it be on a b-side release somewhere or a soundtrack or something. We definitely feel that they’re recorded now and we want people to hear them.

Laurie: There were 15 to 18 tracks this time, weren’t there?

Mike: Well, there were 17 in total that we recorded and there were 12 on the record, so the few that are there will make it out on b-side releases and soundtracks potentially.

Dan: That’s always a challenging thing for us, too. We’ll start talking about what stays on the record and what goes. And it’s always such a hard decision to make because by no means do we feel that they are the weaker songs. To us, every song gets the same amount of attention, the same amount of time, and some of the b-sides that we do leave off, we feel could be singles, too. They could be just as strong, and maybe that’s the reason that we do keep them off, because we do try to find different avenues for them to see the light of day, whether it’s a soundtrack or some other outlet that we could find for them, because we do want for them to be heard.

Laurie: Do you write with the idea of songs becoming singles, or are hit singles something that just magically happens?

Dan: It’s really just got to be a natural feeling for us. When we wrote the songs for The Sickness we never thought that the album would be a hit. There’s no secret formula, otherwise everybody would be doing it. So we just go into it with an attitude of when the four of us are in a room and we’re playing and getting our ideas out and it’s sending a chill up our spine, that’s all we really care about. It’s got to move the four of us. That’s really the headspace that we try to stay in, because it doesn’t make sense to chase something that you don’t understand. We write music that sends the chill, David writes lyrics that are personal and true to the heart and are real emotion, and it somehow connects with the fans that could relate to it.

Laurie: Cool. Speaking of sending a chill up someone’s spine, I was watching your new video for “Asylum” the other day.  It’s quite the visual; who came up with the concept for it?

Dan: It’s funny because when that was shot, we were actually in California to shoot an intro for the live performance. It was just more cost effective, since the crew and production were already there, to just go ahead and shoot some extra footage. It was never really intended to be an official band video because it’s more of a performance thing. We let the actors do the acting, besides the clips of David singing to break up the scenes. We kind of left it in their hands. The same director that we used for the first video of Another Way to Die - we let him just run with the same theme that we were doing with the live intro and he just kind of branched off from there with his creativity.  It came out great and I have to say that the actors in it were amazing.

Laurie: They were, although the lead sure took a beating throughout it.

Dan: Yeah, he was kind of sore the next day.

(laughing together)

Laurie:  As a band, you’ve been rather vocal about what you think about music accessibility and illegal downloads as a result to the internet.  Originally you spoke about Napster, but since then much more has come along.  Have your opinions changed since you made those statements? 

Dan: Well, stealing is stealing; we’re never for fans stealing.  We want them to get our music. At the time though, I think the wrong approach from the record labels was what was bad. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Don’t go after a thirteen-year old kid who’s trying to get music from a band that he loves. So for their knee-jerk reaction by trying to sure every teenage kid who’s trying to get music and is just a fan of the band; I think it just caught everybody off-guard. And I think the whole industry was just hot on their heels and they didn’t know how to deal with the situation on the internet and kids getting the music for free. I mean, there is at least a little bit more control over it in the past few years now and this is just the way that technology has gone. From cassette tapes to CDs to downloads now. We’re all about just trying to get our music out legally for kids, and we know that these kids are fans that are going to come to the shows; they’re going to buy the tickets and buy a T-shirt. We just want to spread our music out to them. We’re not in the business just to sell records, which the record company is - they are the ones suffering the most. I think that the biggest downside for me, or in my opinion, is all those bands were smaller bands got dropped because of the downloading. If you’re a band that could sell a hundred thousand records in the States, a lot of those bands don’t exist anymore - the label has dropped them because those numbers now went down to fifty thousand. It’s not like the fans deliberately did it. They were trying to get music from a band that they’d fallen in love with. But it hurt those bands, they ended up losing their deals with the record labels because it just wasn’t worth the effort to put into a band that was only selling fifty thousand records. It’s just unfortunate that a lot of great bands along the way lost their major label deals. Now they are forced to figure out their own way of surviving.

Laurie:  So I guess the more you sell, the more the illegal downloads aren’t noticed as much.  

Dan: Well, it would still matter, but there wouldn’t be any reason for the label to get rid of a band like us or another big one. They’d just try to figure out like how we could make up the difference for their losses. But a lot of the bands that started out at the same time that we did that might have only sold two to three hundred thousand, just weren’t cutting it anymore for the major labels  and it just wasn’t worth the time and the effort that they had to put into them. It’s unfortunate that a lot of them did get dropped.

There was so much more I wanted to discuss with the boys from Disturbed, as I was really enjoying my time with them.  Nevertheless, Uproar Festival was hectic for press, so I was receiving the signal to wrap things up.

Laurie: I see. Is there anything that you want to say as a band about what is coming up for you next? After Uproar is all over, is there another tour that you’ll jump on?

Dan: We’ll be out for at least a full year of touring on this album. This goes for about six more weeks or so, and then we will take a short break. We’ll do another two-week run in the States. Then we’re going to Europe in November or December. Next year will be more touring, more States, more Canada, more Australia and New Zealand.

Laurie: So you’re out there for a long time yet?

Dan: Yeah, we’ll be gone for a long time.

Laurie: Well, I wish you the best of luck, and can’t wait to see you play tonight.  Thanks for speaking with me.

Dan: Thank you.

Mike: Thanks.