Poison The Well interview

I've heard "life flip," "van flip," "tour flip," "record flip," "career flip," "house flip," "funeral flip."

First post, no care, funeral flip [laughs].

It's been fun. We're a little bit of a sore thumb on the tour, but I kinda like being in that position.

Yeah, for sure. I mean [we are] just a sore thumb in that...

No [laughs]. I wanted to make 'em, though. I wanted to make windbreakers.

I brought my Bane windbreaker on this tour, actually.

Enterprising young children!

We play, like, 40 minutes. Who the hell wants to hear anyone scream for any longer than that anyway? And after 10 bands? Come on. After, like, six bands, people have gotta be ready to listen to, like, Pink Floyd or something.

Knoxville? That had nothing to do with it – it was during the opening band, and it was just [a conflict with] security. The guy running the venue didn't want to have the show in the first place and basically the whole staff was itching to go. That doesn't sit well with people that prefer a more laid-back security approach.

Economically, it makes perfect sense.

Right. It's just cool because, you know, with all the normal summer festery, this is a different kind of thing. Everybody on the tour's broke, but everybody understands that everybody else is broke.

Yeah, the worst percentage was 25% in New York.

Terminal 5 in Midtown. Big place. Corporate jobby.

Well, most of the promoters and venues are working at zero profit anyway, so I try not to be too hard on them. With this particular show, basically all of the promoters are running at a loss or breaking even at best.

Yeah, but at the same time it's win-win. You get to set a precedent.

Yeah, that's true.

No. We just wanted to work with somebody else. We did two record with [Eskil Lövström and Pelle Henricsson] and it was time to try something new.

J. Robbins, yeah – he had a family emergency. We decided it was just better for everybody if he [dealt] with that. It was an important situation for him. It was not a negative thing – it was a very positive thing between us. I would have loved to have worked with him.

Yeah, I hope so. I'm a really big fan of all of his bands/recordings. Anything he touches is pretty much gold as far as I'm concerned.

Mash-up?

It's like Slayer and EPMD. How could you go right, but how could you go wrong?

Yeah, I like it. Definitely a more modern approach than the last two we made – especially the last one.

It means something different to everybody. For me, it's commentary on [how] we come from a place that everyone thinks is vacation town, but it's actually a pretty depressing and stagnant place to live. Sleep, drink, fuck: that should be the state motto of Florida.

It's all pictures from [vocalist] Jeff [Moreira]'s family's picture collection. Lyrically, the record is kind of negative. It's supposed to be the other side of that – the pictures are all things in happy times. Some of the pictures are actually from Cuba. It's a cool way to offset how pissed some of the record is.

Oh yeah. I didn't mind it, though. I preferred the shorter recording. You just had to put your head down and get through it. My problem during recording is overdoing it. If you give me time, I will do something. That's usually a bad thing.

Five and a half weeks.

We had I'd say 80% of the music done, but we hadn't heard vocal one by the time we got to the studio. Jeff is a bit of an on-the-spot guy. We had heard little, teeny snippets, but nothing for real.

I'm very happy with the way things came out. I work very differently, but I guess it's kind of good to have that sort of spontaneous thing happing.

He just kind of went for it, which is good. Sometimes when people [record] like that, it can turn out badly, but I think he has enough piss and vinegar to work it out.

I've never had an easy time doing that. Our other guitar player wrote some blog that said, like, "country-surf-vampire-going-to-prom" or some shit like that. Actually, it showed up on Lambgoat and…

[Laughs] Yeah. But that was just his perspective. To me, it's just music. I mean, the attitude of us as people comes ultimately 100% from hardcore, but all the hardcore bands we truly love are the bands that are a little odd and a little left-of-center – trying to keep the idea that the whole point about being in a hardcore band is to not give a fuck about what anybody wants to you play, and to just play what you want to play. If people like it, they like it. If it's honest, that's all that's really supposed to matter.

Yeah, 10 years since Opposite; 11 as a band.

The same way I felt about it when I was 19 or 20. It was what me and my friends were doing at the time and I really loved it. I still do. It's like a picture for me. It's an immediate time capsule. I regret nothing about it and I still really enjoy the songs. It's just that, for me to do something like that again, it would be an incredibly big lie.

No, it would tank like crazy! I could put out the same record today and it would get "record flip, van flip, career flip, way to be 10 years too late." It's what I've always said when people ask me why we consistently keep trying to change. If I do the same thing, I might get away with it for one record and people would be stoked, but on the third record, they'd be like, "oh, wait – you guys don't do anything." I might as well take a chance and try to live a little dangerously.

Or the Stones or whatever. I don't want to know who would want to be like the Stones.

[Sighs] I know this is going on Lambgoat where they like to do the drama thing, but I don't want to talk about it. I've got nothing to say. I mean, if he can sleep at night, then he can sleep at night. All will be sorted out in the end. Comeuppance will come when it comes. I just don't think I need to drag anything through public air.

Yes, but they're not being pressed right now. What's left is left.

Working on it, but it's not going to be bogus. It's not going to be like, "hey, check me out – I'm trying to make money!" It's gonna be so that they're out there. There will be some different things about [the re-releases], but that's just because it's the 10-year anniversary. We'll do different things with it, but it's not going to be, like, a $26.99 bonus-special-double-re-release remixed by Ric Ocasek.

Yeah, that's why I always reference Ric Ocasek – 'cause nobody could ever believe he did a Bad Brains record!

I like The Cars as well.

The Ventures, man! A lot of surf music: Laika & the Cosmonauts, Man or Astro-man?, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Stuff like that. Also, Stax Records: always big for me. The whole Sam & Dave band – Duck Dunn, the bass player, and Steve Cropper. The backing dudes from Stax Records. Anything they play on I think is amazing. Their band had such a signature sound and such good forward movement. And then I've been listening to a lot of that band Breach.

Breach was fucking incredible. Also, in spirit of the tour, I dug out a lot of 90s records. I started listening to a lot of Acme Records. The Disembodied records again, seeing as we played with them the other day. They're old friends – we toured with Martyr [A.D.] a bunch in the late 90s and early 00s, so it was fun to dig those out again. They were playing and I looked at my friend and I was like, "take that, any band that thinks they're heavy!" The band was so ahead of their time.

G#!

Oh, that whole Burning Fight [Festival] – there were so many bands on there I wanted to see! I did get a chance to see Mean Season and that was awesome. A couple summers ago, I got to see Leeway, which was a big thing for me because I'm obviously not old enough to have seen them in their heyday and I didn't live in the right area. To see Leeway – Eddie and A.J. and everything – was just … [pauses] god. And they opened with the intro from Born to Expire, "Rise and Fall." Heaviest hardcore band ever!

I'm really stoked to hear the Every Time I Die record in its entirety. Other than that … [pauses] I'm really bad with current music. That Carrier record – I'm pretty into it. I think it's really cool.

Yeah! The recording quality gets to me a little bit, but the songwriting – it's cool seeing a band like show every rip-off band of theirs how it's done. That new Coalesce is really good. Ox, right?

It's Coalesce, man – they're probably gonna put out a Genesis cover record next month!

A friend of mine turned me onto that band Cruel Hand recently – I hear they're doing a new record.

I'm honestly obsessed with research right now. I've been trying to dig up a lot of older pop records. Like that Pointer Sisters record Break Out – the one with "Jump" and "Neutron Dance." The first side of that record is all hits. Every song is a hit. It's pretty awesome. Also, Level 42's World Machine is a really good English avant-garde jazzy pop record. Other than that, I've been trying to get into my Gentle Giant catalog – best vocal harmonies of the 70s prog rock scene. I think they're all pretty okay. It's the same as any Yes record – with the songs that are good, you're like, "what the hell, this is the best song ever!" With the songs that aren't, you're like, "eh." That's definitely true of the Yes catalog past Fragile.

I like those records, but there's a dud on all of them. Like, Tales from Topographic Oceans?

And Drama? A couple of duds on that. Plus, there's no Jon Anderson on it. But it's the most fantastic guitar playing Steve Howe might have ever done. That song "Tempis Fugit" is out of hand. That was Steve Howe's last record, actually. After that, Jon Anderson came back and they did that 90125 record – the caca-pipi record.

Shit.

So, I have a Jimmy Buffett shirt to wear later. I'm a big Jimmy Buffett fan as well. I own every record on vinyl. Coconut Telegraph's my favorite. And Rush is my favorite band of all time. I've seen them the last seven times [they have toured] – from Roll the Bones on. Once for every record.

They play for three and a half hours! The first set's, like, 12 songs, the second set's 17, and then a five-song encore.

That's usually everyone's defining line. Mine's Hold Your Fire. Presto I don't really like that much.

Oh, Hold Your Fire is one of my favorites. And that song "Manhattan Project?" And "Marathon?"

That's the worst song ever. That's the worst song they ever wrote other than "I Think I'm Going Bald."

Yeah, "The Necromancer" is one of my favorite Rush songs. Wow, I'm gonna have to do all Rush soundcheck riffs. I can play, start to finish, every record until Signals. Every song. I'm an oddball for this scene.

Complete and total lack of common sense. I have no regard for my future. I've chosen the path of living in the next 10 minutes. One day, it'll bite me in the ass, but until then, I don't care.

I wouldn't enjoy it. I would never want to be a pop star. So few bands can achieve a level of big-time success without losing their personalities. Rush is a perfect example, though – [they can] sell out arenas, but they don't have to placate anyone. They do whatever they want and they have such a loyal following that they'll sell a million records every time.

By being themselves – either it works or it doesn't. I would rather fail trying to do that than succeed building a fanbase out of a lie.