Alkaline Trio's frontman Matt Skiba takes a breather before their show in Manchester to discuss inspiration, drugs, Twitter, and up-coming solo project, 'Demos'...
Hey, how’s the tour going?
“It’s good, everything’s good, we’re having fun we started four weeks ago, so we’ve been out here for a little bit.”
This is quite a long one isn’t it, lot’s of dates in the UK and the US. What’s touring like for you guys?
“It’s good! I mean the shows are really good, sometimes we’re in really cool cities, like today. We pretty much like everywhere in Europe but we’ve been in some smaller towns, which is cool but it can be a little slow.”
Yeh... have you managed to do much sight-seeing around here yet?
“Yeh, we were here all day yesterday so we went out and had some drinks last night.”
Is it difficult, touring for this long, being away from your friends and family?
“Well I’m with most of my friends right now, my best friends are my band mates and our crew, but yeh, I mean it’s hard to be away from my girlfriend, but I just miss her, it’s not like we’re at war or something, so y’no it’s not that bad!”
Right, your new album, ‘This Addiction’, has been really well received, some fans are saying it’s a ‘return to your roots’ is that something you set out to do?
“Not really... just the way that we wrote the record, and we recorded it with the guy that did our first couple of records, so we did that on purpose but we didn’t set out to remake our first record or anything. There were elements of our early records that I think contributed to the way that it sounds, but it wasn’t altogether on purpose.”
Ok, what was the concept, the inspiration behind the album? There seem to be quite a few reoccurring themes; addiction, love...
“Well luckily none of us are heavy-duty drug addicts or anything, but it’s more of a metaphor for love, mostly like lost love, so the addiction theme or the drug references are not necessarily... well, it’s a metaphor. There’s definitely a few different subjects that inspired the record; the loss of a loved one; we had a really good friend pass away while we were writing the record, and a couple of us had some personal issues in our private lives that definitely influenced them at the time.”
So your work really comes from personal experience then?
“Urm... yep.”
You recently left Epic Records to form your own label, what’s that process been like?
“It’s been pretty easy for us, I mean we started the label with Epitaph, but since we’re out on tour we haven’t really done as much work as far as the label’s concerned, we just haven’t had a chance to, so we’ve just been focusing on the touring aspect and then hopefully we’ll start signing other bands, and that’s when we’ll probably get busier.”
Why did you decide to start your own label? I know it’s something a lot of bands are doing at the moment...
“Well it’s something that we’ve wanted to do, we didn’t know that we were going to be partnering up with Epitaph, and I mean we’ve worked with them in the past, so we always want to work with people that we trust and like, and Brett Gurewitz, (Bad Religion guitarist and owner of Epitaph), is a good friend of ours and he’s a fan, so we were talking to some companies that were going to help us start the label and they were people that we’ve never really met before and then Brad came along and asked if we want to do a label together rather than us doing our own thing completely, which is something we can’t really do; we don’t have the staff, we would have to hire people, so Epitaph basically made it possible for us to tour full time and still release... well kind of release our own records. Epitaph’s doing most of the work.”
Well they actually used Facebook and Twitter to promote your new single, do you think the social networking aspect of publicity is useful now?
“I think so, I don’t really do any of that stuff...”
...So you’re not a ‘Twitterer’?
“I am, I mean we have a Twitter account and it’s fun but yeh, I don’t sit there and follow it like some people do...”
How do you guys come up with your songs?
“They just kind of feel like they write themselves, y’no, you’re usually just sitting down with a guitar and something’ll come out of it.”
Is it a group process then or do you do it individually?
“We do it individually initially, and then bring the ideas together and then we make it sound like Trio together.”
Ok... you’ve got a solo project, ‘Demos’?
“'Demos'? Yeh, there’s a 'Demos' record coming out and that’s exactly what it is, it’s just demos of some Alkaline Trio songs and just some ideas that I had floating around that I recorded on my laptop, so it’s pretty lo-fi recording, I did it all myself so it doesn’t sound that great but I think it’s fun.”
So is it along the same lines as the Alkaline Trio sound?
“Not really, it’s a lot more low-fi, it’s a lot more... there’s some electronics stuff on there and it’s way more stripped down.”
What do you do in your spare time, if you get any?
“On the road? I read quite a bit, right now I’m watching a thing about Navy Seals, so I watch a lot of Military Channel and History Channel, and I read quite a bit... try to do push-ups" (He laughs).
If you weren’t in Trio what do you think you’d be doing for a job?
“Uh I’d probably be in design, I went to school for design, but then the band got busy and I put that on hold, but it’s still something that I... I still paint, I still like doing art stuff so I’d probably be in graphic design.”
Do you have quite a heavy hand in your album covers and stuff like that then?
“Yeh, I don’t physically put it together but it usually comes from an idea that one of us has, usually it’s me, I just love doing artwork and stuff like that... with the exception of ‘This Addiction’, that record was ... it took us forever to find cover art, I had no idea what should be on the cover so this last record I didn’t have as much input, but we were lucky that it looked really good the first time around.”
Is it the same case with your videos?
“Yeh, we usually have an idea given to us, directors will send in video... they call then ‘treatments’, like scripts, and usually we’ll take like a basic idea of someone’s video and re-write it to fit us a little bit more. I’ve written our last couple of videos and given them to a director and then they embellish on it and make it kind of more cohesive.”
Ok, cool ... what can your fans expect from your live shows?
“We usually try and switch-up the set, we play different songs, but there’s not a whole lot of urm... we just go up there and play our songs and a lot of time we have a good laugh up there, we don’t have any crazy pyrotechnics in the show, we haven’t had to coax the crowd into singing certain parts or whatever, there’s just certain things that have happened over the course of time that now have become staples in the show, people sing and stuff like that so, really what we want to do is show the crowd as good a time as we’re having, we want everyone that comes out to have as much fun as we are.”
Well you’ve got a huge following, have you had any incidents with your fans?
“Nothing too crazy, I mean I’ve had some friends of mine deal with some pretty weird shit but I, personally, never have and I’m thankful for that. Usually our fans are really cool and really nice and we’re all kind of similar kind of people so we’ve been lucky.”
Ok, last words I guess, do you have any advice for young bands out there?
“You know it’s weird now to start a band, it’s so different to when I started this band, with the internet and with everything , I think, if anything, a new band could probably tell me how to do it! Back when we started this thing we were sending out demo tapes and cassette tapes, so a lot has changed since we started, now I don’t know that I could give anyone advice other than you should play music with people that you like and you’ll be together for a very long time.”
By Beth Cook
Alkaline Trio's new album 'This Addiction', released February 23rd 2010, on Heart & Skull, is available from online stores : http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDetails.do?ctx=280;0;-1;-1;-1&sku=227080
Tour dates and ticket information for their current tour : http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/Alkaline-Trio-tickets/artist/730716
