Interviews Reign Supreme
| Friday, 10 April 2009 10:45 |
 Reign SupremeReign Supreme's debut full-length "testing the limits of the infinite" is coming out in June via Deathwish Inc. You can already tell from the songs that they play live that this record is going to be huge. And another thing is for sure, they aren't your average tough guy bullshit band as the interview with their singer Jay shows. But read for yourself. So, “testing the limits…” is coming out soon, what would you say are the main changes both musically and lyrically? The number one change is that it is a lot more honest, a lot more emotional, personal and sincere. Not to say that American Violence was not sincere or personal – it is, but it is on a different level. This record lyrically deals with a lot of topics that are a little bit closer to my heart and my personal life. I find myself getting more choked up when I sing these songs or read the lyrics. Musically I would say it is infinitely more advanced than our last stuff was. American Violence was sort of meant to be very simple, very basic, brutal, fast heavy hardcore. And this is a little bit more the direction that the band wants to go in. So, I’d say it is a progression, still fast, still very heavy, still in the same style, but you gonna find lot more melody in it and a lot more different influences on the record that you probably wouldn’t have noticed before. It is a lot more Joy Division, Muse, The Smiths, Converge, Turmoil, Buried Alive, it is a lot more different sounds than the Madball, Hatebreed sound we had before. The new record, when you set out to do it, did you have something particular in mind that you wanted to achieve? Honestly, it is hard to say. Actually I don’t feel we have achieved the goal of it, but I wanted to write the best hardcore LP of my generation. I wanted to write an LP that made all the other records look like the musical jokes that most of them are. Your average hardcore band these days releases a record that is an actual piece of garbage. It’s unlistenable. There are maybe 3 or 4 bands that have released a record in the last 10 years that I think are not laughable. So in that vein I thought, 3 or 4 bands can write good records. I know I can write a really great record. So I tried to do that, I don’t think I achieved it though, on this one, there wasn’t enough time, not enough this, not enough that. So that didn’t happen, but what we did do, we created a pretty big, pretty epic record. Something that people who like us right now will like and what people who wrote us of as plain or tough guy will appreciate a little bit more and will see that even though our influences are raw, heavy, brutal kinds of music, we are a little bit more sophisticated than most other bands. So we tried to write music a little bit more thought-out or interesting.
When you say that the new songs are more thought out, do you think people will appreciate this extra effort you’ve put into it? I guess, for many people hardcore music just has to hit you in the face, so to say… No, not at all. I think our record does hit pretty hard. I’d say we are a heavy band if I had to categorize us. But that is what I mean, so many bands put out these records and we are listening to them in our van and we actually laugh. I can’t believe someone put this out, this is embarrassingly bad, so I don’t think kids appreciate if a band actually sits down and writes the instrumentation, I don’t think they appreciate syncing up the bass-line with the drum-line, I don’t they appreciate syncing up the leads to go together with the vocal line, to do this to do that, do elicit some sort of reaction from the listener. I don’t think bands in hardcore really set out to do that, I think they just set out to quickly throw together this form of fast punk rock music and that is really not what we do. Nothing against that, some of my favourite bands sound a lot like that, but that is just not what we do. I’ve been wanting to say that for a long time, I’ll just say it now: We aren’t really a hardcore band. We are, but we are not. We are more of a metalcore band in the late nineties term, more in the vein of bands like Shai Hulud something like that, in the vein of Antidote or Urban Waste. I don’t think hardcore kids will appreciate what we tried to do with the record, but honestly I don’t give a shit if they do or not. So the term hardcore band is more from a idealistic point of view than from a musical one? Yeah, absolutely. I mean how do you categorize hardcore? Is New Found Glory a hardcore band? I don’t know, they all play in hardcore bands, they all played in hardcore bands, they are all hardcore kids but could you call their music hardcore? Not really. Could you call Shai Hulud hardcore? It’d be hard to, they sound like a metal band. Converge? No, but the members have been involved in the hardcore scene. So this has been a debate from the beginning, since the late nineties when the Cro-Mags wrote really heavy heavy metal and called it hardcore. Are Madball hardcore? Do they sound like what hardcore originally was meant to sound like? Not at all. They sound like hiphop meets metal. So, I don’t know how to categorize it, I would say we are a hardcore band in essence, because we are hardcore kids that believe in hardcore but if you were actually to categorize us by musical genre we fit in more with Shai Hulud, Converge, Turmoil, all that kind of stuff. We don’t sound anything like 7 Seconds. I read in an old interview that you had different interpretations for the title of your ep American Violence, which to me, is a more obvious title then “testing the limits…” how many different interpretations do you have for the new title? The new one is much more metaphorical, much more on a meta-level than American Violence which was simple double entendre. American Violence is the way of the referring to hardcore music, which is what we were trying to do with our record, very simple, very accessible heavy hardcore, but it is also a way of categorizing the period of the world we live in, which is categorized by “American Violence”. “Testing the Limits of the Infinite” was sort of meant as a test of us as people or us as a band and us as individuals. It is just a concept to me, sometimes I think about the things we put ourselves through, as a band, just to play music, just to be out there seeing the world, travelling. And I think we are really testing ourselves, how much further can we sink into debt, how much further can we alienate ourselves from our families, our friends and our loved ones? It’s kind of complicated and kind of hard for me to explain. The thing that we are doing, and I can speak for all 5 of us, we feel, is the biggest thing we have ever done in our live and it is the most important to us certainly. So I guess it is more about that, about saying “this is our debut LP, here is our record, here is our band, we are not going away for a while, we gonna fuck with you for a while, so you can like it or you can go on the internet and hate it but this is who we are and we are going to wear our hearts on our sleeves and that’s it.” So, you are not planning to break up after the second LP like 90% of the hardcore bands do? Yes and no. We are not planning to break up. But there is not a single member of this band who’s going to continue if it is not fun anymore. If we start having to deal with stuff like “oh you guys have to go on tour for 6 months straight with all these bands you don’t like” we’ll say “fuck you” and just go home. We all lead great lives at home. I have an amazing girlfriend that I’m going to marry, so does Doto. We all have good jobs, I teach people how to kickbox and I work in a restaurant and make a lot of money. Klint has got a great degree and he could pursue his education further and get a real job. We all have stuff going on in our lives besides doing the band. It is a band for us, it is huge, but it’s a band, it is what we love to do, if we weren’t in reign supreme we’d all be doing other bands, we all have other projects too. So what we are probably going to do is get this record out play it a lot and tour. But we are already writing new songs. We are actually writing for a split with another band and I can’t really talk about it yet. Then we are going to write for another LP and the other stuff is going to be a lot different. Actually I haven’t really told that the other guys in the band this yet: The LP that I want to write is going to be a double LP and is going to be a concept album. One LP is going to be hardcore and the other LP is going to be a little bit more experimental. That’s what I want to do next, we’ll see what happens. One of the new songs, in absentia, has very interesting lyrics, could you say some more words about the song especially the line “I’m only halfway human, the rest of me is a machine, I am reborn…”? A lot of my lines have two meanings. “I’m only halfway human, the rest of me is a machine”, like when I’m on tour, so much of you is just this touring machine: You wake up, take a shower, get into the van, drive to the show, play the gig, go out to eat, have fun, shoot fireworks, pass out somewhere, do the same thing next day and you do that for months straight and it is wild and a lot of fun, but after a while you feel like a machine sometimes and ask yourself “what am I doing? Is this really were I want to be?” because the human half of me wants to be at home with my girl or wants to be at home with my dog, wants to be seeing the world and not being obligated to play a show, when I’m tired. It is almost like the dual existence that we lead, like living our dream on the one hand, playing all these shows and having all this fun but on the other hand as much fun as it is, it is sometimes an obligation. Truth be told, we just did two weeks with Madball, then we came straight to Ok, I’ve wanted to ask the next question since I first heard American Violence. The song “Iscariot” has the chorus, “Iscariot, liar, you betray”. “Iscariot” is like the best curse word ever, and it was then that I realized, that Reign Supreme isn’t the average tough guy band. How did you come up with line? That’s easy. I was raised catholic but I don’t practice it. I don’t care if you are catholic or if you worship Satan, or a fucking slug, I don’t give a shit. I was raised catholic though, so a lot of times when I talk about feelings I talk about grandiose things that are more than me or more than whatever, I use imagery and metaphors that draw from my background. That song is a very typical, Youth of Today, stab in the back song, it really is, it is talking about someone who is really close to you and who you put so much of yourself into. How typical of a hardcore song is that? But I felt it putting in terms like this made it a little bit more understandable. Judas Iscariot is maybe the most legendary figure in Christian mythology and using that metaphor just summed it up properly. That is one of the biggest betrayals of all time.
The next question than would be, how many people do you think get that connection? How many would have gotten it if you had used the word “Judas” instead? More people would have gotten it if I had used “Judas” I think. Let’s say 10% get “Iscariot”, I’d say 50% would get “Judas” but even so a lot of people don’t get any of that, and it doesn’t really matter. I think for them “Iscariot” is maybe a catchy word… …something made up… …yeah that’s fine, maybe they think that is the name of the person that song is about. It’s not, but whatever, that’s fine. The most important thing is that the lyrics become something larger than themselves. Those are the lyrics I wrote in my old apartment, south Philly, feeling like crap, I wrote these words. What’s important to me is not that I portray that, but that I portray that well enough, that some kid in It’s like, look right in front of us, you see this graffiti here? Graffiti is like a world-wide form of expression, it’s all over the world. There are so many people in this world that write graffiti and have nothing else going on in their lives, but if you are some German graffiti kid and you see like a Cope2 tag from You have a lot of religious references and vocabulary in the lyrics to “testing the limits” too. Is religion a topic for you that you think about a lot? No, not really, like I said a lot of that stuff just becomes some sort of second language to me. It is easy for me to talk about that stuff as I have grown up talking about it, so for me it is easy to understand, easy for me to characterize things in using that frame as a reference. One the new record, the first song is “Mother Superior”, a mother superior of a convent is the head nun, that song is about the women in my life that I have let down. For example when I’m at home and I see my mom crying about some cop coming to our house looking for me or look at a girl whose heart I broke, or when I was on tour and hooked up with some poor girl who maybe thought something would come of it and it never did. Every time I think about that, I know it is shitty of me and I look at it and it hurts me and I have a lot of empathy and I really feel bad about it. That song is sort of my way of saying sorry to all the women that I have let down in my life. That song “Saving Grace” which also has this religious tone to it, it is not really about religion. “saving grace” could apply to religion but it is more about how lonely and shitty I feel sometimes and how I feel the only thing that gets me by is knowing is that I will never, no matter what happens in this world, I will never let myself down. I always have the discipline and determination that I need to. The lyric is “this sovereign heart is my saving grace” and that is what it means, “do whatever you want, I keep going”. I use a lot of metaphors, but I don’t really care about religion that much In the deathwish podcast you mentioned, that you served in the marines. In how far would you say did this give you a different perspective on things? It was profound and life-changing in a lot of ways, some good some bad. My time in the Marines was short-lived. Let’s just say, I was a fucked up kid and I did some dumb things and I ended up not serving my full time. It changed me, it made me grow up and it made me really take accountability for myself. So much stuff that I spat out on stage like “you are all that you have in the world blabla…” that all comes from this, that comes from me feeling like whatever happens all I’ve got is me. I can try to call my mom and dad for help, but there is a chance that they can’t help me. That is where a lot of that came from. I remember one time; I went out with my girlfriend to the mall. That was right after I was kicked out. There were these like 10 kids with skateboards, and one of them bumped into me and I tried to fight all of them. Just me. And I remember thinking after that happened “Dude, I’m like a fucking animal, what the fuck is wrong with me?” And I think it is because I took what they teach you a little bit too literally and I guess I just got a little too proud and too hard-headed. And in that sense it was bad, but I think I’m over that now and a little bit a nicer person. From a less personal perspective: People often talk about war and stuff but never really have experienced something like that or served in the army. Does that for you, having served in the Marines change your opinion on War or “the surge” etc? It’s complicated. Those are questions that are not so easily answered. A lot of hardcore kids and people our age grew up college students, university students and we like to think that we are a little more intelligent than we are, we think we have all the facts, think we have everything. But the fact is, these are complicated issues, pulling out of The best thing you can do for the world around you, is simply to live a good life, don’t cheat on your girlfriend, pay your taxes, be good friend to your friends, show up to your mom’s birthday party, do all that dumb little stuff that makes people around you feel good and the world would be a better place. And that is all you can really do. That is what I try to do, that is what the dudes in the band try to do. Our lyrics are pretty heavy shit, pretty negative but I think positive things can come from negative things and I like to think of ourselves as a positive hardcore band. I think we are pretty positive kids for the most part. I don’t know, politics are complicated, I went through enough school and I know that I understand the complexity there, but for me as a musician without a Ph.D I feel it is kind of heavy for me to go into that, and it is not really my concern, I can say my opinion but it doesn’t mean shit.
Ok, I have made it a policy to ask one ridiculous question in every interview. Here it goes: “is it always sunny in I’m glad you ask that. That is probably my favourite TV show right now. I love that show. My girlfriend and I have spent countless hours just lying in bed, watching it. Amazing show. And no, it is not always sunny; in fact it is frequently shitty, climate wise on of the most uncomfortable cities but I still like the city. As I said, I’ve read some interviews you did before and it seemed to me you have been asked some question several times and I was wondering if you have any question that you’ve been waiting for in all the interviews you’ve done so far and have never been asked? That’s a good question. I kind of wish I did at this point. I feel like I do, but I can’t think of it off-hand. (thinks) nah, unfortunately I can’t think of anything right now, I’m sure I have had something at some point, but going through so many interviews like that you just forget about stuff like that and you and you answer: “yes, we started like this blablababla… yes, I was in Blacklisted blablablabla,… yes we are on Deathwish blablablablabala….” Whatever. Interviews are pretty much always the same, this one is probably one of the most exciting interviews I’ve ever done. Just because it is about the band, not me being in Blacklisted or about Deathwish. Ok, do you have some final words, some recommendations, anything? Yes, couple of final things. First, there is this band from |
