Armor For Sleep

It’s pretty cool. I’m psyched to have the day off. I just got out of the shower, trying to do some laundry.

No. Still got to go through all my dirty laundry myself.

There’s a Waffle House, which is an American delicacy that I don’t get to see much anymore because we’re on a bus. We don’t get to go into every Waffle House that we see, which we usually do when we’re in a van. There’s actually one next to our hotel, so it’s definitely high up on my list of priorities. There’s a movie theater. We might try and watch a movie. Maybe go to the mall and buy some DVDs.

No. We actually played in St. Petersburg, Florida last night and tomorrow we’re going to be in Houston. So this was like the middle point. We’re probably much closer to Houston than we are to Florida right now, but it’s just on the way. What’s really weird is that it was really hard for us to book a hotel in advance around this area because a lot of the hotels are still booked up from people who lost their homes from the hurricane.

If you’re talking about the whole idea of the album of being written through the perspective of someone being dead then it was a lot of different things. At the time I was feeling like I was kind of a displaced person. Since we started the band I had to get used to this new lifestyle of being on tour and saying bye to all my friends back home and losing touch with everybody. It’s like you’re growing into a new shell when you decide to make a band your life. That was a contributing factor. Around the holiday season, I had to buy books for some of my friends and I found myself in the occult section of all these bookstores. They are full of guidebooks for what to do after you’ve died. I was amazed that people spend so much time thinking that they have it all figured out. I just started writing songs from the perspective of me being dead. It seemed to make me get a lot of things off my chest that I don’t think I would have if they weren’t written from that perspective.

I guess the whole kind of like Patrick Swayze Ghost mentality. If I was absent from people’s lives and could just see them as a ghost. I felt like me staying in touch with them was me haunting them. I felt like there were certain things I wanted to tell people and I couldn’t get through to them because there were certain walls that we built up in our lives. I felt like they had moved on and gotten over the fact that I wasn’t around anymore.

We’ve stayed away from calling it a concept album. I think it can be taken that way but we also made it open ended so if you have no idea what we’re talking about, you’ll hopefully get something out of each of the songs individually. We wanted to set it up in a way where it is a story but at the same time it’s just a rock album. We didn’t want to make a strict story line and you need to know all of the characters. We weren’t interested in that. It’s a loose story and there’s a theme, so maybe you could call it a concept record. But at the same time, we don’t want to bore people with some insane story.

That was actually one of the first songs we made. I actually brought in the chorus to practice. I was like, “You guys are going to fucking hate this. It’s like really poppy and it’s really stupid.” They wanted to hear it anyway. I played it and they were like “that’s awesome.” I was like, “Are you serious?” So from the beginning I kind of hated that song, but everyone else encouraged me to finish it. So lyrically it was one of the first songs that I wrote and it was like an introduction to what I was going to write after that. But in terms of the melody I kind of feel like it’s a rip-off of something that Saves the Day would’ve done or something.

No, I don’t hate it anymore. When we did a video for it and when that song got played on Fuse a lot of new people were finding out about the band and I was like, “Fuck. I don’t want to be the Car Underwater band.” But now I feel that people like that song and a lot more people who love the album don’t like that song as much as the other ones, which is good. I'm glad we got over that hump of being the Car Underwater band.

He’s a really cool guy. I think he got pinned into doing a lot of metal albums in his career. I guess it’s just one of those things where he did a metal album and other metal bands found out about it but I think he’s trying to get away from that. Everyone was like, “Was he like this scary metal dude?” But he’s just a really talented guy who has a good ear for music and all his records are awesome. I’m really happy that he wanted to take a chance on us. The record he did before our record was the Lamb of God record. So I think he was excited to work with a band that was singing even though he has fun doing all the metal stuff too.

No, not at all. He produces albums based on what the albums have to be and he just wanted our idea to come across. He wanted us to be the best Armor for Sleep that we could be. He didn’t try and put any kind of metal spin on it.

It was actually a living nightmare. The guy who directed it, Alan Ferguson, is a genius who’s a good friend of ours. He’s one of those guys who used to do videos for Jay-Z and then he got really jaded by the music industry so he stopped doing videos and started taking pictures. To make a long story short, he works in the same building as our management company and we became friends with him. He really liked our band so he wrote this really long treatment for The Truth About Heaven. Since we’re on Equal Vision Records, we don’t have $500,000 to make a video. So we had this elaborate storyboard and just two days to shoot it. It ended up being a three day shoot and towards the end we had stayed awake for 48 hours. It was really challenging to do a video of that size when you only have a certain amount of money. You can only have a certain amount of people on the set and everyone has to work like five different jobs. It was just really brutal, but I’m really amazed that Alan pulled it off and that nobody died or passed out.

Yeah, that’s true. Maybe someone should’ve died.

Yeah. For the Car Underwater video, it had nothing to do with the song. So for The Truth About Heaven, we were like, “Let’s make it something about the song.” Especially when the song is so literal and it’s talking about one thing, it’s kind of hard to make it a video where we’re playing craps in Vegas. That totally would’ve been off with the lyrics of the song. So we thought the best thing to do would be to make a direct translation of the lyrics.

It’s insane. We’ve always been pretty well received, but we’ve never really done that well on tour for some reason. Some bands don’t sell many records, but sell out shows. I’m happy with how many records we’ve sold, but we’ve never really seen like huge turnouts. But with this tour maybe something’s catching up to us. I’ve been like “Where have these kids been all these years?” But I guess something’s working.

That’s fucking weird to me because we don’t even have one album released over there. These labels wanted to release our CDs over there and they were just bad deals. So we said fuck it. The kids that come out to the shows are kids who just found out about us from the Internet.

Yeah, we all live in Jersey. When we have time off, we’re there but even when we are home everything we do is band related. Whether it’s being in the studio or writing new stuff. It’s almost like we don’t exist outside of Armor For Sleep anymore.

Yeah. Hopefully we’re going to start recording it in like a month or two.

I don’t think so. I think we’re going to do something new this time.

Yeah I do.

She’s real excited. She sends me emails all the time. She emails everyone in their office about when we’re going to be on TV. She’s a good mom. She’s always believed in me. When I decided that I didn’t want to go to school anymore and start a band, she was like, “All right.” She trusted me. She’s great.

I don’t know. She comes to our shows and she’s like, “It was too loud. I couldn’t hear anything.”

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck