So now that you’ve been doing this for a while, what’s your attitude on the music industry?
Nick: It sucks ass. There is nothing cool about the music industry. It’s all politics. I guess it’s like every other industry, so I don’t know why I thought it would ever be any different. I can’t blame them, because it’s about making money. The industry itself sucks, but it’s made up of... Well in our position, we’ve gotten to meet some incredible people. People that we can consider friends and pals. The industry is just so much politics. I hate it.
Chris: Once you get to this middle of the road phase that we, and a lot of other bands, are in, you get on a good independent label and you’re doing well, but you’re not doing well enough to make it a career. There are bands that have made plenty of money. Not money like driving a Ferrari. But there are bands that are comfortable with the positions they’re in. But for us to be where we need to be, we feel like we need to move up to a major. But it’s being at this weird in between phase that’s new. But we have had indie ideals, because that’s all we’ve ever dealt with, and we meet these people from independent labels, magazine, or merchandise places, who say “yeah I’m going to come see you guys in Boston!” Those people are always there at our show. BUT... We started dealing with these people from major labels, and they’ll talk to you twice a week, e-mail you, talk to your manager, and clip your magazine articles. Then say, “Do you think you guys can get up here on the 18th?” So we bust our asses to tag it on the end of a tour, or drive 18 hours straight up there and straight back, just to have these guys not show up to the show they wanted you to play. Then we wonder why they didn’t show up, and they say stuff like, “Well the Foo Fighters were playing across town, so I went to that instead.” It’s little bullshit things like that are irritating as shit. That’s happened on more that one occasion.
Nick: We drive like a thousand miles to play one show, with the hopes that something is going to come out it. And theses guys just have to drive up the street to see us at the club. It doesn’t affect them as much, and they don’t know how hard we had to work just to get up there.
Chris: Or the same motherfucker that will fly down here to see us play a private show, and then tell us how impressed he is, and, “I’ll see you next week at South By Southwest.” Then we see him there and he doesn’t even recognize or remember us.
Nick: There’s a lot of fucking snakes in the grass.
With all of that, the messed up tours, weird promotions, having jobs/families at home, and constant van troubles, you guys seem like you have a pretty good attitude. What keeps you going with this band?
Chris: Nothing beats hanging out by the trailer, and drinking beer in a different city every night.
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: Even if the show sucked, if nobody cares, or whatever, at least you’ve been somewhere where you wouldn’t have ordinarily gone before.
Nick: On a Tuesday night, instead of sitting at home watching Fear Factor, you’re in Cleveland, hanging outside the club, getting drunk with your best friends. Or you get drive by the Statue of Liberty. Well, not in Cleveland.
Chris: The OTHER Statue of Liberty.
Nick: It’s lesser known. It’s in Cleveland.
(laughing)
Chris: You get to be with people that you like, and you’ve all put your time and effort into this one little project. Touring is a part of it, but it’s almost like getting out for summer break. There is all this focus and effort into putting the record out. Then you finish it, and touring is like getting to go on vacation. So while you’re promoting it, you get to see all these places. People will talk about, “oh I just love Orlando because there is Disney World.” Then we say, “oh yeah I’ve been to Orlando,” and they ask if we went to Disney World, and we say, “no actually I took a piss behind a dumpster at a club downtown.”
(laughing)
Chris: That’s what I remember about Orlando.
Nick: “Richmond was great. We got lit in a bar!”
(laughing)
Nick: It’s never tour stuff that’s cool about it. It’s all the dumb stuff you remember.
Chris: It’s coming home from tour, getting your film developed, and there’s two pictures of Niagra Falls, and 36 pictures of the band in a bar.
(laughing)
Nick: That really happened. It’s all pictures of us in bars in Canada. Oh and a picture of me and this homeless guy that tried to accost me.
Chris: That homeless guy came up to us. He was fucked up and wouldn’t leave us alone, so we gave him a pint of scotch.
Nick: Then he decided I was his best friend. He drooled on me and started crying. He told me that I hated him. We could barely understand him. yeah. That’s the best part of tour. At the time it sucks to drive all that time, with no shower in so long. But when you’ve gotten a shower and gotten clean, you look back and say, “that was bad ass!”
So a shower makes all the difference?
Nick: It really does.
So is the next record going to come out on Century Media, or are you looking at other labels?
Chris: Right now we’re still a Century Media band. We’ve had offers from other labels, and there are some other labels we’re talking to, but it’s the same situation from the last record. It’s also goes back to the weird position we’re in. Whether it’s being on the wrong tours, the wrong label, or we don’t tour enough, or whatever. For whatever reason we’re in this real in between phase. There are some major labels that are ready to make the jump, but they’re not ready to where it’s worth us leaving Century Media. Then the labels, that have put stuff on the table to where it’s where it needs to be to make it worth leaving Century Media, haven’t really come through in the end. It’s still kind of a waiting game. We’re not fed up with Century, and we’re not doing everything we can to leave the label. They know we’ve gotten other offers. We’re not shopping just to get off Century. As many times as we’ve sat around and bitched about that label, I know those guys have bitched about us. But they’ve come through in a clutch. Then there’s time where we felt like they left us high and dry, but for a band that’s no bigger than we are, we can’t really hold them responsible for a lot of our failures.
Nick: A lot of other labels would leave us just as high and dry, if not higher and dryer.
Now that you had a little bit of a line-up change, and Chris is the only vocalist, do you think it will affect your sound and music?
Chris: I think it will to a point. But none of us, especially me, have decided what kind of vocal approach we’ll take for the next record. I’ve never done the lower screaming thing, until now. I think it’s working well. I don’t know if that’s something we’ll continue to focus on though. We’ve always been high and low screaming, and then melodic singing, but I’m not going to worry about that now.
What about writing lyrics? Is that going to change at all?
Chris: No. By no means am I saying I’m the lyrical genius behind Haste, but before, from my end of the deal, I felt like it was a get-lucky situation, with the two singers. There were times, that both of us sat down and focused on one topic, and finished it from top to bottom. There were times when each brought in entire songs of our own. Then there were the times where it was a get-lucky deal. I would sit down with a recording, and come up with stuff, but be like “this is what I got, and I have no idea what to do with a certain part.” Sometimes he would have something that would work with it. Whether he and I were on that same plane, or it was so ambiguous that it happened to fit. But now, I don’t think lyrically there will be any difference.
I noticed that as you continue to release records, your musical influences are less and less obvious. Where do the ideas for new stuff come from now?
Nick: I think, at least musically, we’re not afraid to... Well, Haste had been around for years even before I joined the band, and there was already a style to writing a Haste song. The more comfortable we’ve get playing together, the more our influences seep together. We decided it was boring to just play one thing all the time. Instead of having a formula to writing a heavy song, with a verse-chorus-breakdown style, in 6/8 time, it felt so fun to play other stuff. We got to the point where we decided we can do whatever.
Chris: I think our tastes have grown. When our first record came out, it was pretty obvious there we some of us that listened to hardcore, and some of that listened to metal. To bridge that gap, and what finally got us to that first record, is that everyone had in common Quicksand’s album, “Slip”, the Sparkmarker record, and the Neurosis records. That was the main tie, when everyone came in with those three. That was the main foundation. All the other influences were sprinkled in. Then when the next record came around, some of us had gotten a little out of metal, and switched a bit to hardcore. Some of us just stopped listening to all of that, but that main thread was still there. With the newest record, I think it’s apparent there is so much more different shit going on. And since everyone is involved with the song-writing process, you’re getting different influences from five different people.
Are you guys still into listening to underground, heavy music?
Chris: Oh yeah.
Nick: yeah definitely. And even JJ (*note* Jason Burns, other Haste guitarist), who is the one that listens to the least amount of heavy music, still loves the heavy music that he has before. Oh like Floor, which is his favorite band. He said they restored his faith in music. So even with the quirky music he gets into and loves, he can still grab a hold of a band like Floor, who aren’t everyone’s cup of tea and aren’t the trendy band. He still appreciates the stuff that’s not right out in the mainstream.
Chris: I’m not necessarily THAT into heavy music. The heavy stuff that I hear and like, I absolutely love. But I don’t go out and buy every hardcore album that comes out. But after listening to the most mellow shit... The perfect example, is when I bought that South record, and listened to it beyond belief. I got all this stuff that’s not remotely heavy, and the I went through my CD’s and found that For The Love Of record.
Nick: yeah!
Chris: So I popped it in, because I hadn’t heard that in a long time. It’s records like that, that make me never want to abandon the heavy element of what’s going on with this band.
How did you guys getting on the Guns & Roses tribute compilation come about?
Chris: I love our song.
Nick: yeah. It came about because we’re buddies with Ross at Law Of Inertia. He’s been ultra-cool to our band. He was doing the comp, and since he’s a fan, he just asked us to do it. As far as writing the song, we listened to all the Guns & Roses songs we can do and picked that one (“You’re Crazy”), and figured that one would be fun to fuck up. We actually had written three different versions of it. We had one version that was just straight up trying to play the song. Then we had this really mellow, almost Farside type of rock song. Then we had the sludge metal version, where we tuned way down.
Chris: That’s the one we used.
When you recorded that track, did you use different equipment?
Nick: yeah, we used baritone guitars. But the reason we didn’t use the straight up version of the song is because we couldn’t play it exactly straight on. It came down to the point of having to get it recorded, and we hadn’t gotten it dead-on, and the mellow version didn’t work out. But the sludge version just clicked. It was so much fun to play. It was cool to be tuned down so low and play super slow and mean.
Nick, tell us what happened to your finger last weekend?
Nick: Oh fucking-a. I work with my dad at a print shop, and I was working on a cutter. I was holding the paper down in the back of it, which you’re not supposed to do. But I’ve done it since I was 14.
Chris (yelling from the kitchen): Did you want Coors Light or Bud Light, Nick?
Nick: I think there’s a bunch of leftovers in there. Any one of them. Anyways... My finger got caught in the machine and it caught my class ring, which I got fucked with for still wearing when I’m 26. (laughing). But it caught that ring and crushed it into my finger. The paramedics had to come with these medieval devices.
Chris: The Jaws of Life!
Nick: yeah The Jaws of Life for my finger. They tried to cut the ring of my finger, but they couldn’t fucking do it. So I had to go to the emergency room, and they got like this skill-saw with some thing they shoved in between my ring and my finger. They got it off my finger, but it was horrible. But I got a couple of Percosets out of it, so drinking that night was really fun.
(laughing)
Chris: He got in a fucking fight that night.
Nick: yeah, I got in a fight. But it wasn’t really a fight.
Chris: You just pushed a guy’s head into the wall.
So what’s the plan for the rest of 2004?
Chris: That’s what we’re working on right now. We’ve got a lot of issues at home, because some of us are older dudes. Brandon (bassist) is in the middle of buying a new house. Jeff (drummer) is getting married and Jason is getting married. That’s taking up a bit of our summer, but I’m pretty much wide open. I don’t know that Nick has got a whole lot going on.
Nick: (laughing). yeah...
Chris: But you’ll see at least me and Nick on tour this summer.
Nick: We’ll tour the back of dumpsters.
(laughing)
Chris: It looks like we’re doing a three week tour with Calico System and 1208. We’re trying to iron that out, because we’d love to tour with Calico System.
Nick: Oh and Black Halos might be on some of that. They got the drummer from Sparkmarker, so that would be cool. They (Sparkmarker) are the defining band, as far as what has shaped Haste.
Chris: We’re going to try to do Europe in September, then coming home to write a new record. Well finish actually. We’ve already started some new material.
Nick: Supposedly there is a video coming on Headbanger’s Ball. I’ve had two parties to watch it, but it’s just an excuse to get together.
Awesome. Well thanks for your time guys.
Nick: Thanks Rob.
