So you had said earlier that this was the first time you guys got in a studio together and played like that in a really long time. I’m wondering why you didn’t choose to record the album live.
We really wanted to but our studio is a garage, it’s really small, and basically we couldn’t do it because there was too much bleed and didn’t really have the budget to go somewhere else, or the time, and so I think depending on how we write the next record and how it comes out I think we may try to do parts or all of it in a live setting and find somewhere that we can afford to go. We tried to make it in the feeling of live as possible and just approaching it kind of the same way you would approach recording as if you were all together and not agonize over it and just get a tape that has a good feel to it.
Can you tell me about what some of the homemade wooden devices that you guys came up with were to enhance the sound of Beggars?
Like on the walls?
I don’t know! (Laughs) I just read on your site it says, you know, Thrice came up with homemade wooden devices to enhance the sound of Beggars and…
(Laughs) Basically just because it’s a garage, it’s really not ideal for recording in so we were trying to just fix it in a lot of ways and make-sound was kind of flying all over and it was outta control so we built these baffles or something, but basically just things to corral the sound so it’s not so crazy…things that a normal studio would have.
Can you talk a little bit about how it felt to have the album leaked so early after putting all that work into it and sitting in the studio making your record and then boom, it’s out earlier than you want it to be.
Yeah, it’s frustrating, it was out before we even had the master copy. It’s frustrating, I mean, we just kind of try to roll with the punches and I heard about it and was just like, ‘Oh, ok then, we have to readdress how we’re doing all this,’ but I don’t know you can’t fix it, you can’t undo it.
Were you guys ever able to track it and see where the leak came from?
Yeah, it wasn’t leaked from a press conference or anything. It was someone from Vagrant’s FTP server, so that was frustrating because it meant that somebody really went out of their way to do this, just completely not caring of the harm that it would do to a fair amount of people who were working on the project. That’s just frustrating that it, you know it’s not just someone who got a copy and was excited and gave it to their friend, someone was like, ‘I’m gonna take this and figure out how to break into the site.’
Other than that are you happy with how things have been going over at Vagrant?
Yeah things are good. It’s never like-everyone’s looking out for their interests so there’s always like push and pull and that kind of stuff-but the cool thing about Vagrant is, you know, I think we have good relationships and we’re able to have like more open and fruitful discussion about things rather than like, a major like certain things just get lost in the mess of bureaucracy and so it’s just a smaller pool of people to be dealing with which is good and they’re really good people over there.
With the video contest that you had, you picked ‘In Exile’ as the winner. Did you start shooting the video yet or come up with a concept for it?
Yeah, it’s almost done, um, we going through a bunch of our ideas and budget was not great and so a lot of the ideas just weren’t going to turn out well if we tried to do them on the budget we had. So it’s interesting cause video as a format is changing how it’s being used and it doesn’t make as much sense in some ways to spend a ton of money on it anymore, so basically we ended up having two guys come out for the first week of this tour and film us playing the song and film just around. It’s all black and white and it looks cool, it’s almost done, just some footage of us touring and just kind of around the scene stuff.
Do you have any idea of when we might expect to be able to see it?
Hopefully, I would say hopefully around the next week or two. Maybe two weeks.
So I know a portion of the sales from each album that you guys do usually go to a specific charity. Which organization did you chosoe to support this time around and tell me a little bit about it and why you went with that one.
We actually didn’t do the same thing this time out. We’ve just been finding that as we’ve been moving around through different labels and different publishing things it’s kind of become a nightmare trying to figure out like how to do the paperwork with like the label doing stuff and us doing stuff. So we just decided to try to work with people and not directly for the record but in different ways playing shows and…
So what kind of people have you been working with?
Right now we have Invisible Children out with us who we’ve worked with before, they’re out on the road with us and they have a booth every night and we try to encourage people to get over there and get involved cause that’s gonna be I think in the end more beneficial than whatever amount that we’ve given from the record. The cool thing is since we’ve started working with them they’ve had a lot of people start doing internships or coming on board and doing things or you have people raising money through schools or whatever but through us being involved in it so that’s been cool to see the fruits of that.
So what do you guys have planned for after the holidays or in the future?
We’re not gonna be back out until maybe April, um, I’m having another kid in February, and then we’ll be going out maybe I think April – May. I think we’re doing an ‘evening with’ kind of with Manchester Orchestra so we’ll each be playing full sets.
Thrice will be performing at Nassau Coliseum on Saturday, Nov. 28, with Brand New, Glassjaw, Manchester Orchestra and Kevin Devine. thrice.net.
