An amazing week thus far, and it’s just getting better. There is NOTHING better than putting our ears on New Empire Vol. I of Hollywood Undead, and then speaking to them about it.
Feast and quench your reading thirst with this conversation had with Johnny 3 Tears about all things Hollywood Undead and New Empire Vol I.!
Thanks, so much for talking to me today! I have a few questions about the New Empire Vol. I. Is there one phrase you would use to describe the new album? If you could keep it short and sweet how would you sum up your new album?
It’s a piece of shit, honestly. No, I’m just kidding. I don’t know! That’s such a… I hate when people ask me that stuff. It’s like when my wife asks me why do I love her. It’s like dude, I don’t know! I don’t have any reasons. I just think it’s a great album and it’s a step forward and something we’re proud of. It’s work we’ve never put out before so the whole message I would give is prepare yourself for the unknown.
Okay, Awesome! So why did you change directions with the album and go with one specific producer?
Well, honestly… oof. You know uhm…A.) with the sound and stuff like that it’s never a particular type of record it’s kind of comes to be. We’re kind of instinctual and we go with our guts and our emotions and that’s what was there. As far as the production went, I think we just, things happened a lot quicker than we thought. We worked with a lot of the same guys, who are great guys by the way, you know I love all the guys we’ve worked with for a long time. I think there’s a certain comfort level you know. A lot of them are my friends. Matt, who we worked with, we knew him, and we toured with him when was with From First to Last and Drugs and some other bands and we’d known him for a long time. When we got into the studio the work ethic was certainly different and it sort of brought the best out of us. As we started our plan was still to go in with multiple producers but as we kept rolling with him it came to a point where it was like look, this is really clicking this is really working, let’s just stick with what we’re doing. And that was kind of why. It wasn’t like some kind of decision. It was just like, why stop doing what we’re doing this is really working for us. We ended up just doing the whole thing with him. It was never intentional and honestly, it’s kind of refreshing because starting up with someone new in the studio you always have to go through a lot of different rigamaroo to get going. And it’s kind of nice to stay on all cylinders straight through until you’re done with the album. It was refreshing, it was different. We might do it again or we might do it differently next time but certainly this time it worked for us.
Looking back and working with Matt Good, I know you said everything kind of clicked when you went into it and that there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it. Looking back on it was there anything that you think he brought to the table production wise that really stood out for you while creating the album?
I mean, the guys cutting edge, but I think honestly the main role of a producer in a studio is to make sure you’re doing your job. So, it’s very easy to get complacent and you just want to finish so let’s just write some songs. And most people can write incessantly and constantly but that doesn’t reflect on the quality and he was really good at pushing us. You know, we haven’t been a band forever but we’ve been a band for a pretty long time and we have five records and we’ve released like 50 songs that were never on albums so we, it’s been a lot of material there and I think it’s easy to kind of get in a box and kind of get used to running through the same system to create an album. He didn’t allow us to do that. He really pushed us, and he’d tell you “You know, hey, this isn’t good enough.” Sometimes that hurts to hear and sometimes he’s wrong, but a lot of the times he’s right and you end up going back and rewriting and reworking things and looking back on it going, “Oh, I’m really glad we did that.”. So, I think that is his principle role is pushing the writers and the band to push themselves and he did a phenomenal job of that. And that goes back to knowing the producer too well because eventually you just don’t listen because eh, what are you gonna fucking do? You know, you start and you’re kind of like, “Okay, I gotta listen to this guy because he’s my new boss in a sense.”. You know, there’s a lack of discomfort that I think drives artistic expression. If you’re really comfortable it’s really easy to get lazy about it so that’s what I liked about it was the extra push to do my best.
Right, so you didn’t get too complacent and he kind of helped you push those boundaries.
Yeah, and you know just someone there to say, “That’s not good, that sucks.”. We’ve written plenty of songs that suck. I’ll be the first to tell you that. You want to at least enable your yourself to be honest with yourself and be truthful. I think that is the main role of any producer with any band is to make sure that the band does what the band does. What they’re capable of doing. So, yeah, anyhow.
Was it his idea to bring in Kellin Quin from Sleeping with Sirens or was that more your idea because you saw the connection there and wanted to broaden it? Whose idea was that?
Kellin? No, that was totally random! So, we uh, our manager where we recorded it, the office has a huge… a bunch of studios in it. So you have people bouncing around in there hanging out recording their own stuff and in a different studio or just sitting there and one day like, he was hanging out because they manage Sleeping with Sirens and he was just drinking some tequila, and we were drinking some tequila, and we were writing a song and we’re like, “Hey man, would you want to jump in with us?”. And he was like, “Yeah!” and that was it. That was really it. And I’ve always been a Sleeping with Sirens fan so there’s that. I mean, obviously if I thought it wasn’t, they weren’t good, it wasn’t my thing, I would have never asked. But, uhm, it was really actually just completely random. He was there. We were there and we all like to play music so we played music together. I love that stuff too. Especially like when you read about bands back in the 60’s. Jonny Cash would write stuff with Bob Dylan because they were just sitting around together and they both liked to play music and there was a lot of comradery in the music scene and now I don’t sense that so much. So, it was really cool in that sense. All the guests on our album we were all just hanging out so it’s very natural, I guess. It wasn’t like, “You know who would sound good right here at this moment is blah blah blah.”. It was kind of just a natural progression from just hanging out to we’re all in the studio together let’s make something and if it sucks it sucks, if it doesn’t it doesn’t. It was just a natural thing.
So, there was really a sense of “community” on this album then?
Yeah, no you’re totally right, there really was.
After being around for 15 plus years what sort of propels or compels you to keep going and to keep wanting to break boundaries and keep creating? What is it would you say is your driving force?
I guess the same thing that really made me want to start doing music to begin with. It’s really hard to explain to someone who doesn’t like look at it that way. The best way I can explain it is you don’t really have a choice. I know for a fact if I wasn’t writing music, I don’t know what would happen.
So basically, it’s just a part of you?
Yeah, I’d say it’s just a part of everybody. Even people who just listen to music. They have the same drive towards it just on the other end of it. Like I know there are a lot of people without the ability to listen to music would lose their shit too. I mean, I think it’s kind of a universal thing at least with the musical community that we all rely on it fairly heavily to get through things. That’s really kind of all I’ve got is that it’s a part of me whether I want it to be or not. I’ve often thought “Man, it would be really nice to not have that drive.”, because I really wouldn’t mind just being a happy whistling mailman like you see in like Mayberry or something. That seems pretty nice too, but I guess that’s really just not my fate. You know, music is just an amazing thing and I’m glad to be a part of it and I’m glad there’s people who feel that strongly about our music too and that support the band because the connection certainly transcends most. So, we’re just happy to be able to do it in general.
I can totally relate to that. Now with the album this is a Volume I, so this isn’t all of the tracks? The rest of the tracks are finished though, right?
Yeah, Yeah. We finished everything over the summer this year, but everything is done, and Volume II is ready to go. Everything is fired up Bro.
Can you walk me through the decision process on breaking up the tracks? What made you pick this first set of tracks for this volume? What was the thought process on how you split them up? Was there a specific reason you picked these?
There is to a degree. There’s heavier songs I think, or more up-tempo songs on the first one because you kind of want to come out of the gate with that. The second one has some ballads on it and some different kind of material that’s probably a bit more experimental. So, I think it’s more like, hey let’s make the fanbase happy and that immediate sort of need for it and kind of take care of that on the first one. There’s still heavy material on the second one. I actually like the second volume better, personally. So, it’s more about taste but yeah, I mean it was kind of like that. I guess that was the ballpark was let’s keep the first one like kind of punch-you-in-the-face-style even though there is a ballad on there called “Nightmare” and stuff like that. But that was kind of where we were at is just kick them in the teeth on the first one and then go into the artistic driven stuff so the people who hate that stuff kind of already got what they wanted, I guess.
I had a chance to read over some of the comments you had made about the new album and everything and I read your comments about “Time bomb” and the pressures that kids deal with, in regard to social media. Can you describe what you were speaking about in this comment?
Social media is one of those things I can look at from sort of a distance. I mean, because it’s all kind of silly. But when I started to understand the effect that it had on very young people especially it really isn’t just them. It’s like this worldwide version of keeping up with the Jonses, you know? So, it’s this mythological lifestyle that everybody has. It doesn’t really exist and what it does from my observation is it puts pressure on the person next to you to go, “How come I’m not like these people?”, They seem happy and they seem to have their act together, which is obviously not true because nobody is going to discuss or divulge, you know, the worst parts of life or the lesser parts of life. I found that at first, I thought of it as kind of like this just pocket little fad that was going to come and go but I think social media has a greater effect on the general thinking of the population than anything else. I think its superseded music, its superseded movies, it superseded any type of entertainment and I think it has had a disastrous effect on people’s lives in general. Now some people can use it and just use it for business, or you know, talking to their friends in high school, I don’t know. But in general, I think it’s kind of by nature itself, because human nature starts getting involved, it’s an evil kind of like algorithm because what you have is this constant state of comparison. Which in my mind, is the absolute worst thing a person can do is to compare themselves to the person next to them or the person down the street or in this case, a person across the world. What starts to happen is these feelings come through that they’re not good enough or they’re not doing what someone else is doing. Because there’s so many people on earth, there’s always going to be something that they’re not doing and they’re always not going to be good enough. And I think that projection on to people’s lives is extremely negative. I’ve read a lot of stuff about kids and especially with suicide is driven by bullying on social media. I mean, I think almost everybody has heard about that at this point. And you start to see the really ill effects it has on society as a whole and it really just made me think about this thing because I don’t think it’s going away. In fact, I think it’s going to grow and grow and grow and at some point, we have to deal with the ramifications of what this does to people and how it makes them feel about themselves. “Time bomb” was kind of just a reflection on that and from a different person’s perspective and how it can affect them. Obviously, it’s going to take a lot of resources and time to time to get to the bottom of this stuff and I think this was just Hollywood Undead’s take on this modern disease that people have of the constant comparison on the internet that people have with on another. It’s pretty wild.
Also, in the comments Jimmy said how you guys don’t want your fans to get comfortable. Why would you say you don’t want them to be comfortable? What do you mean by that?
Well, then that would mean I’m comfortable and I don’t think you can write good music from a position of comfort. You have to push yourself; you have to make yourself uncomfortable emotionally. Emotion is the bedrock of music if you look at it. No matter what your progression looks like or how catchy your melody is there has to be something underneath it. If they’re comfortable that means I’m comfortable which means I’m not pushing myself and I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do. Also, it goes to the effect that if someone that’s been listening to our records thinks they know what they’re gonna hear before they hear it that’s a very negative thing to me. Now, there’s a lot of fans that wish, I’m not arguing against this, that would love to hear duplications of records from the past. We hear it all the time. “Why don’t you write a record like this. Why don’t you write a record like that?”. That would be extremely uninteresting to us. I don’t think we’d have much of a purpose if we had to duplicate past work. And then whether they realize it or not, if you did do a record like that, then they’d just be asking you why your record sounds like another one. So, it’s like one of these things is duplicitous. I mean, I think a band in order to do what it’s supposed to do has to constantly kind of push boundaries and if we’re doing that then that should push listeners boundaries to some degree. So, discomfort to me is very vital to writing good music and even from the listeners perspective I would hate the idea of someone releasing an album that I’m looking forward to and almost knowing what’s going to be there before I listen to it. That’s all I meant by it.
Real quick, just a fun question here. If it were your last day what song off of your discography would you want to be remembered for? What’s your number one, holy grail, this is what I want people to remember me for?
Ooh… “I’ll be there” off of the deluxe version of Day of the Dead. That’s a no brainer for me. Yes ma’am!
Interview by Heather Householder
