Alkaline Trio are a band old enough to be my little brother and sometimes it has felt like they were. I mean, in a way where I could give them a poke here and there but at the end of the day, I’d still love them. They’ve got seven studio albums to their name, a million air miles and a creative spark to their work that makes it never grow old. Before they head to Australia as part of the No Sleep Til festival, the band have been taking a little break, recharging their batteries and generally getting things done. Bassist, Dan Andriano spoke to me from his home in Florida about “This Addiction” and the band who has always tried to get their problems off their chest. “Better out than in” appears to be the motto and a good one at that.
Read the full interview here.
Let’s start with This Addiction. I read everywhere that you we’re going back to your roots for that album and it was going to be old Alkaline Trio, was this really what you were going for?
That is something that everyone said about us, that is never really what we were doing. We just wanted to go back to Chicago and record the record with out old engineer, Matt Alison, and do the record ourselves. Everyone took that and put it in the press that we were trying to go back to our roots or whatever. Basically, we just wanted to make a record and not have anyone tell us how to write songs. Not feel any pressure and not to do anything a certain way. That’s what came out of it. It’s got a good energy. In that regard, I guess it is really going back to our roots a little bit just because we did it in the same manner that we did our older records.
In terms of the pressure, do you find that you didn’t have that because you’re on your own label [Heart & Skull] now?
When we recorded the record, we didn’t have a label at all. We found a way to self finance the recording. There was no pressure because it was us, the engineer and the songs that we had written and we would record the songs and be done with it. Once the record was pretty much done, we later sorted a deal with Epitaph to help us distribute it and help us get our label off the ground.
Do you plan to sign other bands to that label or will it be exclusively for the release of Alkaline records?
We haven’t talked about it honestly. I mean I think it’s something that could work with some of our friends or with me, Matt or Derek doing a solo or side project or even another band, we’d probably put it out on that label. We’re not out there trying to sign the next big thing. We’re not really good at running labels, it’s not what we do. What we’re good at is writing songs and playing shows. That’s what we’re focused on. At this point in our career it didn’t really make sense to us to find another label to sign us. We just really wanted the chance to get our album out.
Between the three Alkaline members, there is always a solo or side project going on in there somewhere. How does that affect Alkaline as a band itself? Or does it?
It doesn’t really these days, actually it never really did. Matt was in a band called Heavens for a while, that’s not really around anymore and we were in between records so that really didn’t affect us at all. Right now, I’m working on something that I’m going to call The Emergency Room, I’m still not really sure how that’s going to take shape. Right now we’re on a bit of a break so I’m just trying to write songs and trying to get stuff recorded and see what happens.
With two vocalists, how do you decide who is going to sing a track? Is it the person who writes the song?
Yeah, it’s the person who writes the song. In the past we’ve done it where I’d write a song and maybe I’d sing it, maybe I wouldn’t. These days, the songs that Matt and I write are very personal and it just doesn’t seem right to have someone else sing it. We both write different styles so it makes more sense to us that if Matt writes it, he’ll sing it. If I write it, I’ll sing it.
You said that the songs you write are really personal. This Addiction is definitely a really personal record. Did you want it to encompass the status of your relationships at the time?
Alkaline Trio has always been a band about catharsis and getting things off your chest so you can go on and have fun. The reason the songs are dark is because it’s a way for us to cope and deal with things in our lives whether it’s been relationships or general problems. We’re very fun people, I think. It’s not fun to let stuff weigh on your head day in and day out so we tend to write songs about it and that’s a good way to get over it, whatever it may be. In terms of This Addiction, unfortunately some of us were going through break-ups, a divorce, tight situations and so that came into the way out. It definitely feels like the kind of record we would have ten years ago. That’s just the way life is sometimes. You’re never in control of what’s going to happen, it’s how you deal with it.
As for being a record that you would have written ten years ago, how has your subject matter changed?
Over the course of the last few records before This Addiction, I think that Matt was delving into a lot of different subject matter, especially about books he was reading like true crimes, or films he would watch or even just reading the news and writing a song about it. It can be really hard to expand but Matt, I know, always wants to grow as an artist. In the process of that a lot of the songs, that I thought were amazing, were about some pretty serious things, metaphorical type situations that you could connect with your own life but I think it got away from him a little bit, topically, what he was writing about. With this record, there was a lot going on with us personally that demanded the attention of our songs.
Do you still listen to punk music yourself?
I listen to everything. Honestly, I haven’t heard that many new punk rock bands myself but punk rock it’s a funny term these days. It encompasses a lot. We were on tour with a band called Every Time I Die over the summer, I really like them a lot, kind of punk rock/metal/classic rock. There is a good band coming out of the States called the Cobra Skulls [Respect: Cobra Skulls rock]. They’re pretty punk rock and pretty awesome right? I listen to a lot of classic rock and country stuff these days but that’s just because I’m always looking for something else and to pay attention to the way other people write songs. I was born and raised on punk rock and I’ll always love punk rock.
In having such an extensive library of music styles, do you find those influences creeping into the songs you write?
I think so. It’s funny, I think Dine, Dine My Darling could have been a country song. It’s just the way you approach it. It definitely creeps into the way I write but if I wrote a straight up country song I probably wouldn’t bring it to rehearsal and be like “Matt, Derek! Check out this new song”. I’d play it for them but I wouldn’t expect them to want to play it or record it. I’d figure out something else to do with it.
So we can’t expect the next Alkaline album to be a country album?
That definitely won’t be happening.
Alkaline Trio are currently playing a short run of dates in California right now before heading to Australia.
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