TRIVIUM: The Sign of the Cross (Roadrunner)
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Little Trivium is becoming bigger and bigger: the quartet follows his ‘Ascendency’ with a very bloody ‘Crusade’ on record, sharing huge scenes (Ozzfest, Download…) and the biggest awards (Kerrang awards, Metal Hammer awards) with the mightiest bands on earth, after their heroes, Metallica. Relentlessly touring, Trivium called at Paris to promote their third album before going back on the road, opening for Iron Maiden. Surely, for those crusaders, death is not at the end of the road, as Corey tells us.
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| -Last time we met, it was in 2OO5 for the promotion of ‘Ascendency’: since then, everything has been going very fast for Trivium: have you been surprised by all this turmoil around you? -C: Well, we put our best effort into writing a really good record, and we really like to keep things realistic, we don’t say to ourselves this record has got to win awards but we just try to write the best record, we were really excited and really pleased to see how well people received it. It was a very good feeling to get that recognition for hard work in putting out stuff and people giving a warm reception to that. That record did really well for us and we hope to keep it going, keep building up our fan base and just kind of bring the band to the next level. -Awards, recognition, huge festivals: how did you and do you live that success? What did it change in your personal or artistic life? -C: It depends on what you look at, at the band or personally, but we’re still the same person we were when we started record. We only gained a lot of experience on all aspects of life, but nothing really changed about us, except you have a lot more demand for your time for interviews and promo as you become bigger and more people want to meet you, so you’re definitely a lot more besides playing music, as there’s a lot more things you’re doing with more and more people, so you’re definitely more busy and going downfall, being away from home and your girlfriend and your family. But mostly, it has been very cool, people know who we are, and there’s definitely a good thing, better than when anybody knows you! So, let’s forget the bad things and let’s enjoy it! I love it, tourings are awesome, we’re definitely a touring band, a live band, doing shows and playing for people, travelling around the world, see places we’ve never seen before, so you get a more global awareness in meeting people from other countries. It’s a really cool feeling to see the world, as most people during their life can’t get to places we’re doing. It’s a cool part of the job to do that, travelling around the world and getting different perspectives on things which come out on music as you learn new things about cultures and stuff, which have a certain effect on it. -Since two years, you met a lot of your personal heroes: which one has been the most impressive, on stage or personally? -C: Seeing and meeting Metallica was really cool, because they are such a big band, which accomplished so much and, when you meet people bigger as a band or as a musician, sometimes people can be dicks, assholes and stuff but those guys, from the first time we met them, were the some of the most down to earth and nicest people that we ever met, as musicians as well as persons, it was great to meet someone with a big aura and being that cool. They liked our stuff and knew who we were, they knew our music and it’s really cool to see that we’re big fans of them and that they like what we do. Also other people that has been obvious influence on us, like Ronnie James Dio, who’s a really nice guy .So there has been a lot of people like that has been around the block a few times and still really down to earth, and it’s very nice to see that fame and success doesn’t go to some people’s head like it goes sometimes: it can happen! You can still be a nice person after all that! -Talking about Metallica, you participated to the Metallica tribute for Kerrang Magazine: how did it happen and why the choice of this particular song? -C: Kerrang came to us, as Metallica is a big influence on us, to put together a tribute for the 2Oth anniversary of ‘Master of Puppets’ in gathering a bunch of bands, also obviously influenced by Metallica. We said yes, of course, when they asked us to participate. Before this tribute, we were used to play that song live when we were just a local band playing shows, and so this song has always been involved in kind of what we do and in our repertoire, so that choice was the most obvious for us. No one else took it at that time, so we snaked it up! -This year is also an anniversary for ‘Reign in Blood’ by Slayer: do you have any statement about it and about the band? -C: The first record I’ve got by Slayer was ‘Divine Intervention’, and I really thought that record was wicked, and then I kind of went back and checked the other stuff: I got ‘Reign in Blood’, with ‘Angel of Death’, and the whole record got me into the more speed aspect of metal and the more intense and harder edge metal, which was in your face all the time, and you can definitely hear the Slayer Influence in some of our music: if you talk about intensity and in your face stuff, they are the best band at that coming from that style and the more extreme form of any of those bands, and in listening their records I was blown away by the evil and the intensity of it. With ‘Master of Puppets’, there’s definitely a record that resist to the time, it’s still a relevant piece of music even today, influencing new bands. -Well, let’s talk about ‘Crusade’, your new record: as I have heard, it’s more a diary of the band around the world that something about religion… -C: Yes, ‘Crusade’ is not meant to have any connection with any kind of religious crusade which happen today or happen in the history, it’s more a personal statement of the band: we like to travel around the world, playing our music to people and get many people listen to our music and get the more people as possible, so it’s a musical crusade of the band and what we do, and hopefully people will not get mad at it. It’s a personal statement of what the band does, and a totally different kind of meaning to the word crusade for us than has been used for. -What was your state of mind during the recording? I guess you were more confident than before, in your music and in yourselves? -C: From all the touring and stuff, the experience we gained definitely made us grow as musicians, as songwriters, we all are better as far as playing our instruments, and it wasn’t like we planned for the record to sound the way it does, but we started writing, and this is just how the stuff came out, it wasn’t a pre-planned thing of how the stuff should sound, it came naturally and that comes naturally from our natural progression and the next step for the band as far as the music. We wanted to make a diverse metal record that would cover all that, all the different aspects of what we do, showing to people different sides of what we can do instead of sticking to just one specific thing, but rather a large spectrum of what we can do as musicians and song writers, we don’t want to stick to one specific thing that we can do all the time. It definitely opens up to try new things and show people more sides of our music, making the record more diverse: track to track, it doesn’t always stick together, as many records sounding the same. We added some new things from the experience we gained and learning new things about how to make music interesting. We were very happy to how the record came out. -I haven’t seen the cover, but did Paul Romano realise it again? C: Yes, he did this one, and it’s kind of like our music evolved and progressed and developed in the next step of the band’s artwork, we kept the same theme from the previous cover, with this guy kind of floating and foaming as the band developed the imagery and the guy on the cover is developing too in a kind of intricate, sophisticated type of being instead of staying in a primitive state, he’s developed into something bigger and better: it’s as if the artwork followed the musical path, and it was like Iron Maiden or Megadeth type, having a band symbology type thing, as when you see Eddy it’s Iron Maiden, you don’t have to see the name, and we wanted to have that kind of old school type of imagery with the Trivium symbol, visual as well as very musical too. I love his style because he hand paint everything, instead of using all the computer visual stuff which, after a while, a lot of bands look the same. The hand paint really gives it all his characteristic, a vibrant look, bright colors, looking more…metal! -Yes, and more artistic, too! In your biography, someone compared you to a mix of Motley Crue and Megadeth: what do you think of that? -C: I can see the Megadeth thing, because there’s a definite influence on the style of music we play, but, for Motley Crue, there’s maybe one song on the new record that has Motley Crue Influence, ‘cause we wanted that kind of rhino-rock thing, pumping kind of stuff, so we wrote that song on tempo styled Motley Crue Skid Row, rhino-rock kind of stuff, with more laidback, slow kind of groove I think, but this influence is not like a prominent thing you could hear in the majority of our songs. But I like Motley Crue, so it’s not that bad! -Is it a general inspiration for this album, or rather a string of separate specific songs? -C: We just wrote, without concept or anything, and each person wrote a bunch of songs, for the first time: on our first record, Matt wrote a lot of songs, and on our second record, it was a collaboration between Matt and me, but now, that’s the first time that anyone besides Matt wrote a complete song all the way through and so it was one person’s complete idea. You can definitely hear, when you know what person wrote, different styles of writing and playing. Me and Paolo each wrote three songs, and all songs couldn’t fit on one record, so we needed songs for bonus tracks: two extra songs will be on different formats. It was hard to decide because each song came out very good, and it had been as a whole source sounding like Trivium, even if different people write some of their stuff. All the material assembled very well. It’s pretty cool because we haven’t done that before, as far as collaboration goes, and it’s also due to the fact that we hadn’t so much time to get together as a band and work out songs, so it was the only way to do it to really get the record out, without going over the time we had. -So I suppose the next record will be more based on this collaboration on writing? -C: Yes, It’s the idea. This time, we had so much touring and so few time to do it that it was the most efficient way to write the record, but hopefully we’ll do the same thing of writing individually and then see how we can get together and work on stuff as a band. The last record was good thing for that, a lot of cool stuff came from we had no pre written stuff and it was a sort of jam or whenever comes to mind: I like to work like that, building, creating the songs from nothing, just from band’s ideas. I hope the next record will take all different styles of songs written this time and a lot of cool things could come out of that, instead on sticking to only one style. -Colin Richardson did the mix of the album: was it very important for the sound of Trivium? -C: Yes, we wanted to try someone new: we did all the tons on the record with bass sounds, drums sounds, guitar sounds, we recorded everything the way we wanted it to sound, already on a eight tracks, are usually a mixer change the way of guitars sounds so we said the way we wanted everything to sound and he just mixed it this way and gel together. He did a very good job in taking all the tons and sounds that we wanted the record sound like, he made it sound as a record altogether. We looked back at many things he mixed in the past and really like his style and how he made every band and every record sound, as you can tell that it’s a Colin’s record. It’s definitely his style mixing his skills with something we really thought we worked for the record. -Again, ‘Crusade’ has been produced by the band and Jason Suecof : is it the best team for you? -C: We’ve been working and pretty much recording with Jason, but this record was a bit different, as we got Mark Lewis, who actually engineered the record and who’s great, so we worked hand to hand with an extra person of the team that wasn’t on the last record. The band produced this one, and from the last he has been in the studio, knowing a lot about writing music and stuff, the experience that we got could allow us to handle a lot of the stuff ourselves, we just needed an outside person from the band, kind of like dictating our songs Now we know how to make it the best be can on our own. He was there and co-produced, giving an outside ear on things afterwards. It’s always nice to have a person who’s not kind of like connected to the music but giving his opinion from a listener point of view. He was there when we needed it, it also sometimes opens up ideas we wouldn’t have thought of, and he can incorporate that too to the rest. It’s definitely more a band involved than for the last one, so it’s really cool for us to have that, everyone having good ideas and putting them on the table! -Will we see videos for this new record? -C: Yes, we already did, a couple of days before we moved over here, we shot two music videos: we had to shoot both first and second single at the same time, because it would have been a pain in this ass to try to fit it in on the touring. Both came out pretty cool, so I guess it will be the same for people to see it! Interview made in Paris by JP Coillard on August 18th. Thanks to Karine and Sarah from Roadrunner France.
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