Karnivool Interview

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Interview by: Lancifer
Karnivool, 03/30/2010 @ Baltimore MD

IRR: What did you do differently on Sound Awake, as opposed to Themata?
Ian Kenny: I guess the biggest contributing factor that differs between the two records, is that I think this one sounds a bit more of a collaborative sort of effort from all of us, and that was something that was and could be applied at the start of the record.  The thing about Themata, is that we started it generally myself and Drew, just bouncing ideas, and Drew writing a bunch of music and piecing it all together, and me approaching it vocally, and bouncing that together until the end of that, we sort of got our bass player John on board.

Andrew Goddard: Well, John was on board, but Steve came on board after that record, plus the other guitarist came through. So Sound Awake was really the first record that we had written as a full unit.  The obvious kind of way to go about it was to just let everyone throw their bits into the mixing pot and wrote it collaboratively in a room where we could all feed off of each other.

IK: Which is why I think it’s a vastly different record, to Themata.
AG: Yeah, we wanted to experiment with jamming, and let things take their own coarse as opposed to not.  We still wanted to go with that, but wanted a bit more of a drive.

IRR: What do you want your listeners to gain from your music?
IK: I think, you kind of want listeners, when they hear what your band is about, to react and kind of stop them for a second.  And I think when you do stop them like that, it makes them think and question like ‘shit, if this is what I’m listening to now, I wonder what else is out there, or what else is possible.’ I think it’s really good when you come across something in your time that strikes you and makes you question, like ‘shit, what is going on, what is happening with this?’.

AG: I think our general aim with Sound Awake, is just to open your eyes.  Society is kind of focusing us to do this, put blinders on, and we’re trying to encourage the opposite.

IK: Ultimately you want to have a positive effect on people.  I think you want it to be, for lack of a better term, a mentor for good will.  Like Drew has brought this up before, but you can have a record as a friend, and you want them to be in an arsenal of positive space.  I like the idea of that.

IRR: What is the most misunderstood thing about Karnivool?
IK: We’re a metal band.  People think we’re a metal band.  Maybe that tag is wearing off now because of Sound Awake.

AG: I think the name as well doesn’t do us any favors.  The name kind of stuck very early on, and if you judge a book by a cover, which I think a lot of people do…

IK: And I think it’s easy, because describing this band I don’t think is an easy thing.  I know we have trouble with it.

AG: That label of bands to us is just kind of indicative of human nature, you just want to put things in a box and put a label on it.  I recon the easiest thing to do is just to listen to the record and make up your own ideas about it.

IRR: Where did the name Karnivool come from?
IK: The name has been in the band for nearly 10 years or more.

AG: More than that.  The band has been together for almost 12 years.

IK: We thought of it when we first got out of school, so it was a bit of a juvenile thing that we went through together.  There’s not really an accredited story to it.  It was just an idea of what we wanted to do, and we had to call it something from an early age, so it just stuck.

IRR: What qualifies you as a band, or as musicians?
AG: We can count the booze in about an hour.

(Laughter)

IK: I think it’s something you call yourself because you don’t feel another title is suited.  If someone said, “Hey, what do you do?” I’d say, I’m a musician. I don’t sell cars…

AG: Well it’s like what you said the other day, we don’t really have a choice.  This is what we do, and felt like I didn’t have much of a say, we just got pulled into music.  It had a lure, and I had no option but to go in it.

IK: And it’s our current job.

AG: I’d be fucked without it.

IRR: Did you grow up with music in your homes?
IK: I think so.  I don’t think I was in one of those situations where my parents were always playing music, and that’s how I came about it.  I mean, that was always there, but from the earliest age I remember just being fascinated by music and the actual sonic presence of it all and what it made, and how it made me feel, and it’s been a constant friend of mine since I can remember.

IRR: Do you have a favorite song that you like to perform? And if so, why do you like to perform it?
IK: I think at the moment, and I’m speaking on behalf of the other guys, the song New Day for some reason we’re sharing some pretty good space with that at the moment.  We all react to it, and we all react together to that song, especially live.  It’s got such a sense of hope and I don’t know…

AG: It was weird, because it was the first song we wrote for the album, New Day, and the songs I like the best from other bands are the songs that grow on me, the albums that grow on me, where I don’t quite get it at first.  So we slowly understand what is happening and what it’s about.  To consciously do that with your own music is near impossible, but I think subconsciously that kind of happened because we wrote this song and just left it there and wasn’t completely happy with it.  But after 3 years of recording the record, it started to slowly make sense and the lyrics just made sense suddenly and seemed to have real meaning for us personally.  That’s just one that I feel really good about delivering on stage. New Day has been a great one live, and I think a lot of people resonate with it.  It’s 8 and a half minutes or something, and seems to be a song that goes down better than most.

IK: It feels like it.

IRR: What’s your greatest weakness as a band?
IK: Possibly our collective procrastination.

AG: Our decision making, yeah.   There is a lot of procrastination.  It’s such a weird… like the whole song writing process of Sound Awake, and Themata, but more so Sound Awake.  Even though we’re out of it in the hindsight, it’s still kind of confusing.  We’re still trying to work out what happened.  Because right in the thick of it, it was like…

IK: Pretty desperate.
AG: It was, it was like, ‘What are we doing?’ We were banging our heads against the wall, and we could slowly see it coming together, but it was just a really laden process.  In the end it kind of… because we were not comfortable, and because there was a bit of angst or whatever you want to call it, within the process, it kind of made the record what it was in the end.  We don’t really argue with how difficult it was.  But there are definitely things we learned in the song writing process that I think we’re going to use next time.  One of those, is trusting our instinct a bit more, because we tend to second guess ourselves sometimes.  So we find that most of the time our initial ideas and intuition ends up being right.

IRR: What’s the scariest thing that has happened to you on tour with the band?
IK: Fucking bedbugs.  Did you get first bitten in the UK?

AG: Yeah, I first got bedbugs in London.  This isn’t scary, but this is a current event.

IK: This is happening right now!  He got bitten to shit in London, and then in Charleston, where we just played a couple nights ago, and our manager got bit to shit.  And I took a pillow from the same room, without thinking.  I was really hung over, so I wasn’t thinking straight.

AG: Brought it in the bus.

IK: Brought it in the van and slept on it. My face is bitten, and my neck and my back.  The dude sitting next to me, our sound guy Luke, he is all bitten to shit, so these bedbugs man…

AG: All through the van.

IK: Ugh, they’re brutal.

AG: But seriously, I don’t know.  Scariest moment? I think…

IK: Yeah, that wasn’t really scary, it was annoying.

AG: Scary… I think three quarters of the way through the Sound Awake process, when we booked in the studio time, because we said to our manager, “Hey, you’ve just got to book the studio time and tell us when we’re going into the studio.  That’s the only way we’re going to get this record finished.” That was good for us, otherwise we’d still be writing it.  And just that date was coming up, and reality was hitting us, and we had so much work to do.  There were times when we felt that throwing in the towel a couple times, but it was just like this massive undertaking.  Songs like Change that were still not written, we kind of went into the recording process with pages of stuff still not finished for Sound Awake.  So that kind of forced us to learn a lesson to trust our intuition, and we just had to make these split second decisions in the studio because we were running out of time.  That was scary, going into the recording process with only five songs really.  The rest were just these bits and pieces…  and it was scary but exhilarating at the same time.

IK: That had a massive part to how and why Sound Awake is the type of record it is I think.  It has that whole sort of free space, and sort of jamming.

AG: I think there is some desperation on there as well.

IRR: What’s something interesting about the band or the music that most people don’t know about?
AG: I don’t know.  We try to make most things transparent.  If they’re not, it’s totally for a good reason.

IK: I don’t know.  I think the sound of the band kind of speaks for itself.  It speaks in many voices I think.  For me, it’s such a wide spread of emotion, and you know…  That’s a funny question.  A bloody good question.

AG: I think we put out what we put out, and we do that for a reason.  All you know about me is what I sold ya, it’s like that Tool line that stuck with me.  Yeah, I don’t know.  That’s a good question though.

IK: I don’t think we definitely hold any secrets at all, I think as people we wear our bloody hearts on our sleeves when it comes to music and when it comes to what we’re doing.

IRR: If you weren’t musicians, what would you be doing right now?
AG: I’ve been doing a bit of work in Aboriginal communities in Australia, and that’s something that really interests me.  So I’d probably be doing something like that.

IK: I’d probably find a place of exile.  Somewhere that I could just fuckin’ surf, a lot, and not deal with anything mainstream or busy for awhile.  I’d open a shoe shop.  I don’t know.  Work with animals is also an idea.

AG: Playing a little poker.

IK: Yeah, playing some poker.

AG: I’m striving to become a poker champion.

IK: Which is something you can do while you’re a musician.

IRR: Is it too early to ask what is in store for the future?
IK: I think record-wise it is possibly too early to answer, because I don’t think we know what our next move in that direction is yet.  We definitely have a sense of what the starting point will be, but I don’t know what sort of record we’ll be involved in the next shot.

AG: Lots of traveling.  We’re just going to keep focusing on what’s in front of us.  The next record, that’s really… our number one focus is to take the next step in kind of an evolutionary process, and take it where it needs to go, or let it go where it needs to go.

IK: I think we’ve got a little bit more of this record to use for ourselves before we go into another record.  We’re going to do some more touring and share it around a bit more.  And with that comes our own travel, our own experiences, and our own learning.  The things you come across, the things you love, and the things you fuck up, and take on board, the other things you get rid of.  I think whatever we get from that, we’ll take it to the next cycle.  That’ll all play a part in the starting point I think.

IRR: Any chance you’ll come through DC?
AG: Hopefully.

IK: If so, it’ll be when we get back here next…

AG: Yeah, we want to get back here in August or September, and play as many shows as we can, so if we get to play DC, then great.  Too early to say I think.

Read our Karnivool Show Review