Jen interviews We Came as Romans on their Australian tour.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dave and Josh from We Came as Romans before their sold out Melbourne Show last weekend. The other band members were fast asleep due to some pretty long days on their Australian National Tour.

Hey Guys How has the tour going so far?
Really good, it is one of those bittersweet things where the shows are awesome, amazing, the 45 minutes that we have on stage we are ecstatic and then when we go into any sort of travel it is really tough because we have to get up at like 5 AM. Like we just had a nine or a 10 hour drive what was it from Perth? No Adelaide.
Yeah it was from Perth it would have been three days!
We were all in a minivan and it was completely packed, we were squashed like 10 1/2 hours and we couldn’t sleep. Then in the middle of the highway there was a truck crashed and we had to go another way so it took even longer. So we had to take a detour out of the way like through three other cities.
Yeah I used to do it in 7 hours in a car.
But you can’t really complain as we have these awesome shows. In Hearts Wake have been really cool and we have had a great crowd reaction and all the other bands have been awesome so it’s like at the end of the day you got to hussle through the long traveling and just enjoy the shows.

Any funny stories you can share yet? A guy I met before said that you are all getting sick that you are so tired.
We have had our fair share of partying. Beartooth are partying a lot. There is actually a sign on our dressing room door saying team USA.
I’m heading off to the ice hockey after this, between USA and Canada.
l did not know that you guys had ice hockey over here, I’m from Detroit where Ice hockey is huge. We all played ice hockey growing up for about 10 years.
This only happens once a year.
Really? Thats awesome, anyway Beartooth and us on the first night or the second night we all went out to the bottle shops and bought some bottles and we started drinking super early because we got in about 5 AM and our body clocks or wrong, we were all adjusting to the jetlag and we thought it would be good idea to have a few drinks and it turned into using a big bowl from a hotel putting all our booze in it and having this weird sacrifice thing going on. We went down to the bar and they had pitchers of Long Island Iced Tea which is such a strong drink and they were about to close so we ordered five pitchers of long island iced tea and went back upstairs and poured it into this weird oblong bowl and drank it all. Our body clocks are all messed up because we’ve been flying so much lately so we had dinner and started drinking around six, and by the time everybody was drunk and ready for bed it was midnight which would have been the time in the states that we would have gone drinking. So that was nice because the next day we woke up all refreshed, yeah I actually woke up at 10 and felt great.

I saw you guys at Warped in 2013, I did the whole tour .. I saw your set a few times, never got old….
Did you enjoy it?
Yeah it was okay. (Laughing)
So like a C+ if you’re a teacher? like a passing grade?
Ha ha yes because I am actually a teacher!
The release of your new album is approaching very quickly, can you tell me if you agree with my opinion …that it is different to your older style of music?
Comparatively it’s totally different than To Plant a Seed, I mean the heavy songs are way heavier than what we thought was heavy back in To Plant a Seed days and we obviously we have some all singing songs. I guess it has a good place in the progression of our band but it is definitely totally different from where we first started. I think that is a really good thing because looking back I wrote To Plant a Seed when I was 18 or 19 I hope it is totally different. I hope that in the past six or seven years I’ve grown as a writer and we have grown as a band. This is a kinda of common things that we have been saying in interviews, we talk about this a lot, kids are asking us to write To Plant a Seed volume 2, the same kids that would say I can’t believe this band would do a
To Plant a Seed volume 2 ! They don’t really know what they want. Although we do have a lot of fans that are really respectful and older and that’s nice but we copped the most flak from the younger fans that don’t actually understand that when you grow up, everything about you changes. All of our music that we write as a band is a direct representation of who we are. We are much different as 25/26-year-old’s then when we were 18 or 19. To be completely honest that really happened. To Plant a Seed Came out and we toured off it for about two years and we thought let’s do it again, let’s write likeTo Plant a Seed but better, likeTo Plant a Seed 2.0, we thought that was cool but there was nothing different about it. But our third record we just said screw it we can take some steps as we can keep writing like To Plant a Seed 3.0 or 4.0. And now taking steps is just part of our band and honestly the change in the reaction to taking steps surpasses riding the same record twice. We can’t do the same thing over and over as becomes redundant and then it becomes a immature. You have to grow as a band.

I’ve seen you get negative feedback from fans or even abuse on social networking how do you all deal with that?
I love it. It’s just a part of it. Every CD it doesn’t matter what you do, even every cover song. Like we have done a cover of Taylor Swift song and will release the video, and then a kid would say you guys suck I hate this song you can’t write, I mean really we didn’t write this song, they are just hating it to hate it. There are always people that are going to do that and that is fine because that is all they do, it is someone somewhere sitting behind a computer and they can’t possibly find a better thing to do with their time than tear something down, to play a video that they don’t even like. It is funny to us now because I think we have just developed a thick skin that doesn’t even phase us. We have had worse being said about us before like this is a direct quote…… “Go die in a gas chamber “
Really?
Yeah, we were like um okay…. we are all older now the youngest band member is 25, but the 16-year-old can write something like that and we think well maybe 10 years ago we were immature and did some pretty silly stuff, maybe there is some time that he will grow up. In the meantime we can keep putting out records and touring and doing things we love to do instead of spending our time hating things that we can’t control. I mean what is the point.
I think I connect to “The World I used to Know “ the most not that we are here to talk about that…. is there a song that you connect to the most yourselves? ( I used to be scared to be myself but now I just am I don’t give a crap what people think.)
Yeah everyone has a different song on this album that is really dope. For our last album it was that we all liked the single. And so when we play that live every one would get really into that song. And then after that song was played the rest was kind of luck luster. it kind of started breaking out on our last CD. But for this record, everyone has different song they connect to, if we had to pick our top three then they would all interconnect like a Venn diagram at some point. Everyone has a different favorite than the others. My favorite personally is the fourth track called memories. I just really love that song there is something about it in my head that just clicks and I think that this is the best song that we have ever put out.
My favorite is 12.30 I just love that song.
Everyone went out and did some songwriting was in different groups then we all kind of came together and then did things here and there and gave it a tweak over and just made sure that it was all really smooth and carved well.
I think the song 12.30 was about 20% done (it was less than that ) yeah kind of more I guess. It was like okay Josh help out with some of the guitar parts, Lou and I had already got that 20% is what we put in initially.Josh said I’m going to fix up some of those guitar parts and then Eric was like we can do this with drums and Dave was like I Wanna do this with vocals. It was kind of like we were all there and were all under pressure and it just came together like really naturally. Dave and I sometimes joke that it’s like our Frankenstein creation, it was so weird, it started out with what we thought was a chorus which was like a breakdown that Andy and Lou had written that eventually came the bridge and then I ended up writing the chorus and so then we had a chorus and a bridge and Kyle end up writing the versus and then Dave, Kyle and I wrote all the lyrics together. it is so crazy that that song started with a different chorus with no vocals or nothing and got moved and rearranged with this here and that there, it was done completely arsed backwards. I think the vocals on that song were the either the fourth or fifth set of the vocals, we kept writing it and Dave and Bennett will come in the room and would say that shit sucks we were like thanks David. But he is great, but he holds nothing back and so he would come in and listen and then say no it’s not there yet, do it again. That song took a lot of work and I think we all have equal attachment to it because of how much work we all put in it. It’s a weird song it sounds like Radiohead. (Laughing)
Are you playing the Taylor Swift cover in Melbourne?
Think we are tomorrow at the all ages gig. Tonight we are playing I’m Glad you Came. (In the end they played that at the AA concert as well.)
We have played I’m Glad you Came on every tour in the States because they like to get crazy to it. So I guess it is our bad that we neglected coming here although it was not like we were sitting home doing nothing! So we have mixed it up down here which is probably the first time that we have done that on a tour.

I really love the artwork for all your albums, who designed them? Was the plan to have a continued theme from day one?
So basically I came up with the general concepts or else I would sketch something out and then I will send it to this awesome dude called Paul Romano and he basically starts painting it no wait he sketches then sends it back to me and I show it to the band, I say I am really feeling this one what do you think? Usually everyone is on the same page as me which is great and the artwork has been a smooth process other than the fact it takes ages to do because it is all hand-painted, the paintings are huge, Paul Romano’s work is awesome. We have kind of had this revolution of the character that planted the seed and is clearly young, inspiring and wanting to learn to grow and then you have understanding of what you’re going to be like reality kicks in and you think oh shit, there is a duality, there is a good and evil and that you have to find your place and tracing back roots is kind of like rebuilding yourself. I had to take a lot growing up and make some steps to remember who I am and keep moving forward and then on this record we wanted to do something self titled and we felt like this was something really strong and defined the band as we will are a little bit more grown-up and that is why this character seems like very powerful and silence but like really powerful so that is why we jumped on because he has this point when he is not attached to anything and he is his own free spirit is and I think that just defines our band, like shedding skin and letting go, hearing you have to do this you have to do that and it feels like when you’re floating and you’re not locked down to anything you become aware of more things and you become less stubborn about it and a little bit more open and I think that’s something that is super important that people don’t take in and we try and do that as a band and as people and and I think that is a big step for our band. That is why the colors are like that , it is black and white but not everything is black and white there are a lot of grays in there too. and then the red is showing the powerful that jumps out at you.
I was wondering if you had planned that from day one, the progression of the guy.
Honestly no it just went with the music and growing up. We didn’t plan to still be playing music today and that’s the same as the artwork we didn’t plan it that way. I didn’t envision it to be like that but as we grew older and as we evolved. Pre our band Andy and I had this conversation about planting a seed and that was going to be our thing, we did not even have her album written it was just this idea that we had and we thought it was really cool that we could take his character with us as we went, but when we talked about then we definitely had a different trajectory of the character. Like I said earlier our band is a representation of us as people and we have gone down some paths as a band.
Well you just answered quiet a few of my questions in that answer! ok so jumping ahead maybe a bit cheeky question. This album is called We Came as Romans, was that something that you settled on because you could not agree or a conscious decision that you made?
We actually really tried to look into lyrics, all in the beginning before we started recording the album about what we were going to call it. We started tracking the album in January so this is back in November and we were like what are we going to call it? I cannot remember whether it was you or Dave said it would only really make sense if it was self titled because it is the most accurate statement of who We Came as Romans is as a CD. We all as a band came together to make this CD and it would be weird it was called anything different. It is us as people as a band as a family and when that was said everyone agreed.

If you get negative feedback from fans or even abuse on social networking how do you all deal with that?I admire that you run your own twitter accounts as I feel that fans really like it when they can connect to their fav bands, are there any fans that you have thought what the hell? Yeah all the time! We all do a lot of social media stuff, is the way to keep our fans included what we do, to keep them updated a lot of it is our more humorous side, we have a lot of jokesters in the band, not saying that it is unique to us as a lot of bands do it. There are fans that do have a cool connection with us. There are fans that I tweet back to over and over again. I will see them at shows and I know who they are. It is nice to have a relationship with fans that I can talk to. A lot of people are just out there who are just terrible people. Like I was just saying earlier you just ignore it and take it with what it is and hopefully take the good out of what social media is.You don’t have to necessarily ignore the band but you have to acknowledge it, it is part of our responsibilty to speak out against it which I try to do frequently with out sounding so negative. Kids don’t realise that we are putting ourselves out on the line every day, it’s not like we’re doing anything dangerous but we basically broadcast our life and put under a microscope. It is not like we are super huge actors or anything we are just a rock band that loves to tour and do new things and see new things. It is just tough sometimes when people write horrible things about you and you think what did I ever do to you. Some fans overstepped the boundaries and will tweat our girlfriends on social network and saying to you know when your boyfriend is going on tour?
Wow Really?
Yeah it is just one of those things that similar to Spiderman with great power comes great responsibility and you have to bite your tongue and not give in. We are human beings that we are just trying to do our best. We try and move forward with our head up because if I spent all my time reading the negative comments and taking them seriously I would be in a lot of therapy. We just need to keep moving forward. We enjoy the moments that a fan comes up to us in person and say hey you helped save my life and that is something that makes all the negativity on the Internet fade away. I know Josh feels the same it just lets you let everything go. It makes you feel unreal.
Yeah i feel that in my teaching job, it only takes one student to say I have helped them to make it all worthwhile.

You have released that one song, The World I used to know that I just love as I just mentioned. Have you received good, bad or ok feedback from your fans? Really love the merch that you have for your presales, I’ve got a great package! Do you have a merch designer or do you all have a say in what kind of merch you sell?
We get a whole bunch of stuff sent to us beforehand and we choose, stuff we like and make suggestions for example changing a lyric so we all have a hand in what’s going on. I have done a couple of designs for your band and that is kind of fun. But it is fun with the whole and as it is like going shopping, it is a long process. If someone is going to pay for your T-shirt you want to be the best and the coolest design.

Well thanks heaps for your time, and I hope your gig goes well tonight and I will see you tomorrow at the all ages gig.
Thank you Jen!