Thrice Interview
Interview with Ed Breckenridge of Thrice
Words by Brendan Monteiro / photo’s by Marcus Maschwitz
There are NOT a lot of bands out there that can honestly say that they have kept their integrity during their music careers. The desire for commercial success has to be in many musicians head at some stage, whether they know it or not however there are exceptions to the rule. Thrice is one of those rare bands that have constantly done what is right by themselves, never basing decisions on the affect that it might have on sales but rather on what is best for their art, the music. They have drifted in and out of popularity but the one thing that has remained a constant is the quality they produce, record after record. We recently got to sit Ed aside and try delve into the mystery that is Thrice, and this is what we found.
Beggars is your latest offering and there was a really bad leak with the album, how did it affect the band?
I guess the best way I can describe how the leak felt to us was like, if you were to get somebody a really big present for there birthday or for christmas or something. You hadn’t had a chance to wrap it up yet and you had it in your closet, then your friend that you were going to give it to opens up your closet and pulls this thing out and says “oh is this for me”. We didn’t have it ready, we didn’t have the artwork done and we didn’t even have copies of it ourselves yet because it had just been mastered. So it was kind of like a punch in the gut but at the same time I think that we dealt with it the best we could and we threw it up on iTunes. The version that leaked had talking over it so it wasn’t exactly what the record would be like but at the same time it took away a lot of the surprise and how we wanted to present it.
So do you believe that it affected sales of the album, and was the release with the bonus tracks an attempt to try and salvage sales?
Oh for sure, the thing that sucks though, I am glad that we had the thought to do that but it would of been really cool to have released that with something else. Maybe like a live video or a split with another band or something like that but it took that possibility away. It’s the age of entitlement I keep hearing people say, where people think they deserve everything for free. I think sharing music is cool but there is something that is being lost in society. To get deep real quick, people don’t feel respect for things being special, it just seems like people are losing respect and the feeling of holding something and owning something. It’s probably because of the internet, you can just look it all up now on google. Everything is so instant now, instant gratification, I understand that and I think that probably the music industry has to find a way to deal with it. Actually a lot of industries actually, art in any form especially because it is so personal to the artist. It’s going to be an interesting future we have.
Did you find out who was responsible for the leak and would finding the culprit bring closure to the whole endeavour?
Yeah, apparently it was a single person that had been hacking into Vagrants back-end and blatantly spammed it. I think that they were going to press charges and they asked if we wanted to be involved but we declined just because I think in the end it really hurt our label more than anyone. A lot of the way that we survive as a band is by touring, and the only way a label survives is by selling records. It hurts them and in turn it hurts us and other bands on the label, they need money to give bands tour support and you cant give tour support if your not making any money. I think that people just need to realise how their individual actions can affect things on a greater scale. Just like if you do something good, even a tiny thing, it can affect a large mass as well.
Did you in a way just want to forget about the whole thing?
Maybe, I think with something like that going on and we were to be involved, there would be a lot of people that wouldn’t understand and would refuse to understand what actually happened and we just didn’t want to deal with that. So we just wanted to move on and get it over with because it’s such a weird argument, there’s plenty of people that understand but still take music and then there is also plenty of people that don’t understand how downloading music affects the music industry. I am going way beyond this question but I think there is a lot that’s involved in that, there are a lot of amazing bands that maybe don’t get signed because labels are afraid of not selling records. I think that in the end there is all this stuff that’s involved in how bad the music industry is doing compared to what it used to. A lot of these really cool artistic bands with a lot of ability to push music in to new avenues aren’t going to get signed, especially if they’re only going to sell a few records and people can download those records anyway and so it’s all just a big mess.
With every album that you record you must have aspirations for the release, do you feel you accomplished those with Beggars?
Yeah I don’t think, and this is a good thing, I don’t think as a band we are ever like “Yeah we did it”. At the same time I am really happy with how it turned out and I think how we recorded it was kind of a reaction to what is going on with music right now. There’s a lot of really processed, perfect, you know there’s doctored drums and guitars that sound like a train. We really tried to make it raw and feel live and catch a lot of the weird sounds that might be cut out of normal records. There might be a note or a string on a guitar that was slightly out of tune for a bit of the song and then we would keep that just because it adds this reality. Not everything should be perfect and we as a band find the beauty in that, art in general. Also making this record, that is what we wanted to focus on, we wanted to make the songs have a really raw rock vibe. A lot of what we wrote came to together in a practice space wheras the stuff that we did on The Alchemey Index, a lot of that was written with sharing files individually and we actually hadn’t really played a lot of those songs before we even started recording them. I think a lot of those songs developed on computers and in our own rooms individually and I think this next record we took all those things that we learned from The Alchemy Index and put it all together in this practice space and started working it out. I think what ended up happening was something very special and a cool experience and now that we have done that I can’t wait to move on again, that is always a good feeling.
How has the year been for Thrice since the release of Beggars, especially now with the very sad news from Teppei?
It’s been a crazy crazy year, I think you can look back on it in both ways. I think being faced with something like Cancer and having it be so real and death and all that, it really kind of slaps you in the face and makes you realise what your prospectives on life should be. How important each moment is, how the little things you do affect everyone around you, how important it is to tell someone that you love them. I think that’s really taught us all as band how lucky we all are, even in these times when things totally seem like they are crap.
Do you think that this experience will affect the next album?
Yes, I think so, definitely. There’s a lot of feeling that is coming out and needs to come out so I think it will definitely affect the next album.
Through the years your sound has morphed and changed and constantly been evolving, where do you see it heading on the next album?
I don’t know exactly, it’s so weird because all of us write a tonne and you really don’t know what you will get until it all collides. For example, a lot of the stuff that I was writing for Beggars was really mellow, I think some of the really mellow parts ended up fitting into the more aggressive songs and so it’s just how it happens. Our band is really lucky in that we are so generous with each other, allowing hearts to mingle and it really makes it come out like something that we could never make on our own which is good, it’s what makes the music special I think.
Definitely, this next question is a terrible one and I wish that you would answer it with “50” but obviously all good things do come to an end, so how many albums do you think Thrice has left in them?
I hope that it would be infinite, the cool thing about our band is since the sound is constantly in a state of change there is always the possibility of all those ideas being able to get out. I could do a solo project if I wanted to but I can’t, personally, because I feel like anything that I would submit or do myself I could totally use for our band and I think that pulling those two apart would be a disservice to our band. The band is my number one and if I had a side project I wouldn’t want to have it be a bunch of stuff that I didn’t really care for or second best stuff.
If you were God for a day, what would you do and why?
God, ooh – (with a slight worry in his voice)
I would install logic in everybody’s brain, I guess I think people’s sense of logic can be somewhat relative but I believe that things tend to work in absolutes so hopefully there would be uh. I think people sometimes make a lot of decisions without truly basing it on a logical reason and hopefully If I was God i could do that in a way that would somehow work. I think if everybody based more of their decision making less on emotion at the moment and more on logic I think that things would be a lot better.
To many people use instinct.
Yeah absolutely, it’s scary.
Is there anything that keeps you up at night?
Personally I think about the future and taking care of myself, friends and family. If there is in the future a wife, will I be able to look care of her. I think a lot of it has to do with being responsible, sadly being a guy that tours in a band it is easy to engage yourself from responsibility and it scares the crap out of me. I want to be a good man for a future wife and family and I think I am a good person but I think a lot of that comes from being entirely responsible for everything.
We previously asked Dustin and Riley who’s body they would choose to be in for a day, but it has to be a member of the band, and they both chose Teppei. Who in the band would you choose to be for a day and why?
Would I able to know me aswell.
Yes, exactly that, it would be yourself experiencing life in their body.
I think I would choose Dustin because I think that even though we are connected and we agree on a lot of things, we are also very very different in how we act and write music and whatever we do. It would be interesting to be able to somehow join those two together and see how they would work and I think it would definitely be cool.
