Evergreen Terrace Interview
Interview with Drew Carey of Evergreen Terrace
Words by Brendan Monteiro / Photo by Maggie Day
Coming back after losing a long time member is never easy for any band, it’s a make or break point and too many good bands don’t survive the ordeal. Evergreen Terrace however are not one of those bands. That’s not to say that times haven’t been tough for the Jacksonville four piece, “The last couple of years were the most challenging for us as a band.” explains Joshua James on the bands recent encounters of destitution. Sometimes one has to encounter great loss in order to achieve artistic success, the arts survive of emotion and what more emotion is there than loss. In the wake Evergreen Terrace released Almost Home, it’s an album that stands out from their previous offerings. It’s an album as badass as they come yet at the same time there’s something more to it. There’s something more to Evergreen Terrace and Clink set out to find just exactly that was.
The name Evergreen Terrace seems like a really tranquil name in retrospect to the music, why did you choose that name?
Well it is the street that the simpsons live on and basically it was our old old bass player that said “hey why don’t we name our band that”. I have never actually thought about it that way. Very interesting question, yeah I suppose it doesn’t sound like a hardcore band compared to something like hatebreed. Now that sounds like a hardcore band.
It seems lately every band is labelled “melodic hardcore”, which would you say Evergreen Terrace falls more towards, the melodic or the hardcore?
I would say more melodic, melodic punk. I don’t really know. I’m not really that good with genres, like I listen to The Acacia Strain like what is that deathcore right? I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.
You have released 5 albums, Almost Home being the latest, how do you feel you have progressed sonically through each album up to almost home?
I think that with each album we just try to perfect our sound and actually try to establish an identity in our sound. Every album goes through a filtering process and I think with Almost Home we achived that so with the next record hopefully it will be better. Maybe a better sound, maybe more melodic or maybe more hardcore but you never know.
Looking back on Almost Home now, is there anything you would change or alter?
No not really, I’m really happy with it. I’m happy with the sound that came out and happy with the way that we did it and the recording, like i don’t listen to the record and think man I wish we did that or I wish I could change this.
Do you listen to your own records a lot?
yeah sometimes I’ll put it in and wonder man are we shit and why do people listen to us.
The band seems to have a strong link to the TV world with it’s song titles ect. Tell us a bit about that?
Basically It’s just topical there are a lot of songs that have to do with books. We don’t really name a song after the lyrics, we write the music first and then we’ll be like lets call this one whatever. like Bulletproof Tiger is from Eastbound and Down right so we might have watched that on sunday and on monday came in to write and be like lets call a song that and everybody would be like “yeah cool”. I think it’s better than calling it something like my eyes bleeding black heart bullshit or whatever.
Agreed, If you could get the rights to a soundclip of any one part of a movie or TV series to use on a song, which one would you want?
No, let me think about it for a second.
Maybe do the Sesame Street soundtrack or do the theme song from it.
Nice choise, everyone loves a bit of the Sesame Street. A couple years ago you released a cover album called “writers block” was the title a true statement of the band at the time?
Sort off, we where just really busy touring actually. More busy than now which is actually hard to believe. We didn’t really have time to write a new album, when your touring in a band like we still are it’s just hard to write in a van so we just came home and said lets just throw something out there. It had been a year since we came out with something so we had to give our fans something and so then we just decided to record which was suppose to be a 5 song ep and our record label was like no you have to do atleast 10 songs. We where like “alright we’ll do that then”.
Would we be correct in thinking that the artists you decided to cover are all influences on the band?
Some of them are like Tears For Fears definitely. U2 definitely and all the punk bands like NOFX used to be one of my favourite bands. Then there are songs like the Sponge one which we aren’t the biggest fans. I think the reason why we chose that one was when I was 13 or 15 years old and that song came out and we where like lets cover that song and now years later we can actually cover it properly.
You are in a celebrity deathmatch with bon jovi, what would you do to win?
I don’t know, I would probably just try to rip his ears off or maybe just mess up his hair, there you go nancy boy. Those guys are pretty old now so they might have that old man strength or their hips will just break really easy.
I think we would definately beat their asses though, i mean josh is fucking huge and he would probably beat them all up and myself and craig would just chill out.
