lapdog terror

Bryan Odell, a 19-year-old reporter from Lincoln, Nebraska, interviews guitarist Travis Miguel and bassist Marc McKnight of Orange County, California’s Atreyu on November 8, 2009 in Omaha, Nebraska while on tour with Hollywood Undead.

Brandon Saller, drummer for Atreyu, is pulling a Dave Grohl and getting out from behind the drum kit to front his own alternative rock band.  Saller will perform his first solo show ever on January 18, 2010 at Chain Reaction in Anahiem, California. Buy tickets here.

You can listen to a couple of tracks he posted to his Myspace page here.

ACtv recently interviewed Dan Jacobs and Travis Miguel of  Atreyu before their performance at The Fillmore in San Francisco, California on November 18, 2009.

Atreyu were on tour with Hollywood Undead until November 21, playing their final show in Los Angeles.

Atreyu’s bassist Marc McKnight was recently interviewed by Ken Brzezinski of Static Multimedia.

Here are some of the highlights:

“How’s the tour with Hollywood Undead going?

Marc: Awesome man, we’re almost at the end of it though. We only have like ten more shows left. We have just been home wiring and recording so it’s just good to get out and tour consistently again. And the shows have been phenomenal. Like our bands have been meshing really well together, which I really wasn’t expecting. No offense to them (Hollywood Undead), I just didn’t know what I’d be getting myself into. But it’s turning out really well, the shows are good every night, they are really cool dudes, and, you know, it’s been fun.

Talk a little bit about being on the Warped Tour…

Marc: It’s pretty fun. I mean it’s like the punk rock summer camp that everyone says it is you know? Just a bunch of bands hanging out. I used to go watch Thrice a bunch. Some of the Smartpunk bands I liked was Yesterday’s Rising and Avery, I saw them a bunch of times. Underoath was amazing, Rufio was there for like three days, I watched them. There are just so many good fucking bands…

Is there REALLY any heat between you guys and Avenged Sevenfold?

Marc: Well, I don’t really have the same sentiment towards that band because I wasn’t born and raised in the same area. I didn’t see the scene grow from the ground up. I think we’re all friends and any “grudges” or weirdness is just made up in the media, you know what I mean? Like, I mean we grew up in the same area and played similar kinds of music and grew up listening to the same shit and you know, they’re just a band like us.

Do you have any tour stories?

Marc: Well there was this one girl in Miami that was just hammered out of her mind. And you know, semi-attractive, and she’s just HAMMERED, like sloppy drunk right? And she somehow makes her way on our bus. She wasn’t like at the show with us. She just wanted to see the bands, you know what I mean? So she got on our bus and we kept trying to pass her off to one of our friends or one of the crew members but she was like “NO, I WANT ONE OF THE BAND!” And she was just like riding people and stuff. So she goes in the back with someone…who shall remain nameless, and they were, you know, enjoying themselves in the back, but she had left her phone up front. So one of our friends took a picture of his balls and sent it to everyone on her contact list and said “Sorry, I’m busy being a nut!!” So yeah, that’s a pretty good story!

What was the writing and recording process like for your latest album, Congregation Of The Damned?

Marc: Um, well we started writing for this album in like November of last year, so it’s been about a year ago now. So we started writing and we had like 13 or 14 songs and we were like, “shit”, like on A Death Grip On Yesterday we wanted 10 songs on the record so we wrote 10 songs. So it was like “What are we gonna do? Should we just keep going or what?” And it was like “Nah let’s just keep going and see what happens.” So we ended up with like 30 songs that were all amazing. I mean the well really never ran dry, but we just had to stop because we were like “This is getting ridiculous”. Widdled that down to 18 songs, met up with Bob Marlett, our producer, and did like pre-production stuff with him, widdled those down to 16 and uh, recorded 16 songs.

We did the drums in Henson Studios out in LA, which is like Jim Henson, like Muppets, which was amazing. And then we did the rest at Bob’s house in Woodland Hills. It was amazing, like as far as my bass, I did all the songs in 2 days I think. I just muscled through them, 10 songs one day and 6 the second. Then the guitars went and did all their things. There were some guitars done before I did all my stuff. Because I had to like, go back home for some family stuff and then two weeks later, they had some more guitars done. And it just really started like, I mean because in pre-production you have an idea of what it’s going to sound like, but you don’t really hear what it sounds like till everything is starting to get laid out.

So once I started to hear all the guitar parts being put down and the solos starting to be put in and like all of the vocal starting to get laid down, it was awesome. But we had just focused on the music in pre pro so then it’d be like Alex and Bandon sitting in the studio just shredding out the vocals. And they’re both like, their performances are absurd. Like Alex hasn’t written better lyrics and his performance is just amazing and he’s so genuine and “there”.

How do you allow yourself to change when you have so many fans on, especially the web that can be so critical of the music you make?

Marc: Yeah, I’ve been on Lambgoat, I’ve been on Blabbermouth, I’ve been on Absolute Punk, I’ve been on PRP. I’ve seen all that sh*t and I stay away from it because I’m not doing this. No offense to them because our fans got us to where we are, and without our fans, we’re f*cked, so I’m not saying we’re not doing it for them. But when we write music, we write music that we want to hear and that we love because we do it because we love it. You know what I mean? So if I started to write it for kids who only listen to The Curse and Suicide Notes, that want us to write that album again, who are we being fair to, you know what I mean? I’m not going to be 18 years old again; I’m not going to write that record again. I want to allow the band to expand and allow the band to grow. ”

You can read the entire interview here.