“I basically lost everything I had–except for the songs” Spencer Chamberlain gets his Sleepwave on

For more than a decade, Spencer Chamberlain was the shrieking hellion fronting the metalcore fulcrum known as UNDEROATH. But when the band chose to adjourn after a brief tour at the beginning of this year, the singer had some big decisions to make. Chamberlain was making demos of songs before Underoath had determined their fate, so he was already preparing himself for his next musical chapter. SLEEPWAVE is the singer’s new vehicle for everything from straight-up rock to atmospheric intentions. Sleepwave’s debut track, “Rock And Roll Is Dead And So Am I” sounds closer to unbridled alt-rock , harkening back to the amped-up mania of classic songs by Smashing Pumpkins and Filter.

Chamberlain spoke with Jason Pettigrew about post-Underoath angst, scrambling for fast-food money and his steadfast dedication to make music his first priority. Some of the singer’s mythology is pretty grim, but if his new song is any indication, Sleepwave will be hoisting the modern-rock flag high in 2014.

SLEEPWAVE will stream and offer free download of their first song, “Rock And Roll Is Dead And So Am I” this Friday exclusively on AltPress! Stay tuned!

What’s the significance of the name Sleepwave?
SPENCER CHAMBERLAIN:
You would think the process of writing 40 songs, picking a new team, recording, hiring a new band—all that kind of shit—would be the hard parts for starting a new band. For me that’s all the easy stuff. The hardest part was to name this band. Every name is already taken; everything you could imagine. I had a list of 200 band names at one point, and my lawyer sent me back four that weren’t taken. I picked that one out of the short list that I got back because it’s basically another name for REM sleep and how you would document the actual waves on paper when your brain is sleeping. A sleep wave is when your brain’s at complete rest, but I made it one word and kind of made it my own thing.

“Rock And Roll Is Dead And So Am I” is a full-on rock track. It’s definitely not the type of power Underoath put out, in terms of density, but there’s still acceleration and velocity to it. What type of aesthetic are you going after here? Are you being blatant or ironic with the title?
That track in particular isn’t really about me thinking rock music is dead. It was just an afterthought that there’s no honesty left. It’s hard to find honest music, new music—especially in rock. Rock is what saved my life. When I was a kid, the only things I had were those songs I listened to. As I’ve gotten older and listened to different styles of music, I’ve always gone back to the same songs that I love.

Being in this industry—at least successfully—for a decade, and then I was sitting down in all of these offices with people I haven’t met, to have them look me in the face and go, “We really love what you’re doing, but there is no market for rock.” Rock now is Mumford & Sons, Fun. and the stuff you see on Warped Tour. I’m not talking shit on either [category], but we don’t need another Warped Tour band, and we don’t need another indie-rock band. As far as rock radio goes, there’s the butt rock: the Shinedowns and the Nickelbacks. You know how you hear the honesty when Dave Grohl plays a song? That’s great. Foo Fighters are one of my favorite bands, but they’ve been around since the '90s. Where are those bands now? Where is the next generation of Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Alice In Chains and bands that actually sang about something other than partying and girls? I just feel there’s so much missing from rock ‘n’ roll that even the businessmen are like, “What do you want us to do with this?” It’s just weird to me how people give up and change so fast. It’s just kind of disheartening. So the title of that track is a middle finger. It doesn’t necessarily have too much to do with the song, itself.

Sleepwave logo | AltPress band revealIn terms of the song itself, it seems like you wanted something a bit more streamlined. If Underoath were dropping a bomb on somebody, the Sleepwave song is like cutting someone with a single knife stroke.
I think Underoath were a heavy, somewhat metal or hardcore band—however you want to put it. I’ve been playing in bands since I was a little kid. I got paid to play at parties when I was 12. I’ve been doing it forever, it just happened to be the metal band that I was in stuck. You enjoy it; you ride it out; you do your thing. But that’s not all I am. I won’t do Underoath Pt. II or continue the saga with another heavy metal band; a band with screaming, in particular, is what I’m not going to do. That song is probably one of the heaviest that I have. There’s a lot more rock stuff, you know, there’s some piano-driven stuff. The people who are paying attention right now are my Underoath fans, so I’m going to give them something heavy to listen to.

A Foo Fighters track is heavy in a different way than a Slipknot track is heavy. Are Sleepwave going to be stripped-down rock music?
There’s some experimental stuff happening, but a lot of the songs are more straightforward, as far as structure goes. And there are some songs that start at point A and end at point B, like a Sigur Ros song. I have a couple of those, and I love that. But the thing that really gets me going, the reason why I always go back to certain songs, is because that’s just what a normal ear wants to hear, that familiarity of a chorus or a verse. I wanna hear that chorus for the first time and be so pumped that it happens again, and then by the end, you know it and you’re riding in your car, and you’re super-pumped. I like that feeling. >>>

It’s very velocity-oriented. It’s definitely a rock thing, but there’s an edge that’s not hardcore or metalcore. Point blank: Are Sleepwave a reaction to Underoath?
I haven’t done any interviews about this band; I haven’t even been able to talk about it—it’s been torture. Lets go back to Underoath, the era of Lost In The Sound Of Separation. With Define The Great Line, we were all hitting on the same page, and everyone was pumped. But by the time Lost In The Sound Of Separation came, Aaron [Gillespie, vocals/drums] wanted to sing more parts, and I wanted to sing more and not scream as much. It wasn’t a big butting of heads, but with the music we were writing, neither one lent to it. Aaron’s one of my best friends in the entire world, and we were sitting in the car working on songs. We were just like, “Whatever, we do what we do, and we do it well.” And it just got brushed under the rug. After that record, I started writing a little bit when I’d come home from tours. I play guitar, bass, piano, drums. I love being on the computer and programing shit. I do just about everything I can do; I’ve been a musician my entire life, you know? So I came home, and I had a song I had written on an acoustic guitar. It had some piano and really pretty vocals, and it kind of had more of a Radiohead/Coldplay vibe to it. I had my other friend come play drums. We went to my best friend, who has a studio in his house, and we tracked the song. About a third of the way through the vocals, it was late and I went home—we had done all this stuff in one day. I came back the next day, and I got him to highlight the entire session and I pushed “delete” on his keyboard. And he was like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Give me a couple days, and I’m going to come back.”

Spencer Chamberlain, Sleepwave | AltPress band revealI sat home and I was so mad at myself because at this point in my life, I thought I’d at least finish a solo record while Underoath were going—there wasn’t even a question of us breaking up. I was like, “This is just so dumb.” I couldn’t picture myself onstage at 40, playing with Underoath, but I also couldn’t picture myself onstage right now playing soft rock. I’m very easygoing; I’m nice; I’m not really the kind of pissed-off person who runs around with a chip on my shoulder and gets in fights. But there’s this aggressive part of me that I only get out in music that I love, and I love the way it sounds and feels. There’s this darkness that has to come out, this energy. Before I wrote the first track for Sleepwave, I was like, “I am not Underoath. That doesn’t define me. That’s part of who I am, and that’s part of my life. But I’m not that music, and I’m not this music. But what I am is this energy.” Energy has to come out of me. I’m a performer and a songwriter, but my favorite thing is when I’m onstage. I need that release. When I go really long without it, I start to act different. I sat there and thought, “Well, I don’t wanna play metal, I don’t wanna scream, I don’t wanna right anymore riffs, I don’t wanna sit here and write all of these Underoath-style riffs.” I kept wondering, “Why don’t I go drive to see Converge anymore when they play 15 minutes away, but I’ll drive six hours to see Alice In Chains?” Why do I keep going back to see these bands that I grew up on? Is it because I grew up on them? Or is it because that is part of me? Why are all these other things I got into just little phases in my life, and I always go back to the same thing?

So I came back to Stephen Bowman, who’s been my best friend forever—when I would have a problem or Underoath got in a fight or something happened on tour, that would be the guy I’d call. I just came in, and I was like, “I don’t wanna do this singer/songwriter thing. I wanna do an energetic rock band.” And we never talked about it ever again. I just wrote riffs and he recorded me and added things. The band is just Stephen and I. Everyone else who plays is hired as a live musician.  All of this has been on our own money. I’ve spent every dollar I have to get this band off the ground. That’s probably why it has taken so long and why my fans don’t understand how hard the industry is. No matter what platform you’re jumping off of, it’s still hard to get things right—at least for me. Then I just thought about those songs, and Underoath were going through a point where Disambiguation was out and we were touring. And then all of a sudden, the rug kind of got pulled. At least in my mind, I was kind of shocked they decided we weren’t going to play anymore, we weren’t going to write anymore, we weren’t going to tour anymore—that was it.

When you say “they,” is that the other guys in the band?
Yeah, the other guys in Underoath. To a few of us, it was shock. To other people, it was more their call. Underoath got to a point where certain people weren’t going to be there anymore. I wasn’t going to get up there without Chris [Dudley, synth/programs] or Tim [McTague, guitarist] or someone else, again. That’s probably half the reason why I did Sleepwave on my own: Because I know what it’s like to lose a member. Whether that member wrote or is on a record or not, kids look at it and don’t think it’s the same band. I’ve made it very apparent. At that point, there were about seven to nine months [between the time] Underoath decided we were going to break up and the farewell tour. I basically lost everything I had except for the songs. >>>