In The Studio: The Word Alive

Big things are afoot for the Word Alive, who are in the thick of recording album No. 2 with producer Joey Sturgis. The record, which frontman Telle Smith says will be out in “late June/early July,” will have an accompanying “awesome” tour–“which I was told I am not allowed to say what it is yet,” he notes–and a x. Smith checked in from a North Hollywood studio, where he was doing pre-production.

How is pre-production going? At what studio are you? Who are you working with?
I’m actually working with a friend, Adam. The guys are with Joey [Sturgis], and then I’m in there with Allen Hessler. We’re actually working out of a friend’s studio currently, but I might be tracking my actual vocals out in California. It’s getting pretty close to when we’re supposed to be done, and the guys were still working on music stuff so it’s looking like I might track out here. I wouldn’t mind staying in the nice weather a bit longer.

What made you decide to track vocals separately from the music? What is it about the people you’re working with in the studio that made you think, “This is where I want to be”?
It’s a mixture of things. More than anything, it’s a product of circumstance. The guys were tracking, then Joey had to take several days off towards the beginning of our record. Since we’re recording 17 songs—which is way more than we’ve ever tracked at once—it was obviously really hard how to predict how long exactly it would take us to record. The music was just taking longer than we had hoped it would. I mean, it’s coming out insanely good, so it’s worth it. That being said, there wasn’t going to be as much time as what’s truly needed for me to do vocals—especially for that many songs—if I were to wait until the music was done and then go there.

I had previously tracked with Allen before, so there’s already this comfort factor. And Allen’s heard every single take, whether good or bad, that I’ve done for this entire record. He’s heard where my ideas have started and where they’ve ended up. It just makes the most sense, efficiency-wise, to stay out here where everything is already in the right mindset—rather than possibly trying to recreate that again [elsewhere] and potentially putting the record back further.

Ideally, in a perfect world, we would have had the perfect amount of time, and we could have all done the record together.  Ultimately, what’s most important is the record coming out the best it can possibly be. The guys have been really stoked on the stuff I’ve been doing—and I’ve been really stoked on the stuff they’re doing. If it’s working, then there’s no need to go away from it just because it’s not necessarily what we had envisioned making this record being like.

What exactly do you guys have done?
Basically, all of the music is done for the majority of the record. [On] about half of the songs, they’re working on production stuff, keys and all the programming stuff [guitarists] Tony [Pizzuti] and Zack [Hansen] wrote, and then Joey’s basically just taking that and making it better. They’re making sure the songs are as big and awesome as they can be. Realistically, not including vocals, we have probably 80 percent or 90 percent of the record done.

Once I get all my vocal stuff—like every time I finish a song—I would send it to Joey. Since all the other guys do vocals as well, then we have notes of, “Okay, here do this part, here to that part”—anything they feel could help add to the song. Then Joey will have them send it back and forth until everyone’s stoked.

It’s so nice you can do that now, thanks to technology.
Yeah, especially for a band like us. We rely on it very heavily. We [almost] wrote every single song for this record while on tour over the least year and a half. We actually wrote 25 songs for this. We chose 17 of the best ones with the anticipation of putting the top 14—once they were all done—on our record and then three on a deluxe edition as sort of b-sides.

How is Joey Sturgis helping you guys and your sound on this particular album?
A few things. Don’t get me wrong when I say this—I love what we’ve done in the past, I love what we’ve done with Andrew Wade. Joey is a more aggressive and more metal-headed-minded person when it comes to music, so he just gets our sound, I think, a little bit more. He’s been able to pull out some of the specific things that we do and really bring them out in the mixes.

The record [isn’t] mixed or mastered, and it sounds so different from anything we’ve ever done, but in a great way. The guitars—everything is very distinct and clear. Everything stands out. We have a lot more shredding and solos, and we really wanted to showcase that we’re not the standard “chug-breakdown” band. Every single person in this band is this talented—and every single person in this band worked really, really hard since Deceiver to make sure nobody could possibly be disappointed with anything that we do.

It does kind of feel like you guys almost have something to prove, because there are so many bands who sound like you guys.
That’s exactly what it is. There’s also that chip on your shoulder that you have to have that’s like, “We’ve been a band for three-and-a-half years or so and we’ve done just as well—if not better—than several bands who are technically at a higher level than us.” And we’re the type of band who practice constantly. We talk to our fans every single day. There’s not a day that goes by that at least one of us isn’t online; typically, I’ve been online every single day. We just try to bring something new to our genre. There are no egos in our band. We’ve said from day one, “If anyone has an ego or starts to get too ahead of themselves, it’s our job to bring them down to Earth.”

That mentality has pushed us to better ourselves. But we’re also prideful people, and we see some of the music that’s doing really well right now, and we have something to prove. We feel the things we’re doing are different. Not necessarily better—those [other] songs are meaningful to a lot of kids, and I don’t want to take anything away from that. But especially musically—and what we’re able to reproduce live—we feel we’ve worked really hard and really deserve our shot, and this CD is our best.

A lot of bands put out nine, ten songs, and a couple of them are re-done—we’ve done that in the past—and this time we were just like, “Nobody releases a ton of music anymore, because it costs more [and] there’s not any benefit.” People are like, “Oh, save those songs. We can put them on another release.” We’re not a band that’s afraid of running out of ideas, so we have the mindset of, “Let’s prove that not only can we write more songs than a kid’s favorite band, but we can write 17 songs and not one of them is a filler song.” We just have that to prove about ourselves—that we’re a band that can write good music and go out and perform it as best as we can.

Of the songs that made the record, are there any lyrical themes emerging? What sorts of topics are coming up?
The album is actually called, tentatively—I’m not sure if it’s 100 percent final—Life Cycles. What I wrote about on the majority of the CD is a look into people’s lives, from the perspective of someone who’s having an out-of-body experience; they’re kind of floating around the world and looking into the lives of different people. Since we started touring overseas, we made some friends who are in the military who would come to our shows and would tell us how much they missed home and the reality of what’s going on. But as much as they missed home, they were there for duty—and they were so proud.

We all talked and I was like, “I want to write a song about those people, our friends in the military.” But I didn’t want it to be political or to be so overly noticeable that people were thinking it was some sort of propaganda or anything. I just wrote it as a thank you and a story to them, but it’s coming from inside the mind of someone who’s in the military. We see on the news all these things that are happening and it’s like, a lot of stuff doesn’t get reported. A lot of people are losing their lives, but they just keep doing what they do and they keep serving their country no matter how much it’s reported or appreciated.

There are several songs that are definitely about my life. On past CDs, I’ve always written super personal stuff. I didn’t want to go away from that, but I also wanted to try story-writing a little more and [using] fictional characters. There’s repeating fictional characters within the album. We kind of have a concept album idea, but I didn’t want to do that for 17 songs, so there’s a batch that tie in together lyrically. Then there’s obviously some that—you know, 17 songs we’re a heavy band, there’s some negativity you have to get off your chest. I took that opportunity.

The biggest song we’ve had as a band is our song “2012,” and I had written that one after a movie, Law Abiding Citizen. I kind of wrote in the same mindset of that person. It’s kind of the “2012, Pt. II” if there were to be one.

There’s going to be something for everyone. Something for someone who’s falling in love, something for someone who’s having the worst time—they just got betrayed by someone they loved and cared about. There’s something for someone who’s just trying to figure out who they are, what they are, where they belong in this world, and [also] some [addressing] the basic questions we have as humans growing up of like, “Where is my place? Where do I belong?” And that longing to feel like you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be.

I tried to definitely branch out in topics, because Deceiver was kind of mostly one sided. I wanted to showcase all the human emotions that people go through and experience. This album is definitely more broad in terms of that.

What else do you want people to know about the record?
We’ve basically been that band that’s been on tour non-stop, and I know that on our last record we had some songs on it that we couldn’t play live—not that we couldn’t, just that it didn’t make sense in a live setting. [This time around] we wrote 17 songs that were meant to be played live. Seventeen songs that were full of energy, full of passion, full of big moments that make you feel something, make you want to sing along, make you want to move. We’re not trying to fit any mold. There are several different sides of this band. There are a lot more metal parts, but then there’s also some experimental, almost jazz-influenced, old soulful-type stuff. I don’t know, I’m really proud of where it’s at, and I think we’re going to prove a lot of people wrong about this band, about “Can we endure member changes?” and “Is this band the real deal?” kind of thing. I think we’re going to prove that with every member change, we’ve not only grown individually, but we’ve grown together. We’ve grown as a band.

This is our first record without our keyboard player, Dusty [Riach], and a lot of people were afraid, thinking that we weren’t going to have keys or that we weren’t going to have electronic components within our music. I think the programming and dynamics of acing electronic is way more advanced than we’ve ever had before. We’re not just looking at that as, “Okay, we could have synth and then nothing else.” We’re thinking about what sounds—what does this make you feel like, this part. Let’s make something that makes you feel that way. So we’re not limiting ourselves—and not that Dusty was limiting us, but it just wasn’t his thing.

He was a synth/keyboard player and that was what he wrote. Just like me—I’m a vocalist, so I’m not going to coming up with crazy, weird atmospheric things for the record. But this time around, we were like, “What can we do?” and Zack and Tony put it upon themselves to not only write some amazing songs, but then to also program some really awesome ideas. I think in that aspect, that’s going to be one thing kids are looking for us to almost fail on. I think they’re going to be really excited with the direction that we’ve taken with the electronic stuff.

Explain more about the programming stuff. What’s really standing out to you? What’s your favorite song, keyboard-wise, they’ve come up with?
One of Zack’s songs has some instrumental-type breaks that are like the Word Alive meets Ellie Goulding almost—Ellie Goulding, but dark. It’s still really melodic, but it’s not like your smiling, bouncing-around-type electronic stuff. We wanted to incorporate some stuff like that, but we didn’t want to sound like typical electronica, like we’re just trying to mix dance beats or anything. It’s not like that. It puts you in the right mood for the song. There’s more grooves; there’s more things that, at times, are more in the background, but it just makes the song sound more full.

It brings a whole other dynamic to our music, because before it was just—not typical, because Dusty created each one of his sounds individually—but it was the typical, “you know that’s a synth” sound. Now, there’s times where you’re like, “What instrument is that? I don’t even know what that is. I’ve never heard that.” I think that’s going to be a cool thing. There are a lot of different sounds and noises and stuff going on that we’ve never done before, and I don’t know that anyone within our genre has ever tried before.

With Deceiver, as far as I know, we were the first band to incorporate doing a breakdown within a dubstep part—and that was before dubstep started getting huge. Now we’re looking for that next thing: What can we do now that a bunch of bands are going to start wanting to do, too? So we’ll have that. And as always, we’ll have those Slipknot reference keg hits as well, because we like to honor Slipknot as well on pretty much every album we do, because they’ve influenced our writing a lot. Even though it doesn’t sound like it at times, they’re always in the back of our minds. alt