The Alternative Star.com

Thursday

At the Winnipeg stop of the 2009 Taste of Chaos tour, I had the chance to sit down with Thursday front man Geoff Rickly. We go into depth about Common Existence, the state of the scene today, why bands can’t write songs for their fans, the band’s relationship with their fans, his opinion on Full Collapse and Geoff’s past work as producer, among other topics. Big thanks go out to Keith and the band’s tour manager Marc Hudson for helping to make this interview possible!

Common Existence came out in February and you already have 4 other records. How did you come up with the set list for Taste of Chaos?

Geoff: Well, this tour we’ve been playing to a lot of new people and a lot of younger kids. We kind of just did a Greatest Hits type of set list. We took all of people’s favourite songs from all 4 of the records we play from and added in a few extra new ones because the new CD is our favourite. We’re trying to play more from the new one for sure.

How has the response for Common Existence been?

It’s been incredible actually, like our fans have really taken to it! It hasn’t really made us a lot of new fans but that’s kind of what touring is for us, we don’t really make new fans from videos and stuff, like we do from just playing in front of people.

I’ve also read how all about before making this record, it was certainly a darker time for your band and members had to take on other jobs and such.

Yeah, we took some time off and decided whether or not we wanted to be a band and stuff you know? Other people in the band were working different jobs; I was doing United Nations, which was sort of a distance between some of the band members for a minute.

What was the thing that really made you guys decide to not give up?

I’m trying to think, it was probably the song “Last Call.” We wrote that and we were like ‘Oh man, we should keep going with this band! This is like our best stuff so far!’ It’s one of those things, like after the last record I didn’t feel like the band necessarily has that strong of a career going forward. I feel like we’ve sold the most records we’re going to sell and stuff like that but at this point, I just get to be in a band that plays so well together and writes music that I love so much and I don’t think that there’s any other band in the world that sounds even remotely like Thursday now that that trend has past. Now I feel like we really get to do the best stuff of our career even if nobody’s listening, even if nobody were to listen. I mean, we just got a record out and already sold 26 or 27,000 copies or something like that so it’s not like nobody’s listening. It’s just funny that I think we’re doing some of our best stuff at our least popular time. But whatever, I find it’s for us.

Other people might catch on eventually, sometimes music takes time to grow on you but once it does, you love it even more.

Yeah! I mean in Europe it’s the best that we’ve been received. We’ve never sold as many records there and we literally haven’t gotten 1 bad review in Europe, not even from NME who hates us. Like NME hates us and they like this record so that’s been pretty surprising. In Australia, we’ve had our biggest record so far so it’s just different. Now we’ll be travelling a lot more and probably won’t play the continental US or North America as much as we used to, you know?

What do you think of playing overseas?

I actually love playing at home! I have so many friends all over the US, like every tour is a chance for me to visit all my friends.

I’m sure you’ll make new friends.

 Yeah, yeah! We’ll make a lot of new friends, I have a lot of friends in the UK, Germany and my wife’s family is from Australia so I get to see them. We’re playing in Japan with this band [Envy] that we recently did a split with so that should be fun!

Awesome! Moving back, Thursday seems to be known for personal lyrics. Which song on the new record hits closest to home for you?

It’s sort of a tie between “Subway Funeral” and “You Were the Cancer.” All I can really say is that I’ve always thought of myself more as a writer than a singer. You write everything, you write it to the best of your ability and you try to make it worthwhile but sometimes you say... I guess it’s just when you hit the nail on the head and it’s making your soul into a tuning fork you know what I mean? You hear the note and it’s true and it’s the same with writing a word. A set of words, it truly expresses something because language is not the most natural way. Like the whole idea of the cave and everything, where everything we make in art is a shadow of the real and sometimes you get much closer to the real than you ever thought you would. That’s when you feel really good about a song!

Did anything overly memorable happen while filming the “Resuscitation of a Dead Man” video?

Yeah! Our director Travis is crazy; he wanted to stretch the budget as far as it would go so he found a place where he could do pyro that didn’t need permits, which would have taken up the whole budget otherwise. He found that warehouse and literally just burned down the entire set around us until we had to stop filming. We were supposed to be filming for like 15-17 hours and 12 hours into the day, he’s like ‘It’s a wrap!’ and we’re like ‘Really?’ and he’s like ‘There’s nothing left to film, we burned it all down!’So then it was over. I had to throw out all my clothes because they had burn holes all over them. My sweater, my favourite sweater, burn holes all over it but the sweater was so old and the elbows were wearing out anyway. My wife was like all over me to get rid of it so she was so happy that it burned up! (Laughs)

Would you say that is your favourite video that you’ve done so far?

Yeah... I mean I love that video. “Signals Over the Air” is still probably one of my favourite videos. I just like loved the set; it looks like the Cure or something. We had the privilege of touring with those guys and they said that the reason they loved us was seeing that video so I still have a special place in my heart for that. But yeah, of all the videos we’ve done with Travis we’ve done 3 and that is my favourite of the ones he did for us.

Also the album’s cover art looks really awesome, how did you come up with it?

Yeah, I love it! A friend of ours is a photographer and we had the title Common Existence. We wanted something very real. I think... there are a lot of bands that don’t have the same interests we do where we take very seriously what motive of expression we’re using, whether it’s post modernism or realism or hyper realism and to have such a vocative cover art that was completely real, those pictures are all candids. None of them are staged and that was really, really important for us on this record. You know, we recorded the whole thing on analog tape, there are no fixings. We never fixed any mistakes; they’re all just in there. We just want to be our own thing kind of.

Epitaph also released it, what was that experience like?

They just continually treat us well. They ask us what we want, what our goals are and they don’t tell us what our goals should be. That was the thing every other record label did. We had creative control. On Victory, it was just ‘Never get off the road, just keep pushing. You need to sell as many records as possible and when you sell records then people will care what you say.’ And I started thinking that maybe there is something to that, maybe this message will only reach people if I sell enough records.

Then we went to Island and the whole staff treated us great until the whole staff left and then it was ‘You know, it’s great you’re selling 400,000 records every time you put out a record but you’ve never even had a gold record. You guys aren’t even a real band until you’ve had a gold record; nobody takes you seriously until you have a gold record. Then they’ll look at your art and see how good your lyrics are but before that, they don’t care. You need a hit, you need a hit.’ And that was it, you need a hit, you need a hit.

And then you think ‘Well, maybe we should try writing a hit, maybe we should try a pop song, I don’t know. Maybe then people will take our lyrics seriously.’ You know, it’s just funny because you’re doing something that’s supposed to be your dream and you’re following everyone else’s advice, even when you’re not trying to. It just makes its way into the way you think.

I remember we had this goal when we started the band, which was that we were going to subvert the music industry. We were going to do something, we were going to put something real and something thoughtful in there and it was going to be a virus, no one even saw it coming, you know? It would just slowly take over and bands would start acting differently and for awhile it really felt like it was working. Bands treated their fans like people with 2 way discourse and people started caring about human rights, that was like the cool thing. And then more and more I realized that the music industry was subverting us more than we were subverting it, you know?

Yeah, it’s so much more than the money and singles. At least for you guys.

Yeah. If it was, we’d be stupid because we’d make more money in other jobs. For us this year, it’s like we keep saying you gotta give us some time off so we can get real jobs. You know, you work for 4 months and make $2000; there aren’t many where you’ll make less than that though I do love doing this band.

You mentioned earlier about treating your fans like actual people. What makes you put in the extra effort that a lot of bands don’t? I know I even read that you are inviting your fans to phone you, just as an example.

Yeah, we can’t do that from other countries right now unfortunately! We just started as part of a community. The only reason we started playing was so that we could play basement shows and be a part of that community. The band was like a means of staying in touch with our friends and I’ve never seen any reason to change that. It was like you start talking to people on an Internet forum and you get each other’s emails and then you come out to the shows to hear their bands, who are amazing. It just makes sense to me. We’re lucky that our fans don’t freak out when they see us; they don’t treat us like rock stars. They come up and they talk to us, they have a coffee with us. I’ll ride on the subway in New York with them when I’m going home. For when I’m taking my wife to work I’ll see people. You know, it’s great! We’ll talk about books; we’ll talk about other music that we’ve been listening to. They’ll often turn us onto something new.

One of our earliest fans, I saw him on the subway and he was telling me about Dubstep. Do you know that form of music at all? It’s like a really heavy electronic music where there is like one long break down kind of, in the electronic music. He told me that he got into it because it’s big in the gay scene in New York and he’s a part of that. I started listening to it and there’s some really cool stuff. There’s this one guy named Burial who is really cool and 6, 7 months later I woke up and heard him being broadcast on the radio! It’s so great when the fans tell you stuff before the musicians you look up to do. I like keeping close to the ground like that, where you’re just out on the street and you hear about stuff. I just think that keeps things fresh, like the beat poets never let themselves get disconnected from the street, they never let themselves get cocky, they always want to be a part of what’s going on now. That’s kind of what I feel like; I want to be a part of what’s going on now! There’s a lot of stuff going on now that I don’t like but I want to know about it. I want to speak to it; I want to say something back to it. If I don’t like it, if I hear Brokencyde and think it sucks I want to be able to have a reaction to it, you know what I mean? I don’t wanna just not know that it’s going on. I feel like there is so much to be reacted to right now, like the worse the mainstream music gets, the better the underground should get, you know what I mean? That’s what I feel like, like the 80’s was such a superficial time for pop music but the 80’s was also Black Flag, Sonic Youth, all of these bands in the underground. I feel like there should always be that relationship and that you should know what’s going on around you.

Well said, I’m assuming when you were growing up in the New Jersey scene your favourite bands had a similar relationship with you, right?

Yeah, I’d go to one show and the next time I’d go to a basement show one of the members of the bands that I went to see the first time would be in the crowd and they’d say hi. They’d recognize me and I thought that was such a different thing, I grew up and would see bands around New York City who’d be on stage so far away with barricades. I understand why those things are in place in big places, they’re trying to keep people safe but I still feel like that’s not what it’s about. Like I’ll play on those stages but that’s not what music is to me, music can be something else. It can be truly inspiring, people can come and the audience should feel a part of it. Whether it’s going home and writing a zine, though at this time it would be a blog, or taking part in a non profit. You know, shows that you bring a can of soup to the door and they have a soup drive. Those things need to have a comeback and I just don’t mean, because there is always a small pocket of people in the underground who do that, I mean the dominant social culture should be one of compassion.

 That’s why I’m still doing this and doing things like the Rockstar Taste of Chaos, which honestly to me is a very hard thing to get up and do. I’m speaking to people I don’t know and playing with bands I didn’t know before this tour and I’m doing something that’s all about sponsorships, which is something I’m not excited about at all. But that being said, I feel the only way you get in is if you let yourself be a part of things you wouldn’t normally do otherwise.

Have you been able to get any new fans off of this tour?

 I’d say the majority of the crowd don’t give a shit about what I have to say. They don’t, they really don’t. But every night there has to be 15-20 people who are surprised and moved that there is a band on the bill that is actually talking about something that matters to them. I think that makes it worthwhile because if we played a small show, one of our own shows in a small club with 400-800 people, a lot of those kids wouldn’t have been there, you know what I mean? So I feel lucky that I get to turn on a few Bring Me the Horizon and Pierce the Veil fans every night.

My next question is something you’ve already touched a bit on. I’ve noticed that you have been speaking out a lot about issues such as gay rights lately. I’m guessing it must be difficult to deal with crowds that aren’t as progressive with their ideals, right?

Yeah, well it’s interesting because I think gay rights is the one, it’s like everybody has taken for granted the civil rights movement. They think it’s over now, that everything is fine but somehow you are allowed to bash on gay people and treat them like second class citizens. I think that’s crazy, I mean we have a whole segment of the population that do not have the same rights as we do. They don’t have the same rights, they don’t. It just seems like during the civil rights movement and after it, all the other barriers started to fall down like dominoes because once you open someone’s mind they see the hypocrisy all around them but it’s funny that this one thing really hasn’t gone down as much. So that’s something that I hold very important, I just think that music is intrinsically tied to somebody’s freedoms. There will never be a revolution on Earth that makes people more free, you know the people who take power in a revolution end up being just as bad as the people that came before them. The only real revolution you can get is a revolution of the mind, that’s when you start to realize that every being deserves rights, dignity and liberty. That to me is the most important thing.

It’s kind of interesting how punk and hardcore started off being so progressive and open minded.

Yeah! Right! That’s the thing that I’ve noticed lately, that the scene is not the scene that it was. And I don’t mean that like ‘Oh, it’s really gone to shit.’ I mean that like literally it’s no one who started it in the first place, it’s mostly a whole new group of people. A lot of the signifiers are the same, you’ve got the punk rock music, the t shirts, the Vans, you’ve got the whatever.  But like some of the most important stuff, I think what happened is that I think there were steps. I think it started out and it was implicit, everyone talked about the social aspect of the music every day. Then in the early 2000s, late 90s, it became really passé to have to say it, everyone felt it. Nobody said it anymore because obviously we’re all here together, we all feel this way, and it will be implicit in the music, right? So not there to look at but everyone knows it’s there. And then the next generation that comes up doesn’t see it mentioned at all, doesn’t understand that it’s implicit because they weren’t there so to them, there may as well be nothing there. And then the next generation just has it without it and it was never a part of it for them. There is such an acceleration of culture, generations move much faster now and are every 2-3 years. Whereas it used to be like 10-15 year generations, the gap is much smaller. Things change very quickly and you can lose everything you worked for if you don’t be resilient.

 That’s something I can say I’ve been guilty of too. We started so socially and there were a few years when people weren’t as interested so I was like ‘OK, I should stop now or else I’ll get too repetitive. People are going to get sick of me always talking about this.’ So for a few years I didn’t say anything like that and I should have been because it was all new crowds we were playing to. So every night, I try to remember that, to say everything I think is as important as a band and just go right out and say it!

Awesome! Moving on, I read that you were planning on playing Full Collapse in its entirety but it got cancelled.

 Yeah, it got snowed out and I was really disappointed! We’re trying to think about rescheduling that but we have this idea in New York to do Full Collapse, A City by the Light Divided, War All the Time and Common Existence, do all 4 on different nights in a row and you can buy a pass to all 4 of them for cheaper.

Sweet idea! Moving back to Full Collapse though, I was reading your Alternative Press cover story and I wondered, after all these years what is your opinion of that record?

I love Full Collapse!

When I read you were going to play it in its entirety that’s what I thought. I was just wondering because when I was reading your Alternative Press cover story, it makes it seem, though you weren’t the one they quoted, that maybe you don’t like it as much anymore. How when fans still say it’s their favourite after all these years, there is a “little sting” like when someone says “You were cooler when you were in seventh grade.”

I think the feeling is just that we’ve played those songs thousands of times. Literally, we’ve played a thousand shows since then. Yeah, I love that record but I don’t want to play it every night for the rest of my life. It’s not that I don’t love that record but that the band keeps on getting better and better. We write better songs and we play so much better. Like even if you just put Full Collapse and War All the Time back to back, just the playing difference. Like one record later we were playing so much better. We were playing every single day for 2 years between those records so it makes sense but just that someone wouldn’t recognize that, it feels like shit. You know what I mean; it makes you feel like an asshole for even making other records. We could have just not of made any other records since Full Collapse and half of our fans would be happier if we hadn’t made any other music since then. Like regardless of the fact that almost all our fans like at least half a dozen songs on every record that we do, it’s like they’d rather not have 6 great new songs that they love. And it’s different for all of them, it’s not like we put a half record of filler on all of them, it just depends on what you like and at times it just blows my mind.

But the thing I’ve realized about all the messages we get about not wanting us, like we get hundreds of messages everyday about how kids aren’t going to see us on Taste of Chaos because they hate Four Year Strong, they hate Bring Me the Horizon, they hate Pierce the Veil, even some hate the fucking Cancer Bats and it’s just like I realize our audience is made up of haters. Like us and Against Me! both have total haters in our audiences, which is fine, they like us, I don’t know why they like us but they don’t even like us. They like a record by us. They like this one vision of us that they had when they first had the record and if in any way we change outside of what their vision is for us, they don’t like it. So I mean, it’s interesting...

Kind of frustrating?

It can be frustrating but on the other hand, if I go and read, like a kid will write a whole thing about why he hates the new record. I’ll read and I’ll understand why he likes certain things and doesn’t like other things. That doesn’t mean I should do them because he likes them though. So I do find it interesting, I think a lot of our kids are really fucking smart, a lot of our fans are super, super smart and I enjoy that but sometimes having really smart fans means that they are really, really picky. And it’s not quality control; it’s just specifically what they want from you. Like this one fan, he writes line for line what he likes and doesn’t like in each song. He’ll write about how great one song is and then about how the next one is such shit. He’ll be like ‘Yeah, the next song I liked until I realized that the guitar part was actually a keyboard part.’ And it’s like ‘But you liked it when you thought it was a guitar part.’ And he’s like ‘Yeah, I thought it was awesome!’ ‘But because of the keyboard part you don’t like it?’ ‘Yeah, that’s bullshit!’ So it’s just totally, there’s no way I could ever predict what any of those people want to hear.

And that’s why I think that whenever people say ‘Yeah, we wrote this record for our fans!’ I always think ‘Really? How the fuck did you do that?’ you know what I mean? Like to me, the only way you can write music is so get excited about it and be like ‘Oh shit, this is really good! We’re going to make this song awesome! I feel great about this!’ And they’re nice kids. I don’t mean this as talking shit but I remember the Hawthorne Heights dudes said about A City by the Light Divided: ‘Yeah, it’s a good record but they wrote it for themselves and not for their fans and it’s not going to sell anything.’ They told one of my friends that and I just thought ‘Well there you go, that’s the difference between Hawthorne Heights and Thursday!’ Because I don’t believe it’s possible to write a record for the fans, to me that’s just like writing a commercial. Like writing a jingle for a product and that’s not what we do. That’s not what any of these bands should be doing, we should all be fucking stoked that we’re allowed to play music for people and try, try with all our might to make these beautiful, glorious, complicated, interesting, and engaging, put your heart into it music. You can’t do all those things and still think about what’s going to sell. That’s too much to put into one song.

I mean, sometimes we do fall on our faces. I’m not saying that every Thursday record is great in every way. Or even that I’m proud of every song, there are some that I look back on that I think are terrible. Terrible but I put my heart into them and I feel like that is what is important. We should all be out here trying to build something perfect. A little perfect place, a thing you can listen to that elevates you and brings you somewhere else. I really am one of the naive people who thinks that music can save lives constantly. I constantly think this, I see people who find a song, even if it’s not one of our songs, they find it and they love it so intensely.

Yeah, that’s pretty much why I’m sitting here with you right now. I love this music so much and I have a hard time imagining doing anything else.

Awesome! Yeah totally, I mean in order to dedicate your life to it, you have to have a way that it changed you. Changed you profoundly as a human being. I mean, that’s intense you know what I mean? It shapes the rest of your life, what you want to do with your life. That’s so amazing. You know you can’t take that lightly if you’re a musician. Who cares if I get to go on a vacation to Mexico with my wife? I’d rather touch a couple of people profoundly.

So you’ll be doing this no matter what?

Sort of. Well, I was in school to be a high school English teacher. I don’t know if I’ll necessarily ever go back to that. I don’t know, if I had to go into something different, it would be strictly words and not music, that could be fun. I did some freelance journalism last year and it was fun but it didn’t pay anything. Like literally, half of the places didn’t pay me anything to publish my articles. That was a bum out but I do like to write.

I’ve kept you awhile now but I also wanted to ask about the status on United Nations.

We’ll be playing in Belgium in 2 weeks and when we get home, we started, just started, writing a 7 inch so that should come out eventually. As far as the status legally, our feelings about it is that we haven’t been contacted in awhile, since they took down our Facebook and MySpace, so we’re going to see how long we can get away with it, you know what I mean? We’re like ‘We know we shouldn’t be doing this probably but you know what, fuck them.’ If we had the money to be fight them anyway, we’d win, we’d totally win. Because one of the laws about trademark infringement is that you have to prove that there is confusion in the market place and I can guarantee that there is not one single person in the world who will buy a United Nations CD and think that they are getting the United Nations. No one would do that! That’s like if I called a pear a United Nations and people would be like ‘Oh, this is what regulates governments in the world!’ you know what I mean? It’s just insane, it’s just that we don’t have the money to fight it and that’s why we can’t fight it. So we’re going to hope that eventually they find out it’s not worth their time to chase us! (Laughs)

Also, you’ve done some production is the past, most notably for My Chemical Romance. Any desire to produce again?

Well, the last thing I produced broke my heart. I produced a band called the Blackout Pact.  I put so much work and effort into them and I loved them and I loved their music. But they became drug addicts and started stealing and all this stuff. It literally broke my heart to where I feel like I don’t want to invest that much in anything else right now. I’m going to stick to Thursday. No, it’s tough too because I’ve only ever produced debut records and so much of my time producing is also spent helping out a band figure out how to be a band. I’d really love to produce a second or third record for somebody just to see what I could do with the sound, you know what I mean? Like I have no budget or time to make it sound good. Right before they broke up actually, I was supposed to do an EP for Matchbook Romance. I was bummed I didn’t get to do that because their last record for Epitaph, the one with “Monsters” on it, I thought that record was a huge step in the right direction and I was really excited to do something with them.

Cool, I remember hearing they got back together recently so you might have your chance yet! The Blackout Pact may not have worked out but I’m assuming My Chemical Romance did, right?

Yeah, I’m still friends with My Chem! They still like to give me a platinum record for my wall and stuff like that because I was their first producer and put out their first record. I stay in touch with Gerard, he got me started on reading comic books again and I kind of hate him for it because they’re so expensive one you start reading them.

Yeah, I remember reading an interview you did with Marvel when I was preparing for this interview.

Yeah! It just made me realize because I’ll buy a novel and I’ll read it for a week and that’s a good use of $12. But then I’ll buy comic, which is like $17.99 and I’ll read it in a day. It’s too expensive!

Lastly, what does the rest of 2009 hold for Thursday?

It’s a big year for us! We go from the last show on Taste of Chaos, which is like 5 days away and head over to Europe. When I come home I’ll work on the United Nations 7 inch and then fly over to Japan and Australia to tour with Envy, who we did a split with. Then we go and do the festivals in Europe, then we come back for a US tour, then another European tour and then another US tour by the end of the year hopefully too.

Lots of touring!

Yeah! Though when I say US tour, we’re going to try and to some Canadian shows too so more of a North American tour I guess!

Interview by: Deborah Remus

Check out a Taste of Chaos show review here.

Check out an interview with tourmates Four Year Strong here.