ION (TIM CAMPBELL): It’s been a busy year since your last EP. Take me through the
process of preparing for this new record.
STEVE HATMAKER: From the writing side of it, the rst few months of getting
everything together was pretty stressful. We wrote 16 songs and picked 11 of them for
the album. The deadline was creeping up, and we were sweating. But we went to Joey’s
(ORANJUDIO RECORDING STUDIO), and it just turned out great.
LYNN ROOSE III: I gave everyone a deadline to have all the songs written by the end
of 2016. We were going into the studio January 22nd, which gave us a month to
rehearse. By December 1st, we only had half the album written. That last month was
total crunch time.
DREW DIMITROVSKI: Lynn saved our ass. He was that dude you thanked God was in
your group for an assignment. It was a core effort, but Lynn and Steve drove the writing
process. We would work and change things as we go, and we had a few songs that
were show-ready prior to recording. We felt more comfortable with recording once
we played some of this material live, but we were still structuring some material in the
studio.
STEVE: Which was scary. The time we all spent together was just “grind, grind, grind”
nonstop. Eventually, we got to the point where we could sit down and listen to tracks and
feel good about them.
LYNN: Joey (GURWIN/Oranjudio Recording Studio) worked us really hard. It was
great to work with an engineer and producer who cared about our sound as much as
we did.
ION: Take me through the concept of the album.
TONY CASA: We have always seen concept records that carry the same musical theme
throughout, and the concept is strictly lyrical. That is not what we wanted to do.
Lyrically, we wanted to talk about nding the middle; nding the blend in the battle of
red vs. blue. It’s not only a push and pull between you and other people, but the push
and pull within yourself. I am trying to nd a happy medium within myself, between
recognizing the world’s problems and being a person who only cares about myself.