Saosin - Some weird crowd...
October 31st 2006, Taste Of Chaos! Earlier that night we did an interview with Underoath. One of the great bands that played that night. One of the other bands were Saosin. After Underoath’s show I had a chat with Chris, Saosin’s bassist. All rocked out we sat down and talked.
Wow, that was one crazy show from Underoath, man! One great night with a lot of great bands!
‘Yeah, a great band indeed! But the crowd here is so weird.’
Haha. I had a perfectly overview from where I was standing. We Dutch folks do suck as a crowd, don’t we? We all stand still and just watch the show.
‘Yeah, it’s not what we are used to. They’re not really enthusiastic…like they don’t care about freaking out. Because that’s what we are used to. The show tonight was pretty cool though. Our singer did took offence to it, which I think is wrong. But when we come back we should play more intimate shows. This one has that sort of festival feeling.’
Well, you did a great job tonight. Could you, for those not yet familiar with Saosin, introduce yourself? What's the history behind Saosin?
‘We started in 2003 and played our first show in June that year. We started touring ever since. Until January 2004 when our previously singer Anthony Green decided to quit. We started working with Cove in July 2004. Then we toured for a year and a half. We did the Vans Warped tour, did a show with Coheed and Cambria here in Holland, played with Avenged Sevenfold, did the Taste Of Chaos in the States with The Used and My Chemical Romance. We did a lot of cool shows before we decided to put out a record on Capitol Records. Which just came out a month ago.’
How about that? Because Death Do Us Part is the label that Beau (guitar) and Drew Sang (band manager) own, right?
Drew was our manager. Death Do Us Part was basically just a fictitious label made up to look a little more professional. We released our first EP Translating The Name on our own. It’s hard to get this thing into the stores when it sounds like a demo, you know. We wanted a more proper release. Something we could sell and that could demonstrate the value. Because there are some good songs on it. We created Death Do Us Part as a record label. Honestly, our first goal was to make Death Do Us Part as an imprint of whatever label we would sign with.’
So that was all DIY (do it yourself). Since you’re on Capitol, things go easier?
‘Surprisingly, as we are on a major label…. we’re on one of the biggest labels, especially in Europe EMI is huge, but it’s still a lot of do it yourself. As far as the artwork…this dude Martin Kvamme, he’s from Holland actually, did the artwork. He did the artwork for Turbonegro also. That was all collaboration between him and us. Without the label involved. And we picked the producer ourselves too. Capitol wanted us to produce our own record. But we came to a point when we thought that wasn’t the right thing for us. Maybe a couple of records down the road when we are more secure…maybe we’ll do a self produced record again.’
That’s not normal. A label saying you should produce it by yourselves.
‘Nope. We wanted to sign with Capitol because the problem we had was that we didn’t had a lot of resources. We didn’t have huge contacts, we didn’t had an art department. So…that’s why we signed.’
You just answered one third of my questions here man. I’ll have to go to the boring ones now... How are the reactions on your full length so far?
‘We haven’t heard one bad review. I’ll have to knock on wood now…’
You haven’t seen ours yet….
‘Oh, is it bad?’
Just joking. We didn’t receive a promo.
‘Ah, too bad. We don’t have any promo's with us at the moment. Otherwise I would have given you one. But you know, we spend a lot of time writing the record. Spend a lot of time recording the record. But how people receive it is always up to them. Fortunately people are super stoked on it. So that’s good.’
I do hear a lot of metal in your music. Especially the drums!
‘True. I grew up listening to Sepultura and Pantera, In Flames and At The Gates. Stuff like that. But we also listened to more vocal bands like Soundgarden, more grunge bands. Even some pop stuff what you maybe wouldn’t expect from us.’
I know Saosin only from a video that I watched on punkrockvids.com. Now you recently updated your website to a real proper one. You’re back in Holland again, on tour with TOC..does this mean you’re ready to take over the world?
‘Not take it over but we definitely try to make ourselves known. I think a lot of bands focus too much on the States and leave Europe up to the festivals. After this one we will tour with Senses Fail. And then we do TOC in the States. Right after that we’re coming right back to Europe. Hopefully do something either with The Used or headlining or do something with Rise Against. One of these three possibilities…basically we’ll do as much of Europe as we can. But we’ll play in little spots. Instead of playing one major city show we’ll do two or three smaller shows.’
So we definitely will see you back again. Any words left to say to Metalrage?
‘Check out our record! We’re not mad at you for being different. Haha..no just joking. In the States you sometimes see like three fights a night during a show. All because of mosh pitting each other. It starts as a sort of dance fight and turns out in a real fight. And that is just foolish. Anyway, thanks for this interview.’
And thank you too.
So we both went back to see Taking Back Sunday perform. Well, I did... Chris was more focused on some pretty lady he met at the merch stand. Anyway, it sure was a great night!
Love Maurits