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Underoath have gone from upstart death-metal kids from Florida to one of the most high-profile bands in this genre we know and love as 'screamo' on the strength of 2004's pop-emo masterwork They're Only Chasing Safety. This writer interviewed drummer Aaron Gillespie three years ago as the band was touring Canada for the first time behind 2002's The Changing of Times, and that night Underoath tore up a very small Ottawa room in support of Unearth. This time around, the band had a thirty-minute set in front of ten thousand screaming Montreal fans as part of the Taste of Chaos tour, which also featured Killswitch Engage, The Used, Senses Fail, A Static Lullaby and My Chemical Romance. Needless to say, times might be changing, but they're sure good times for keyboardist Chris Dudley, who talked about lots of stuff, including the crowds, the nasty bus rides, ex-Underoath vocalist Dallas Taylor, faith, and more. Oh, so much more! Including salt licks!
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sd: Things are so different for you guys now!
Chris: Yeah.
sd: From when I saw you a couple years ago opening for Unearth at a club in Ottawa -
Chris: Was it across the street from a national-defense building or something?
sd: Yeah.
Chris: I remember that show! I talked to Aaron about that. Crazy.
sd: When did the crowds go from the smaller sizes to this? Was it when Chasing Safety came out?
Chris: Yeah, but this is the result of, like, all the bands on the tour. The package is so good. There's kids here who, if we were playing, they probably wouldn't come. Maybe even if the Used was playing, they'd be like, "Well, I don't know", but the Used, My Chemical Romance, Killswitch...when everyone comes together, kids are more like, "I can't not go." That's why the crowds are so huge. This is one of the best tours I've ever been a part of.
sd: It's gotta be one of the biggest you guys have ever done.
Chris: It is the biggest tour we've done, but even if we weren't playing I'd be sitting at home going, "Man, I wanna go to that show."
sd: I read somewhere recently that Bert McCracken (the Used) specifically asked for you to be on this tour.
Chris: This whole thing was the Used's idea, and then they got ahold of [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman, and they talked about it, and from what I understand Kevin said, "You can have whoever you want on it."
sd: So it wasn't about record sales or anything like that.
Chris: If it was, we wouldn't be here. When the tour was being put together the record was at a good point, but it wasn't where it is now.
sd: How many copies has that record sold now? It has to be the biggest release Solid State has ever put out.
Chris: I think it's right above a hundred and forty thousand, which is phenomenal.
sd: Do you guys still mention Christ at every show, get up and be like, "This is what we believe"?
Chris: Yeah, yeah!
sd: The reaction has gotten different. Do you get booed still? I didn't hear any boos tonight.
Chris: No, we don't really get booed. The thing is, we're really cool about it. We're Christians, and that's what we believe, but we're out here with all these bands who don't believe what we do. We all kinda just hang out.
sd: I've heard that [Killswitch Engage vocalist] Howard is a believer.
Chris: Honestly, I don't know. I haven't really gotten into that with him, but it's cool. We don't shove anything on anybody; we get on stage and say what we say, and if you agree with it that's cool, and if you don't, that's cool too. We can still hang out. Anyone who lets something that they believe get in the way of being friends, that kinda sucks, you know?
sd: Are you sick of questions like that? Tired of it?
Chris: Not at all. I think it's a question that needs to be asked, because I think a lot of people get the wrong idea when they hear the words 'Christian band'; they're like, "Aw, those guys, they just sit in their bunk and read their Bibles all day" or whatever.
sd: Did Bert make that "the Taste of Chaos tastes like Christians" crack tonight for you guys?
Chris: Probably, yeah. He says stuff to get the crowd going. It's cool, though. Those are all cool guys.
sd: And he's from the capital of Mormonism, too! [The Used hail from Utah - ed.]
Chris: That's probably why, man! Whenever we're in Salt Lake, we always encounter really weird stuff, like last time we were there, there were these dudes on the corner of an intersection, a whole family sitting there yelling at these people with Bibles in their hands. There was this eight-year-old kid that was doing this stuff, and I was like, "This kid doesn't even know what he's saying!" So odd. I know whenever we're there, someone always winds up coming up to us talking about how weird the whole situation with the Mormons is there. It's like this iron fist on the city, and the kids can't stand it.
sd: That's why [the Used] got out, I guess.
Chris: Everyone there is like that! Anyone who's not a die-hard Mormon can't stand it, like people in our age bracket who come to our shows are like, "Man, this really sucks; everyone's like this." Not that they're wanting to do really bad things, it's just that there's such an aura of 'everyone's watching you'. Honestly, I don't know much about Mormonism aside from it's strict like crazy. There were three kids at our last show there that had shirts on that said I CAN'T - I'M MORMON. *laughter* I just thought that was hilarious.
sd: There was a story a couple weeks ago about how Lamb of God were turned away fom the Los Angeles date of their tour with Slipknot because the venue is owned by a church; they weren't allowed to play because of their name. Does that happen - in reverse - to you guys at all, or have you made your name by now?
Chris: I can't remember us ever not being able to play anywhere because we're Christians.
sd: So there might be opposition, but not to the point where they'll kick you off the tour.
Chris: Not to the point of a corporate, like, huge thing. Again, we're not crazy loud about, "Oh, you need to believe this and believe that!" We're just like, "This is who we are, and if you wanna come and talk to us about it, cool, and if not, let's hang out and talk about rock and roll." The bottom line is we're just trying to be a good example.
sd: How's Dallas doing?
Chris: He's doing awesome. He's married now, got a house, a new car.
sd: And a band, I hear.
Chris: Yeah, he's doing a band; they're not doing much touring right now. They're called Maylene and the Sons of Disaster.
sd: There was a whole lot of rumour about why Dallas left.
Chris: Anything you read about that is not gonna be true, because only me and those guys over there *indicates various band members* know what happened. It's a really, really long story, and the way I try to explain it is this: you know those conversations you have with people where you're up until four in the morning talking about all kinds of different stuff? Iimagine having a hundred and fifty of those, and then someone coming up to you and saying, "What'd you guys talk about?" It's like that. [Dallas] was having stuff going on at home, and there was stuff going on within the band. For me to say, "Well, this happened, and we decided he had to leave the band" - it wasn't like that.
[Much hullabaloo arises with some other miscellaneous band types including Underoath's singer of a year and change, Spencer Chamberlain, resulting in the culminating statement: "Chris needs a salt lick." Anyway.]
sd: How did you pick that guy to replace Dallas?
Chris: To make a long story short, we needed a fill-in for a show, because when Dallas left, we still had one booked that we had to play, because we had already canceled with this guy once before and didn't wanna do it again, and [Spencer] came to practice and we played the show. We basically couldn't not do it. It worked out really well. We all got together and were like, "How can you not be our new singer?"
sd: What happened between The Changing of Times and They're Only Chasing Safety? It's such a switch, and you guys lost some hardcore fans and gained, like, that. *indicates giant arena*
Chris: Every record we've ever put out has been way different from the one before, and the thing is, no one seemed to notice or care that there was a huge change between records until this one came out. We don't wanna write the same record twice, and with member changes comes new ideas.
sd: Have you started thinking about the next record?
Chris: We actually have half of it written already.
sd: It'll come out on Solid State? Three-album deal?
Chris: Technically two, but...it's a long story. Basically we were on Takehold [Records], and we had one record left and were recording it, and then Tooth & Nail bought Takehold and bought our record, which was The Changing of Times, so that technically wasn't our first Solid State record, it was They're Only Chasing Safety.
sd: A lot of kids think that was your first record, period. Have you titled the new album yet? What's it like?
Chris: No, no title yet...it's a lot heavier, a lot more screaming, a lot
more technical, a lot faster.
sd: Are there jackhammer effects like on Changing of Times? Because that was rad. That was you, wasn't it?
Chris: Yeah, that was my idea. *laughter* I've actually thought about this a lot; looking out at the front of the crowd, and it's all these seventeen-year-old girls, and I'm like, "When our new record comes out they're not gonna give a crap about it", you know? Honestly, I'm enjoying this while it lasts.
sd: So you know they're fickle.
Chris: I know that a lot of the people here, when the new record comes out, probably wouldn't wanna come see us unless we were playing stuff off this one. It's way different.
sd: I was kinda hoping to hear something from Changing of Times.
Chris: We were thinking about it, but our set was so short and the new record's doing so good - that's what everyone wants to hear, and honestly, we don't like playing those [older] songs as much as we like playing the new stuff.
sd: Maybe after this record's touring is done you'll go back to the old
stuff? When you're a headliner and have an hour to work with?
Chris: I don't know about that. We might play one song off that record - we only ever really played two songs off that, because the rest were just these...
sd: Grinders?
Chris: Yeah, like, "Oh, man, I don't wanna play that." *laughter*
sd: What have you been listening to lately?
SH: A lot of Silverchair; their new record, it's a DVD set I ordered from Australia, and it's phenomenal. I've been listening to the last Sigur Ros record. The new Norma Jean is awesome - Matt Bayles produced it, and that's who we're gonna record our new one with, I think.
sd: You really do wanna get heavier! And he's a keyboardist too, isn't he?
Chris: Yeah, I'm stoked on that. The thing is, just with the way our music's progressing right now, I think he's the best to do what we want. We were throwing around ideas, and we knew we didn't wanna go with James Wisner again, because we know with his style it just wouldn't come across the way we want it.
sd: Are producers really that pigeonholed now?
Chris: Not really, but...if you get a handful of one dude's records you get a feel for what he does, and the stuff Matt Bayles does sounds like what we want our record to sound like. The stuff that he's done most recently, I listen to it and I'm just like, "Wow." It's got a lot of feel to it, and we wanna have a lot more energy in the next record. It's gonna be fun. Honestly, right now I'm just enjoying touring off this record. I'm looking forward to the new stuff, but this is just awesome...we don't wanna take too much time off the road to write, so we're probably turning the back of our bus - on our headlining tour - into a studio so that we can write while we're on the road. Hopefully we can take just a couple weeks off and then record in November.
sd: If you can't get Bayles, is there a second choice for producer?
Chris: Not really, because we just called him up and he was like, "Any time you guys wanna come in, just call me."
sd: He flew from Seattle to Ottawa on his own dime to do Buried Inside's record.
Chris: He's an awesome guy. Maybe in six months we might decide to go somewhere else, but right now that's what we're looking at.
sd: How was Europe?
Chris: We'd never been there before, and pretty much all the shows were sold out. It was nothing like what we were expecting, like, I had no idea what kind of rooms we'd be playing...they were decent. We were playing like from two hundred to a thousand-capacity rooms. The kids were nuts, but we all got really, really sick, because we were sharing a bus with two other bands, and it was a really dirty bus, so we were all throwing up. The toilet on the bus we got - and I was told, other ones - the toilets don't actually flush. There's no water involved, so...yeah. And the dude who has the bunk next to the bathroom smells it all night long. We were on the road with Silverstein, the Hurt Process and Roses Are Red, and it was Silverstein's bassist Josh who had that bunk, and he was waking up with headaches every morning. But overall it was awesome. There were so many good dudes on that tour, and it was a good time. It was really hard, but the shows were awesome.
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Underoath are back in Canada in September, opening for - you guessed it - The Used. Head Automatica and Alexisonfire will also be on the bill. Check to see when this monster of a show is coming to your city.
- Mike Postma
Copyright ©2005