Robyn Writes

Interview with Tom Conrad (Empires) by ninthandash

In this interview, ninthandash asks Tom Conrad, guitarist for Empires, about his thoughts on the current music scene, the internet fanbase and how Empires are different to virtually every other band out there.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few years about the impact that the internet has had on the music industry, and the general consensus seems to be very negative. Especially with MySpace, it’s now so easy to be heard or to find new music that a lot of people aren’t bothering, and new bands are either generic, one hit wonders or people are just choosing to listen to whatever popular music is in the charts.

However, Empires have a very strong internet fanbase. Do you feel that the internet has had a positive impact on the music industry, and you as a band, or do you think that it’s still mostly a bad thing?

I would not say it’s negative, it’s just different than what we have known in the past. It is important for life to evolve and I believe the general state of music is in a transition period. Everything is so quickly and easily accessible because of the internet, so you really need to offer something different to stand out.

Also, the internet fanbase; it’s unusual for a band to build up such a strong community so quickly. The fans all seem very close-knit, and have taken gifts to shows to give you, or made lists of fans from all over the country to give you. Do you think your fans are different to a more mainstream band’s due to the fact you can still talk to them personally, and that one-on-one dynamic is important?

The five of us have been very lucky thus far. We try very hard to have direct contact with the people that care about Empires as much as we do. I wouldn’t want it any other way. This is about sharing and hopefully sparking some sort of feeling in each other at the end of the day.

Putting ‘Howl’ on your website available for free download was a move almost like Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows. Coming back to the impact of the internet on the music industry issue, was this a response to that? Were you worried that no one would buy the hard copy of the album if you did this, or were you just happy to get your music out there, and this ensured that possibly more people would listen to it?

We released “Howl” online for free for several reasons. First, we did so because we could and not many artists can. The album was ours and will always be ours. Since the record was completely constructed by the band, we could do whatever we wanted with it. Second, it was important to us get our music out as fast and as easy as possible. We knew this way anyone in the world could grab it and we could know exactly where from. Third, we loved the idea of this being our
introduction to everyone. Knowing we initiated our relationship with you by giving away something we spent a lot of time and energy on is a great feeling. Now, we hopefully started a strong bond with the listener. “Howl” is the starting point for Empires and to me, feels like when the band truly kicked off.

Some of our readers have been asking about “Hayley”, and whether there’s a story behind it. Could you clarify this?

Sean writes all the lyrics for Empires. The story is true as far as I know.

Do you feel that being unsigned allows you a greater level of control? A lot of the reasons so many fans feel so strongly about you is that they feel a connection, due to the free download of Howl, and due to the way you can personally interact with them. Would you ever consider signing to a label, especially a major one, or do you feel that it wouldn’t be worth it for you in the long run?

The best thing about being unsigned is that our path is unwritten and unseen. Anything could happen. The downside to not having a home for Empires is that it does make things much harder for us and can be a cause for distractions while trying to achieve the main goal. I’m not opposed to signing with an indie or a major at this point but obviously whatever is in the best intention for Empires, we’ll decide to do. Max, Sean, Ryan, Alfred and myself do everything we can to make Empires as self-sufficient as possible and I don’t think that will change. It’s very important for us to be “hands on” with anything we do together. The more we can do on our own, the more accurate of representation it will be.

Your music is very different to most bands around these days and definitely stands out, especially the way all your songs have a different sound to them. Do you think this is important? What do you think about a lot of the bands that seem to have made it big these days, as some artists have labeled them as talentless and generic?

I think it’s important to be yourself and pursue what makes you happy, which is what “Howl” is to us. It’s not my place to judge or to call someone else’s work generic. Though I have been finding myself digging deeper through more experienced and educated artists to find inspiration lately. You need to have something valid to say to get my attention.

Emotions by Nox

Originally posted by Nox in November 2009

I have noticed over the past few years how several people handle their emotions. Every person is different and has their own way to cope with situations; however, these methods are not always healthy. For instance, being introverted is just fine except when a traumatic event occurs. In such a case, you cannot expect to handle all those emotions alone. If you feel like you need to get those feelings out then do it. Do not let shyness or fear stand in your way. When you hold so much in, it starts to tear you apart inside.

I know the world may seem like a terrible place, but trust me when I say there are people willing to listen. There are people in the world that have big hearts and open minds. Sure, they may be harder to find, but they are truly out there.

Now, let me make one thing clear – expressing your emotions does not make you weak. Given, wearing your heart on your sleeve twenty-four seven is not the best idea, but in moderation, it’s okay!

If strong emotions are suppressed they will find other outlets to make themselves known. This can be anger, hysteria, abuse, and stress.

It can feel like having a monster inside or maybe you just have not noticed yourself holding back. Either way, if you notice you are unusually lashing out or becoming overly controlling in any aspect of your life then you need to find yourself a healthy outlet. This doesn’t mean you need counselling. Although it is an option it is not the primary one. Exercise and extracurricular activities can be some of the best therapy for your heart and mind. Also, utilize your friends; they care about you and what you are feeling. A day out of the house with your best buddies can do a world of good for your emotional stability. Besides, it’s always good to escape and catch a break every now and then.

All in all, don’t hold back. Let it out, but be careful about it. Channel it into something creative and enjoyable or just say it out loud. Either way, get it out. Don’t bottle it up and stow it away. Life is too beautiful to be torn apart from the inside out.

Contrary To Popular Belief…

The other day, fightclubsandwich pointed something out to me during a conversation about music elitism. She said “Ripper, you’re pretty non-elitist, because you don’t go off a band when they release something new.” It’s not an entirely true statement – My Chemical Romance are a no no since The Black Parade, but maybe it’s their fans I hate more than the music – yet she makes a good point. It’s rare that I start to dislike a band based on their latest efforts.

Admittedly, in some cases, after years of glory, bands go shit. It’s the sad, but honest truth. New Found Glory, although one of my favourite bands, are a good example of this. From ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ to ‘Catalyst’, NFG released nothing but pure pop-punk gold. And then ‘Coming Home’ came out. It was okay, but nothing special. It didn’t make me jump around my bedroom like a five year old on a sherbet craze. However, I never stopped loving New Found Glory because of those earlier albums. My favourite band, AFI, have released a series of ‘okay’ albums since they crossed over to major label territory, but no matter what, I’ve found something that I love about those albums. They sure ain’t punk any more, but who gives a shit, it’s still great music! It’s really rare that a band is going to produce a perfect album every time – it’s totally possible because Jimmy Eat World have done it, but I find that’s probably Jim Adkins’ non-changing haircut that probably has sway over that – but no matter what, there’ll be something good in there.

Like the introduction states, no matter how much of a tangent I’ve gone off on, I tend not to go off bands when they release new records, like a lot of fellow music aficionados that I know. More importantly, I actually tend to prefer new material that others shun. The best example of this is probably my love of ‘Good Mourning’ by Alkaline Trio. It’s one of their darkest albums in terms of demonic metaphors, but is lacking the edge of some of the older material. However, it completely makes up for it in subtlety. There are so many hooks and lyrics in it that totally knock you by the wayside and you don’t even realise first time round. And that’s a pretty awesome quality in an album. It really kind of shocked me to find out that a fair few hardcore Trio fans actually don’t like ‘Good Mourning’ very much, nor anything afterwards. Alright, I didn’t like ‘Agony and Irony’ very much, but if we follow the ‘Less Than Jake Theory Of Awesomeness’ – which is, if we take ‘Hello Rockview’ as the starter for LTJ and ‘From Here To Infirmary’ for Alkaline Trio, awesome album, awesome album, awesome album, sucky album, awesome album – then the Trio have a lot more to offer.

Also, just because something has a more poppy sound or slicker production doesn’t make it instant sellout material. For example, whilst Against Me!’s ‘New Wave’ doesn’t sound as raw as ‘Reinventing Axl Rose’, the message hasn’t changed. If anything, Gabel’s trying to reach more people, which is something that I’ve found fans really don’t respect. I know that joy of finding a favourite band, and I also know the irritation when it gets played on Kerrang! TV. But, music’s meant to be universal, right? So we shouldn’t be selfish with our favourites if it helps the band be even more successful…

…that said, I’m not telling ANYONE about Cobra Skulls. No way.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you love a band, don’t stop just because they’re not ‘yours’ any more, and appreciate the fact that bands can and will move on because let’s face it, it’s kind of boring to play the same kind of stuff over and over. Well, if you’re not Rancid, anyway.

Elitism Is For Cool Kids

We at TBO decided a while ago that we were going to do a series on ‘show etiquette’ and the types of people you might find at your local punk rock show. This is a slight departure from that notion, but essentially, this article is about the elitist. You know who I mean. The cool guy who stands at the back, appreciating the band, but hating every other fan in the room. If we’re being honest now, depending upon what show I’m at, I am that guy.

Being elitist can be extremely fun. In a way, it’s fun because you actually know what you’re listening to and you’re not just there because your friends dragged you there or because you think the lead singer is highly attractive. Elitists aren’t really as dedicated as the fangirl, but they quietly own every single album that the band’s released in some form or another. They like to wear shirts featuring bands that the vast majority of the population has never even heard the name of. More often than not, the elitist owns vinyl. If you don’t own vinyl, you’re definitely not cool. For the ultimate in cool, I don’t even have a vinyl player and I own vinyl. There’s also that smug satisfaction of knowing that if you met the band, you would be totally chilled about it. You’d sit and talk music, being complimentary but not over the top. Maybe you’d get a picture with them, but you’d be cool about it. And no, the elitist would never put it as their Myspace picture, not at all.

There’s a few downsides to elitism as well. For a start, you can’t just lose it at a show and not care what everyone else thinks. After all, there’s a reputation to uphold. And sometimes, that can mean missing out on having as good a time as you might have liked, especially at a punk show. Another one is having your feelings of superiority clearly on show which definitely results in animosity. Of course, elitists shouldn’t give a shit, but really, in their heart of hearts that still listens to those first two My Chemical Romance albums, they do. Also, that music habit can be damn expensive. That one where you have to pick up everything on special order because the record store doesn’t stock the kind of music you like? After all, ordering from the internet… it just doesn’t beat that indie music store down the back alley now, does it?

However, elitism is still the preferable option to fangirlism. During my teenage years, I’ve probably gone through all of the different stages of fandom – ignorant poseur, casual listener, regular fan, obsessed fangirl, ashamed fangirl and then finally, to hip elitist. The fangirl angle definitely limits your credibility. First of all, it can be kind of creepy. No, excessively creepy. I’ve never been this bad, but you know those girls who own every Clandestine hoodie, probably have Fall Out Boy lyrics tattooed in some horribly visible place and have met the band four times through persistent waiting and hounding? Yeah, would you want to associate with them? It’s like that friend that finds a new favourite each week, instantly knows everything about them and won’t shut up about them at all. Not your favourite person. Secondly, fangirlism is so consuming. Looking up all those photos, learning all those lyrics purposefully, posting all those blogs and contributing to all those forums… before you know it, you have no life and your best friend is helenaxxloverxx666xxOMGGERARD from some bad MCR fanfic website. Thirdly, how many fangirls over the age of 16 do you know? Not many. It’s just not cool.

Of course, elitism isn’t something to be proud of. You’re snobby, hard to please and you probably irritate all the fangirls with your eye rolling. But goddamn, it feels good to be cool.

The Dangerous And The Diarists by fightclubsandwich

Originally posted by fightclubsandwich in September 2009.

Lately, I have become – arguably – a keener diarist than ever. I’ve gotten a thirst for reading anything non-fiction and am writing anywhere between two and five pages a day. I’ve been writing diaries on and off for the last six or seven years of my life. It’s something I feel really proud of, and it’s hard to express why. In the same way that people are shaped by their experiences, my journaling has been influenced by any number of other things that other people have written. This article is a list of things that I read, that then either changed my way of writing diaries completely, or at least invigorated my passion for it. All together they form something of a brief history of my diary-keeping life, and thinking about these books (or thinking about thinking about them… which is weird) made me think about all the great reasons there are to keep a book you write in every day.

Mia Thermopolis

If you don’t recognise Miss Thermopolis’s name, that’s likely because she’s a fictional character, from the Princess Diaries books. I understand that the thirteen year old girl demographic is not exactly the prime target audience of this website, webzine, whichever, so I will forgive you for not being entirely familiar with this particular series of books. If you are a thirteen year old girl, I am very sorry, I will try to swear less.

Unsurprisingly, I started reading the Princess Diaries books as a thirteen year old girl, and was inspired to start writing my own diary immediately. The book is written in the style of the real diary of the main character, and the author, Meg Cabot, really makes the most of the format she’s chosen. Mia writes her diary in lessons, at school, especially Algebra, which she hates. She has written conversations with her friends, she writes about things that are happening in the classroom she’s in at the time; she makes notes about her homework; she composes silly lists with her friends about which actors they find attractive or their favourite TV shows. At some of the more dramatic moments she writes a statement of the latest plot development at the top of the page, says she’ll write about it later and leaves the rest blank.

I’d argue that it’s very true to the way a real teenage girl would write a diary, but the truth is, it’s such a huge influence on my own style of writing my journal. Like Mia, I write a lot of entries that start with declarations of where I am at the time of writing, e.g. in a lecture. I make notes about homework and used to have written conversations with my friends in the diaries of my teenage years. I realised soon that what really appealed to me about this style of Mia’s was that it went beyond a direct retelling of what she’d done that day. One of the most offputting things about writing a diary is the idea of churning out entries that read “today I woke up and got dressed and brushed my hair and ate some cornflakes for breakfast, and drank some coffee, and then went to lectures and we learned about African American writers who lived in Europe and how their nationality eclipsed their race and then I shot myself in the head because I found it so boring to write all this shit down so dryly.” (dear thirteen-tear-old-girl readers: I’m sorry about the swearing and the suicide joke, please do not tell your parents)

My actual diary entry for today consists, so far, of things I did last night, speculation about the future, my current state of mind, notes for the future, (I have to buy washing up liquid…) it’s just so much more fun to write stream-of-consciousness style, utterly structureless diaries. If you want to, why not go ahead and write four pages on a new scarf you purchased, or how some guy locked his dog in his van, but in the driving seat, which looked hilariously like the dog was driving a van, and totally leave out the part where you fell over and scraped your knee or went to the cinema or what have you.

Cabot obviously chose to write her book in this particular format because a diary is something that is shaped so completely by the identity of the writer. This is such an obvious thing to say, I know, but it’s true, and The Princess Diaries totally ingrained in me that whole idea of your diary being shaped by your own experiences, your own life and emotions and personality. It’s a chance to be completely in control of something and a way to express yourself in a way that is like no other medium with it’s complete lack of limits.

My Friend Natalie

I have a friend called Natalie, who I have known ever since we were both seven. I’d never hesitate to call her one of my closest friends, but it was only last year that she showed me her inspiration journal, and that’s the only part that’s really relevant to this article – to go any further would be to completely shed any pretences of real subject matter and completely derail this piece into self-indulgence.

Anyway, Natalie is an art student, and it was during her foundation year that she showed me this book. It was a small one – a little bigger than a quarter of an A4 page – which she treated as a scrapbook. It was amazing. It was gloriously multimedia – she just stuck in anything she saw and liked, basically. Adverts torn out of newspapers, drawings on the backs of envelopes, scraps of fabric, ribbon, sequins, photographs, playing cards, anything at all, every inch of every page was completely covered. The spine was tight and tense, the front and back covers nowhere near each other. She still maintains these inspiration journals, the last one I saw had playing cards with typewritten words on them (notably after we saw The Dark Knight this summer) and drawings of trees she’d done, among other things.

Maybe it’s cheating to include her on this list, since technically, Natalie doesn’t keep diaries. These books don’t have dates, they have very few words, and those they do have are mostly incidental. But I just love the idea of adding a collage element to diaries. The next one I started after seeing Natalie’s was filled with ticket stubs, patterned tape with Christmas trees on for giftwrapping, pictures of Matt Skiba, chewing gum wrappers, images cut off flyers for art shows or bands playing gigs (that I did not go to). This diary ended up extraordinarily fat and difficult to close properly, but the mixed media approach was so much fun, and it felt like a way to rejuvenate my love of keeping diaries – it’s difficult to write one every single day, so I told myself that for this one, I would just have to put something on a page every day, it could be a drawing, or stick in some sweet wrappers, or anything at all, just so long as it was something. I photocopied a page of a Virginia Woolf novel at one point, became an even more avid magazine cut-up-er, and of course, allowed my housemate to draw a picture of “Moon Hitler” walking around in a Star-Wars-looking robot. (I don’t know why, either)

Henry Rollins

To be perfectly honest, I found Mr Rollins’ literature initially quite disappointed. I ran out and bought Black Coffee Blues immediately after having seen his spoken word show, which was such an utterly amazing experience – too brilliant to describe with any brevity here – so it couldn’t help but come off unfavourably in the comparison I couldn’t help making. Black Coffee Blues is simply just not a good expression of how brilliantly intelligent Rollins really is. The book can be split into two parts – the first is somewhere in the region of two hundred (I wish I had my copy of the book with me right now) very short pieces of fiction. They’re between a paragraph and a page long. Many themes are recurring, which makes it interesting to identify connections between them. Are any of them about the same characters? Rollins is very effective with what he leaves out, what he doesn’t tell you, in these short pieces, he cuts out morality, names, and plays around with tenses and perspectives, but overall the prose itself is kind of hamfisted. It gets a little frustrating, there’s this feeling that he could write something better than this and that the book is trying to articulate something really special, but it just… can’t

The second half of the book is extracts of diaries. This is the best part. This is the part that makes me crave Get In The Van – the work by the same author that consists entirely of diary entries. This is the book that was initially recommended to me, but they didn’t have it in Borders at the time. Rollins is a really good diarist, it’s a perfect medium for him, because he’s at his strongest and most confident when writing about either the world around him, or his and feelings and general introspection. His strength is not coming up with great ideas of things to write, it’s how he writes these things. And as I was reading the book, I got thinking about how that’s another way to think of a diary. You have all the material you could need, it’s just your own life, and it’s often mundane, or the same as the previous day; there are too many characters and too many details to condense into one page of words. But that there’s so much of it is a glorious thing. Writing a diary is taking your own life and times as raw material and strengthening your own voice, and making the telling interesting. This was what made me start to think of a diary as writing that’s no less real than a novel or poem or article such as this one. You find your own voice, and end up learning so much about time and how to arrange narratives chronologically and give opinions and get as personal as possible. Reading Rollins’ diaries is like reading someone transform their own life into… something else – I can’t think of a term that doesn’t sound so pretentious, in my head – only ever a snapshot or few pages at a time.

Henry David Thoreau

When I first applied to study literature at university, I was thinking about it in terms of plays, novels and poetry. This is probably the solid view of most people who look in on the field from the outside, and for the most part that’s the case. But I discovered, gradually, that there’s more to it than that. If you’re interested, it’s easy to find published compilations of written letters from a lot of famous authors – most notably Jane Austen and Alexander Pope, among others – and, I’m sure you could see where I’m going with this, there are journals.

Henry David Thoreau was a poet, but published a lot of his journals, and when I started studying him this year, it sparked a sudden interest in non-fiction writing for me. Most famously, Thoreau wrote Walden, his journals of a period he spent living in the woods, apart from society, and it’s considered a classic of American literature. This is such a good example of diaries as real, fancy-pants literature. It’s all polished up, of course, stuff that he wrote in the moment and then corrected and smoothed out later, before publishing, but it’s still worth looking at. Thoreau was fascinated by science – especially nature and biology – so the approach to the whole Walden project can be seen as similar to a scientific experiment, but applied to philosophy and how people live. Thoreau here puts his money where his mouth is, and weaves his life and his work together, and that’s an approach to writing journals that we can take from Thoreau. Walden is an example of complete expression, something that Thoreau obviously put a lot of work into and something to be proud of, and writing a journal gives one a lot to be proud of. Even the most unwilling to write can build up a really prolific body of work, without it even really feeling like working. You can write whatever you want to write, within this framework of stability that you’ve set out for yourself. My favourite way of looking at a diary is still as pages and pages of pure blank freedom, that slowly become a piece of the writer themselves.

I guess there’s no conclusion that I can come to that’s not completely trite and obvious, but the bottom line when it comes to keeping diaries is that there is beauty in the individual special-little-snowflakeness of someone’s journal. Diaries are kind of like rice, they’re just blank, plain things that, with the right additions and flavourings, can be moulded into the most interesting, satisfying things, but even on their own, before being touched, they’re still so intensely blank and empty that you can’t help but being filled with hope and excitement about all the things that you can write inside them, even if I am moving way away from my rice analogy. It’s one of those things that everyone approaches differently- this year I am living with a girl who writes one page every evening, a regularity which I could never enforce up on myself, and I can only wonder about what her journal is like to read. And every time I read someone else’s – the examples in this list being key – it just fills me with a strange sort of joy, a joy that comes from the confirmation that what I spend so much time and effort doing is really worth something, whether it’s art or work or whatever. Again, I have to say, I’m sorry about all the Disney movie sentiments that are drawing this article to a close, but in my defence, I did not know, when I started, that it was going to end this way. That’s just how it goes when you try to fill up a blank page.