Interview . Cancer Bats . w/ Liam Cormier (vocals).
Interviewer: Marc . 21/04/2010 .Nijmegen, Merleyn . Netherlands .
Punk76: Hey Liam, how was your day so far?
Liam: It's good. We played Rotterdam last night, so we spent the day there which was nice. The guys all walked around Rotterdam and I answered E-Mail and everything because it's been so busy with a new record. I usually handle all the business. We have managers and stuff but I do a lot of that. Today was crazy, everything getting busier and busier than it ever was. I mean it's good but at the same time it means that I don't get to hang out in Rotterdam and walk around.
Punk76: Were there any problems travelling from the UK to this part of Europe because of the big ash clouds?
Liam: No, we came driving in this bus. And we booked the train coming from England to France. It was super easy. We thought it was going to be super busy but it was fine. They didn't even look at our passports.
Punk76: Please tell us something about the UK shows, I noticed you played there very often in the last few years.
Liam: It's going awesome for us in the UK. It's like those are some of the best parts for us to play. I mean we do very well in Canada, because that's where we coming from. So it's cool that the UK is doing us well as Canada is. We can play a lot of different places in this country and the shows are all awesome. We played two shows with 700 kids in London which was crazy. That's like the biggest show we ever played in England and it was sold out like a month before we came. The biggest show we played before that was 500. It was definitely really awesome.
Punk76: Are there important differences between playing the UK and playing in Germany?
Liam: Yeah, I mean for us shows in Germany were always been awesome. Like we came and headline in 2008 when Hail Destroyer came out and all of the German shows were the best. We went to Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and so on. We played the Underground in Cologne in front of maybe 80 people without a support band. But had an awesome time and shows like that make me want to go back to Germany again. I mean we've done a tour with Billy Talent and it was crazy. We're playing in front of 5000 or 6000 people in Germany. It was great to do that. Now we coming back for Rock am Ring and Rock im Park and this is cool. We are playing like also different stuff.
Punk76: The tour is supported by Vans, so what's the story behind this collaboration?
Liam: Vans have been always awesome to us. We start working with them in England, They did our last headlining tour there and it went really well. The cool part of them is that this is it what they are interested in. They could sponsor any band like maybe Killswitch Engage or others like that. But they want to work with smaller band because that's kind of more the spirit of what Vans is all about. In the same with the skateboarding is like that, so they sponsor upcoming skaters. They also have a whole European skate team which I think is wicked. So yeah, they are sponsoring the whole tour and we doing a bunch of stuff with them.
Punk76: After playing the Netherlands tonight and tomorrow your next stop will be Germany for five dates. Are you looking forward to rock the metal crowd?
Liam: Yeah, I mean I'm stoked to go back to all those places we headlined before because it's been two years since we played any of these places. So I'm really excited to play these shows and I think it's going to be awesome. In most cases we're coming back to the exact same venues again so I think it's going to be really cool. We have support from Roadrunner and we're starting to do actually press, this is our first time being on your website and stuff like that were we've come to Germany so many times before and not have those opportunities. So it's really cool for us, it's almost like we're starting fresh with this new record.
Punk76: So let's talk about your new record which is called 'Bears, Mayors, Scraps & Bones'. What does the name stand for?
Liam: Basically it's a reference to all of our nicknames. We all have tones of stupid nicknames, so like Mike is the 'bear', Scott is the 'mayor', I'm 'scraps' and Jaye, our bass player, is 'bones'. We call him 'bones' because of 'Jayebone', it's like his nickname. They call me 'scraps' because I used to eat like scraps of food, like leftovers and so a friend of mine said it to me as a joke. Scott is the 'mayor' because we have a joke that's like he lives by his own rules and does whatever he wants to. It's like you can't tell him what's to do, like he is very set in his own world and so he is the 'mayor of scope city'. Mike is the 'bear' because of his big beard and he is a big dude. When we went to England people thought that he looked like a 'bear', a big mass of a bear. The other reason why we want to do it is that this is the first record that we ever made with a full lineup. 'Hail Destroyer' we wrote as a three piece, we had no bass player. So it was just Scott, Mike and I working every day and figuring it out and then we recorded with Scott at the bass. Now that we have Jaye in the band it feels like more than a solid lineup and kind of like everybody's working really well together. This album is what we able to do when we all worked together.
Punk76: Please report us about the writing process and the recording sessions of this album, are there any big differences when you think of the other two releases?
Liam: Yeah, one of the big differences was that thing that we having Jaye in this band. The fact that we were jamming as a full band meant that like we could hear the songs without having the downside of a bass that's going to add later. We had that all in there from the very start and that's cool, this allowed Jaye to hold down a lot of the heavier parts where Scott could kind of back off in some cases and play different things on guitar, made everything a lot heavier and dirtier. And it also pushed everyone in the band that now we were writing a lot heavier than we ever had before. The other thing was that having Jaye I think made it a lot more fun because it was just like jamming more
as a full band and everyone hanging out and being like this is what I love about when we play live and this is what I love about playing old songs or playing songs of 'Hail Destroyer'. Sometimes you write a song that maybe wouldn't work live but on this record I feel like we can play front to back and it's going to be a party and it's going to be fun and it's going to work.
Punk76: You released your last record 'Hail Destroyer' in 2008. Were there any big differences in between these two albums when you think about the development?
Liam: A big thing that we realized was that with 'Hail Destroyer' we really figuring out what we want to do as a band. I think with 'Birthing the Giant' it was just like those are the first twelve songs we had written. So that was kind of like us getting things figured out and then we toured the album for two years and it was like now we had an idea of what we want to do with this band. And the big thing that I find is now with this record it's like us finishing of those ideas that we started with 'Hail Destroyer'. We started with the ideas that maybe we could have some stoner stuff or maybe we could be heavier and it was like everyone giving us the support to be as heavy as we want to. We realized that kids appreciate that and that our fans are into that kind of stuff. We could make a really slow song, a really fast song, a really hardcore song, a really punk song and everyone would go 'Oh cool, this all sounds like Cancer Bats'. So I feel like that meant we had a lot more freedom when it came time thinking of the new record.
Punk76: On 'Hail Destroyer' there was a song called 'Lucifer's Rock Chair' which you always introduced with the words 'that's a song for the head bangers...' Are there a song like that on the new record, too?
Liam: Yeah! We definitely have some really slow ones on it. The first song 'Sleep this away' is like the heaviest song we have ever written and it's like a total kind of like banger. Another one that I think of it is 'Darkness lives' which is the halfway point in the album and it's ever slower than 'Lucifer's Rock Chair' in sense of like Type O Negative or like Life of Agony. It's really heavy and slow like that old New York stuff. We're getting super psyched on that and that's what 'Darkness lives' came from. So I think those are two of my favorite bangers.
Punk76: Somewhere I read that 'Dead wrong' will be the next single. What's the story behind that song?
Liam: The whole idea with 'Dead wrong' is basically like those points in your life when you realized that you not going to kind of conform in a lot of ways. I know that's sound cliche but it's like when you realized that we're all getting older. We're like 29 or 30 and a lot of our friends are married, are working jobs and have kids and it's like they are not satisfied with that. So that's what we've been told our whole lives. If you meet a girl and have kids and work a job - that's it, that's your life and you're going to be happy doing that. And everyone's going 'This sucks!' or 'I'm not happy doing this!' So it's like looking at that situation where we've all made the decision to not do that, to not have families, to not work jobs, to not conform into the system even know the fact that we're older and a lot of people going like 'Oh you know, you may not want to tour in a punk band for the rest of your life'. But I think 'Fuck that!' I'm perfectly happy with what I'm doing even know that this is not the norm. So if this is what you think is right than I'm going die being wrong.
Punk76: The first single was 'Sabotage', a cover of the famous Beastie Boys. So we all love that song, how does it come to make your own version of it?
Liam: We didn't even think about it more than just the fact that everyone loves that song and it would be really fun for us to play. We love that song so why not start playing it and that's what we did. When we're writing the record we we're playing festivals all summer long, just kind of like every month we played a few just to get out of the studio and have fun. So we played the Roskilde festival, played two festivals in Canada, played a festival in England and we went to Japan. So everywhere we played the 'Sabotage' cover and people were so stocked and were freaking out. So when we came home we went into the studio to record it for maybe a 7-inch or something like that. We put video blogs and make references to it and people were like freaking out. Everyone was mailing us 'you have to let us hear this cover!’ We're getting all this feedback and people were so stocked on it so we decided to do something with it. For us we had all this tours booked and we didn't think about 'Sabotage' being the first single for the record. We more thought of it being like something to play and talk about in the five month when we finished the record in October and doing tones of touring all over the world. So we want 'Sabotage' to fill in this five month but then it got so much hype that it got attached to the record as a bonus thing. It's last like 'hey, we did this cool thing and we had fun making it'. So I never want it to take away from the fact that we did this record because I think the album is awesome. We never want to be like the band that does the Beastie Boys cover. It's like we're a band that does covers sometimes but we have all of these other songs which we really like.
Punk76: Your video for this song is insane, who has the idea for it?
Liam: We always do our videos with the same director who is called Marc Ricciardelli from Canada. So he and I came up for bouncing ideas back and forth. We had the idea to try and find the Beastie Boys for our video and that would going to be our video like us running around New York City. And then we realized that that was going to be too hard and it be really expensive so we think about it would be funny if we were looking for people who look like the Beastie Boys. But it was cool because in a way the whole thing became a bit like homage of how much the Beastie Boys has been a part of our own lives. It's like everybody knows all the videos that they have done and it's just like a testament of how massive they all are. We remember to all of those videos and it was cool because Marc is a big fan of them and we're all big Beastie Boys fans. The other thing is that we wouldn't just copy their video because that would look so lame. So we want to do something cool on our own.
Punk76: On 'Hail Destroyer' there were guest vocals of Tim (McIlrath from Rise Against), Wade (MacNeil of Alexisonfire) and Ben (Kowalewicz from Billy Talent). George (Pettit of Alexisonfire) appeared on 'Birthing the Giant'. Are there any guest artists on the new record, too?
Liam: It's a full Cancer Bats album. The big thing that I want to make appoint is that Jaye is in the band and he's the guy that doing all of the backups. So whenever we played any of these songs with Tim, Ben, Wade or George, Jaye is always that person singing all of their parts. So it's the point that everyone is hearing his voice when we play live and he sings on almost every song on the record.
Punk76: What's your favorite one of the new songs and why?
Liam: I really like 'Scared to death'. It's definitely one of my favorite songs. I like it because it's completely different from anything we have done but I still think it sounds like a Cancer Bats song. I can't even classified this song, maybe it's more like Queens of the Stone age, like Rock and Roll which I think we have never done before and it's all about my girlfriend who I really love.
Punk76: The record will be released in Germany on Roadrunner Records. Tell us something about this cooperation.
Liam: We're super stoked like they have definitely stepped up and blown our minds in terms of like how much there pushing our record and how into the band they are. We met a bunch of the people from Roadrunner last night and it's cool because in most cases you met the people from your label in Europe only once or twice a year because everyone is busy. In a lot of ways you don't really get a chance to know them. So we show up to meet these people from Roadrunner and it's like right off the bed and they are super nice and we're hanging out and talking about bands. We know so many people of them like the guys in Spain or France. We're going to meet the guys in Germany in a couple days and it's really nice to know that they have such like an awesome family and that's so far that we met seven people that work for the record label and hands down they are like the coolest people.
Punk76: After finishing in Europe the next stop is the United States for a tour with Every Time I Die. In September you will return to the UK to support Bring me the Horizon. Are there any plans for some shows in Germany, too?
Liam: I will say yes but I'm not sure about it. It's like today all of our planes are going crazy and all this stuff and I feel like there are people who have heart of our band and then this record comes out and people have bought it and there is like people going crazy where we hadn't sold any records before. So there will be definitely a lot of Europe shows in the near future. We will be in Europe so much people going to go 'Fuck I hate that band now!'
Punk76: All right! Thanks for the interview! Are there any last words for our readers?
Liam: Thanks for having me. This is my first time on Punk76, I'm stoked! Lastly, I love buritos!
Post a comment about Cancer Bats on the board
Buy this CD at:
| Itunes.com | Itunes.de |
| Amazon.com | Amazon.de |
| Ebay.com | Ebay.de |
Cancer Bats - Pneumonia Hawk
