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Interview Questions by Aly Mae & Yising Kao, Photos by Aly Mae
Vancouver, Canada
Concert Photos!: https://www.galaxy-mag.com/set-it-off-biltmore-cabaret
FOLLOW SET IT OFF!:
1. Congratulations on wrapping up “The Medicine Tour” with Sleeping With
Sirens, Belmont and Point North. What was your favourite moment from this
specific tour?
I don’t know if I can pinpoint honestly a specific moment but
the whole tour was fantastic and one thing I really appreciated about the
tour was there was no like drama at all throughout it and cause sometimes
people can get dramatic and it was just a big friendship tour and everyone
was so supportive of each other. I got a lot closer with Kellin and me and him
went out one day and played virtual golf on an off day and it was really fun
and it was really cool. But I think on a personal note, it’s getting back
together with the guys and just playing shows again and really feeling back
in control of our craft was just the overall great feeling.
2. You guys just released an amazing new single “One Single Second” off of After
Midnight! Are these new songs that you cut from Midnight or did you want to
create a project as a continuation?
You’re right on the first part. They were
three songs that we felt, so we wanted to release an 18 track album, we told we
couldn’t so we’re not going to let the songs die so we decided to release them as
singles and the reason why they didn’t make it was there were other songs on
the album that we felt served the same sort of purpose as those songs did and
the other ones were thought were slightly stronger but we still think they are
great songs so we decided to do that and kind of use it as a interim period
from now into going into the next era of Set It Off.
3. Your sound has evolved from Cinematics (2012) to Midnight as
you guys have matured over the years. How do you guys
challenge yourselves to constantly grow as artists?
I think it is a lot about who we end up writing with. I like to write with
anybody and everybody because I feel like every single
writing session is a growing experience, you learn about the
things that you’re capable of, things that you thought,
maybe you don’t know exactly how good you are until you
write with other people sort of thing. It can give you
confidence but also it can help you explore different sounds
and different possibilities. I grew up listening to pop music
so Brandon Paddock kind of opened that door for us cause
I never knew how to write it and I saw he did so he kind of
opened that door for me mentally. It is just always kind of,
it is never like an active decision if we're going to change
now, it's just whatever we’re going through or listening to
at the time is influencing us to continue to be who we are
today.
4. What is the process like for choosing which bands to join you on tour with these
different parts to “The Midnight World Tour”?
A lot of the time what we will do is our
booking agent will send out a submission list say this band is looking for these sort
of people, this sort of draw and or usually a lot of people will get a ton of names and we will look at this list and we will decide alright, who do we like, and if there are names we don’t know we will listen to their music and see do we like what
they're about and if we want to let them we will ask friends who have toured with them
before and make sure that they are really good people and stuff like that.
Sometimes people you know will be like “will you do me a favour, will you bring
this artist out?” And we’re like “oh yeah, you’re our homie and we know that we’ll
scratch your back and you’ll scratch ours”, because it is a business at the same time too so there’s a lot of factors that goes into it. Sometimes it is just that we have a notepad on my phone of different artists that I think would be great for direct support or an opening slot. Bands we are listening to or artists that we are listening to, people we want to bring back sometime. It is a whole convoluted process.
5. You incorporate orchestral instruments and even a gospel choir into your music,
such as featuring Matt Appleton of Reel Big Fish with his saxophone solo on “I
Want You (Gone)”, which is really unique! Thank You What is the creative
process that you go through when it comes to writing a song and combining these
sounds together? I think because of my musical background, like I grew up in
a classical environment, I was playing clarinet since I was age eight and I
was just doing nothing but symphonic band, wind ensemble, marching band,
jazz band all that stuff and its always been a huge part of my life, then my
first love of pop punk music was actually Ska music, so it was like they
always incorporated horns into it as a counter melody and I thought that
was really cool and at first we didn’t do that with Baby, Don’t Tripjaharda
and Calm Before The Storm and we had this long talk one night at Warped
Tour and maybe it would be so cool if someone mixed Mozart and Beethoven
with rock and so then that started the birth what ended up being Horrible
Kids and Cinematics era, then we felt like we were pigeonholing ourselves
just by being “now we are only this, and okay now you can’t be a creative
branch out” so well let's find a way to do that. So it’s this evolutionary
process that just kind of happened on its own but it’s always consciously in
my brain on how we involve these string lines so maybe like a string loop will
appear because that is more pop oriented now or on a cool string loop, like I
did that on Splice. So when we were are working, or already writing there
was this bridge coming up and I found this really somber sounding string
sample and it was like a whole orchestra, so what we did was I had our
produced Mike Green take the sample, patch them both together and then
he kind of threw them through these plugins and made it sound like our
soundscape. There are all these different avenues and ways to do it but it is
always in our mind to keep that on the record because it is very much us.
6. Your music videos tell narratives and portray visuals that express your lyrics
well. What’s your process of planning a concept for a music video?
It’s changed
over the years, but currently what we do is we have a creative director that
was overseeing this album cycle, her name is Shelby Sparks and usually
before what was I would try to come up with an idea or I co-directed
somethings during the Duality era. I would always be very literal and I
always liked that a lot because I liked that as far as theatre stuff goes or as
movies goes as it tells the story piece by piece but it is also not as, there is
multiple types of art out there and Shelby had her own style so I kind of took
my hands of the wheel a little bit more this time as far as that stuff goes. And
so she would basically give us a concept and we’d all come together and
discuss what we liked about it, what we wanted to change, how to expand
upon it and she would take those critiques and create a final treatment and
then once we loved it, presented it to the label. The label never gave us
problems and that’s how every music video happened on Midnight . Nice and
concise and we trusted her because her vision is sound.
Rapid Fire:
1. Who is the worst to share a room with (if you stay in a hotel) when
sleeping?
I think me (Maxx & Zach laugh) because I sleep with the TV
on, I stay up late and then also I can snore sometimes so I will have to
give that to myself.
2. Chick-Fil-A or In-N-Out?
Chick-Fil-A. Wow, that came out right away.
3. Instagram or Twitter? Why?
Instagram. I think it is less toxic. I also enjoy
visuals and it is more of a place of lifting people up than tearing people
down and that’s what I like about it.
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