Interviewers: Jennifer F., Jesica Fowler, and Melissa Lozano |
HV: Since being on tour have you had any interesting things happen or crazy fan stories from the road?
Greg: Crazy fan stories?
Dan: What about… We keep telling the same crazy fan stories. But, one of our favorite ones is in North Carolina, a friend and fan of ours, he?s on the SWAT team so he took us out last time we were there and we went shooting at a… we shot all kinds of machine guns and shotguns and stuff at a firing range and we’re going back there next week and we’re going to go out in black hawk helicopters. So that’s pretty cool. Other than that, we don’t really have any real crazy fans, you know?
Greg: There are people that hang out.
Dan: There are people that are pretty obsessed sometimes.
Greg: I just told this story in the last interview, but uh… There’s this one fan in Chicago after one of our Metro shows that came down after we played and her face was all bloody from her nose and stuff and I was like, “Whoa, what happened?” and she says, “My boyfriend punched me,” and I’m like, “What? Why did he punch you?” “Cause I got to hang out with you guys before the show and he didn’t.” And I was like, “Whoa,” and she said, “And I broke my parole to come here from Michigan.” I was like, “Great, that’s awesome!” So, you know?
HV: What’s been your favorite band to tour with?
Greg: Well, we really haven’t toured with any bands.
Dan: We haven’t done anything long term yet. All the shows, we haven’t played with any bands for more than like, probably five or six shows. But we’re really looking forward to doing it.
Jonny: Chevelle, Eve 6.
Dan: Yeah, those guys are cool. Eve 6 is really nice and so is Chevelle. (to Garret, putting his drums in the room) Garret, you’re making a racket. (laugh)
Garret: Excuse me.
HV: If you could choose a band to tour with, who would you choose?
Dan: Well, we all probably have a different thing… I think U2, let’s go with U2.
Greg: Yeah, U2 is good, but as far as what would make more sense with our fans and stuff… Evanescence I think would be a really good tour.
Dan: A Perfect Circle.
Jonny: Nine Inch Nails…
Dan: Nine Inch Nails.
Jonny: Jane’s Addiction.
Dan: Yeah, we’re taking offers, so… Yeah, so who’s reading this? (laugh)
HV: You’ve played in a lot of different places, do you have any favorites locations?
Dan: We played for our first time in Denver about two weeks ago. We were doing really well there, the radio people seemed to really get us, so we had a sold out show.
Jonny: Cleveland.
Greg: Cleveland’s really cool.
Dan: The jury’s still out on Springfield, Missouri, but I think it’ll be pretty cool here tonight.
HV: I think a lot of people are coming.
Dan: Yeah, hopefully.
HV: So what’s the best part of being in a band? Writing, recording, touring?
Greg: Dan’s eating. Uh, worst part for Garret is touring, as you can see, he’s not very happy at this moment. (laugh) He hates touring. I love touring. I like the studio a lot too, he’s more of a studio guy. Everybody in the band’s got a different favorite thing to do. I think a majority of us… (Garret gets offered cookies) Free food, he loves it, he loves the touring… Um, I mean, all of us love being in the studio and playing live every night too, so… (Sirens in the background) As the paramedics go by.
Dan: We don’t make very much money.
Greg: Yeah.
Dan: And our health suffers being on the road.
Greg: There’s definitely more downside of touring than there is downside of the studio, so…
HV: What’s been your worst job?
Greg: Wish job?
HV: Worst job.
Greg: Oh, worst job… Jonny, why don’t you? (to Dan) You’ve had pretty bad ones too. We’ve all had bad ones. My worst job I think was actually bartending a lunch shift at a downtown restaurant, where they wanted martinis done a certain way with like you know, anchovy olives and it was like annoying. And you had to pack the olives yourself.
Dan: Bartending? You candy ass. (laugh)
Jonny: You have to tell them the one about the…
Dan: Oh God no, I could tell you these for hours. The actual worst one was probably I had to walk racehorses in the morning (Greg laughs) at like 4:30 in the morning and the thing was I only did it for a few days, and it was a seven day a week job, so there’s no break from it. And I got to… all the racehorses are inbred, so they bite you and kick you and everything. And all these other people I was working with were all illegal immigrants and ex-cons and stuff, so it was really —
Greg: How old were you?
Dan: Oh, I don’t know, 17. It was really funny. And I quit because a horse almost kicked me in the face so I just left that day. Jonny, worst job?
Jonny: Uh, I’ve only had two jobs my entire life. One was an internship which was fun and the other, I worked at a skate shop for half a year or something like that. So… yeah, I didn’t really have a bad experience there either.
Greg: (laughing) Garret, this is his worst job ever right here.
Garret: Yeah, my worst job was actually, I have two. One, I worked for Best Buy for one day and then quit. They put me in the television department and I can’t stand TV. And then the other one was baling hay. I volunteered to help my father-in-law out baling hay for his horses and it almost killed me. I couldn’t believe how heavy those things are and the thing just keeps shooting them at you. So you have to catch them and set them up, catch them and set them up. And yeah… I was like, near heart attack and I thought I could handle it. I had to clean up, yeah, for a week I had to watch their house and clean up after their horses. And it’s… I love horses, but they are a lot of freaking work.
Dan: When I was walking the horses, this guy pulled a knife on me because my horse drank out of his horse’s water bowl.
Greg: (laugh) What!
Dan: And he pulled a knife on me… and this was all at five in the morning, so you’re not really, you know. You don’t know how to deal with it at that time. It was great.
HV: If you weren’t in a band now, what would you be doing?
Dan: Walking racehorses. (laugh). No, I don’t know. Greg, you start.
Greg: What would I be doing? Probably something in the music industry. I love music, and I love film too, so probably something in music or film. I went to film school for awhile and then realized I wanted to do music more, so… And may as well take advantage of being young and being in a band, so that’s what I did.
Dan: I would move out of the country and probably start a… I don’t know, I really don’t know, a winery? Maybe try to get a job at a winery in a different country, I’d like doing that.
Greg: That’s great man.
Jonny: I didn’t get to finish college, cause I just got stuck with this band. Look at us now (laugh). No, so I’d probably finish college and then probably stick with music, do something in the industry.
Garret: Probably engineering. I’m into the…
Dan: Conducting a train? (laugh)
Garret: I’ve got one of those hats and the blue overalls already. I like to travel, so… I don’t like to tour, but I like to travel.
HV: Is there a reason for the butterflies?
Greg: (noticing recorder was stopped, gets it recording again) Now it’s recording. Hopefully that all recorded otherwise, you’re fucked! (laugh) Uh, butterflies, yeah. They’ve kind of always been with Kill Hannah before any of us really got in the band. You know, even from the first name of the record, or the first record was named Hummingbirds the Size of Bullets, so there’s always been —
Jonny: (laugh) Hummingbirds and butterflies are completely different.
Greg: Yeah, but I’m talking about the CD insertion where you see dead butterflies in the casing of Hummingbirds the Size of Bullets.
Dan: Want to hear an interesting story about the butterflies in the CD?
HV: Sure, yeah.
Dan: If you open it up, you know, there’s all different pictures of butterflies. A lot of those were captured out of our big grill of the van, we were driving the van, touring. And uh…
Garret: All of them.
Greg: All of them, really?
Dan: And we stopped at a gas station and we noticed there were all these multicolored butterflies. Most of them were pretty intact and they were huge and really colorful and we picked them out with tweezers. We have it on video tape too actually. we’re going to try to put it on something someday, so you can see it. But, we took them, put them in a box, and then we brought them home and scanned them into the computer. So they’re actually butterflies that we killed with our van.
HV: Do you have any early childhood memories you can think of?
Greg: I don’t know if I’d like to share that. I don’t know if you’d like to know. (laugh)
Dan: I know yours.
Greg: (laugh) Yeah, these guys know some dirt on me… Dan?
Dan: Oh, I don’t know.
Greg: In music, or just in general?
HV: Just generally, the earliest memory…
Garret: I remember my grandfather dying and my mom crying in her bedroom.
Greg: Yeah, I think I have that too.
Garret: But that’s not really uplifting.
Dan: When did John Lennon die, 1980?
Greg: Yeah, 1980.
Dan: I remember that. I was really, really young. I’m not going to say how young, but I was really young and I remember it being on TV. I remember my parents mood changing and everything and I didn’t understand what it was about.
Greg: What year was the space shuttle, was that ’84?
Dan: Oh, the challenger? ’85, I think.
Greg: I?d say ’85. But that not my earliest childhood memory, I got a bunch, but I don’t think that they should be shared with the public, actually. (laugh)
HV: All right, so is there anything about you guys that you don’t usually tell people, that they’d be surprised to find out about you?
Greg: That we’re heterosexual. That we’re heterosexual. (laugh) That Mat’s heterosexual. (laugh)
Dan: Not really, I’m pretty open.
Greg: Yeah.
Garret: If we tell you, then there’s no surprise.
Greg: Yeah, there’s no surprise. There’s some things left… that should remain in the closet, you know. (laugh)
Jonny: There you go.
Greg: Contradiction, man. You got to, you know…
HV: Do you have any guilty pleasures?
Garret: Fieldy’s Dream.
Greg: Yeah, Fieldy’s Dream.
Dan: Yeah, we like cheesy music. Some of our favorites stuff —
Greg: Dan, you’re out of control with the Fieldy. Tell them.
Dan: Oh, I don’t know.
Greg: Come on, that’s a good guilty pleasure.
Dan: There’s this guy, Fieldy, you know, the bass player for KORN, has a solo record. Have you heard it, his solo record? It’s the worst music that has ever been recorded.
Jonny: It’s a rap record.
Dan: It’s a rap record, but it’s so terrible and so idiotic… and I can’t get enough of it. I listen to it everyday. So there’s that.
Jonny: Avril Lavigne.
Greg: Jonny and I like Avril Lavigne songs.
Jonny: Yeah, a couple of them.
Greg: All the ones I’ve heard. I like them all. Only about four of them, but…
HV: That’s all the questions.
Greg: That’s all the questions? All right.
HV: Thank you guys.