Raleigh, North Carolina natives Alesana have been making post-hardcore music since 2004. Shawn Milke (vocals/guitars), Patrick Thompson (guitars), Dennis Lee (vocals), Shane Crump (bass/vocals), Jeremy Bryan (drummer) and Jake Campbell (guitars/vocals) released their debut album, On Frail Wings of Vanity and Wax in 2006, and re-released it in 2007 after signing with Fearless.
In 2008, Where Myth Fades to Legend was released and hit the #96 spot on the Billboard 200 chart as well as #13 on Billboards Hard Rock Albums chart. The band also spent a day in the studio recording a cover of Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around, Comes Around” that was featured on Pop Goes Punk 2. With a new album titled The Emptiness set for release in early 2010 and a slew of national tour dates, Alesana is definitely making waves in the music industry.
Milke took a few minutes after their show in Des Moines, IA to chat with editor Lucy Albers about their current tour, the upcoming album, and future plans.
Have you been to Midwest states before?
Yes, but very sparsely. Midwest is kind of a you-only-do-it-once-in-a-while kind of thing, and we’re kind of doing a B-market run right now. We were in South Dakota once like four years ago. There are actually only two continental states we’ve never played before: North Dakota and Vermont. And we hit both of those on this tour so I’m kind of excited. The shows around here are usually a little bit smaller, but the kids that are coming out are way more intense, so it kind of balances itself out.
What can kids expect for your shows?
We go absolutely insane every night no matter if there’s two kids or two thousand kids. Everybody gets the same show because every bought a ticket. Some bands, when they perform, they won’t perform quite as well with a smaller crowd but that’s just not how we do things. It’s one thing that you’ll always get from us is our intensity.
You guys recently finished recording your latest record, The Emptiness. I’ve heard it’s a concept record, is that true?
We’re trying to avoid saying it’s a concept record because that scares people away. They automatically think the songs are going to be weird or whatever. That’s not the case at all. Basically, we’re calling it our new story. Dennis and I are both complete book nerds and we’ve always made our albums thematic. The first album was based of Greek mythology, the second album was based off of fairytales, and it was always in our dreams from day one to have a record where we wrote the story. So the record is one whole story lyrically, with each song being a separate piece of the story like a chapter in a book. It’s not conceptual, we’re not trying to preach or take the side on some controversial record. It’s just a long story. It would be like if you went out and published a novella. It’ll all make sense when the record comes out.
Any hints on what the story is actually about?
We don’t want to give away too much in the beginning. We’re working on getting it out piece by piece. Our whole MySpace layout is an illusion to the record. We’re not giving away too much but it’s basically like a love story mixed with a lunatic type theme. That’s why we dressed up in our photos, we wanted to look like normal dudes who are completely insane but you wouldn’t think that just by looking at them. Then with the newspaper, if you look closely the two articles on the side both allude to characters in the story. One side is for the artist and the other side for Annabel Lee. Everything is going to match up on January 26 when our record comes out. Our live show, the record, our artwork and posters, it’s all going to be this one big story. That’s one thing that’s maybe hurt us and helped us in the past is that we’re not a band that does things in a traditional way. We just write a bunch of songs and we write it so that you don’t necessarily have to know the story to like the song.
How long have you been working on the concept?
Dennis and I are really good Edgar Allen Poe fans and we really write our lyrics cooperatively. It’s like co-authoring a book, we write everything together and the concept came up because we both like horror. We were originally going to present it like contemporary horror but it didn’t really seem like our band. Everything we’ve done is kind of ancient with mythology and fairytales so doing something contemporary would be going against our band. So we picked an author that we thought did some pretty good horror stuff back in the day and we picked Poe. And that’s actually where Annabel Lee came from; it was the last poem that Poe ever wrote. It’s been a sort of work in progress since about January.
Musically, how does it compare to your other albums?
I think every band kind of finds themselves by the third record. If you look at it, you have your whole life to write your first record, and then you have a time frame to write every record after that. So of course our first record had that very honest feel and a very under-produced sound of course because we didn’t have much money. And on the second record we did the whole producer thing and it was a much more clean-cut sound. With this record we pretty much took what we loved about our band before anybody knew who we were and brought that in to our writing style. Alesana fans will know it’s Alesana, but there’s also going to be this whole mature thing to it that will appeal to other people as well. We even brought in the Portland Symphony to do a live string quartet on the record. We’ve always found our band to be very theatrical so we went with a producer who really understood that about our band and helped us get that.
What is it about Alesana that fans like?
All of us consider ourselves to be, I don’t want to say a cult band cause that sounds kind of vain, but the fans that we do have are the most devoted fans that you could ever find. We’re definitely not the kind of band that just has the fans that like you because you’re the new cool thing. The fans we’ve had since day one aren’t only fans yet today but still massive fans that will drive for hours to see us and completely get what we’re doing. With some other bands that started off the way we did and shot into popularity, our popularity may not be along the same scale, but it’s a much more intense scale. These people totally get our music and that’s honestly what we want out of it.
What else is up for you guys in the future?
Well right after Thanksgiving and up until Christmas we’ll be touring the western part of the U.S. where we go to some smaller cities that didn’t get to see us. We’re still finalizing our 2010 tour plans but it will for sure be another 300 days for us on the road, which is pretty much what we’re known for doing. Hopefully we’ll get some more international dates in. Our international fan base has completely surprised us. And basically just push our album more.
Currently on tour with The Bled, Enter Shikari, Asking Alexandria and Broadway, Alesana makes a stop at Nutty’s North on Thursday, September 10. The all ages show starts at 7 pm and is $14 in advance. Visit Pepper Entertainment‘s website for more information or to purchase tickets.
