#interviews1

How would you describe your style?

I guess all of it is hard to describe. It’s like asking what does rain sounds like. I think for everybody it’s a little different but I would say for mine, I wear my influences on my sleeve and it’s a combination of all the things that I loved growing up aesthetically. I’ve always liked darker imagery and more “gothic” things so it’s a little bit of that. I love sports too so there’s a little bit of athletic thing in there and a little bit of all of that.

Who are your music idols?

I’ve always been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen, and like I said before I love KISS. My favorite band growing up was Alkaline Trio. I loved The Misfits, New York Dolls, kind of all over the place I guess. Generally speaking in the Rock world but you know I also like Hip Hop when I was kid like Outkast and stuff like that.

Can you walk us through your process as an artist? How do you usually come up with songs?

Every song is different. Sometimes it starts with an idea and then it’ll be a lyric and sometimes it’s the melody and I write something around that. I’m not someone who has a constant creative process, it’s kind of always depending on the song or where it’s coming from. Some of the time, I’ll come up with a concept and then write lyrics around it and try to figure out a melody and other times it starts with a melody or a piece of music.

If you could collaborate with an artist dead or alive who would it be and why?

I mentioned Springsteen before. I would love to be able to work with him just because he’s such an influence on my writing style.

What’s the story behind your new album, The Ghost of Ohio?

I grew up in southern Ohio and I was deathly afraid of everything growing up. I couldn’t sleep in my room by myself. Sometimes I’d sleep in the hallway outside my parent’s bedroom when I was a little kid on the floor. I would set booby traps for ghosts in my room. I was obsessed with the idea that something was out to get me and as I got older I didn’t really have that as much anymore but I still had an interest in what was so frightening and so I started doing research into my hometown and found all these crazy ass ghost stories and stuff and so I just decided that I kind of wanted to write my own folklore. It was influenced both by my childhood and a podcast called, “Lore” with a guy named Aaron Mahnke, who is a wonderful storyteller, and that was hugely influential in kind of the writing for the bible so to speak for this story and just kind of taking actual parts of folklore and applying it to this new story.

What inspired you to create the tracks in it?

Every track has a different inspiration. This album in particular is really speaking about my upbringing and growing up kind of being a loner and feeling like I didn’t have a lot of place to belong so finding my own fun and ways to navigate life.

Is there a specific track that’s closest to your heart?

There’s a song called, “Heaven” that I wrote about my relationship with my wife and how much she means to me. For me it’s very difficult because, day to day, I have 3 or 4 emotional freak outs and I’ve always had her there to talk me off the ledge and be my rock and I try to be there for her as well on the same capacity so we’ve gone through a lot in our life and it was just kind of a song about how much I appreciate her.

Top 3 music in your playlist right now.

I’ll pull up my spotify and see what I listen to.

David Bowie - Let’s Dance

The entire Alkaline Trio Crimson record

Our Lady Peace - Burned

Foxy Shazam Self Titled Record

Tell us about your upcoming show, Paradise City and your character, Johnny Faust.

There’s a film, American Satan, that came out in 2017 and I play a character who wants to be a rockstar but unfortunately things go awry and he makes a deal with this devil like character that makes him ultra famous but also becomes a drug addict. His whole life blows up. The series takes place after the film and it’s not about the supernatural element but more about what it would be like to follow this guy who risked everything to become ultra famous but now that he’s so incredibly famous, has to pick up the pieces of all the lives he’s’ affected in a negative way.

What’s something that people don’t usually know about you?

Sometimes people don’t necessarily know that I played a lot of sports growing up and I was a hockey player from my adolescence. It was a big part of my life.

If you’re not creating music, performing or acting, what usually keeps you busy?

I follow sports particularly Cincinnati sports, so that’s kind of a hobby of mine. I collect sneakers. When I’m on tour, we just play sports video games all day and then just sitting alone (laughs)

If you’re a book, what kind of book would you be and why?

IKEA instruction manual. Impossible book.

Any advice that you can give to any aspiring artists/musicians/singers/songwriters out there?

Don’t be afraid to suck and don’t be afraid to have people tell you that you suck. When people start, the hardest thing to do with is deal with criticism and I feel like if you’re able to build a kind of teflon suit around yourself and let criticism bounce off you, you’ll have a much larger likelihood of being able to succeed because you won’t be inhibited by the negativity.

Ben Bruce: You’re very much thrown into the deep end quickly and you either learn to swim or it does consume you. Over the years there have been countless iconic rock and roll films, but the characters were all actors. I think one of the wonderful things about this film, that we’re all musicians. We have lived this life, we have been through it, so when you watch this film its a unique perspective.

Sam: What would you say are some of the musical influences for the film? Tell me about some of the composition.

Ash Avildsen: Once the band explodes, I wanted to have the music sound like what a big band might sound like today. There are a lot of bands on rock radio right now that are imitating the greats.

Ben Bruce: (to Ash) It would have been really easy for you to go down that route and pick some old hits, but you didn’t do that.

Ash Avildsen: I wanted to be like “Okay, what if Tool was a more mainstream heavy metal band with more raspy punk vocals?”. So I strayed away from having the band sound classic rock, I wanted it to sound modern and relevant. We weren’t ambiguous with the time frame. A lot of movies wont tell you the time frame, “It Follows” did a really good job with that. We wanted to make it clear that this was present day.

Andy Biersack: The truth is for us, as career musicians emulating these musicians playing these songs, one of the coolest things for me and I think for Ben as well is that these are not our bands. We got to be these other people with this other sound, and that was a great way to get lost in the character. It didn’t feel like this is what we had done everyday for the last decade.

Ben Bruce: I did an interview not too long ago where they asked about that, and the craziest thing about this for me is I’m not necessarily in the place that my character portrays in the movie anymore. It really did take me back, the movie for me was very nostalgic. It made me look at how I was when I was young and think “I can’t believe the place that you’ve come to in your life and the person you’ve become”. Because it did feel very familiar, and its scary.

Sam: What are some of the directorial influences in the movie? What works did you study while making “American Satan”?

Ash Avildsen: This is really a coming of age story, and one film I loved growing up was “Dazed and Confused”. That doesn’t get too dark, but if it got way more gnarly that would be similar. As far as music film influences go, “The Doors” is really the best one. There’s another film called “Sing Street” that we looked at, I thought “Straight out of Compton” did an excellent job. I really wanted the audience to be along for the ride, feeling like the sixth member of the band.

Sam: What do you want your audience to be thinking after they see this film?

Ben Bruce: There’s the age old thing of people saying “Ah, you’ve got the best job in the world!”. This movie just shows that isn’t factual, that’s not the case. We love our jobs, we have a great time, but there’s so much that goes into it, so many things that can drag you down as a person. I want people to step away from this movie and say “I get it”.

Andy Biersack: One of the things that I’m most struck by and that I hope people will see is that people can change. When you’re young and living fast, whether or not its rock music, you might do things before you’re able to put real thought into who you’re going to be. I think that by the end of this film, Johnny is ready for change and the next chapter of his life. I hope that if nothing else, maybe some young people that see this who are going through something similar see that it’s okay to grow and change.

Ben Bruce: You’re not destined to live a life of your past, and that speaks loudly in this film.