Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / Being Yourself With JOHN BOECKLIN From BAD WOLVES
Transcript
- 0:05Just your he did now hit you obscarity up to my eyes with all the
- 0:24absurd eleves Hey names John Bergland for the band back Wolves, I played drums.
- 0:28We got a new record called Diabout It comes out on Better Noise Records,
- 0:32Remember third and uh we worked our ass off on it. And here
- 0:36she comes in a couple of days now, beautiful John takes for Joinalists today.
- 0:41Good to see you, good to be here. I was actually Wolves
- 0:44releasing your fourth album, Dive out It on November the third. So Hey,
- 0:47you feeled about it, very kid, very fresh. She feels like
- 0:51a great start to a a cycle. We're gonna hit the road with Bush
- 0:57in America. I feel the record has a lot of not a vant garde
- 1:04things, but things we certainly haven't tried before, which makes us feel not
- 1:10stuck in our rut doing the same mold rock radio in general. As the
- 1:14kind of band we are, some very very very heavy songs on the side,
- 1:19and so you can feel it. You can feel it. Every album
- 1:23a creative rut of getting kind of stuck in certain formulas, and so we
- 1:29tried to do the best we can to stay out of those and just doing
- 1:33songs that feel more expressive and make you feel a little bit more emotions than
- 1:37some of the past songs. So can you dive into it a bit more
- 1:41deep and musically what you've done for it, what I've done with it?
- 1:45Yeah, like what you've done for with the album. We weren't I think
- 1:49where we started is we weren't going for anything. We dropped any ideas of
- 1:55well, this worked in the past, let's do that. Sometimes we did
- 1:57that. Sometimes, Oh, so like this did really good, let's try
- 2:00and do some of that. We I think the first song we some of
- 2:05the first songs we wrote for this album were musically We're die about It,
- 2:08the song the song n d A, which you know in the end as
- 2:13a two minute saxophone solo, stuff like that, which is just stuff we
- 2:17were just had never tried before. And Doc was a big part of He
- 2:23he came in. Normally I start by myself or with Max as a guitar
- 2:27player, but Doc came in and he wanted to start from the beginning,
- 2:30and he said, I'm here to disrupt your process. Doc is here to
- 2:34make sure that we don't go down the same roles and stuff like that.
- 2:37So that that that helped a lot too. So, yeah, we weren't
- 2:42shooting for anything in particular, but not focusing on our past was a goal
- 2:46of ours. So you've released this thing those legends Never Die, Bad Friend,
- 2:51and Die About It? So I would you say I've ruled there a
- 2:53good sonic representation? What do you expect? Legends feels like an outline on
- 3:00the album. It's there's not a song on it. There's not another song
- 3:04like that on the album, which is to me if anything is all one
- 3:07big vocal song, it's like a big vocal hook, you know. I
- 3:12feel like that could have been a post Malone song or something that's a very
- 3:16it's it's a it's a it's just say it almost has like a modern pop
- 3:23chorus, you know, stuff like that. But songs like Bad Friend and
- 3:27Die About It are very representative of the kind of the rest of the record
- 3:30and son of touch with this way. But the press release says that the
- 3:34band pushed the boundaries of their soundscape in pursuit of a new sonic dimension.
- 3:38Would you agree with that statement? Yeah, Like I said, like a
- 3:42two minute saxophone solo on one song, certainly rapping on on Die About It
- 3:49a song that's about the fear of getting old and fear of dying hungry for
- 3:53life. To me, that's the sonically. There's nothing we've ever done that
- 3:58sounds like that. It almost sounds like a Safari song, a jungle song.
- 4:03Just yeah. We've definitely pushed things and we found a new ground on
- 4:08this record, more so than anything else we've done before, for sure.
- 4:12At Dive. Bat of Cols follows twenty twenty one's Deer Monsters, which was
- 4:15a massive success. Mate, So didn't put any extra pressure on you got
- 4:17into this run the fact the last one was so well re saved. No,
- 4:25we felt the least amount of pressure on this album. Deer Monsters.
- 4:28We felt a lot of pressure due to our member change, and I think
- 4:32if anything, we were excited to get away from Deer Monsters and start over.
- 4:35Yeah. Yeah, now you sort of touch on this by but I
- 4:39already got to do it a bit data line. Is it tempting to recycle
- 4:44that winning formula when you get it on an album like that? Look,
- 4:47yeah, kind of like I was mentioning before, you can get stuck in
- 4:50the cycle of things that work radio radio. There's radio analysis people, you
- 4:59know, well, this won't work at radio, and we are, in
- 5:01fact at radio band, so we need to deliver something that is palatable at
- 5:06radio. And yes, it is very difficult to navigate that and feel respected.
- 5:14I feel your egos respected, like with like what you want to creatively
- 5:17accomplish and also please other people. And at the end of the day,
- 5:21it's not an easy to ask and we did less of that on this record.
- 5:28We stopped thinking about radio and started thinking with our hearts more so what
- 5:36you say, our role. There's a central theme or message to die about.
- 5:42Yeah, it's it's a message to complainers about this band or people.
- 5:47It's like, you know, there's been ways of negativity about this band online
- 5:53or whatever. It's a message. It's like if you're gonna cry about it,
- 5:56die about it, Like get the fuck out of my face, you
- 5:58know, like, don't waste your breath trying to take us down, because
- 6:05we're not giving up and we're just moving forward, you know. Yeah.
- 6:10So the album is kind of produced by the band members, yourself and Daniels
- 6:14What are so many advantages and disadvantages that keeping something that he has well was
- 6:18also produced by Josh Gilbert. Advantages. I mean this isn't the eighties.
- 6:26It's not. It's not like there's only a handful of people that understand,
- 6:30you know, how to work a board, and we don't even use boards
- 6:34anymore really, but how to work all the engineering aspects of it. Most
- 6:40people know how to do those things. So it's kind of like. The
- 6:42advantages is like you can cut corners and just do things yourself if you kind
- 6:46of and if you have a passion for it, then you can actually really
- 6:49make some cool tones. Disadvantages is, yeah, you're kind of talking to
- 6:56yourself in the mirror, like you're getting back what you're putting out, and
- 7:00you're not getting that outside perspective, which is what we use Josh Gilbert for.
- 7:03Josh is great at saying let's do this, let's do that, let's
- 7:08try this, let's try that. You know, but me and Dale could
- 7:12do that all day long, and yeah, once sometimes it's nice to have
- 7:15that last accent out outside help, but we could, you know, we
- 7:20got the record mixed by Joseph McQueen. We got a producer, Josh Gilbert
- 7:25d L and I alone could make an entire album and produce and mix it.
- 7:30He could mix it or whenever but it's not that's gonna be around eighty
- 7:35percent. It's not going to be one hundred. So yeah, there's limitations
- 7:39to what we can do for sure, but we try and get it done
- 7:42this you know, that's why we hire other people as well. Yeah,
- 7:46so as match man, this is a band's fourth album. So how would
- 7:49you say that band moves dound has changed from your debut distant Base and you
- 7:53die about it? Yeah, Like the first album was an extremely heavy The
- 8:03goal of the first album for me was write an extremely heavy record with like
- 8:07little to no screaming. I think there is screaming on the record, but
- 8:13it's far more experimental. It's like a jet It's a heavy metal jet record
- 8:20that had a cover song on it, and then one song that went to
- 8:22you know, hear Me Now is the song I wrote way before that.
- 8:26So once Zombie went off, like we need more radio, so then hear
- 8:30Me Now was on there, and then the song you know, remember when
- 8:35those got added at the end of the album recordings to ensure that we had
- 8:41songs that we could follow up greater with because once Zombie went huge, we
- 8:43knew the direction that we were headed. And then you know, when you
- 8:48have success that day. There's a lot of pressures. So the second record
- 8:54was a much more blend of rock and metal, whereas the first record was
- 9:00metals with and then the other songs just fell off the ledge and then the
- 9:03other. It was like two different bands. So then we just consistently as
- 9:07the next two records got better at blending the heavy to make you know,
- 9:11yeah, the heavy and the and the rock side of the bands, you
- 9:15know, mhm. And you guys have just recently come up to with Alexander
- 9:20and the who might How was that? Oh? We unfortunately had to pull
- 9:24off at that tour. Yeah, yeah, like a little bit right before
- 9:28for a bunch of reasons but not really worth totally getting into. But it
- 9:35ended up being a problem with our tour bus. Yeah, amongst other things,
- 9:39it was paying the assid Yeah, well, betters, are you handing
- 9:43out with Bush and I vempamite that should be a cracker of Zola. Absolutely.
- 9:48I heard Gavin's of metal head too, so I'm excited to maybe have
- 9:50a couple of conversations with him about heavy metal, you know what I mean?
- 9:54And uh yeah, I mean I'm the age of you know. When
- 10:00Bush arrived in America you know on the radios. That was in the mid
- 10:07nineties. That was my prime, thank you. That was when I was
- 10:11discovering music, you know all that stuff. So it'll be exciting to tour
- 10:18with them, watch the hits get played, all that stuff. Yeah,
- 10:20and then he plans to bring it this out of the world. Well we're
- 10:26trying. We were just talking about that this morning. So if youhang Tige,
- 10:31we'll see. Uh, we're trying to get to Australia, Europe and
- 10:33we want to make this whole record cycle, like get get the international land,
- 10:39internationally everywhere we can, you know. All right, job, Well,
- 10:43thanks very much for tom and I might die about it comes down with
- 10:46the third So that's what I'm saying, all right, thank you, just
- 11:00fading out into obscurity up to my eyes with all the absurdity bullshit that comes
- 11:18out your mouth and concerning me. You're never hurting me, looking bullish,
- 11:22universal labord and does he's with your prestol is playing your internet game for the
- 11:24hell of it? Grassfriend that straws you teem yourself for elevant with crystal clarity,
- 11:28lacking the etiquette. I don't want to talk a bounch of different man
- 11:31and I'm gonna come across there and like a pressive mass batman style. We
- 11:33just met the riper, Say crawl along glass because the motherfucker's till a kid
- 11:37kids stage winging on my sentiment in the meantime that a parliament and gentlemen,
- 11:39but we all know that you're just so niggatre and he give us something like
- 11:43a motherfucking sesamenta come on true well lord flush straws or make that same no
- 12:00can it's not super cab me time son stops show set slash back because I
- 12:15did a limited and the devil some of my badcock center could just let it
- 12:18go always time put your credit, but you have none, even if it's
- 12:20going to a lot to get it. Oh, he's a collision with the
- 12:22taste the vision, so it seems like admission. So your old man cried
- 12:26by that tells about it. Motherfucking dime chill story. No it's not call
- 12:41me time stops show said the sell no sound, it's not sup time son
- 12:58stop show mess s sad friend get the fugot you jolly no time, so
- 13:48started using show mess s sad frad nod that you bad sons told you up
- 14:07short and st