PureGrainAudio.com conducted an interview with guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz of Massachusetts metallers KILLSWITCH ENGAGE when the band played in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on July 19. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).
On what it has been like working with singer Jesse Leach again since Jesse rejoined KILLSWITCH ENGAGE in 2012:
“Working with Jesse is always a great thing. He’s a very, very creative, thoughtful dude. He’s got really great lyric ideas. He comes to the table with a lot of just passionate, really cool, articulate ideas. It’s just really nice to work with somebody who is just so driven and so motivated. So having him in the band is always a great thing to have when making a record. It’s awesome.”
On how different it is working with Jesse today from how it was in the early years of the band:
“It’s completely different now. He was in the band when we began fifteen years ago, and he only lasted a couple of years, and then that’s when we had Howard Jones [singing for the band]. But [Jesse] was a completely different person back then; that’s the reason why he left the band. He didn’t really have any kind of… He didn’t really believe in himself; he didn’t have any confidence. But now he’s learned a lot of things about his voice, how to take care of himself on tour. He’s kind of a different guy when it comes to all that stuff. So, yeah, it’s actually a little bit different.”
On the lyrical themes covered in the songs for KILLSWITCH ENGAGE’s next album:
“Honesty, [there aren’t] too many concepts or themes yet. A lot of Jesse’s ideas are, again, kind of tying back to hanging on to the positive aspects of life through the negative aspects of life. There’s a lot of that thus far. We’re not completely, a hundred percent done with the record, so we don’t have a lot of things.”
On how the KILLSWITCH ENGAGE writing and recording process has changed over the years:
“We don’t really change much with what we do, writing- and recording-wise. We still kind of do our own ideas separately, show ‘em to each other. If we like ‘em, cool. If not, we’ll all get together and just kind of tweak the initial ideas, or just throw the song out, either way. And from there, we give all the ideas to Jesse, of course, and he’ll come up with his lyric ideas. And then we just go from there. We get into the studio and get some sounds down and start embellishing from there, and the song kind of just grows up.”
“I guess in the fifteen, sixteen years that we’ve been recording records, it’s mostly just computer-based now instead of before. A lot of things were analogue and a lot of things outside of the computer. It’s way different. I think it’s the reason why a lot of recording studios have gone by the way of the dodo. People end up recording a lot of records on their own, with their own computers and all that stuff nowadays.”
“I feel like a lot of the metal records nowadays are feeling really, really sterile, because a lot of people aren’t even recording drums. They’ll just progam ‘em, and then just go with that. And that seems crazy to me. That’s not the band. If you are a bandmember, wouldn’t you wanna be performing on the record? That’s a part of you. That’s what records are supposed to be. So we’ll always be that kind of band, where people are using equipment, playing equipment and recording it. That’s the soul of rock and roll, man. That’s it.”
KILLSWITCH ENGAGE’s follow-up to 2013’s “Disarm The Descent” is tentatively due in early 2016 via Roadrunner.
A KILLSWITCH ENGAGE concert film shot on October 31, 2014 at The Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts will be included on the band’s next DVD release. The performance footage was filmed by the direction team of Ian McFarland and Mike Pecci (FEAR FACTORY, MESHUGGAH) using five Canon C300 cameras outfitted with Zeiss Prime Super Speed Lenses.
KILLSWITCH ENGAGE has contributed a new song, “Loyalty”, to the mixtape for HBO’s hit fantasy series “Game Of Thrones”.
Source: Blabbermouth
