With Grace We Fall

Baby Faces Going Places

Photo By Michael Ish

The city of Galt is best known for its annual Spring Strawberry Festival and the Galt Market, held twice a week, offering shoppers fresh fruits and vegetables among many other things. It is a surprise to most then to hear the sonic creations of Galt’s very own screamo/electronica group With Grace We Fall. This group of six young men produces an intense blend of brutal screams and breakdowns with melodic vocals and soaring synth lines. Although only half of them have graduated high school, WGWF has played an impressive amount of shows and has garnered themselves quite a following in Central and Northern California. Submerge recently caught up with three of the guys to chat about how they met, their plans for releasing new music and playing the Marysville stop on this years Warped Tour on Aug. 16 at Sleep Train Amphitheatre.

How did you guys get your start? How long has With Grace We Fall been doing their thing?
Micah Stevenson: How we started was just basically a couple friends messing around. We new each other for a while then we started just combining our talents and we were just messing around, not trying to do anything serious. Then we picked up different people along the way. That was a little less than a year ago.

What’s the age range of the group?
MS: It’s about 17 to 20.

Did you meet in school?
MS: Pretty much, yeah. We were friends in school and friends outside of school doing recreational stuff. We started hanging out and just fell together basically.

Are you guys still in school? Who has graduated?
MS: I’ve graduated, Cody [Dettman, drums] has and Doug [Sheldon, guitar] as well. John [Oliva, guitar, vocals] is still in high school, same with James [Garner, bass] and Matt [Miller, vocals].

For those of you that have, what are your plans? Are you going to college or are you going to do the band full time?
Cody Dettman: Micah and I are both attending a community college this semester. Doug isn’t. But really I think our main focus is going to be on school and then the band on the side. We’re waiting until things progress a little bit. When more opportunities become available, we’ll have to make that choice if we want to pick the band over school. I mean we can work around the schedule regardless. If we got signed or went on a big tour or something we would have to put the band first.

When you guys are writing is there one main songwriter or is it a collaborative process?
CD: It’s definitely all of us. Everyone has different ideas and brings different stuff to the table and we work with it.

Have you released any music officially? Demos, EPs or LPs?
John Oliva: Right now we just got some demos out with the five songs we have up on our Myspace. If we record more in the future we will probably put an EP out.

Do you have a general time frame for when that would happen?
JO: We’re pretty much just going with the flow, hopefully sometime by next year.

How many shows would you say you have played approximately? Have you toured or has it pretty much been regional stuff?
JO: Whoa, yeah, quite a few over the past year. We haven’t really been touring because most of us are in school.

You guys are trying to get on the Ernie Ball stage at Warped in Marysville, right? How were you getting people to vote for you?
JO: Yeah. We’re using myspace and we’ll tell people around our hometown and when we go to shows and just spread the word as much as we can.

Do you know how that is coming along? Do you think you have you been getting a lot of votes?
JO: We check it every now and then. We’ve been on the top 10 artists page a couple times.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this or not, but fuck it”¦We talked to someone at Ernie Ball the other day and they said you were definitely one of the bands they are going to choose for that date. How does that make you feel?
MS: No way! [Laughs] Basically John is rolling on the ground right now and running up and down the halls. I have the fattest smile on my face I’ve ever had in my life. I have an erection right now. Oh my gosh. I definitely think that now that we have this information we are going to work our asses off.