Head to Shoreline Amphitheatre on Saturday, June 20 for Vans Warped Tour! Although we’re bummed Warped skips over the Sacramento region nowadays, it’s nice to know that ticket prices are still reasonable enough (just $39.50 plus fees) that you can afford to fill up the gas tank to make it down to Mountain View. Nearly one hundred bands (yes, you read that correctly) are set to perform, including many old school/throwback acts like Silverstein, Senses Fail and Motion City Soundtrack. They join a ton of popular younger bands like Attila, Beartooth, Emarosa, We Came As Romans, Pierce the Veil and many others. As always, Warped isn’t just all about the distorted guitars and screaming vocals, either, as there are a few alt/hip-hop acts to look for like Mod Sun, Riff Raff and MC Lars, as well as some electronic/dance artists like Black Boots, ChrisB and Drama Club. There are even some spoken words artists (Jake Ducey and Trey the Ruler) and a few acoustic/pop acts as well (This Wild Life and Buttons, to name a couple). Get out there and discover some new music! Tickets are available online at Vanswarpedtour.com or in person at many of the region’s Walmart stores, which act as “Ticketmaster retail outlets.”

A Skylit Drive comes into their own on their latest album and gears up for another Warped summer

Summer. It’s as if just the sound of the word can make you feel young again. It conjures memories of skinned knees, camping, day trips to the lake (any lake, just pick one) or endless carefree hours at the beach. Fun? You bet, but all that running around, traveling and carousing can also be exhausting. Just ask Michael “Jag” Jagmin, vocalist for Lodi, California’s A Skylit Drive. This summer, he and his band mates will be taking part in another great seasonal tradition, the Vans Warped Tour, which turns 20 in 2014.

Since 1995, the Vans Warped tour has become synonymous with summer, especially for bands and fans of punk, hardcore, metalcore, emo and any and every hyphenated-hybrid thereof, and it’s not difficult to see why. The tour brings a veritable army of bands to fields, parking lots and amphitheaters all over North America. This will be A Skylit Drive’s third stint on punk rock’s most popular traveling circus.

The band had recently hit the road in support of their latest album, Rise, which was released in September 2013. Their fourth full-length album, Rise was something of a coming of age for A Skylit Drive. It boasts a bolder sound than their previous efforts thanks in part to a more painstaking writing and recording process, according to Jagmin.

The band first entered into pre-production with Jim Wirt (Hoobastank, Incubus, Something Corporate) as well as Mitchell Marlow and Kit Walters, who worked with A Skylit Drive on their debut Wires…and the Concept of Breathing before nailing down the finished product with producer Cameron Mizell at Chango Studios in Arizona.

Jagmin says this was the first time the band really had the opportunity to take their time recording an album, and he was really pleased with the results. In the past, however, writing and recording had to be done at breakneck speed.

“Everything is so fast-paced, there’s not a lot of planning that goes into it,” Jagmin explains. “You put out an album, and a year later the label is knocking down your door for the next one. And it’s like, what’s the game plan? And they’re like, you’re going here for a month, and that starts in three weeks. So we’ve got three weeks to write and a month to record, but we’re probably going to be writing that month in the studio as well. That was usually how it went.”

With a few successful albums under their belts, A Skylit Drive felt confident enough to speak up about how they wanted to do things.

“We put our foot down and wanted to take our time,” Jagmin says. “We weren’t promising when this album was going to come out. We wanted to make the right album…just give us the time, and we’ll give you the album. Things finally went and operated the way we wanted them to.”

Determined to take a more methodical approach to recording, A Skylit Drive left Fearless Records, which put out the band’s previous two albums, and returned to Tragic Hero, which released their aforementioned debut.

In the following interview, Jagmin speaks more about Rise and the band’s return to Tragic Hero and also waxes eloquent about the trials and tribulations of having so much fun in the sun on Warped Tour.

Was taking your time in recording something you brought to Tragic Hero but weren’t sure how they’d take it?
No, that was one of the biggest draws. Fearless is a powerful label and an extremely capable label, but our biggest concern with this album—being our fourth full-length, and we’re not a new band anymore—we wanted that time to work on it. And we also knew that it was going to need a little extra attention. On Fearless, even that label has competition with all these bands in the same genre, and it’s kind of overwhelming. We just felt that for where we were and where we are in our careers, going back to Tragic would have been a smarter move, to be back on a label that could hone in on us.

It must have been cool to go back home, so to speak, and it definitely worked out, because it was your biggest charting debut weekend, and their best seller as well.
I’m sure every band says this, but even a year later, this is the best album that we’ve ever done. The way that we wrote it, the time that was spent on it and the fact that we were able to do it the way that we wanted to do it, that kind of freedom had never been offered to us.

Was there anything you missed about the fast-paced recording process?
I would never want to do it at a fast pace again. It’s amazingly stressful. You don’t get to try all your ideas. You’re left listening to the album for the rest of your life hearing all the things you’d wished you’d done differently. Even on Rise, I’m sure I’ll hear one or two things that I’ll think could have been slightly cooler, but on the other ones, all the way through, I’m like, man, we could have worked on this so much more had we been given more time.

This will be your third time on Warped Tour this summer. Do you have a certain way of preparing for it? It’s such a long haul with a lot of long days.
As for performance and such, we prepare the same as we would for any other tour. As far as preparing for the long, grueling days, that comes with the experience of doing it before. There’s no real way to prepare for it. It’s not like we go running around outside, because even doing that, that doesn’t really get you ready for that. Sure, you have a bus or a van to go back to, but it’s not like going on a run because you’re whole day is different every single day. There’s no plan to it until when you wake up. You wake up, and it’s like, “Oh, you play at 1 today.” I just got up at noon, and I’ve got to play in an hour, or you woke up at 10 a.m. and you have play in an hour and a half. It’s like, oh crap. Time to wake up. Then it’s like, you’ve got a signing at this time at this tent. You have to do this at this time. It’s like, alright, I guess that’s my day.

When you’re in it, it must seem pretty hectic, but at the end it must felt like it all flew by…
I don’t know. Both times that we’ve done Warped, it definitely felt like it was as long as it was. As far as I remember, the days do not fly by. It’s just so hot, every day is a long day, and by the end of it you just can’t wait to go to bed.

As a vocalist, it must be tough on you not knowing when you’re performing. When I wake up and I just speak I sound like crap, so it must be a lot tougher for you considering you have to sing in front of so many people every day on the tour.
Yeah, it’s definitely a whole different experience. You’ll hear a guitarist complaining before having to go on early, and it’s like, your guitar doesn’t have to wake up. It sounds the same whether it has gotten an hour of sleep or slept all day, whereas I am my instrument. That definitely makes it harder, not having that repetition for your body to get used to. On a normal tour, your body almost naturally starts getting used to you performing at a certain time. Your body knows when it’s game time. On Warped Tour, you have to force the game time. There’s almost no perfect time for you to play for your body. If you play too early, you didn’t get enough sleep; if you play toward the end, almost all of your energy is gone because you’ve been waiting to play all day, and you’ve been out in the sun all day. I feel like most bands shoot for that middle of the day spot, because you’re finally awake, and the sun hasn’t sucked all the energy out of you just yet [laughs]. Every day is a different thing. I don’t think there’s any way to prepare for it.

All that being said, this is your third time doing the tour, so it must be something you really enjoy.
Oh yeah. All of this stuff about being tired, it’s not me saying all that sucks. It really is the best experience. It’s like mobile summer camp. I remember doing summer camp, and those days were tiring too. You’re running around, doing the [Water]Blob thing in the lake, playing games and everything, and by the end of the day, you’re knocked out, but you’re having such a great time. It’s definitely the most taxing tour I’ve ever done, and I’m pretty sure it’ll always stay that way, but at the same time it’s the most memorable tour I’ve ever done.

Michael “Jag” Jagmin on Game of Thrones

I saw on your Facebook page, you made a comment about this season of Game of Thrones. How are you enjoying the fourth season?
I don’t think I can handle anything else. Just when you think something is going one way… I could tell you that something is going to surprise you, but it will still surprise you. That’s the beauty of it. It’s almost like it’s right in front of your face, what’s going to happen, but you ultimately have no idea. As soon as it happens, you feel dumb. Like, Really? How did I not see that? That’s what makes the show so great. It can deviate you for that one second and then just sucker punch you.

How did you get into the show?
I started watching it in between the second and third season. Someone gave me the first and second season to watch. If I remember correctly, it lined up that as soon as I finished the second season, the third season started up. It was a major blessing, because I thought the first two seasons were the hardest to get through. All the characters were so overwhelming. To this date, I still don’t know all their names. I have not memorized the names. If someone from this house is talking about someone from another house, I have no idea who they’re talking about. I’ll pause it and google that person’s name and be like, oh OK, that’s who it is.

They should have an onscreen Wiki so you know who everyone is.
Yeah, or one of those pop-up bubbles like I Love the ‘90s. They should just have the person’s name pop up with an arrow that says, “This is so and so from the House Baratheon.”

Were you stoked when King Joffrey was killed? Because I jumped out of my seat.
Oh man. I almost kicked the cat. That was one of those shocker moments where I wanted to high five everyone I didn’t know.

The Vans Warped Tour rolls through the Sacramento area with a stop at the Sleep Train Amphitheater in Wheatland, California on June 26, 2014. A Skylit Drive will perform along with Finch, Saves the Day, Anberlin, 3OH!3, Bayside, I Fight Dragons, MC Chris…and pretty much every band ever. Go to Vanswarpedtour.com for a full list of performers and also to purchase tickets.

Andrew W.K. puts a tumultuous five years behind him

Hardships can be blessings in disguise. At least, that’s how Andrew W.K. sees it–maybe because he has little other choice. In 2001, W.K., born Andrew Wilkes-Krier in Stanford, Calif., burst on the scene and relased the best thing to happen to pop-metal since Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood. I Get Wet, W.K.’s debut album, catapulted the relatively unknown songwriter/party starter into the thick of pop culture’s collective unconscious. No doubt, anyone embarking on the road to stardom–for those lucky enough to achieve such a height–marks a strange and interesting journey. However, W.K’s path has seemed downright bizarre.

With the uneasiness of the past five years behind him, W.K. is back to doing what he does best: rocking the fuck out and igniting fans worldwide with his undeniable enthusiasm. He says a new album is on the horizon for 2011, but in the meantime, you can check him out on this year’s Vans’ Warped Tour.

How is Warped Tour going for you? This isn’t your first time. Do you still enjoy the experience?
I enjoy it more now than ever before. The first time we got to do Warped Tour was in 2002. We did a handful of shows. We were doing Ozzfest that summer, but we were able to duck out and get a little taste of the Warped Tour. We loved it and were able to do the entire tour in 2003. To be invited back to do it again after seven years is a big surprise. I’m really able to appreciate the professionalism and efficiency and the hard work of everyone involved much more than ever before. I think the tour has just gotten better. Every year it improves.

Being gone for seven years, have you noticed the scene change since the last time you were on?
I don’t even know what the scene is other than a bunch of people–really young people, young people of all ages–coming out to enjoy a really memorable summer day with high energy music. As far as a scene or culture that goes beyond that, I don’t know if there is one or how to describe it. It doesn’t seem really appropriate to call it a punk scene, it doesn’t seem really appropriate to call it anything except high energy. It’s enthusiastic about life and friendly and open-minded and passionate vibes.

You have a party tent set up at this year’s Warped Tour…
It’s a big tent that allows me and anyone who wants to go in there to celebrate the day together and create some memories and have some fun. I’m there, my band is there. We’re all hanging out there not only to say thank you to the folks that are coming, but to get those experiences and memories under our own belts. Every day that I play or tour–not just Warped Tour, but in general, going around the world doing entertainment–I meet people all the time who either saw us for the first time at the Warped Tour or first heard about us there or had a friend that saw us there. It’s definitely a powerful opportunity to make an impact and meet people, and that’s what the party tent is all about.

Close Calls With Brick Walls finally got a full release here in the United States and United Kingdom. The album had limited release here and elsewhere in the past, but how did it feel for the album to finally be available in stores to a wider audience?
It just feels like relief on one hand. There’s nothing more that I can do for that record. It’s done. It’s had its time, and now we can move forward. It’s very satisfying now that everyone who’s ever wanted it can now have it more easily. Of course, anyone who’s ever wanted it from when it was first released in Asia could’ve had it by downloading it on the Internet. It just felt good to make an official worldwide version. We love playing the songs from that. It’s great to make sure people are aware that it’s there.

Now that the album is out, does that signify the end of your contract dispute? You’re free to release albums under the Andrew W.K. name again?
The main issues that we had been having have been resolved over the past six months. Over the past year, we’ve been piecing together, reassembling the plans we’d had in place since ’99. It’s not very interesting to me. I would imagine it to be kind of boring stuff. There are a lot of people that it takes to work in show business the way we want to work. I’m grateful for this entire team of people and everything they do. I don’t talk a lot about what we do behind the scenes, but I’m glad it’s all worked out.

There were a lot of allegations made about you, and you seemed to be pretty open with confronting them recently. Are you happy with the way you handled the situation?
I’ve been dealing with certain allegations, rumors and accusations since the first album came out. I’ve tried to handle them many different ways. The stuff that you saw more recently…I’ve tried a different approach to be more upfront. In the past, I ignored things entirely, and that did not help. It made people a lot more paranoid or curious as to why I would ignore these things and pretend they weren’t there. Certainly the approach of acknowledging the questions was a new one, and I think it does work better that way. Sometimes, you think you can ignore an issue and it’ll go away, and this one didn’t. Almost 10 years down the road into my career, it’s never fully been resolved. People will always have questions, so from now on my approach will be to answer them, or at least acknowledge them as best I can.

Do you think the mystery helped you in some way, like, by giving you some sort of rock star mystique?
It could be fun to some people in the audience, but most people seem pretty upset about it. That hasn’t been fun for me either. The people I work with don’t want to be in the limelight. When you’re in show business, everything is on display to a degree, because it’s a show. Most people don’t care about bankers or pharmaceutical company people, because they think those characters are boring–and they usually are. But because show business has this automatic excitement, they assume that everyone working in show business is exciting, but they’re usually not. And they’re usually not interested in being exciting. They’re just interested in the business…

What happened with us was that people began to accuse me of not being–not a real person–but not being who I said I was, or not being the way I said I was, and that’s just not true. That’s been the hardest part for me, the disappointment my fans have had or my friends have had, that feeling of being disillusioned and getting hung up on genuine concerns, but ones that have just been distracting them from the real point of this, which is that this is supposed to be very fun and exciting… I would prefer that it all go away, and that’s why I used to deal with it by ignoring it.

Now that you’re out on the Warped Tour, have you noticed that it’s starting to fade into the background?
Most people don’t know or care about what we’re talking about. A small percentage of people I meet are concerned with this… It can drain a lot of energy from me. I used to be way more stressed out about it, because it felt really bad when someone would say, “You’re a fake,” or “You’re not a real person,” or “You’re a paid actor.” That took a lot of energy away from me too, so now I just try to focus on what really matters with this stuff, and ignore the rest or just let it be on the side.

Are you going to make anything else like 55 Cadillac again?
Someday I’d like to make another instrumental album. That one will always be the way that one is, but the next one is going to be a rock album for sure. That one had a lot to do with the contracts I was in. It came at the right time. It made sense at that time. But thank you for asking about that. I want to make all kinds of albums, you know?

The Devil You Know

Two nights in New York City have taken its toll on Jeremy DePoyster. America’s largest city is a lot to take in for new visitors and longtime residents alike, but for a member of a band whose star is on the rise, New York’s hectic pace can reach exhausting levels. DePoyster, guitarist/vocalist for Dayton, Ohio’s The Devil Wears Prada, has been shuffled from meet-and-greets to photo shoots to interviews, not to mention playing two shows at The Fillmore at Irving Plaza, which he says were “probably the craziest New York shows we’ve had.” DePoyster doesn’t mind all the fuss, though.
“I’d still take this over any other job,” he says through intermittent yawns, early in the morning after the band’s second show.

Submerge rustled DePoyster out of bed for the following interview.

What did tuning lower do for your songwriting?
We could still write our same style and still do our same thing, but it had a different feel to it, just because we’re not used to playing in that tuning. Playing our same style of things and our same style of writing in a different tuning, it added a different feel to even the singing parts and everything like that. It was heavier.

Do you think it opened you up creatively?
Yeah, definitely.

Was there a particular song that was really benefited by using the lower tones?
There were two songs, I’d say, “Assistant to the Regional Manager” and “Wapakalypse,” that would have suffered if they weren’t in that lower tuning because of the style of the riffs and stuff like that. They were definitely helped by being in that lower tuning. There was this other song that we did that had this really epic singing part at the end of it that I thought was cool just because it was in a different tuning with different chords than we would normally play. I could do some different stuff with it, and if we had done 10 or 11 more songs in drop-D, it would have just been too monotonous. It would have been just like Plagues.

I read a quote by someone in the band that said the new album is “more mechanical” than what you’ve released before. Would you agree with that?
I don’t know who said that. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s more mechanical. Maybe they meant better structured because I think we’ve become better songwriters together than our last two records. Plagues was a big step forward in our songwriting, but I think this one even more so. The songs flow better through out. Other than going into some weird tempos and things like that. We’ve done that before, and that was cool, but it’s not really what we want to do now. We want to write better songs and not just breakdowns and big metal riffs and stuff like that. I think it [With Roots”¦] is easier to listen to and it’s more catchy because they flow so well all the way through. My favorite songs on the last record were songs like “HTML”¦” and “Hey John”¦” and stuff like that, because they flowed pretty fluidly throughout the song. We tried to do that with all the songs on this record.

So it’s less about seeing how much you could cram into one song than it is making the songs cleaner?
Yeah, exactly, and I think we were a lot more apt to, like, if it didn’t make sense in the context of the song, we would just scrap it. As opposed to before, we would be like, “What should we play here, this weird little thing? Yeah, let’s do that. Why not?” This time we were stricter on what made the cut and what didn’t.

I was reading the lyrics for “Dez Moines,” and one of the lines goes, “Profit zero, achievement zero.” I know the band’s name deals with materialism, and that seems to work into that song in particular, as well as being a recurring theme within the band. Do you see materialism as one of the biggest problems this generation has to overcome?
I don’t even know if it’s necessarily this generation. It’s just one of those things where”¦well, it’s hard to say. As a Christian band, we’re working for God first. I know myself, in my own personal life, it’s easy to get wrapped up in other things, whether it’s guitars or video games. I collect DVDs and stuff like that, but none of that stuff really matters in the end of it, by any perspective. It’s not important. It’s just something that’s always been important to us, and Mike [Hranica, vocals] really dove into that again lyrically.

Given what you just said, are any of the songs on the new record inspired by the current financial situation? What’s your take on that?
Reading through the lyrics, I wouldn’t say any of the songs are inspired by the financial situation. We haven’t really talked or thought about that whole business too much. I know we have one political song, but it’s a little bit different than that. It’s obviously a scary time for everybody. Even before all this crap happened, it’s been really hard to sell records, because everyone downloads, and the labels are suffering, and the bands aren’t selling as many records. Someone’s record just came out, I don’t know, Kelly Clarkson or something, and it only sold 250,000 copies the first week, which is insane that she would only do that many, where if it was three years ago, she would have done a million or something. It hasn’t really affected us, because we still have a lot of people coming to shows. We’re really lucky in that. Obviously, it sucks. Industries are crashing—the auto industry and all that stuff—and that’s not cool.

You’re headed out on the Warped Tour, and I guess it’s a nature of the beast, but there’s a lot of marketing that goes on during the tour, in the tents between the stages, does the commercial aspect of the tour bother you at all?
Not really. We’re not a punk rock band or anything. It doesn’t really matter to me, I guess. I come from a different background. I used to go to Warped Tour when it was in the new shape of things—Fall Out Boy and all those bands—and I was really into it. I was telling someone the other day that Kevin Lyman is a genius, and he’s done a really good job of keeping the tour current. He could have kept it all old punk bands just to please people and appease people, but he hasn’t really done that. He still brings back those bands every year, but he also brings in a lot of the new things. We didn’t know what to expect going into it. We thought it was either a pop-punk tour or a punk rock tour, but we went in on the first day and had a huge crowd and that happened the entire tour—the craziest shows we ever played. He does a really good job of building a broad package that still does really well.

You already mentioned that you and the members of the band have strong Christian beliefs, but many bands in the metal genre have a decidedly anti-Christian message. Did you listen to a lot of metal growing up, and why did you choose this form of expression?
Yeah, I definitely listened to a lot of metal growing up—and even more so now. I love Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer, all that good stuff. Musically, I love those bands. I don’t necessarily agree with what they say, but I can appreciate the music. I think the same thing applies to us. I mean, obviously we’re a Christian band, but we’re not preaching. We’re not shoving things down people’s throats. If they do come from a metal background, and they’re really anti-Christian or whatever, I still think they can find something in the music that they like.


Also read The Devil Wears Prada at Club Retro in Orangevale on April 19