Frantik Interview: The Dear Hunter “Sometimes I Feel Like This Is That Weird Surreal Period Where A Band Fails Or Does Really Well”

21 Dec, 2009

The cell phone crackles on an unusually warm day in November and a familiar voice picks up on the other end. The voice is familiar as I heard this voice live in it’s full capacity two days prior to this interview and it’s resonated in my head ever since. The voice belongs to none other than The Dear Hunter’s enigmatic and talented frontman, Casey Crescenzo. The Dear Hunter were at the last days of their tour with Thrice and Casey was nice enough to do this phoner with me to chat about a few things such as their magnificent CD Act III: Life And Death, the H1N1 vaccine and what he would like to see happen in 2010. Hanging out in their RV just about 50 miles or so away from me, Casey and I got down to business and had a nice talk without any cell phone cut-offs, diva drama, dropped calls or weird interferences, usual with some frontmen of this generation. Nice. Read our chat down below.

Hey Casey! What’s going sir and what are you up to?

Right now I’m in Anaheim, sitting in the RV, waiting for a few of the guys to wake up and see what we’re going to do for the rest of the day until we play.

Awesome man. Now you guys are going to be coming off the road I believe after two more shows. What are you guys going to be doing after this tour and do you guys have any plans of touring in 2010 by any chance?

Definitely. We’re going to hopefully do a headlining tour in early spring but beyond that, we don’t have any definite plans. We’re basically going to promote this record as long as we can.

Cool! Now do you guys have any new material brewing in the lab? Maybe for future release? Not sure if you guys are currently writing or taking a break.

I like to take breaks in between writing records and sitting down laying a record out but there’s definitely a few songs that are kind of floating around that when we get free time, we like to form them. Nothing definite right now, but I know that we’re all itching to get back in the studio.

Awesome, I know you guys definitely need that break. Lets go back to Act III: Life And Death. Can you tell us a bit about the recording process and what transpired in the studio during this time?

Actually, at the time that we started writing the record, we were also building a studio in this kind of like industrial building. Right around the time we finished writing and started recording was right when we had our studio finished. I produced the record and engineered it with my band mate, Andy Wildrick. We also own the studio that we worked at so the whole thing started in September and we were done by March? It was six to seven months of work with a few breaks here and there but we definitely wanted to take our time and didn’t want to force anything and that meant a lot of time spent searching and exploring so it wasn’t all necessarily grueling work. We wanted things to happen naturally and it ended up taking a little longer than previous records have but I think we’re all really proud of what it turned into.

Well, I’ll tell you this much, six to seven months or not, the record sounds phenomenal! I didn’t even have a clue that you guys did the whole thing yourselves! Great job!

Thanks!

Where did you turn to for inspiration while writing lyrics and how serious did you take yourself while writing lyrics?

The record is primarily about what can happen if somebody was in the situation of a band in war. I mean have not experienced anything even close to being in war but I tried to draw from my imagination of what I’ve been through and what it’s like being in a band and kind of being having rely on each other and only each other at times, feeling stranded, feeling chaos at times and trying to find some solid ground in the way that it takes a toll on you mentally. I guess the inspiration of what this record is about, as far as what can happen, would be just looking inside of what happens to us in extreme situations. I wanted to use a much more romanticized and extreme sort of setting that’s why I turned to something like war. I also wanted to make a record that was about war that wasn’t necessarily a political record or a record that was complaining but more of a observant approach to writing about it and that’s kind of the heart of where it all came from.

Awesome man and you successfully did that on this record! I caught you guys Monday night and it was my first time seeing you guys live and I’d have to say that I’m pretty impressed!

Thank You!

The thing that stood out for me was the power of your voice. What are some of the things that you do to take care of your instrument and who are some of the vocalists that influenced you while growing up?

You know, for a long time, I was in a band before this band where the vocals were kind of demanding, more powerful and intense. For a long time, I didn’t really take care of my voice very well. At first it was that sort of pushing the boundaries of my voice and breaking it and then letting it heal. For me it was like when a broken bone heals it would be stronger but there’s a fine line of breaking it and letting it heal and going too far. I’ve heard a lot of stories of vocalists who end up with the nodes in their throats or real damage done to their throat from excessive singing intensity. For me, it was just a long time that I didn’t know what I was doing and that worked for a while and helped me expand my range and helped me kind of learn the boundaries of my vocal chords. But then it got to the point to where the stuff I was writing and the way I was singing was so intense that I could only really last on tour for only a few days and so when I was on tour with mewithoutyou, a couple days into the tour, I completely lost my voice to the point of just embarrassment when I started singing. I then talked to their singer Aaron, who also sings with real intensity, and he showed me thei DVD of vocal lessons and exercises so I started doing those and it made it so much easier to tour and maintain a voice on the road. For me it’s weird, everything influences liability to sing from obviously the way I slept to the weather. To throw into not warming up or not taking proper care of my voice on top of the variables make things really scary so I started warming up and that’s actually only started in the last six months. I’m glad I did start cause I’ve been watching a lot of vocalists around me kind of end with some real major problems. I would die if it got to the point of someone was to tell me that I’d have to stop singing. As far as vocalists that I really inspired me? I grew up on Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and as I grew up, vocalists like Rufus Wainwright, David Bazan from Pedro The Lion, all influenced me. Even when I was 17 or 18, I was listening to a lot of Incubus and 311 cause I was living in Southern California. Now it really is like vocalists like Rufus Wainwright who are so expressive and such masters of their voice who know what they can do with it and know what to do with it. Those are the vocalists that are really influencing me now, the people that can do it seemingly without effort.

Well, those are some pretty good vocalists to be influenced by. Those are some excellent points cause I seem to talk to a lot of bands that have a problem with this, like getting nodes. You know you begin to wonder if they were ever properly trained before hitting the road and what kind of damage their doing to their instrument and if only they could’ve trained their voices before going out.

Absolutely. Stepping out into the cold air while you’re still wet, hopping into a van, going into a hotel that may give you not very good air, waking up praying you don’t have a sore throat is like walking a very thin line. Warming up is so necessary.

It is! Hey Casey, are you brothers with Nick? ? ? Saw your last names?

Yeah!

How is it having a brother in the band with you? There’s a pretty good track record of successful bands with brothers like Van Halen and Pantera.

It’s great! I was playing with him and jamming with him since we both started with our instruments and then to finally be able to be in this band is awesome! To bring a level of common creativity to what we do, whereas before the percussionists that we had a little bit of struggle to get what I was generally going for and what my perspective and opinion of what should the percussions be was also based on what my brother played. So to have him in the band is a step to translate what I want to hear. That alone is amazing on it’s own. To have family in the band is always a good thing.

I hear you. So you guys have been racking up some pretty good reviews of your live shows and latest CD. Do you guys feel like you’re finally getting a break for all of your hard work and is everything finally coming into focus for you guys?

You know what I don’t know? Sometimes I feel like this is that weird surreal period before a band fails or does really well. It’s an interesting time where we’ve successfully put out three records that our fans enjoy and the critics seem to enjoy and so now it’s that time where I feel like the next step of our band has to be a big step in one direction. We can really push ourselves and grow or to look at what we’ve done and be finished but none of us want to be finished. We all really want to continue with what we’re doing so I hope that if I was to take a step back, I would think we’re growing. It’s so hard when you’re inside of it, to look around and really be able to tell one way or another but I know that just the fact that we’re still playing and still seeing people sing along with us and more and more people singing along with us definitely feels more things are happening for us. It’s so hard to tell. You’d play one city and it would be so phenomenal and the very next night, it’s an absolutely different experience. It’s hard to combine them all and get a good cross section of your band.

Alright Casey, let’s reach into your head. H1N1. Take the vaccine or skip it?

Ha! I think I’m going to skip it! I have a fear that if I would have to take the vaccine that my body would actually succumb to it and something bad would happen. It just seems like; what was I hearing? Something like to treat it as a normal flu? I don’t know vaccines scare me.

With you on that one, skip it! Which band member has the most interesting mix of tunes in their iPod?

Definitely Nate, our bass player. He listens to such a wide variety of music like everything. He’ll listen to everything from the heavier music to really soulful R&B and then all the music we listen to, indie, singer-songwriter music, and he is definitely an open mind listener to music.

Aside from your mind blowing record, is there another record that should get the “Album Of The Year” nod for 09’?

I really loved the record by David Bazan called “Curse Your Branches.” It’s such an amazing musical record and out of all of the records I’ve heard this year, I definitely feel like it’s the most powerful record I’ve heard in a long time.

I’m going to have to check that one out. Since Christmas is coming up, know of any Gag gifts I can pick up for people? I was thinkin’ of the Snuggie.

I don’t know? Didn’t Weezer come out with a Snuggie? Snuggie’s always a great bet.

Fair enough! How do you feel about people’s addictive obsession with networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace and what do you think would happen to music if these sites all of a sudden shut down?

Oh, I think it’d be wonderful! I think that bands would have to get by on the merits of their music a little bit more instead of instinctual ability of self-promotion on sites like Twitter. The heart of what makes these sites good is eventually molested in; I’m not an extremist in any kind of way, but it’s very commercialized and at some point, it just becomes another way for bands to market themselves. I feel like a band spreads themselves so thin and they feel like they have to update Twitter, update Myspace, update Facebook and this and that and they definitely lose sight of the fact that they should be marketing who they are and not what they do. It doesn’t matter if you woke up this morning and had the best steak and eggs in your life. You shouldn’t be telling your fans about that. You should be spending your time becoming a better musician or songwriter or writing music instead of alerting people about the movie you just saw and really liked. The idea of these sites keeping in touch with your friends is amazing but the way that it’s being used for music, I guess just annoys me. I think it would be wonderful if all of those sites just eventually shut down and bands went back to just playing shows and people went out to just see music and more.

I couldn’t agree with you more. Great answer! What would you love to see happen in the year 2010?

I would love to see us stay on a steady growth. I don’t want anything to happen too fast and I don’t want us to have some song that hits like a flash in the pan. I would really love to see us continue to do what we do. If you look at where we started and where we are now, it’s a steady build we’re getting with friends and fans that legitimately love what we do and not just like us because it was cool to like us or because of the juxtaposition of us becoming a bigger band. I would love to see us tour more, keep building our fan base and hopefully make another record in the next year and not wait two to two and a half years in between records. It’s become the standard and it’s more of what we’re doing so I’d like for us to just continue what we’re doing.

Casey, before I let you go, any shameless promotion, plug or anything you guys want to get off your chest or throw out there?

No, I don’t think I can, with a good conscience, plug our Twitter or Myspace or anything like that! I’m just thankful we did this interview so thank you.

Well, Casey, you’ve been a gentleman and scholar. Thank you for taking the time out to do this interview and like I said, good luck out on the road, we’ll see you next year and I look forward to your next releases!

Thanks!