GLASSJAW Frontman Discusses Band's Future

U.K.'s Rock Sound magazine recently conducted an interview with GLASSJAW frontman Daryl Palumbo. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock Sound: How do you think people will react to the new record?

Daryl: I just imagine that people will be harsh critics. I only care what Beck our guitarist thinks of the record and I know he only cares what I think of the record so I don't give a fuck what one other human on this planet thinks of it. We know what we want the record to sound like. The four of us are going to sit in a room and do it, I am not paying a million dollars for some fucking figurehead producer to sit in a room and not do a damn thing. It is just going to be the record that we have in our head. People are waiting to put it under the magnifying glass but I could not care less.

Rock Sound: Are you talking about Ross [Robinson]?

Daryl: That was not a reference to Ross, that is a reference to any producer you pay to not do anything. I did not make a reference to Ross I am just not going to pay anyone to get in the way, fuck with my emotions, turn up late, try to tell me what to play and all that. I will not listen to some forty-year-old fucking producer who knows nothing about the type of music I want to make. I don't care what any producer would think about our band, I don't trust their judgement. Unless I meet someone from today until we make the record that blows my mind and makes me and Beck reconsider then no one goes in the studio with us. It is not early for me to know but it is too early to convey in an interview, its almost pointless. As of right now, the melodic shit is way more melodic and progressed and the heavy stuff is that much heavier. It is forty years heavier at least. Brutal. The melodic and ambient are that much more of an experience.

Rock Sound: Are you financially well off?

Daryl: Dude, people saw our videos and thought it was a billion-dollar video and that we had made it. Are you crazy? It could not be any further from the truth. And now it's the same, I am not a millionaire from making music. People always saw stuff and thought the machine was working for them. No it wasn't. It never was. There were no ads for our records, there was no major promotion, no one gave a fuck about my band. When GLASSJAW was a full-time touring band we were not a huge thing. People did not understand that. We had people taking advantage of us the whole time. Because we were young people were ruining us all the time. In many ways and I feel like the whole time we were not happy as we were not seeing the results we had worked for years to get, we spent years eating, sleeping, shitting GLASSJAW and all we got was ripped off.

Rock Sound: Would it be different now?

Daryl: You open up any magazine now, especially a magazine like Alternative Press, and there are a thousand bands that GLASSJAW could tour with if we were a young band. Back then there was no one we could tour with, we used to be asked who to tour with and we would not know, bands like QUICKSAND had broken up so we guessed at bands like FILTER or the FOO FIGHTERS. There were no post hardcore bands. Now there are a million. We were unhappy about almost everything at the time, we saw bands that had been about for six months headlining for 5,000 people a night and we did not want to headline those shows, we just wanted to get by. We could not even do that. We did not want to be rich and famous, we just wanted to get by. And we could not.

Rock Sound: We never saw it over in England, you guys headlined over here from almost the first tour.

Daryl: We were always bigger in the UK than we were back home. We did not tell anyone over here that it was not like this at all usually, we would just crack up. We were just a hardcore band. Two hundred people would come see us at the most back home and we got fed up with it. We played a show in Chico with AMERICAN NIGHTMARE, fifty people turned up. Imagine the crowd that show would get now. I could not work out what we were doing wrong, I used to question whether we should have signed a record deal at all and done it all ourselves to see if that would have worked out better. People who weren't signed to majors were doing great and we were not, we were fighting on the road all the time as we were together all the fucking time, we were a bunch of brats from Long Island having a tough time. But people made it into a legend. Biggest shows we played were when we played the primetime slots on Warped in New York, New Jersey. I remember every show we played. I remember how many people were at them. I know how many records we sold and every week I would keep track. I remember it all. I tell you, it has been made myth and way bigger now than it ever was back then. It is great to know that we toured a few months ago in the US and they were the biggest shows we had ever done. It is great to know that. In every way it was the biggest and it is hysterical but at the same time anything from the lyrics to the image was made into something bigger than it ever was. We were five dudes from Long Island who wanted to play post hardcore. It was nothing more. We wanted to play progressive hardcore.

Read the entire interview at www.rock-sound.net.