KILLSWITCH ENGAGE Guitarist Talks Touring And Songwriting

Arielle Castillo of Broward-Palm Beach New Times recently conducted an interview with KILLSWITCH ENGAGE guitarist Joel Stroetzel. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

New Times: What do you think has contributed to your mainstream success?

Joel: I think doing the Ozzfest a couple years helped us a lot. And then we did Warped Tour which was weird, but we got to play for some new people. We like to keep the audiences different, to get a chance to try to play for many different types of people as we can.

New Times: Everyone's used to you playing all those different bills by now, but at the beginning was it hard to get over on certain crowds?

Joel: It's weird. For us, in the beginning we didn't have a specific genre that we fit in. We had the hardcore parts, metal parts, melodic stuff. And a lot of the stuff at the time was either more metal or more hardcore. SHADOWS FALL was maybe similar; that was a band that had the melodic parts, the breakdowns, and the thrash stuff. They were one of the only other badns from our area doing something similar.

But yeah, we went out with SOILWORK, and later we went out with KITTIE, which was a completely different crowd. Then we were out with IN FLAMES after that. We jumped around a lot. We didn't really know where we stood.

New Times: KITTIE, wow. How was that?

Joel: It was fun. That was our first tour where a lot of shows were sold out, it was a super big deal for us at the time!

New Times: After all that stuff, why did you decide to go back and play Warped Tour last year?

Joel: We had done so many metal tours over the course of two or three years, we figured it was time to try something different. We had no idea if it was goinng to work or not. It turned out pretty well, but, you know, I'm sure there were kids who didn't like us at all.

New Times: What was the most difficult thing for you guys about playing Warped?

Joel: It was a little weird getting there and not knowing what time we were gonna play. But there weren't many days where we'd have to play before, like, 2:00 p.m.

New Times: One word that's used a lot to describe your sound is "clean," and I don't mean that in a derogatory way. For you as a guitarist, how much of that is on purpose? Did you get a lot of formal training growing up?

Joel: I took guitar lessons for a couple years when I was a kid, and I did jazz band and all that. I went to Berklee for a little while to check it out; I had a few years of guitar nerding. Adam [Dutkiewicz, fellow KILLSWITCH guitarist] is a Berklee guy; he went and did the whole thing. He's a nerd. But we're very comfortable playing guitar together. We think in a similar way as far as riffs go.

New Times: How does the writing work between the two of you?

Joel: It depends. Usually you hear something in your head, and figure out something in your guitar. Sometimes he'll write an entire song or an entire riff and say, “Hey, I need something to go after this.”

New Times: So do the two of you do the majority of the band's songwriting?

Joel: It's usually just everybody together. I think if there's anybody who writes the most complete songs from start to finish it's Adam. The rest of us will do a few together. It's kind of weird and unpredictable, whatever happens.

New Times: How is Adam doing with his back? Obviously he's well enough to have undertaken this tour.

Joel: He's doing great, and he made it through the past tour with no problem. As you know he's had two pretty major surgeries recently. He seems like he's rediscovering his health and figuring out what he needs to do. Like trying not to drink too much so he thinks he's invincible onstage.

Basically we're trying to convince Adam not to kill himself, telling him you don't need to drink 20 beers and stagedive every night. It's cool, but it's cooler to be able to walk at the end of the night.

New Times: Well, what's changed about the music over the years?

Joel: We used to be a lot more random about writing songs. We'd crank out a riff and jam on it, and there you go. Now we try to make sure the arrangements make sense and stuff. It might sound cheesy, but we try to structure it like a pop song where the changes at least make sense, that they are where they should be.

Read the entire interview at Broward-Palm Beach New Times.