KITTIE Members Discuss Band's 'Rebirth'

PiercingMetal recently conducted an interview with KITTIE's Morgan Lander, Mercedes Lander and Tara McLeod. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

PiercingMetal: "Funeral for Yesterday" has been out now for several months. I wonder how you feel about the album now and the overall reception that it got now that you can look back on it.

Morgan: I think we accomplished what we set out to do and the whole concept behind the album was sort of a rebirth of the band and a reintroduction and essentially it's just another step in the evolution of the bands music. Looking back on it I would have to say that we did exactly what we wanted to do with it. Production wise I felt it could have been a little bit heavier but of course hindsight is always 20/20.

Mercedes: We had about two years with this one as it essentially was two years in the making so it was actually the first time since we did our first record that we were able to play with the songs for an elongated period of time before we recorded them. So the songs pretty much took on a life of their own after a little while, they really came into their own. I mean it's like this — I always find that if you're playing a song live and touring with a new song that it helps the evolution of the song and it helps you to work out the kinks.

PiercingMetal: Tara, would you like to add something?

Tara: For me well as far as "Funeral For Yesterday", I came in halfway in the writing process that Morgan and Mercedes has been involved in and they wrote the entire thing, and I really felt that this was the album that they needed to put out for emotional and essentially for anything during those two really hard years. I wasn't really around for that and I just think it's their album and I can't say that I did much more than layering guitars…

Mercedes: And gnarly guitar solos….

Tara: Yeah, and that's just how we are growing together because as the songs are coming together we are also feeling each other out as players.

Morgan: Yeah, the next time around things will definitely be a lot different and it will be nice to be able to start writing again because as we said a lot of those songs on the album were two years in the making so much of it is about 2-3 old for us.

Tara: But I think that you guys really needed to do that album.

Morgan: Absolutely.

PiercingMetal: Define what Tara means by this.

Morgan: Well, with the lyric content and the writing on it, we were in between labels and it was just the two of us and we didn't have any other help.

Mercedes: Basically this was how we had written every other album though so it wasn't really that much different but I think for Morgan and me that it was more of an emotional release for us because we were going through such a hard time. Morgan and I were not even sure whether the band was going to continue or not and you know it was just one of those things where we had this big emotional release once we started writing songs. They just started coming out like crazy once Morgan and I sat down, and we would get together once a week or twice a week or whatever and write songs. Everything was just coming out and we were fucking pissed (laughs).

PiercingMetal: The interesting thing I found with this one, and I admit that I am more of a casual fan of the music and have sporadically followed your career as opposed to being hardcore, was that this one seemed a lot more melodic than opposed to the really growling rough stuff.

Mercedes: Not really and I'm going to correct you on that because we have always had singing in our music, always, always, but this one is just more of a mature showing of the band. We are showing now what we can do a little better because as you grow things just get better and obviously Morgan's vocals have strengthened quite a bit and….

Morgan: They're a lot more defined. It's just a lot more apparent on this one for instance a singing song is a singing song and that's all it is, and a screaming song is a screaming song and that's all it is. I mean we have always sort of had those two elements separately in the past and I think what we wanted to do with this album was to be a little different. It's not like we were looking to have more melody in the vocals but we were looking to take the songs that were singing songs and instead of making them more of a melodic ballad hard rock song we would put them with a hard rock or metal thrash kind of riff. You know what I mean?

Mercedes: It worked out really well.

Morgan: For example with "Breathe", in the past if we were writing it for a record like "Oracle" or "Until The End" I probably would have screamed over it but we decided that it would be an interesting concept to blend the two elements with the Thrash heavy type of style of music with a singing vocal. I think that might be why there seems to be more singing on it but I don't think it makes it any less metal or angry because the subject matter is still there, you know.

Read the entire interview at PiercingMetal.