POISON THE WELL Drummer Talks Lineup Changes

Morley Seaver of CausticTruths.com recently conducted an interview with POISON THE WELL drummer Chris Hornbrook.

On lineup changes (the band has once again welcomed a new bassist and guitarist):

"It does affect things and it doesn't. I think at this point, it doesn't because we came to the conclusion that it's always going to be the three of us, even when our old guitar player Derek was with the band, it was the four of us. It was always like a revolving bass player or a revolving guitar player. It sucks because every time that we've brought a person in, we've tried to bring him in to our circle and have them be a part of the band, and make them feel like they're part of it. But for some reason it has always backfired for one reason or another. Usually it boils down to, they're really cool and they can't play their instrument very well or they can play their instrument really well, but they're not very cool to be on tour with. It's kind of seems what it's boiled down to, at least for bass players."

On the title of the new record, "Versions":

"The title means pretty much just different versions of this band, whether it's with Derek or Jason or Ben or our old manager or being on Atlantic, it's just been revolving different, multiple versions of this band, with myself, Ryan and Jeff kind of being the witnesses to it. We felt, because of the past three years, it was an appropriate title for the record. We tried to go through a bunch of titles and once Jeff kind of presented the title to us, we knew that was it. We thought this represents the record and where we're coming from.”

On using horns on the new CD:

"Well, I don't think anyone was intentionally looking for horns, so to speak. It just seemed like it would work. I think one of the producers suggested, 'Why we don't have like an Americana horn section?' and I think Ryan kind of took the ball and went 'Okay, that's really cool,' and wrote the melody for it [and] said, 'Let's try it.' Our engineer, Eskil, plays an array of instruments, one of them being the trombone so we knew we'd have that in there. We doubled two different types of horns and it just worked. They just sat back and did it and we listened to the play back and it was like, 'This sounds great. This is cool.' This has never been done before in the type of music, the scene that we came from. This is different and it's cool and we're into it and it's not going anywhere and hopefully kids don't hate it. (laughs)"