WE ARE THE FALLEN Bassist Discusses Band's Debut Album, Live Performance

Ken Brzezinski of Static Multimedia recently conducted an interview with WE ARE THE FALLEN bassist Marty O'Brien. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Static Multimedia: What's it like to work with a guy like Ben Moody [WE ARE THE FALLEN/ex-EVANESCENCE guitarist/songwriter] who is one of the more prolific songwriters of at least the last decade? I mean, the guy seems to be able to pull these great songs with these monster hooks out of nowhere just one after another after another.

Marty: It's kinda funny that you should say that because we're really good friends and we've been hanging out. Actually, right after he left EVANESCENCE, he and I started working together and we met right around that time. I met him and we started working together for the last six years, I guess. But we actually hang out more than we work together. It's kind of funny, though. You forget about some of the bigger stuff he's done, you know, just hanging out with him. But it's kind of funny, he is just one of those guys who can sit down at a piano or pick up a guitar and he can just be fooling around on some little thing and you can turn around 10 minutes later and it's like, "Oh my god, that's a hit song!" He just wrote a hit song in 10 minutes right in front of me! It's like God, I hate guys like that! [Laughs] But no, he's a great guy and he's great to be around. But you listen to him playing with these things and what you don't know is that he's layering things and then he pulls the headphones jack and you hear it and go, "He just wrote a hit song in 10 minutes!"

Static Multimedia: Since you've been a studio bassist for so long, when Jason Newsted left METALLICA, did you have aspirations to join or at least try out for the vacancy?

Marty: I did. I was actually putting a few words in, this is actually a cool story. I had a couple "ins." I knew a couple people who knew some of the guys (in METALLICA),you know they'd been working on the crew or something, so I was kind of hoping they'd recommend my name for the gig. After they had already picked Rob (Trujilo),someone I know had been in their studio and told me that they had like this big dry erase board in the studio. And they had an "A" list and a "B" list of guys to audition. And it was like maybe five guys on the "A" list and five guys on the "B" list. Most of them we're their friends to audition. And somebody, I don't know who it was, but somebody had printed out my bio and like a picture of me from my website and apparently it was stuck on the wall right next to the "A" and "B" list. So I guess I was on the "C" list!! [Laughs]

Static Multimedia: When I first saw that Carly (Smithson) was your singer, I thought to myself, "What the hell are they doing? She's from 'American Idol'!" Because I don't really watch that show, and I don't really like that show, like AT ALL. So what kind of misconceptions have you or has she had to fight through with that rather large "storm cloud" hanging over her?

Marty: If anyone is skeptical, I suggest they just go to a live show because she does NOT look like some "American Idol" girl trying to be in a rock band. That's one of the things that surprised the hell out of me — I had never heard of her either before she came down and someone asked us to check her out and you look on YouTube and all you see are these "American Idol" clips and stuff like that. But if anyone thinks that she came down and we tried to turn this "American Idol" girl into a "rock girl," it's completely wrong. The first day she came down to hang out with us, she was wearing an IRON MAIDEN shirt! What's funny is , we do an IRON MAIDEN song in our set live, we do "Flight Of Icarus". We also did a cover of MADONNA's "Like A Prayer". It was originally going to be on the album, but it'll probably be like a bonus track or be released on a soundtrack or something. But the funny thing this, you'd think she (Carly),being an "American Idol" girl, would have recommended the MADONNA song and that we were the rock guys and that we wanted to play the "Flight Of Icarus". But ever since she came down, she'd been saying how she wants to cover "Flight Of Icarus", and the MADONNA idea was Ben's idea. As far as stage performance goes, I thought it was going to take us at least a couple of months to hit our stride as like an "arena band," ya know? But you could tell that within the first couple of shows that Carly was embracing the whole "power of a rock concert." It just encompasses her whole being when she's up there on stage. About like three shows in and I'm looking out of the corner of my eye, and I see her just kinda on stage doin' her thing and I'm like, "Oh my god, who is this!?" She just has this amazing stage presence, ya know? So any misconceptions, one song into our set and her performance kind of speaks for itself.