As I Lay Dying return to Australia next week to commence their run of dates alongside Disturbed and Trivium around the country. Deborah Konopnicki recently caught up with singer Tim Lambesis to have a chat about the tour, and what’s coming up for the band. Click below to expand this post to have a read, and to re-cap all the tour details.

Hey, Tim! What’s happening?
Not much man. How are you going?

Not too bad thanks. What are you up to at the moment?
Just hanging out at home with some friends and family and taking it easy.

Now, you are about to come back down to Australia with Trivium and Disturbed. How did you guys get involved with that lineup?
Well we had talked to Disturbed about a couple of tours that they were doing in the US. They didn’t really work out for whatever reason and this seemed to be the only tour that make sense and worked out with Disturbed. It’s defiantly cool. They obviously have a much broader audience than we do but it’s cool that they’re willing to bring out a heavier band. I think that Trivium are a good transition band. Us being the heavier of all of the bands and Trivium being the band that bridges everyone. It’s really cool. We’ve toured with Trivium a bunch of times before so it’s cool that we get to hang out with those guys again.

Yeah, as you mentioned you are most definitely the heaviest band on the tour. With that said, what are you expecting in terms of the crowd response from Disturbed fans that might have never heard of you guys before?
Even though we’re going to be a fair bit heavier then I think some of the Disturbed fans are used to their fans seem pretty open minded. Especially in a live situation I think that heavy music translates very well. I have family members for instance who don’t like our style of music at all but they really enjoy seeing us live.

These shows sound like they’re going to be huge. The last time that you were down here you played some rather intimate club shows. How do you expect your sound to translate into the area settings?
Yeah, it really comes down to how good a band’s sound guy is! The band can really only control so much and then it comes down to the front of house guys. We hired a really great guy that has been on a couple of tours with us now so he has a bit of experience. i feel pretty confident that he’ll do a good job. There’s really nothing that we can do as a band apart from be ourselves. We just have to trust the people that work for us for the rest of it.

You’ve said that this year is all about making the effort to play the smaller shows in cities that a lot of bands ignore and just pass through. How have you found those shows going down? I’m assuming that they would be met with quite a lot of enthusiasm!
Yeah. Some of the small cities that we play turn out to be an insane surprise in terms of the energy. Some of these small cities don’t have a venue that can hold over like 500 people but those 500 people are sometimes louder than 2000 people.

You have a pretty massive year in store so far. As it stands you have tours planned all the way until the end of August. Is it ever daunting to look that far ahead and see what the schedule is like, or do you just take it one day at a time?
Even though we have a lot of tours booked, we have enough breaks in between. Like, right now I have a couple more weeks left at home before I start travelling again. It’s good to have that time off so that we can recharge and still have those roots with our families back home.

It was almost a year ago now that you released your monster album “The Powerless Rise”. How are you feeling about that album now?
We’re all really proud of the songs. It’s been great that on tours a lot of the fans have actually been requesting the songs live and stuff. From a creative standpoint I think that my attention span is getting shorter and shorter the long that we’ve been a band. I’m already getting the itch to work on new material but I feel like we have at least six more month of touring before it’s time to work on a new album. I’ve got to pace myself! It’s not that I don’t appreciate “The Powerless Rise” but I do look forward to getting back into the studio at some point.

You guys spent a little bit longer in the studio for this one – just nutting out some of the songs a little bit more than your other releases. Was it a case of just really wanting to refine what you had?
Yeah. I think that there are really subtle layers that a lot of people wouldn’t know that were there. They wouldn’t really notice it but they would feel it a little bit when listening to a song as it grows. I think that those layers between the intro and that first heavy part or whenever that first bit hits, I think that those layers are important on the recording process. Although a whole lot of fans haven’t really pointed them out specifically I think that they really acknowledge that the whole album has some depth to it.

Do you have any favorites from the record?
Yeah, we really like the song “Anodyne Sea”. We’ve made it really clear to our fans that we’re really proud of that song. When we’re playing areas with Disturbed and that type of stuff, the songs that go over well in the club shows, I’m also curious to see if they’re go over well and translate in the areas and stuff. Sometimes some of the faster and thrashier songs are a little hard for a mainstream audience to grasp. I think that the hardest thing on this album is finding a song that’s slow because they’re all pretty fast.

Yeah, I just wanted to have a quick chat about “Anodyne Sea”. I love the track and the video that you guys released is pretty insane. It really feels like the viewer is a part of the video. Who came up with the concept for that one?
The director was Ian McFarland. He had a pretty good half-hour long conversation with me about lyrics and thing that I wanted to get into the video and the songwriter and lyricist. He took the conversation to heart and spent about a week on the concept. When he came back to us, I feel like it went out of the way to make sure that it still connected with the lyrics even though it wasn’t our idea.

Was it a fun video to act out?
Yeah. I mean it’s a very serious video but there were a few goofy outtakes and a few serious injuries here and there; nothing major! People were just these rebel authority figures or whatever you think they are in the video, pushing us around and putting guns in our faces. A couple of times somebody would actually get thrown to the ground when they were supposed to be acting. Overall we were all able to laugh at all of the small stuff. It was pretty fun.

There’s an EP that is being put together at the moment for your ten-year anniversary. How close is that record to completion?
I was actually in the studio right before you called me just working on some of the tones for it and working on some of the mixes for some of the songs. There’s at least one song that I know of that I need to track guitars for but overall the album is starting to take shape. I wish that I could reveal more details but the only thing that I can reveal is that the songs are done at this point and they’re all in their final stages.

I also heard that there are a few cover songs that might be making the cut. Are you about to talk about them at all or will As I lay Dying fans have to hold out a little bit?
Well we have to wait for some of them just because we want to make sure that once they are mixed that they make the final cut! I think that at this point that we’re pretty happy with the way that everything came out. So far we can definitely talk about that there is a Slayer song that we ended up doing that was originally for a video game, and because we already recorded it for the video game it seemed like perfect timing for the ten-year anniversary thing. So, that’s one song that’s going to be on there.

Do you think any of the new tracks are going to be ready for when you get back down to Australia? Or are you going to be focusing on playing songs from “The Powerless Rise”?
We’ll probably just focus on “The Powerless Rise” because this is really our first tour here on it. Our last tour was just before “The Powerless Rise” came out so this will actually be our first time to tour on the record and play a lot of those new songs.

Considering that it is your ten-year anniversary, can you pick any one or two moments that have really stood out for you along the journey so far?
I remember that first time that we did a big festival tour. I think that it was Ozzfest at the time. We had only played a bunch of club shows before then and that was a pretty amazing experience for us. I think that will always stand out to me. Although we’ve done tones of festivals since then, just that one summer it was when we as a band realized that we had really gone to the next level with playing with Iron Maiden and bands like that. So that’s one side and then the other side of it would be some of the smaller shows that I feel were a triumph. One example is when we were going to Indonesia to play a show. It was just one show, just a normal club show and our flights got canceled actually because of a protest that was going on over in Thailand so we were stuck in Thailand for a few days. With three days notice they had to reschedule the entire Indonesian concert. Somehow with only three days notice almost every single fan that bought a ticket was able to come to the show. To me, that was just such a cool experience; to play a smaller show and to have that many die-hard fans there and that we didn’t lose anybody by switching the show from a Friday to a Monday or something like that.

Just one more question for you today; what is it that you’re most looking forward to about the upcoming tour with Disturbed and Trivum?
Australia to me is always the combination of a tour and a holiday all at once. A lot of the places that we tour, we have to kind of sacrifice the comforts of being at home but in my opinion whenever we go to Australia it’s very similar to San Diego and Southern California where we live. Obviously there’s a different accent and there are other smaller differences but overall the weather is beautiful, the people are extremely kind all of the time and we just feel very much at home for being on tour.

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THE FRONTIER TOURING COMPANY PRESENTS

DISTURBED
‘Music As A Weapon‘ 2011 Tour
With Special Guests TRIVIUM & AS I LAY DYING
Plus FORGIVEN RIVAL (All Australian dates except Perth)

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