MUSIC PIERCE THE VEIL

It’s All Us

By Jeanette Madden
Music Editor

Trying to get progressive post-hardcore band Pierce The Veil to explain how they got their name was a challenge. They finally settled on Darth Vadar coming to Jaime [Preciado – bass] in a dream and telling him to name the band Pierce The Veil. They released their debut album A Flair For The Dramatic in 2007 and their sophomore album Selfish Machines in 2009.

“We are all, in one way or another, selfish machines,” Vic [Fuentes, lead vocals and guitar] explains when asked about the album’s title.

“In no way is this a negative thing, its human nature. We all have natural tendencies to want, love, and take. When it comes down to it, humans have animal like qualities that we keep inside and even try to deny-but no matter how morally good someone may think they are or try to be, we are still humans. One example of this is how we are all constantly searching for someone to love, or even more desperately, someone to love you. It is human nature broken down to its bare bones, no bullshit, just rock bottom honest feelings and desire. No trying to be nice, shy, or respectable, it’s about the ‘evil’ thing inside of us that is really not evil at all. It’s just there and always will be … “

Sitting down and talking with the band is quite an adventure. Different members offered different insights into how and why they’ve done the things they’ve done, all the while talking about each other like they’re family, which they are, literally and figuratively.

High Plains Reader: What’s the history of Pierce The Veil?

Vic Fuentes: Started with me and the bro [Mike Fuentes – drums]. We started the band together and we put out the first record. Then we met Jaime and Tony [Perry – guitar] and we started touring together. We’ve been touring non-stop although we took time off to do another record. 

Jaime Perry: The last four years have been tour, tour, tour, home for a couple days, tour.

HPR: How do you guys handle that?

JP: Soccer. Lots of whiskey, lots of Pantera.

HPR: You guys went through some changes, right? You disbanded and then reformed?

Michael Fuentes:  Me and Vic have been in bands since high school so I think a lot of the history of our other bands has been mixed in.

JP: Pierce The Veil has always had the same four members. They [Vic and Mike] used to be in another band on Equal Vision Records and they disbanded. Tony and I were in another band on Equal Vision and we all got together and became Pierce The Veil. So we’ve all been in this band since it started. Tony and I were in bands together growing up just like they were and our band broke up. They met Tony at a guitar shop and Tony was telling me about this band that wanted and needed a guitar player and a bass player. We started jamming and it clicked and we’re like ‘let’s do this’. We started touring immediately after that. It started from talking and hanging out and it worked out. When we say we’ve been touring for four years it was a lot of work to get where we’re at right now.

HPR: Influences and inspirations?

VF: I always go with my pops, my dad. He taught us a lot about music, taught me to play guitar.

MF: He bought me my first drum set from a flea market.

JP: I’m the only one in my family that’s ever done anything with music. When I started out I was in band and I don’t know, I liked music. It’s something I could understand and it’s always chilled me out. But influences, I think just being in a band and touring all the time around other bands because being in a band is different than working a day job. Seeing people doing the same thing that we’re doing, things rub off and you learn from each other so I think that really influences a lot of what we do.

MF: The same for me, our dad. He always told me you have to have soul. You can’t just go out there and pretend you’re having a good time, you have to really feel that music. Every hit, you have to really mean it. You can tell if you’re watching a band and they’re just up there doing the bare minimum. That’s the worst thing. I hate watching a band that looks like they don’t even want to be up there.

HPR: How is Selfish Machines different than A Flair For The Dramatic?

VF: The new record really changed a lot from the first one. The first record me and Mike just wrote a bunch of trash, we didn’t have a lot of touring experience. This one we had about two years or so of being out on the road, meeting new bands, and we tour with a lot of heavy bands and that came out in a lot of the music. Seeing what kids responded to and the experience of being onstage.

JP: The fact that we wrote parts that were fun to play. When you write a record you realize that when you write songs you’re also going to play those songs for the next year so why not write songs that are fun to play live.

HPR: How was it working with producer Mike Green [Paramore]?       

JP: He’s in it and he’s got his stuff together for sure.

VF: He’s really smart and he knows a lot theory and he knows what goes behind why music sounds like music. Its really crazy and stuff I don’t know anything about because I never went to school for music. He’s more the opposite of us. We play off of emotion and the way things sound and he plays off of why they sound like that. It was actually a good compliment for us. He’s super talented at engineering and board app and he made us sound really good.

JP: He was super stern that he wanted everything to sound real. Nowadays everything sounds so crazy. I think this record definitely sounds different from a lot of records out there because you can actually hear that there’s soul to everything. Its real stuff.

VF: Every clap you hear, every snap, its all us.

Pierce The Veil is currently working on their third album. Their next tour, which starts in September, 2011 will take them to Europe with Bless The Fall and Motionless In White.

See their video for Caraphernelia here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dlbYEOme7E&feature=player_embedded

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