It would’ve done us some good to take another month or two to work out the transitions in songs and things like that. But everyone else was like, “No, you’ve got to get it done now!” So it was a little bit rushed and a little bit forced.Īnd when you listen back now, do you think there was any benefit to not having time to second-guess things? Or do you hear the mistakes you wish you could’ve let marinate a bit more?įrom a band member perspective, I hear things that feel not fully fleshed out. He told us to wait three or four more months. Even Bill Stevenson, our producer, was feeling it. We felt unprepared as a band going into that record. We felt pressure from the label and management, and everyone was feeling that. But with Black Market, we ended up taking a little more time.
Rise against the sufferer and the witness song list full#
Then we meet up in a studio and write as a full band. We get off the road after touring on a record and we spend four months writing ideas.
Do you ever say to yourselves, “We’re not feeling it at the moment, maybe we won’t write a record this year.” Or do you push yourselves to make sure you get them out regularly? You guys make a record every two to three years like clockwork. I felt absent writing that record, mentally. So, on a very personal level, that’s why it’s on the bottom. It was like, “What does Rise Against even sound like now?” I had the worst writer’s block on that record. Rock music was going by the wayside in mainstream radio. Joe Principe: The mental headspace I was in for that record, I was thinking, “Oh shit, this is our seventh record.” I was trying to figure out what it should sound like, and the music world was changing drastically at that point. Something’s got to be last, but how did Black Market end up at the bottom? To commemorate the release of Nowhere Generation, Principe sat down to look back at Rise Against’s 20-year career and rank the band’s records, from his least favorite to most favorite.
Now, finally, Rise Against is finally ready to unleash Nowhere Generation ( safely) upon audiences and have a summer tour lined up with Descendents and The Menzingers. It was like, ‘Wow, I don’t know when we can release this record.’ But then it was like, ‘Ah, but don't worry, Covid’s gonna go away in three months.’ And then we realized we can’t do shit until there’s a vaccine, and that could be five years.” “I remember this panic came over me and sort of snowballed. “We got done recording everything before the pandemic, then everything started shutting down,” remembers Principe. Originally scheduled for release in the summer of 2020, the band decided to postpone launch plans once they realized they might not be able to perform its songs for quite a long time.
They’ve reliably released a new record every two to three years since then, through Obama and Trump, and have just put forth their ninth album, Nowhere Generation, their first during the Biden presidency.īut even though Nowhere Generation is just hitting stores now, it had been ready for a year. The band later made the jump to a major label on their third album, 2004’s Siren Song of the Counter Culture, and, at the start of Bush’s second term, they had a freak stroke of good fortune when the album’s acoustic outlier track “Swing Life Away” hit the mainstream and catapulted them to stardom. Two years later, during Bush’s first term, Rise Against planted their flag in the sand with their debut album, The Unraveling. Bassist and founding member Joe Principe was determined to start a band that was outspoken and stood for something meaningful, and he found the key to that identity when he recruited Tim McIlrath, an idealistic singer with a wide-ranching voice and a notebook full of fiery lyrics. Originally named Transistor Revolt, the Chicago group formed from the ashes of 88 Fingers Louie in 1999, at the end of the Clinton administration. By that standard, Rise Against has been a band through five different Presidents. Rise Against has been together for 22 years, although perhaps it is more appropriate to measure politically charged punk bands by the elected officials they’ve outlasted.
0 kommentar(er)
