Before their January 29th show at the Hard Rock Café on the Strip with Strung Out, we sat down with The Sheds’ singer Mac Miller to discuss how he became a drum tech for Strung Out, an interesting interaction with Warped Tour’s Kevin Lyman, and what his band has planned for 2012. The interview features special guest appearances by Strung Out drummer Jordan Burns and The Sheds’ guitar player Morgan Miller.
Jordan (drummer for Strung Out): You’ve been working as a drum tech for Strung Out for the last 2-3 years now. What has been your experience?
It’s hard work, but it’s rewarding and quite fun. I’ve gotten to travel to places I’ve never been and meet people I’d never meet. Mostly because they’re 3 generations ahead of me. I get to see a lot of bands that I would never get to see otherwise.
Emily (Punks in Vegas): How did you become a drum tech for Strung Out?
Mac: About 4 years ago, we were playing a show with Voodoo Glow Skulls at our home venue, Cobalt Cafe, and Jordan happened to be there. We started talking about drums, and he added us to one of their shows in our hometown. We just kept in touch. Eventually, he lost his drum tech and asked me to do a couple of shows, and immediately asked me to go to Europe. That was my first real tour with anybody, not even with my band.
Jordan: I remember that I began helping their band and seeing a little something in them for some reason.
Mac: It was probably the 13-year-old [Morgan Miller] playing the guitar.
Jordan: Morgan was really young when they started. They got some Warped Tour dates and I thought they were doing good. They stepped it up quite a bit with the new album they just put out [Self/Doubt]. I was trying to help them out a little bit. Mac here is Mr. Music, I think he’s very set in his own ways and wants to learn about the way things are going to go, outside of the experiences that he’s had with our band.
Mac: It’s weird, every once in a while, I have to say “no” to work with Strung Out because The Sheds have things to do.
Emily: How did the Warped Tour 2011 dates come about?
Jordan: Because Morgan was 13, and was talking shit to Kevin Lyman [creator of Warped Tour]. There is an awesome story about how that happened.
Mac: We’d been on Kevin’s ass about playing some dates for a long time. Long before we deserved to play. We just kept updating him every year about how we were doing. Eventually he put us on one date in LA. After that he told us to take a year off, and if we were still together the next year, he would give us a week or so. So the time came around, and he wasn’t responding to emails and nothing was happening. For some reason, Morgan was handling things for once. That doesn’t happen anymore. He emailed Kevin, saying that if he didn’t tell us our dates, we would just show up on the first day assuming we have all of the dates.
Morgan: It was a joking email though! There was a “haha” in there!
Mac: So after that, he immediately wrote back telling us that it was the worst attempt at getting on Warped Tour he’d ever heard. He said he was saving the email for a book he was going to write and he told Morgan to take some business classes. He also forwarded it to everyone who works on Warped Tour. Luckily, they all had our backs and he wrote back pretty quickly.
Jordan: Kevin didn’t realize that it was Morgan who wrote it. They thought it was going to be super negative for them, but it actually turned out to be positive. Because like Mac said, he sent that email to EVERYBODY on the Warped Tour, so it spread the word about their band to everybody. It turned into a cool thing.
Mac: Kevin had us in for a meeting and we thought we’d get one date again, and he ended up having us on a whole third of the tour that summer, so that was cool.
Jordan: But I must note, it turned into a very cool thing, AFTER Morgan called me in tears saying “Kevin Lyman hates me!”
Mac: We thought we were blacklisted.
Morgan: He told me I would never play one of his tours ever.
Jordan: And here they are, on tour with Strung Out!
Morgan: The best band ever! With the best drummer ever!
Mac: Hopefully, we’ll actually get to do a tour with Strung Out, not just a weekend.
Emily: There are 3 brothers in The Sheds (Mac, Morgan and Evan). Do you come from a musical background?
Mac: Not at all. My dad plays a little bit of bass and the banjo. My mom has no musical experience at all. I played clarinet in beginning band in middle school but never actually learned how to play. I would just look at the person next to me and follow what they were doing. Then I started doing percussion. Around that same time Morgan got a starter guitar kit at T.J. Maxx for like $75.
Emily: How old was he at the time?
Mac: He was 9. Then Evan, just because it was what was left over, grabbed my dad’s bass and started playing that. So we just started teaching ourselves some punk covers, some Clapton covers, Strung Out covers. And then we eventually started writing our own stuff.
Emily: What made you gravitate toward ska in the beginning?
Mac: Honestly, we just gravitated toward covering any song that we liked. It didn’t matter what kind of music it was. We wanted to do a Reel Big Fish song, and Morgan had a friend who played trumpet in the school band. So he came and played trumpet on that song. We had just started writing some music, and we thought “oh, why don’t we have some trumpet” because we liked hanging out with the guy. “Why don’t we just be a ska band?!” Honestly though, none of us have ever been huge ska fans. There have always been a handful of bands that we love, and we got more into ska after playing it. It probably should have been the other way around.
Jordan: I think our band [Strung Out] had a good influence on directing them to get away from the horns. Everybody in my band told them “get rid of the horns!” They finally listened and became a way better band. Not just because they got rid of the horns, but mostly because of it.
Mac: Morgan got better at guitar, and we had a better drummer so we didn’t really need the horns to keep things interesting anymore. And as the writing progressed, it just wasn’t necessary to keep them around. It would have been too busy to keep the horns in. We still have that ska influence. We still have the same sound. We just don’t use horns anymore.
Emily: So were people pretty accepting when you lost the horns and your sound started to transition?
Mac: I think people were very excited that we didn’t have horns.
Jordan: They’re a fresh enough band that it’s too early to get pigeonholed. They’re coming up the ladder and they can do whatever they want.
Mac: We just kind of play whatever we want. We have ska influence. We have an obvious hardcore influence. People often call us a pop punk band, which I don’t understand. But if that’s what it takes for you to like us, whatever. I’ll be a Norwegian Viking metal band, it’s fine with me.
Emily: I first heard about you guys when you signed to No Sleep Records, but then …And Now for Something Completely Different came out and it was self-released. What happened there?
Mac: They saw us play at Cobalt Cafe, which is kind of the catalyst for anything that has happened to us. The Wonder Years were kind of pushing for them to sign us right as they were leaving No Sleep. It happened. At the time, No Sleep was a much smaller label, and they just didn’t have the time to give us the attention we needed as a much smaller band. So we sat on the backburner for a year, and kept practicing and playing shows, and it just dissolved.
But we got out scot-free, and we’re still friends with Chris at No Sleep. No problems in any way. I’m just glad that we aren’t still just sitting there doing nothing.
Emily: How did you get involved with Mediaskare/Rite of Passage?
Mac: Cobalt Cafe! They’re located in the valley where we’re from and we’re good friends with a couple of the metal and hardcore bands on that label. They were pushing for it. They saw us a few times at Cobalt and then we had a meeting, and it just happened.
Emily: How did the idea come around to give away your Self/Doubt EP for free on the Alternative Press website?
Mac: I’d been talking about how cool it would be to give it away, because we just want to get people into our band. I thought it would be cool if everyone could just have it on their iPod. I feel like our music is finally where it should be, where if people hear it, hopefully they’ll enjoy it. But I thought there was no way the label would go for that. Coincidentally, about a week later they were like “hey, we’re going to give away the EP!”
Emily: How has the response been to it?
Mac: I haven’t really heard a bad thing. I’m really proud of the EP.
Morgan: We read a comment on YouTube that one of the songs sounded like “if metal raped ska and had a baby.”
Mac: Beautiful, poetic.
Emily: What do you have planned for 2012?
Mac: We’re going to do a lot of writing this year for a full length. I can’t say what it is yet, but in March, we’re going to be doing our first full U.S. tour. The East Coast will finally see us. Hopefully we’ll start breaking into international touring, and then hopefully there will be a new record in the summer.
Photo by Emily Matview
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