Ahead (just) of doors for God Forbid’s UK stint with Ill Nino, Planet Loud grabs an empty corridor, away (again, just) from the pulse of soundchecks and gathering crowds to chat with tired-looking (blame the previous night’s drinking fun and games, he alerts us early days) band guitarist / vocalist Dallas Coyle, to get to grips with fifth album ‘Earthsblood’, the difficulty in finding your voice and meaning as a band and some exciting classically-tinged future plans..
Planet Loud – So, we’re joining you during the UK leg of the tour, where you’re teaming up with Ill Nino. What’s it been like sharing the stage with those guys and what sort of a relationship do you have with the UK fans?
God Forbid – Well the changes since we came here with Trivium, I mean it’s crazy. It was a much bigger crowd then, but with the Ill Nino tour I think we’re trying to make more of a ‘statement’ as a band. People come to the show and they have a God Forbid shirt on, we try to let them known that it means something, that it’s not just a shirt they’re wearing. It’s more like the ideology of our music.
Planet Loud – With the latest album, ‘Earthsblood’, you’ve really shaken everything up. Even though it’s your fifth album it sounds really fresh and you seem stronger than ever. When you started getting together ideas for the album, before you started writing it, were you filled with ideas and creativity? Because it certainly sounds like it!
God Forbid – Well I was in L.A when we first started writing it and they said that things weren’t really vibing. Things started vibing a little bit better when my brother (Lead guitarist / backing vocalist Doc Coyle) had gotten the beginnings to a couple of songs together. Then we decided to move to seven strings and things really started to open up. It allowed us to get a little more complex but also at the same time simpler and slow things down.
I guess it sounds fresh but the thing is our band has never really written the same record twice, I was showing the dudes from Exilia our first album and they were like ‘this is crazy, it doesn’t sound anything like you!’ But before we go into the writing space we always try and have an idea of what we’re going for and then when we get the idea we hammer it out. We work on five or six songs at one time, try to get three of them done and then the other ones that maybe don’t make the cut come back around. It’s kind of like rolling a snowball down a hill..
Planet Loud – Were there any nerves about wanting, needing, to push forward and not stay in the same place?
God Forbid – No, not really. We write the songs and then what we do is, with the songs we’ve done, we invite some of our friends over and play the songs for them, you know? They start digging them and then we know we’ve got something good. I don’t think our band has ever worried about trying not to repeat ourselves. I think there’s some stuff, maybe a riff or two, on the new album that you’d recognize from the past. We actually decided to do that this time, instead of something that we SHOULDN’T do, we were like ‘lets use that’ – Like the ‘Walk Alone’ riff..
Planet Loud – How did the songwriting take place for this record, was it shared through individually, or more a case of getting together and jamming it out?
God Forbid – Well my brother and I write differently. He’ll form the first halves of songs in his head, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the first half, it can be just ‘parts’. What we try to do is I’ll come and write something that might fit in the beginning, or that will come in a little later. The way I write stuff is usually I write all of my music on tour. Like ‘Bat The Angels’, I wrote the groove riff to that in Florida, ages ago. Then the chorus riff I wrote on the tour with Devildriver. I remembered it, I didn’t record it.
If we’re headlining it’s a little easier, as we’ll have a soundcheck and then some time. Like on this tour I’ve wrote some pretty good stuff. I don’t know if it’s God Forbid stuff though..
Planet Loud – Lyrically, what kind of messages and concepts did you want to capture with this album?
God Forbid – It’s just social things. One song’s about racism, there’s two songs about the soul and the spirit. One song is about the fear of something more. ‘Bat The Angel’ and ‘Chains Of Humanity’ to me are kind of like connected songs. We wanted to do a war song, but to be more like the effects of war on the people at home, rather than an upfront war song. ‘War Of Attrition’ is a trend-killer song. 90 percent of the shit that comes out is trendy and terrible, and people buy into it. It’s questioning, why?
Planet Loud – The title of the album ‘Earthsblood’, I’m sure relates to the lyrical content, but there’s also, with the huge production, a way of kind of capturing this earthy, organic sense within the album. Like the weight of the planet being torn apart. Is this an intentional thing, or something that you see yourselves?
God Forbid – Well on the last record we thought the production was good but maybe a little thin, because the drums were not really there. It was mainly a guitar record. But we went with Jens Borgen because he does have an organic sound with it still being metal. As far as the concept of the earth, I’m not sure if we really got that ‘deep’, we’re not really earth-savers or anything (laughs) but we definitely think that from a societal standpoint the earth is important.
Planet Loud – Your lyrics feel a very ‘core’ part of the band. Not something left as an after-thought. How does the process normally work in terms of writing lyrics and where do you take inspiration from for them?
God Forbid – I get inspiration from a lot of things. When I’m writing riffs a lot of my inspiration actually comes from movie soundtracks. As for lyrics a lot of it comes from my own stories and screenplays. ‘Gaia’ is a song based upon a movIe that I was writing, and the movie was based on racism and dissociation, two different vibes. Usually when writing I have more of a theme inside my head. I like to write ambiguously, I don’t tell people exactly what I’m feeling. I like to write them like The Beatles!
Planet Loud – The 9 minute title track is a monster, did you already have an idea of that track being the ‘centrepoint’ of the album or did it develop more naturally?
God Forbid – We really didn’t realise that the song was going to be that long, so when we wrote it we had the beginning, the first riff. We felt like it had a Morbid Angel like feel, but we kept working on the song. Sometimes a song like that is difficult because you don’t really know where it’s going to, because it’s such a long song. So we got the whole song finished and we were like ‘okay, this is good.’
We usually know where our first and our last song is going to be, so when we’re filling in the record, it just made sense that ‘Earthsblood’ would be where it was. People have said the last three songs on the album are totaled at like 21 minutes I think? We wanted to have that feel where the album starts off like an old God Forbid album and then it gets more and more and then it ends on this note, this somber note where when you listen to the whole thing it makes you think ‘damn, I need to go back and listen to the whole thing again’.
Planer Loud – Any personal highlights on the album for you personally, maybe individual songs that were the hardest to write or that you’re most proud of, or even just fun to play live?
God Forbid – I like ‘Bat The Angels’ because the vocal melodies on the chorus are really weird. It’s funny because a lot of people gave me shit because they say I sing out of key but to me that shit is Alice In Chains, the way it’s done. ‘Empire Of The Gun’ is starting to grow on me a lot because it was my least favourite song on the album but when we’ve been playing it live it’s been going really well. It’s really weird with this record, like I didn’t like playing ‘The Rain’ but now I’ve started playing it live it sounds good. I feel with this record we’ve achieved something better, because writing it and listening to it I’m starting to find different things from it.
Planet Loud – How do you feel the album artwork captures and portrays the album within it?
God Forbid – I think it’s perfect. I didn’t think so initially, usually I wait for what my brother’s going to say before I inform my opinion because he’s better at forming something immediately, realizing if it’s good enough. I pulled it up and I was like, damn, that’s great, but my wife was like ‘eh’. (laughs) But then I started looking into it and thinking.. ‘That’s pretty crazy’. It’s kind of like Pan’s Labyrinth, you know? The only concept that we’ve kept from my concept was the eye idea. My concept was an eye in a hand and a jungle surrounding it, it was going to be a giant’s hand, but it didn’t work, so we did this one. Plus, we’ve never had a ‘red’ theme going on with our artwork before.
Planet Loud – What would you say have been the biggest progressions for the band between previous album ‘Constitution Of Treason’ and latest ‘Earthsblood’, musically speaking, or even just the way you are as a band?
God Forbid – I think we were able to expand our sound without going overboard. With ‘Constitution Of Treason’ a lot of people say ‘that’s such a ‘metal’ album’, but they didn’t realise that we did a lot of things on that album that allowed us to do the things that we’re doing on this album. Like ‘The Lonely Dead’ (From ‘Constitution Of Treason’) is such a weird song – it’s a song that has two parts. It has a lot of singing, which opened up the singing for something like ‘The New Clear’ (Earthsblood) which is pretty interesting.
Planet Loud – With the release of ‘Earthsblood’ and some huge tours on the way, does this feel like a pretty great time for God Forbid?
God Forbid – Yeah, it’s really good. To be honest I’m having such a hard time at home that I guess it makes sense that things are good out here. I think right now we have to really keep our focus. We haven’t established our own selves, our own message on the scene. With this tour one thing I’ve learnt is that you have to stand for something to a band. It’s not easy, you have to grab people. I just try to call us the ‘trend killers’ right now. We wrote an accessible album, but we didn’t right something that was poppy. I think it’s much more difficult to put your emotion out there in a substantial way than it is to just sing straight out.
Planet Loud – Having been around for well over 10 years now, what would you say are the biggest rewards and have been the biggest challenges so far for the band?
God Forbid – The biggest reward has been the amount of people that you meet and the opportunities you have. I mean, these jeans (points to some snazzy jean design) right here, me and my brother are getting our own jeans. They’re called ‘deluxe’, deluxenyc.com, just because the guy loves the band. That’s the type of weird thing!
The most unrewarding part when we look back is the question of ‘when are you guys going to step over the hump?’ because in order to keep doing this, we need to make more money to do it. You get older and you can’t live in your parent’s house forever. No matter how big your band is. When is the money going to be able to make sense to be ‘free’?
Planet Loud – What lies in wait for the rest of 2009?
God Forbid – I think it’s just touring. I’m working on something though. David T. Little, who’s a composer from New Jersey, well he really loves our band. He thinks us and Pantera are the best metal bands ever, that’s what he literally said. My dad heard him mention us on the radio. So we’re messing with the idea of doing a classical version of ‘Earthsblood’. Where instead of it being Metallica-styled, we’d actually have David T. Little doing his interpretation of the songs. We’re trying to get it done but no labels want to mess with it. We were trying to get a filming. Honestly, we would take that chance but most people are so fake and their passion isn’t real so they look at the idea and they’re like ‘no, I don’t think that’ll work’. But I think a God Forbid fan would buy that.
Planet Loud – Thanks a lot for your time Dallas, best of luck for later!
God Forbid – Thanks man.
Interview by Jim Hall
