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INTERVIEW | MORE INTERVIEWS | SUBMIT MATERIALInterview with Rise Against | VIEW COMMENTS [0 Comments] | ADD COMMENTS |  Posted on 06.12.09 | Interviewer Rob Sayce We recently caught up with Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath ahead of their sold out Brixton show to talk hardcore, politics, and life on the road. Planet Loud - Hi there, thanks for your time today. How's the tour been going so far; you've been all over Europe in the last month or so….? Rise Against - Tim McIlrath (vocals/Guitar): Absolutely, overall it's been really good. Our band's been coming to Europe for at least ten years now, but this time we've managed to play a lot of places that we've never played before. We went to Russia, we did Estonia, Finland, cities like Stockholm and Copenhagen where we'd never really played before. Got back down to Spain for the first time in many years, so we've had a lot of fun destinations and a lot of fun shows; we're just wrapping it up here as this is our second to last night, and we head back to the states on Monday morning. Planet Loud - So how have you found touring with Thursday and Poison The Well? They're both really influential bands in their own right… why did you choose to bring them on the road this time around? Rise Against - Yeah, actually we've known them for a long time… we've opened for both of the bands before on different tours. They've been friends of ours for quite a while, and we've navigated quite a lot of the murky waters of the musical world together in our careers. We've existed side by side ever since we met almost ten years ago, done Warped tours together. Thursday, we've toured the US twice with them, Canada, and Poison the Well we've spent a lot of time with too. All just good friends, and coming to Europe we wanted to bring friends out this time, have a fun backstage atmosphere. Planet Loud - Tonight's gig is at Brixton Academy, a venue that I believe you've played in the past? Are you looking forward to tonight's show, in such a historic venue? Rise Against - Well this is our first time headlining here in Brixton, and also our first time selling it out. We've played here before on the Taste Of Chaos tour, but this is our first time, properly headlining. It's great to be finally headlining the place, such a legendary venue, and it feels great to be here, a great way to go out, to end the tour. Planet Loud - Having a wealth of material to draw upon in your live show, ten years worth of music, how do you go about putting together a setlist at the start of a tour? Do you have a method relating to which tracks seem to fit well together, or… Rise Against - Yeah it gets really hard, I mean we have five records, and that's a lot of records to find the right songs to put into an hour and a half set, because we get time for maybe eighteen songs or something like that. So it's a sort of combination of the songs that we like to play, the songs that our fans like to hear, the songs that most people know… And also we've learned, over the last decade of touring, what songs go over well for a live audience, what songs aren't built for a live audience, and which ones to fit into the set. It's about achieving some sort of balance. You draw on the variety of songs that you have, you make sure that you don't play, like, twelve fast songs in a row, or too many slow songs in a row, you want to give everybody a variety. Planet Loud - Yeah, I'd imagine that there are quite a few crowd pleasers, tracks that really get the crowd going, 'Give It All' and so on. Rise Against - You've got to place those in important places, do you know what I mean? You place them in places that will allow you to play a less popular song, get people into it, and then you can use your slow songs at moments when the crowd understandably needs to slow down a little, give them time to rev back up. Planet Loud - Like you say, about getting a balance. Regarding the song 'Hero of War' from the last album (2008's 'Appeal to Reason') the track seems particularly prescient in light of the current political climate, with the question of sending additional troops to Afghanistan hanging in the air. How did the song come about? Is it like a composite of experiences that you'd come across or been told about, more hypothetical , or from soldiers that you know or knew personally? Rise Against - It was a combination of things, certainly the stories that we've heard from our fans who were our soldiers, a lot of those were stories that we heard directly either backstage or at a show, or stories that were emailed to us. From learning about a lot of what's happening there through Rise Against fans and all the different conversations that we've had with them. And certainly as the war gets a little more coverage, soldiers are speaking out more, there's more and more press about what's happening there. And so it was a combination of all those things. There was a documentary that I saw actually called 'The Ground Truth' about soldiers coming home from Iraq, and how they're doing with that, and that was the moment that I decided that; the film world is doing a pretty good job of documenting this time, about what's happening to our soldiers, but no one in the music world is really doing a good job of documenting this. There needs to be a song that touches on what's happening here, now, in our generation. Planet Loud - Are you playing the song in your set at the moment? Rise Against - Yeah, we play it live, yeah. Planet Loud - Ah, will be interesting to see how that goes down then. As you mentioned earlier Rise Against is around ten years old… how has your approach to writing and playing changed over the years? Obviously there have been logistical changes with crowd sizes, record labels and so on, but do you still play for the same fundamental reasons that you did when first set out? Rise Against - Yeah we definitely do, if not even more so now. The band was a struggle for a long time, and we relied on the music to really get us through because there was no money, there wasn't a lot of payback, there weren't even a lot of fans, all there was, was the music. That's what got you through every day, just your love for playing those shows. And then we did that for a long time, but we stuck around because we loved the music, and that's why we're still here to this day. Certainly as the band's got bigger this has all gotten easier to do, even more fun to do, with more opportunities at our fingertips. We get off to more places and play bigger shows, communicate with more people and that kind of thing, it makes it all an exciting, almost like a social project. You take a band like us, put us in the spotlight, and everything that we do is magnified, we have the ability to touch people with songs like 'Hero of War,' put that on TV, put them on the radio and see what kind of reaction we get, get people talking. And so it's been an exciting time for the band, we can take our ideas and have access to such a wide audience that it's exciting to see how the audience digests the stuff that we're putting out. Planet Loud - From the very beginnings of Rise Against it's seemed that you've been gathering momentum incrementally with every release, musically and the growth of your audience. So do you know here you'd like the band to go in the future, how you'd like to go on and develop? Rise Against - I don't really know I guess, and that's kind of been the magic of Rise Against in that there's never been a plan, we've never really mapped out what we're doing, or talked about what direction we're going to go in musically or conceptually, it all just happens spontaneously. The ideas are still there, nothing is ever required, like a conversation around, 'oh shit we're out of ideas, what do we do now?' Every time that we sit down there's a new idea being talked about, a new song, and the direction just kind of happens. It's not really something that you need to spell out, and extrapolate; it's just something that happens spontaneously. And that's been really rewarding, to watch your band grow, and every time that you sit down you're innately challenging yourself, every time that you pick up a guitar... it makes what we do a little more honest. Planet Loud - As a band you've always maintained a link with the hardcore community, ethically and to some extent musically, while also evolving in that respect.... so how do you view the hardcore community as a whole today? Are there any bands that seem to exemplify the current scene for you? Rise Against - I mean, I'm admittedly in many ways out of touch with the hardcore scene, in the sense that the hardcore scene is something that happens at such an underground level... It's something that needs to happen at an underground level, and I appreciate the fact that it happens at an underground level, you know what I mean? I appreciate the fact that a guy like me that tours nine or ten months out of the year, and is almost never home in Chicago; I'm sort of a foreigner to that hardcore scene in Chicago, but that's the way it should be. A good hardcore scene would keep someone like me out of it... it would be the kind of thing that you need to be there for it and watch it grow, that was how the scene was when I was growing up, and that's the scene that's continuing to exist today. It's something that... There's a great explosion lyric, the band The Explosion, that said, 'if you don't know, you weren't meant to.'* And it's so true, it's the kind of thing that finds you, and sometimes you find it, and it's an important part of your life. It was an important part of my upbringing, and I took from it what I learned. Someone gave me a microphone and a stage and an audience, and now I'm trying to do my best to take what I learned from that scene and pass it on to the next generation. And the times that we do cross paths with the hardcore scene it's great to see it so vibrant, and that it's still happening, it's such an important part of music, an important part of music and life, and I think that it's an underrated and underestimated part of the music scene, for sure. Planet Loud - On a political note, the international climate has altered dramatically over the last year or so, with the Bush administration coming out of office and the election of President Obama, among many other things. How do you regard the steps that the new administration has begun to make, the closure of Guantanamo Bay, Healthcare reform etc... Are you more optimistic about the possibility of overcoming the challenges that we collectively still face? Rise Against - Um, I am... obviously I'd have liked to have seen a lot of the changes that are starting to be talked about, I'd have liked to have seen them expedited long ago. But I'm happy that things like the closing of Guantanamo Bay are at least in international conversation, that healthcare reform is finally a dialogue that's been created, and people are talking about it. The environment is being brought to the forefront a little more too. I, like many people, would have liked to have seen somebody pull the trigger on all of those things in the past year, and we're still talking about it. But I'm happy that somebody's at least bringing it into the spotlight, and it's being talked about. Y'know I still breathe a sigh of relief at the words 'President Obama' together, instead of 'President Bush' or 'President McCain,' 'President Sarah Palin.' I'm still reeling from that election, which in a lot of ways certainly was the election of this person, of Barack Obama, but more was this symbolism of the collective will of America, to achieve not only the election of this one guy, but the rejection of the Bush administration, the rejection of all those values that were infecting America. And when I see that someone like Obama is now our president, I can see that America has finally got sick of the Bush administration's agenda, and in a broader picture the right wing conservative agenda that was starting to take over the states. While I think that blaming Bush for everything misses the point, and certainly gives him too much credit, letting a lot of people off too easy, at the same time putting all of your faith in one person like Barack Obama also kind of renders yourself useless in the process. You take a step back and are like 'shit man that guy's got it, I'm gonna chill out.' And I think that in both regards someone like Bush is the symptom of a much bigger disease that is still very much in America... Obama is only as powerful as the collective will of the people. Planet Loud - I notice that you're heading straight into a US tour next month... it seems that you're touring as hard as ever at the moment, so do you ever face burnout on the road? And have you developed ways of dealing with that over the years? Rise Against - It's something that we've learned to deal with, though it still happens. We're pretty burned out right now, at the end of a tour... especially when you're overseas, you're far away from home and everything is a little more difficult. It's harder to have a phone that works, it's harder to figure out the lay of the land in foreign countries, everything is a little bit more challenging. It's definitely exciting, and an adventure in that sense, but after a few weeks everyone's ready to go home. Shows like Brixton lift everybody's spirits, everyone's happy to be out here, it's going to be a great night. But we still get the burnout... everyone that we're out with has been on the road for a while and knows how to deal with it, get the job done, because in the end we're all relying on each other to make every night happen. And without one link in the chain it doesn't happen, so we know that we can depend on each other, and you can't just call in sick that day because you'll screw a lot of people in the process, so... Planet Loud - Thanks again for taking your time today... finally then, is there anything you'd like to say to Rise Against fans reading this? Rise Against - Thanks a lot to all of the fans who've been supporting us through the years, it's been an amazing ride and we're certainly stoked to still be coming to England and having even more fans every time that we come. We can't wait to come back real soon. Interact - http://www.myspace.com/riseagainst Find more articles on Rise Against Related Tags Rise Against Poison The Well Thursday USER COMMENTS - 0 Comments ADD COMMENT |
       
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