| As I Lay Dying's Nick Hipa on the White Noise Metal Video Podcast |
| As I Lay Dying's Nick Hipa on the White Noise Metal Audio Podcast |
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"The vision has never changed," AILD's lead guitarist Nick Hipa told White Noise Metal's That BS Dude Brian Shields on the last night of headlining the Cool Tour with Underoath and Between the Buried and Me. "There's all sorts of styles of music, even with heavy music that we're all fans of, we're very confident of what As I Lay Dying is. We know that we are energetic and intense and kind of a brutal band yet we have a melody in a lot of parts. We just try to incorporate a lot of our outside influences with those boundaries. I'm not trying to say we just put ourselves in a narrow box to fit in but we never want to just focus on all of the things we're interested in on the side and neglect what As I Lay Dying is. We're trying to find that perfect medium between expanding while staying the same."
On White Noise Metal, Hipa and Shields discuss three songs off As I Lay Dying's newest record, "The Powerless Rise" starting with "Anodyne Sea."
"That is one of my favorite songs on the record because it includes a little bit of everything that we have done," Hipa said. "It's got the pummeling rhythm, the noodly kind of melodic riff, but then there's a little bit more there. There's a chorus but after that there's this post-chorus that incorporates some of the influences that him and I have which is a David Gillmor type or Bryan May type Queen harmony, something out of the old school but it still fits. We then tried to write a heavy part in the middle of that and just making it work."
Hipa says the band members were better prepared for this album having all worked on parts separately using pro-tools before first getting together to put the songs all together. Still some of the songs like "Anger and Apathy" needed some work in the studio.
"We had actually had to do a little more cutting for that song. Adam D of Killswitch (Engage) who produced our record, had helped to make the song a little bit more cohesive. It was longer with not as much chorus. He was taking on the persona of a very sleazy producer who was like, 'Don't bore us, get to the chorus' to try to make a song out of it. The end result is that is probably the most mellow, non-aggressive song on the record."
Hipa says "Condemned" came together in the old fashioned way with all of the band members together in the studio in collaboration.
Josh had the initial idea for it and we all just sat around and figured out where to go beyond the first 15 or 20 seconds of it. We threw in a solo section which obviously I'm always going to be a fan of. It's actually the first song I've ever recorded with a whammy bar. That's a song that we really enjoyed and was really cool but we didn't know if our fans would like it. The feedback we've been getting is that that's one of the favorite songs on the record."
There's a real progression to As I Lay Dying's work over the years but Hipa insists it's natural and not as a result of consciously saying they needed to make a heavier record.
"If you heard As I Lay Dying before and you never really liked it, just go and download the newest one because it might change your perspective because we've grown a lot and there's a lot more to the band these days so it might be a good cd to get re-introduced to the band."
White Noise Metal focuses on the music of some of the top names in metal. We've profiled such bands as Between the Buried and Me, Cynic, The Faceless, Gojira, Trivium, Shadows Fall, and more. The reports are available on YouTube, for podcast download in both video and audio formats at iTunes, and at www.whitenoisemetal.com
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