Although it’s been 20 years since they first walked out onto a stage, the gentlemen of Every Time I Die continue to perform as graciously as they did all those years ago. Their passionate live performances are due to how thankful they are for the love and support that they’ve received over the decades, especially from the hardcore scene and Warped Tour crowd. Eight years after joining the fast-paced tour, the guys came back once again in preparation for today's release of their eighth studio album, Low Teens.
Myspace sat down with vocalist Keith Buckley to talk about the band’s evolution up to Low Teens, their return to the iconic summer tour, and what he does when he’s missing home.
How would you say the band has evolved from the first album up to Low Teens?
We haven’t abandoned our sound that we honed in on when we started out, but we definitely keep finding ways to push it a little further without completely breaking off into something entirely new. We’ve seen a lot of bands change their sound and their style over time, and it doesn’t ever really serve them well. It feels really good to be playing the kind of music that we love and to do it honestly and have people receptive to it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
After all of these years, what does it mean for the band to continue performing at Warped Tour?
It means that our band is at least going to last another two years. I feel like that’s kind of the cycle we’ve been going on, where we put out a record and play Warped Tour around the same time. We then tour the record cycle — which is about two years — and then skip a summer of Warped. For the last eight years they’ve brought us back every other year. We completely owe our longevity to Warped Tour. It really means a lot to us.
What advice would you go back and give yourself when you were first starting out?
I don’t think I’d tell myself anything. It was really necessary that we make a lot of mistakes and sort of learn our way. Maybe I’d say to avoid certain roads in the winter to stay out of car accidents, but other than that I think it was really important to do all of the really stupid things that we did when we were coming up. We learned so much from it all. I would just make sure that that kid — whenever he felt like giving up — would not give up.
Which bands have influenced you personally?
My influences when I was younger won’t make much sense in the grand scheme of things. The alternative stuff that I was listening to — Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots — definitely added that rock element. One of my favorite bands growing up was Rage Against the Machine. I guess if I could find a place for that in the evolution of our band, they were the first band that made me think about the lyrics. Every song by Rage Against the Machine I would look up in an encyclopedia, and it added a new dimension to listening to music — which I appreciated and, in a way, tried to incorporate into lyric writing in order to give people something more than surface-level lyrics. I also loved Counting Crows. I know that’s a strange one for people to hear. The lyrics that he wrote when I was a kid hit really close to home, and I knew that lyrics could be a very powerful thing. Those bands taught me a lot about lyric writing.
What’s your favorite song to perform live?
There’s a song called “The New Black” which was important to me because it was the first time that I really had fun with a song and wrote it just because. Based on the way it sounded, I was trying to write a party song and didn’t take myself so seriously. Once I did that and it worked, it opened up so many new things for me as far as the content of the lyrics went. It was a monumental song for me, and I still like playing it.
Do you have any guilty pleasures?
I try to make it a point to watch Dr. Phil every day at 3:00. It just began right before we left to start the tour. I have a very new daughter who’s only like 6 months old. When I was home, her feedings were every three hours — noon, 3:00 and so on. I was feeding her at the 3:00 one day and turned on the TV to have some noise in the background. Dr. Phil was on, and I found myself kind of watching it. Then it became a thing where everyday at 3:00, her and I would sit, I’d put on Dr. Phil, and I’d feed her. It became sort of a strange routine, and now that I’m here without her it takes me back home a little to watch it. It sounds stupid, but it’s me and my daughter bonding over Dr. Phil.
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