In this day and age, there are few bands who are willing to stop and reprocess their place within the music industry, and fewer who are willing to sacrifice the glitz and the glamour of what they have already achieved in order to start fresh and do what feels right. One of those exceptions is We Are The Fallen, a band that has come together in a somewhat improbable twist of fate. With their paths crossing and the stars aligning, Carly Smithson (a prior American Idol contestant), and bandmates Ben Moody, Rocky Gray, and John LeCompt (former Evanescence members), as well as Marty O’Brien (who has backed bands including Static-X and Disturbed), brought to life, We Are The Fallen.
Who says a girl can’t rock? Leading the charge on vocals, Carly Smithson fronts the hard-hitting band whose tracks are haunting yet chillingly ethereal. While individually the band members had found successes with other projects, it was only when all five came together did they strike true gold and find magic in the music that they naturally were able to express as a collective. One thing that is very clear though, is the fact that there are no egos in this band, everyone puts their bandmates ahead of themselves, where each role is just as important as the next, and the respect and genuine care between members is visible. Undoubtedly it is important to remember where you come from, but for We Are The Fallen, it is exciting to see where they are going, and with their histories behind them, they have embarked on a new chapter together and are making a huge name for themselves. With their debut album Tear The World Down released this past Spring, the band has been touring and with a recent stop in Vancouver, asapmusicblog was lucky enough to sit down with bandmates Carly and John to discuss Canada, social networking, summer plans, and more!
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→ asapmusicblog.ca: So you guys have done a couple tour dates in Canada already, what’s the vibe been like up north?
Carly Smithson: I think actually, our favourite show ever – I know mine was Edmonton.
John LeCompt: Yeah, it was a big show for us.
CS: It was in the biggest mall [West Edmonton Mall] in America, in the world or something like that? For me, that was my favourite crowd of the whole tour since March. It was one of my favourite audiences, those people were nuts, it was great. So yeah, favourite has been in Canada, and one of our favourite moments with the band was waking up to see our music video for the first time in Montreal on TV at 7:30 am. It was pretty amazing.
JL: It was funny, she was trying to take pictures of the TV and stuff.
CS: I did! (laughs) I took pictures of the TV and sent them to everybody like an idiot at 7:30 in the morning! Very funny. Yeah, the best audience and that first moment of seeing our video both happened in Canada.
A: So do you guys feel that there’s a difference in the American and Canadian music scenes, or is it all just the same?
JL: I think it’s getting closer to being the same, you know, with big bands like Nickelback, and like the band we’re on tour with, Saving Abel, they’re an American band, but they’re in that same realm as Nickelback and bands like that. I mean Canada’s just full of talent, and America just embraces it, so I think it’s all kind of blurring together now.
A: [With us] being a Canadian website, are there any Canadian bands or artists that you guys follow?
JL: Finger Eleven. I’ve played tons of shows with those guys. they’re magnificent musicians, which is wonderful. But I don’t really know too many Canadian bands besides Nickelback and Finger Eleven.
CS: As a singer, I’d have to say Celine Dion. It’s not that I’m necessarily a big fan of her music and stuff, but her voice is just undeniable as a singer, just listening to that. Our guitar player [Ben Moody] actually produced some of the songs on her last record. He wrote two songs. As a voice, she’s just amazing.
JL: And [Ben] was pretty blown away by working with her. He thought he was going to walk into the room and it was going to be this really scary situation, but he said she’s just like the coolest lady ever, and really down to earth, that they just got to work together and everybody just vibed out in the room so it was cool.
A: So tell us a little bit about how you guys came together, how the band started.
CS: It was very accidental, it was very perfect and weird. A friend of mine lived with Ben, and he has a house with a basement kind of apartment, and she moved in with, she said, ‘an old friend’. I would be down there all the time and I had no clue who this ‘old friend’ was, but I guess I saw Ben’s girlfriend in the kitchen one day, still hadn’t met Ben, but she told her mom, who was a big American Idol fan. They were creating a band already but didn’t have a singer, and then I was working on my post-Idol project and putting a band together, and [I] didn’t have a band. So it was like the perfect kind of week, that the guys needed a singer, I needed a band. If it had gone like a day, or two, or three more, it wouldn’t have happened.
JL: It wouldn’t have happened, it was really strange. We had talked about like, ‘Hey, let’s play together again’, Ben, me, and Rocky, and it had been so long since we played together, so we’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s do something’ – we didn’t think about getting a band together and who we were going to put in, we just jammed together and as we’re jamming together we were realizing, ‘Yes, we’d love to play together again’, and [Carly] just happened to be looking for exactly the same thing…
CS: And I was already in Ben’s basement!
JL: This all happened within like a three-week period too.
CS: Yeah, by three weeks, I think it was already announced that we were together, and we literally just met each other. I don’t think that… unless you were one of us, like us five in a room, we knew it was right. It was weird, we just started singing together, playing together – it was just perfect. Like writing in the first week, we just started straight away and started putting songs together, it was crazy.
A: It’s like the missing puzzle pieces coming together.
CS: It is!
JL: Exactly, and not having to search for them you know? Normally when you try and start a band, the hardest thing in the world to find is a singer.
CS: And chemistry, people who all get along with each other.
JL: Yeah, if you find a singer, you gotta have the chemistry, and if you don’t have that you have to go back to square one. We didn’t even get to the point of trying to figure out, ‘who’s going to be in this’ – it just all happened at the same time, cosmically, it was really weird.
A: Carly, what’s it like for you being a girl surrounded by all these guys in the band?
CS: I get asked that all the time and it’s not really any different from my life before. I mean, I own a tattoo shop and I used to live in Atlanta, I think there was about eight guys that lived in the house that were a mixture of tattoo artists, hot-rod builders, and upholsters. And they’re all tattooed, grease-monkeys, and listened to metal all the time. So these are probably the most clean-cut guys I’ve ever been around.
JL: She does spend at least once a day ranting through the bus with a big smile on her face going: ‘I hate John LeCompt!’
CS: I do! I hate you in the morning! His bunk is right there, and mine is over here, and I get out, and I don’t know how he knows it’s me every morning, but he grabs my leg and I freak out and wake everybody up because I’m screaming.
JL: (mimicking Carly) ‘Jesus Mother!’
CS: But it’s fun! I mean it’s just like a big family, you know, and even our crew, we all get along together and it’s fun, it’s great. I think the one thing that was very important for me was that my husband got along with everybody. And as soon as he came out, I didn’t have any time with him, because he was off with [the band] all the time. So for me, that was very, very important. Like even spouses, girlfriends, we’re all like a big unit, so it’s great.
A: The cover of the album is very interesting looking. You’re immediately drawn to it because it’s so creepy looking. What’s the inspiration behind it, and where did the idea come from?
CS: Well we had a different name for the record, which was another song title from our record, and some of us liked it, some of us didn’t. John and Ben were in Arkansas and started talking about [the] deadline, we had to pick what this album title is. It was clearly staring us all in the face…
JL: Yeah, because we had the song, “Tear The World Down“. and that wasn’t even thought of – maybe because it sounded a little violent or whatever…
CS: It’s the boldest song we have on the record.
JL: But it is that song that has so much put into it. There’s a few songs that have choir and strings, and a lot more songs with strings, but only two songs on the album that have choir. So that was one of them, and we’re just like, ‘We just gotta name it something’ – something we all agree on, and Ben goes, ‘I don’t care, we can call it Tear the World Down for all I care’. And it was like boom! That’s it right there.
CS: And one night I was going through, because we’re trying to come up with a concept of what the cover of the record would look like, and we all agreed that we didn’t want us on it. For us we wanted it to be more of an image that spoke of ‘Tear the World Down’. So I was looking online and I saw, [it] was on istockphoto or something like that, I saw this picture of this child – what do you guys call it here? We call it a pram, I don’t know, you put a kid in it?
JL: A baby carriage?
CL: Yeah, so she had one of those, and she was in the middle of a field with a ruined building behind her, it was black and white, and the kid was dirty, her hair was all scraggly and it was like, ‘That is so cool’. And the kid, she was like six, she looked like she could be me, like when I was younger, and immediately I called Ben and went over to Marty’s, and Marty’s like a wiz with creating Photoshop and crap like that, so we sat down and came up with an idea of instead of having us, having five band members as 6-year-olds, kind of like in The Omen, The Shining, or The Orphan – those kinds of movies. Just having this eerie contrast between these angelic kids that are six, but kind of creepy looking with the background just destroyed. The idea is that these kids got up in the middle of the night and tore the world down. So myself and Marty sat there and came up with this photoshopped, real pasted together, like mock, to show everybody else what was going on in our brains. We actually did a whole photoshoot with five band members as 6-year-olds, but when we put it all together, it didn’t look as isolated and alone as one child, so we kept little Shiloh.
A: Yeah with this girl, it really draws you to the centre.
CS: Mmhm, yeah, we had it with five but it just didn’t make sense…
JL: Yeah, it just looked corny (laughs).
CS: So we ended up just decideing on one child. And –I love it, it’s perfect. We wanted like a Tim Burton kind of feel to it.
JL: We wanted to create a world that’s timeless, you can’t really put a date on what you’re looking at right there. It could be now, it could be 40 years ago, or in the future…
CS: This kid was amazing. It took us a really long time to find a kid with black hair. There were a lot of parents [who] were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just dye her hair’, and I was like, ‘Absolutely not! I’m not dying a 6-year-old’s hair’. We found this kid last minute, and she was amazing. It was a task to have five children there during the day, they were all menacing.
JL: Yeah, they had a teacher, because they had to have their education for the day, it’s part of the union thing…
CS: Yeah, within California, it’s the law. They had a little classroom!
JL: We had to hire a teacher for them to learn and whatever…
CS: We actually had the teacher from American Idol come because I knew her very well, so Teacher Wendy came – ‘cause we had a lot of underagers on the show. It was cool, it was a fun day, but we ended up with one child, becauseit looked more eerie and isolated and angelic, which is what we [wanted].
JL: There’s a lot of thought and work into that cover, we didn’t just go, ‘Oh, boom! We have it’. We really had to work on it, and it took a while.
CS: It was cool because it was the band’s concept, and you know sometimes it’s left in other people’s hands. With the band, all five members, it’s nice that everybody has their [own] thing. Marty’s really good on the computer, my mom comes from a fashion-photography background, so that’s kind of my thing, and John can just make tracks for days. It’s a great group of people that all have creative ideas for days.
A: On that note, individually you guys have so much history, how does that come together and help you as a collective?
CS: All it does is help us…
JL: It works really well, because – and I hate when people say this – but it’s not our first rodeo type thing. [Carly] has done so much on her own, more than most women her age have accomplished, and obviously with myself, Rocky and Ben, we’ve done a lot of things together and apart. Marty’s been involved in every band since the beginning of time. (Carly laughs) We’ve learned how to write songs with other people, and by ourselves – we know how to do it now. When we were younger and we had success, it was kind of like a crapshoot you know? You just hope for the best, and you can sit down and try to write a song, and you wait for inspiration and this or that. But now we’re all at the point [where] we’re very confident in what we do, we’re like, ‘Oh we need to write a song? Okay, let’s do it’, and we just do it.
CS: As well I guess, being a songwriter and a musician, you have a point where you’re doing things that aren’t necessarily for your project, because we’ve all worked for stuff that’s not for [WATF]. Ben’s been writing for other artists for a while, [and] I was singing other people’s songs a lot. When you get to finally that place, there’s so many ideas that are building up and building up – this record literally just spat out of everybody.
JL: It’s finally good to be able to something that is ours, because we have worked with so many other people. I’ve been helping people for a couple years, like local bands in my hometown and all that…
CS: But you save all the good things for yourself.
JL: Well there’s many times when I’ve written stuff for other people, and was like, ‘God I wish I kept that for myself’! But I was inspired at the moment because of who I was working with at the time, but for a couple of years I didn’t have a project that I could go, ‘Okay I’m creating for this’, and I think that’s what we all did. It was much more important to us because it was our project that we were working on.
CS: There’s lyrical content on this record that’s just decades old, you know? It’s been waiting for the right moment, and the right five-piece to put it on paper. Our first idea for this band was to do two songs every eight weeks, and when we sat down to do [the first two], 15 happened – it was amazing. They write tracks and songs so quickly, I was overwhelmed.
A: What would you say is your favourite track off the album?
CS: I think we all have a different one…
JL: Mine is definitely “St.John”, because I was so inspired by these people that I’m in a band with now, that I pulled everything out of my guts that I could possibly do, and put it on that song. I just spent a lot of time on it, and Ben really encouraged me, because him and I both play lead or rhythm or whatever, but we’re both still those guitar players that are like, `We’re not those shredder guys’, and he just kept encouraging me. I think everything that’s on there, solo-wise and electronic-wise, I think it’s the coolest stuff I’ve ever had to deal with. It was a cool song, but [then] what is Carly going to do over it vocally? It doesn’t just float around on these one-note rhythm things, it’s crazy guitar work – how is she going to sing on that? Then she sends me this demo track of her – what you said you watched the Wizard of Oz and were inspired?
CS: I wanted something on the chorus – because the chorus was very bizarre, what he had written – I didn’t know what I was going to put over it, melody-wise. It just sounded like something that was a mixture between Tim Burton, This is Halloween on Nightmare Before Christmas, the Wizard of Oz, Munchkin Land, and that’s kind of like, if you watch like Girl Interrupted or those kinds of movies, that have the message of being a part of an insane asylum, there’s always the funny side of it. That`s kind of the contrast of the verses, very angry and feeling very trapped and alone in this place, but the chorus is just very funny, because there just has to be some sort of light heartedness in places like that.
JL: I feel like I’ve never heard vocals captured to exactly what the lyrics are talking about as much as on that song. It really sounds like you’re thinking about what you’re talking about. I literally fell out of my chair when I heard it, I was like, ’Oh my god’.
CS: It was funny because I finished it and then it got sent to them, and then I didn’t like a piece of it, I was like, ’No, I want to change it,’ and they were all like, ’Absolutely not!’ And I probably pissed everybody off for the next week and a half, because I was like, ’I don’t really like this part’, and they brought in other studio [workers] and musicians we know, and were like, ’Listen to this, and tell her she’s wrong’. I was like, ’Fine, we can keep it.’ For me, “Tear the World Down” is one of my favourite songs on the record, just the whole message of it, and its just huge. It’s this finale, like Braveheart…. it’s just that dramatic, dramatic song, it’s very cool to perform.
A: The instrumental at the end is amazing!
CS: Isn’t it cool? It goes on and on, we had to cut it! It’s like days long, it was crazy. The string arranger, Dave Campbell that came in, it just kept going. It was a big moment for us though, and I think [John] has it on video, we were all sitting there and all teared up. Just to write something and have it be a demo, and then hear an orchestra and a choir come in and sing something that you weren’t expecting, it’s just very emotional and very powerful to hear it completed. Even “Bury Me Alive” – I had been working on it before I met the boys, but as soon as they got a hold of it, it just turned into this new thing, and I’ve never had a song that I’ve written transformed into this monster of a song. I wasn’t expecting anything that the guys did, it was crazy. From the beginning, the first song, it was like, ’This is perfect”.
JL: She had brought such an awesome piece of music for us to do that transgression, I really think each one of us were like, ’Wow she really brought it to the table, we gotta bring our A-game on this song,’ and we were so anxious to get our pieces on it, and everyone did have their individual, ’Oh I’m going to do this, or I’m going to do that’, and just started jamming in the room.
CS: We were so excited, because that stage when we first met, that was just one song that we had. We put everything that we had [into] it because it was the first thing that was going to be released to the world and it was like, ’This is who we are.’
A: You guys were doing pretty well before that, but like I told you at the beginning, I first heard about you guys after [“Bury Me Alive”] debuted on The Vampire Diaries. Did you guys notice any explosion after that from your fans, or the reaction you got?
CS: Yeah, there’s a lot of new people that we weren’t expecting. Fans honestly, have just been – even when we didn’t have a song, people caught wind of what was going on. People from my fan base, people from their fan base, and you could see all of a sudden, this thing was happening on the internet of websites and fansites, and now we have them everywhere from Turkey to Brazil, to Japan to anywhere.
A: You’ve got a Canadian one too!
CS: Yeah! There’s a fansite for We Are The Fallen in almost every country. It was an amazing thing to watch these people become so excited about something that really didn’t even exist yet, but I think they all knew – where I’d come from, where they’d come from, and what is this going to sound like? – and they really believed in the project before it even developed, and it was crazy because we had the record finished from November, and it didn’t come out until May, and it was just like, ’We just want to play it for these people, they’ve been so good to us, and they’re dying to hear it!’
JL: A lot of them, they had been around from the beginning when we had our first press release when we were talking about releasing a couple songs every couple weeks or whatever. We had this record that was being done and it was nearly finished, and they were like, ’Alright come on, aren’t you guys going on tour? It’s already been past eight weeks, you owe us two more songs!’
CS: We were like, ’We’re sorry, but this record happened’ – we weren’t expecting it, but it just came out of us. We’d be mad to do two songs and wait, it was just like this powerful, creative moment. It took… not a long time…
JL: Six weeks to write, and six weeks to record.
CS: It was a crazy time.
A: You guys have talked about your online community, and you guys all seem to be very involved in that with Twitter and everything. Music has shifted to this type of technological era. As an artist in this day and age, how different is it and how do you feel about that?
CS: I think for us, we can come from both sides. I was signed ten years ago, and it was a very different road, and these guys have been around for a very long time. I like it though, I’m not sure I like, for me, as a music lover. I used to look at people like Stevie Nicks and Madonna, and these kinds of artists and they were like this untouchable person that you would never meet or anything like that, and times have changed. For me, I’m not crazy about being that close with the artist, it’s very weird when a fan can directly contact you and ask you questions, but being able to say, ’We go on stage in three hours, be here’, and people show up because of that is a beautiful thing. Being able to say, ’We have a record out today’, and people who didn’t know about it can go and buy it. This whole re-tweet, and ’Send it to your followers!’ – it’s like this snowball.
JL: I guess it’s a trade-off, it’s like the communication that you can get people straight there and they’re paying attention, and it’s going to come straight to their phone or whatever. I guess I never really thought about it like that, that it kind of takes the magic out of, ’That’s the artist that I love, that’s the person that inspires me musically, and yeah I could never talk to them but I can only imagine what their life is like, what they’re doing,’ but then you see their Twitter about how like, ’I’m going to the lake today with my kids’, and then you’re like, ’Oh they’re just regular people’. (laughs)
CS: For me, it’s kind of ruined it for artists that I used to feel so separated from like, ’I’ll never meet them, I just love the music’. As an artist, it’s a great tool, it really is. As a person, I don’t believe in Facebook, it’s weird, I have a Facebook account only ‘cause I’m foreign but I don’t know, updating what you’re doing every five minutes if it’s not business-related I find very weird.
JL: It drives me absolutely crazy. I don’t use mine to go, ’Hey this is what I’m doing right now’ or ’Hey look at, I just did this yesterday!’ It’s more for the fan base, and my family so I can stay in touch with them, but mine is totally private.
CS: I only really use it for music. If people that I know follow me on Twitter, like my father-in-law’s friends do, and he’ll be like, ’I heard you did this yesterday!’ – I’m like how do you know that?’ And these are all these old people, and he’ll be like, ’So-and-so told me on Twitter!’ and I’m like, ’Tell him to stop following me, that’s weird, I know them!’ But as a business tool, it’s an amazing thing, but other than that I think it’s kind of weird.
JL: I think ruining teenagers, because I have one, and she’s on that thing constantly. It’s like, ’Oh, this is what I’m doing, let me see what everybody else is doing, I wonder what she’s doing, I wonder what they’re doing’ – it’s like, ’Do your homework!’
CS: Or go meet them and see what they’re doing, and do it together!
JL: Exactly! It drives me crazy.
A: Tonight you play Vancouver, but what is the rest of the year going to be like for you guys?
CS: We’re on this tour for about another month, and then we do have plans but we can’t talk about them just yet.
JL: There’s a lot of feelers out there for the right tour to jump on, and we definitely want to pick the right one for the fall.
CS: We have a new single, we can’t release what it is just yet. It’s not even really top secret, it’s just that we haven’t been told that we can talk about them. But yeah we just found out what the new single will be and it’s pretty exciting, definitely happy happy. There’s some times when some people may not be on the same page but for this song, we’re all definite.
JL: They’re jumping on it pretty quick, just once we get the, ‘This is exactly what we’re doing!’ – then we can talk about it.
CS: Yeah, because “Bury Me Alive” was a single but not really, because we gave it away for free, so now this will be our first time really putting out a song for sale on the market, so it’s a big deal for us.
A: On our site we do a weekly playlist – do you think you can come up with five songs each for what you’re currently listening to?
JL: Oh man, I listen to Lil Wayne all the time, that “Drop the World” track is awesome.
CS: I have been listening to Eminem recently, since the new record came out, and I’ve gotten back into the old stuff.
JL: I haven’t heard his new record yet, I love Eminem!
CS: I don’t know about actual songs, um, “Mob Scene” from Marilyn Manson. Sia, I’m a massive fan, “You Have Been Loved” is one of the most beautiful songs on the planet.
JL: I’m constantly listening to Massive Attack’s, “100th Window”, constantly, I love that disc. It’s the perfect, ’Walking-around-in-a-place-I’ve-never-been’, just walk around and put my headphones in and realize, ’I’ve walked for miles, now I gotta find my way back.’
CS: I love a guy called Scott H. Biram as well, he’s not very well-known, but he’s so good. Everybody should go get all of his music.
JL: The new Deftones, the first track, I guess it’s the title track… what’s the name of the song? Oh, “Diamond Eyes”, that track is so good.
CS: Radiohead, anything by Radiohead, ‘Karma Police’. And I think it’s a Zero 7 song, Sia sings it, I think it’s called ‘Take Me Somewhere We Belong’.
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The full playlist from We Are The Fallen can be found here. Thanks again to Carly and John for taking the time to chat with us!
