Straight Line Stitch - Alexis Brown
Posted on August 15, 2008 at 12:04 am by admin
Straight Line Stitch has their first album on a label coming out on August 19th (only a few days after I’m posting this interview!) They’re coming up fast, and I was fortunate enough to get an interview in with lead singer Alexis Brown. Now don’t get any funny ideas of any stupid questions being asked towards women that you may have seen in other publications (those questions don’t have anything to do about music anyways). What Alexis said was much more important, especially to all those local bands looking to make it somewhere, giving out useful information on what it takes to get signed!
Way Too Loud!: Everyone loves to talk about this - what got you up to sing and scream?
Alexis Brown: My first influences are old music. I love Stevie Nicks. I love her voice and the songs she sings about. I’m also influenced by Shawni and Billy Holiday. As far as screaming and heavy music goes, I love Daryl Palumbo from Glassjaw. I love his sporadic vocals, and how different he can be, because he has an unusual voice. I have a big affinity for all music, especially from the 50’s and 60’s. That’s what I mainly listen to, which seems weird because I don’t always listen to a lot of metal.
For the other guys, they listen to everything too. It’s pretty eclectic. Our guitar player, Seth Thacker loves the 80’s, like Loverboy, and he loves Pantera too. Our bass player loves In Flames, Pat Pattison, the other guitar player loves the Boston hardcore scene and Hatebreed, and our drummer is into 36 Crazyfists and Lost Prophets. All that is probably why we come together and make some pretty weird music, because our tastes differ so much.
WTL: How do the lyrics come together?
Alexis: I write my own lyrics about lifes little experience, like what I see around me. Things that get me down, or pick me up. I write by myself because it’s a very private thing for me. I also like to write lyrics that all people can relate to.
WTL: Obviously the metalcore tag gets thrown around a lot, and of course bands hate to be labeled.
Alexis: People are going to label you regardless of whether you want to be labeled or not. We don’t care. I think our biggest thing is that we don’t want to be pigeonholed as one genre of music, because we’re not. We go from one spectrum to the other. We think our music is metal, don’t get me wrong, don’t get me wrong, we love our metal, but it also has other influences too. We want our music to be embraced by anybody who listens to it, not just people in one type of genre. I think it’s unwise that a band would try to pigeonhole themselves. I could be wrong…
WTL: I’ve been noticing some big push from your label. Is there any fear of some backlash if you become big?
Alexis: Yeah! We definitely have some fear of that! This whole thing is scary, although I can’t personally speak for the guys. Just in general I’m afraid because people saw we’re going to blow up, and when they say that I’m afraid we might not blow up, but if we do, is it just going to be for a little while? Are we just going to be that hot thing in one moment, and the next we’re yesterdays news? I mean, I want to make a career out of this, and I’m sure other bands do to, so I’m scared all the way around to answer the question!
WTL: I pick up Revolver magazine every now and then, and pretty often they have the “Hottest Chicks in Metal” issue pretty often now. Do you think you’ll have any involvement in that if someone behind the scenes asks you? I know some people will say it’‘l help promote the band, and other people just hate doing it, if at all.
Alexis: I think that’s cool! I think it’s great that women are being recognized, so power to us! But I’d like for my band to be beside me instead of behind me. You know how they push me because I’m the front person, and that’s what some audiences go for, “she’s the female, she’s the frontperson, she’s the face”, but I wouldn’t be anywhere without my band, so I wish they’d focus more on them, instead of me, as just some hot metal chick. Do you know what I’m saying? Does that make any sense?
WTL: Yeah! Sometimes I’ll look through the issue and think that people are focusing on a hot girl instead of having any focus on the music.
Alexis: That’s how I feel! Where is their band? I can’t even think of what their band members names are, because it doesn’t talk about them, it doesn’t even their music. It’s usually about them and how they look. I’m sort of torn on it, because some promotion seems cool. Me personally, I’d like the whole band to be represented as a whole.
WTL: How did you get hooked up with Raging Nation and Koch Records?
Alexis: We were on a DIY tour with some friends of ours who knew Rage and his wife, like one of the band members moms was a friend of Rages wife Kim, and they had a meeting while they were on tour, and we got to sit in on the meeting. I was like “why are we here?” I’m not going to lie, I was a little jealous because I wanted us to be doing something, but I didn’t say that, I just put my head down and let them do their thing because their my friends. Unbeknownst to us, Rage was tracking us for a year, and called us out of the blue, saying that he wanted to sign us, and it just knocked my socks off! He said that he believed we have something, so after that we kept touring and kept in touch, and then he set up a showcase with the TV News and John Freen from Koch in Virginia. We played first, got the crowd worked up, we had a great turnout. The label was interested, but they didn’t say anything, because the like to play the cat and mouse game, and then we had a video made, and when they saw that, we signed right then and there, right on the dotted line!
WTL: What else would you say that you did to get signed beyond that? There’s still a lot of people out there thinking that all they need to do is wait around for a bunch of suits in a limo to drive up and give some free money away.
Alexis: That is an awesome question, because I used to think that way! That was before I got into Straight Line Stitch, I was in another band wondering “Why? Where are the labels?” We’re playing all these shows - and of course we were just playing in our hometown - and we’re playing this shows, and nobodies around, and we’re not signed, and now I get e-mails from these bands that say “Oh, we’re so awesome! I’ll send you my demo! We’re the shit!” and I tell them it doesn’t work that way, and I had to learn that the hard way. What we did was the same thing that everybody else who gets signed does, unless they know somebody, was to work our asses off on the road, and that’s what we still do. That’s the only way you’ll get noticed, is to put yourself out there by being on the road.
Labels want to know that you can take care of yourself. That’s what labels want. They don’t want to hold your hand and baby you, that want to know that they can let you go and do your thing, and that’s what the label saw in us.
WTL: how were you able to do 200 shows on the road for so long without being signed? That must’ve been pretty hard.
Alexis: Oh lord! It was tough! A lot of that has to do with our guitar player, Seth. He’s the brainchild of this band. He’s the one that kept us moving before we even got signed to a label. He’s pedal-to-the-metal, let’s do it, and he’s a no-nonsense person, and if we’re gonna do this, let’s do this. I wanted to go out and tour, and go out of state, and he made it happen.
WTL: How much real life stuff, and fun things did you have to give up in order to play in a band? How many fun things did you have to turn down to go to practice, or play a show, or work on something that has to do with the band?
Alexis: The most important thing for me, was that I had to move away from my mom. I lived with mom, and my brother was in the army doing his thing overseas. I didn’t really have friends. I didn’t do a lot of hanging out with anybody, because all I wanted to do since I was a kid was do music and take care of my family. That’s all I ever wanted to do! To move away in order to do that was the hardest thing I had to give up. I don’t get to see her at all, maybe once in a blue moon, but we do talk on the phone.
WTL: What jobs did you do before you got signed?
Alexis: I actually had two jobs! I was a maid to clean up big houses for rich people, and I wasn’t too good at that, and rich people don’t like there to be any traces of dirt anywhere, and I can understand that. Then I had a job doing restoration for fire damage and water damage to go in and clean up and package what little stuff they have left, and some of the other guys had jobs, but we couldn’t have jobs once we hit the road, so we lost them - naturally.
WTL: Does that mean you pretty much live on the road?
Alexis: Things slowed down a little bit because we were recording this album, “When Skies Wash Ashore”, so we didn’t get to play as many shows. We pretty much lived in New York for three months. Things now are just starting to pick back up where we’re on the road, a lot!
WTL: What kind of things do you do for the band beyond playing and touring that regular people don’t see?
Alexis: We still have to go through battles to get merch, we’re till in control of all of that. When we’re not playing, we’re on the computer talking to our fans, doing MySpace, just trying to do what we can to make sure we’re well promoted, and that everyone is on top of what their supposed to be doing. It can be hard because people get agitated, they don’t want to be bothered, but we don’t want to get swallowed up. There’s a lot of new bands out there, and a lot of them are good, so we need to be on top of things. Today we might be it, but tomorrow, people could be asked “Who are you?” So when we’re not playing, we’re working to keep our name out there. One of our goals is to try and make Straight Line Stitch a household name.
WTL: How important is merch?
Alexis: Merch is our bread and butter! And every single band that we’ve toured with, merch has been their bread and butter too! With gas prices being so ridiculous? Bands get a guarantee for playing a show, but that guarantee gets sucked up in gas, so we don’t make anything from that, so selling shirts is our lifeline
WTL: How far have you played so far? Have you been outside of the US?
Alexis: We haven’t been outside! [note: at the time of this interview, Straight Line Stitch had not played outside of the US, but had a show lined up in Toronto, which they’ve now completed, as well as dates in Mexico] We’re ready to go! When they tell us that we’re playing overseas, you’re going to see a big rainbow, because I’ll be farting rainbows, because I’ll be so excited about going to Europe!
WTL: You had an EP, and an earlier album. Are those going to go by the wayside now?
Alexis: We’re actually out of those, we did those independently, so this “hen Skies Wash Ashore” is going to be our first national release through a label, but I don’t think those earlier efforts will ever go to the wayside because there’s still people who still want those CDs and want us to play songs from those albums, so I think as things progress, we’ll bring those songs back out and play them. We just had a conversation of a song that we’re recorded a couple of times, and we’re tired of recording it, we’re tired of the damn song, so we’re not going to do it anymore, but the fans like it so much that we’ll probably do it again. The old stuff that we did won’t fall by the wayside, not by a longshot.
WTL: Who would you like to tour with?
Alexis: I don’t want to sound corny or cliche, and everybody says this, but I truly mean it. I would like tour with Metallica! That’d be cool! That’s a band I was into when I was younger, listening to the black album, and that’s a band that totally went out there and made a name for themselves. You know you’ve made it somewhere when you’ve played with Metallica! I we did that, that would prove that we did something right!
WTL: Have you ever lied about what your band name means, or just completely lied about your band name?
Alexis: I think our bass player did that once when we were at a gas station, and he said we played for Kelly Clarkson! And another time when we had another member when we were taking pictures outside, and he said we were Aerosmith! People have asked about Straight Line Stitch and what it means, but I don’t lie about that, because I honestly have no clue what the hell the name means. It was there before I was in the band. I asked the guys about it just in case someone asks what the band name means, but they didn’t know what it means either, so I guess it sounds cool. What they told me, and what they could remember, was they had 2 male singers in the band before they even thought of me, and I guess the mom of the singer sewed a straight line stitch in come clothing, and they thought the name was cool, but don’t quote me on that!
Straight Line Stitch at MySpace
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October 2nd, 2008 at 11:34 am
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