Interview with The Dillinger Escape Plan

Check out an interview with The Dillinger Escape Plan vocalist, Greg Puciato, below.

Please state your name and role in the band.

Greg Puciato and I sing and do whatever else in The Dillinger Escape Plan.

Tell me how the tour with Deftones is going.

It’s going great…as we anticipated. Our bands complement each other well, and we’ve known them for years and get along really well also. I think we’re playing better than we ever have, and the vibe offstage is just as relentless/over the top.

Since you did guest vocals on Every Time I Die’s “Marvelous Slut”, and Architects’ “Year In Year Out” is there any chance that Keith Buckley or Sam Carter will do guest vocals on the next DEP record?

I mean we have no intention of it really, we don’t have any songs nearly far enough along to even think of guests. It’s not something that I’m/we’re even thinking about yet. The only collaboration that I’m really focusing on right this instant, on the front burner, is the one that I do with the other DEP members haha. I mean there’s some other stuff in the works too, a one-off record with Max Cavalera and Dave Elitch (ex-Mars Volta), and a probable new Spylacopa(collaboration between John Lamacchia of Candiria fame and myself) EP or album on the horizon…but I can’t really go into detail yet about either.

On the Metal Injection Livecast, you said the band is currently in the process of writing new music. How many songs have you got written so far?

Not one. We have odds and ends written but nothing resembling a full song. After this tour we’re gonna start getting things a little more organized….get some songs solidly done. We may release an EP before the next full length. I like the condensed idea concept of an EP. Short and sweet. Less cumbersome than an LP. More to the point. You can really dial in on a vibe or feel and not have it get stale, whereas a full length is this long journey that takes much more out of you and goes all over the place.

Tell us about your collaboration with Devin Townsend. How did that come about?

Oddly enough, and this speaks volumes about the time we live in…in a positive way…Twitter was the catalyst for us working together. We’ve met before briefly and obviously have/had mutual respect for one another…but had never toured together or talked of working together. I think it was just one of those things that neither of us had thought of simply because we hadn’t really met extensively. Someone on Twitter sent us a both a comment about how we should work together…and I was kinda like yeah I’d love to, and his response was the same….so it was just like…okay…why is this not happening if we both publicly acknowledged it? Then we just direct messaged each other and the ball was rolling. He was already mixing the record, and I was in Australia, so I found a studio and engineer in Melbourne, knocked out the part, and emailed it to him. We didn’t even hang out until a few days ago, long after the collaboration had already taken place. Crazy times. I’m really happy with the way it came out. His whole album, and entire body of work, is beautiful genius level insanity, and I am proud of my contribution. I’m sure we’ll work more together in the future. I’d like to.

If you could tour with any bands, past or present, who would it be and why?

This question is an almost endless answer. So many great bands from so many time periods, so I’ll keep it brief and deliberately in a rock vein. Three off of the top of my head? Bad Brains from 79-82. Guns N Roses from 88-90. Metallica from 1987-1994. Why? Because I think you’d be hard pressed to find many rock bands that were better live at ANY period than those bands were during those periods.

What do you think about all these technical metal bands like Animals As Leaders and Veil of Maya getting more and more popular?

I don’t really care about technical metal. It really doesn’t interest me too much. I don’t really listen to it as a genre, but sometimes isolated bands pop out. Animals As Leaders, particularly Tosin, I think is amazing. Really blew me away even at first listen. I reached out personally to them to get them on our tour last year, and it makes me proud that they are doing so well now. I was proud to have them play with us, to be exposing them to our audience. Such a phenomenal talent, and what separates him/them…is that the music has feel and soul, and style. It’s not just aimless noodling. I can’t stand prog and tech honestly for the most part…for that reason. It’s brain over dick, and when you’re playing music you really shouldn’t ever be thinking. The problem with a lot of people with immense technical ability is that they lose the ability to completely let go, and they usually have spent so much time practicing that they haven’t lived enough or really gone down enough emotionally extreme passageways in life to have anything or worth to report back to the rest of the world. I don’t need to hear some guy show me how much time he’s spent practicing scales or rudiments. It’s like having a massive vocabulary with nothing interesting/worthwhile to say.

What promoted you to take your current stance on Twitter against “posers”?

I was talking to some friends in Australia about “Soundwave”, a rock festival that happens down there, that we’ve played…that’s really cool. This year Slash, Slayer, Iron Maiden, QOTSA, The Melvins, and a lot of other cool bands played. Legit rock bands. And then there was 30 Seconds To Mars. I’ve said all I really need to say about it. It reached the ears of everyone it needed to reach. That shit belongs in Tiger Beat or playing the Disney Channel festival or something like that. Shame on anyone for allowing some rich actor and his narcissistic vanity project to even clean the stage that those other bands are playing on. Rock ‘N Roll is a sacred institution and it needs to be kept that way by the gatekeepers, and that includes other bands, promoters, journalists, etc. Point made. I’m not saying he has no right to sing or make music. But let’s keep it in the pop world it belongs in….let’s not start letting Miley Cyrus open for Tool anytime soon, ya know? At no point should I open a rock magazine and on one page see Thom Yorke’s face, the next Dave Grohl, and then the next Jared Leto…if you see what I’m getting at.

What were some of your music influences and how involved in music were you growing up?

Ahh…this is gonna be extensive. I’ve been playing and listening since I came outta the womb. When I was like three and four and five, when normal kids were listening to the smurfs sing songs and shit like that, I was listening to my dad’s Aerosmith, Def Leppard, and Lynyrd Skynrd tapes, to my mom’s Elton John and Michael Jackson records. To Boston and Prince and to the Black Sabbath “Paranoid” album. Music was always playing, and I would beat on things to drum along, sing along to everything. When I was five my parents took me to an REO Speedwagon concert with them. At five! I remember NOT liking the way the cottonballs in my ears felt, and I still don’t wear earplugs now and hate the way they make music sound. At seven I heard Appetite For Destruction, and it COMPLETELY changed my life. I played that tape nonstop, my mom tried to throw away the insert, which had the robot rape scene on it, and I had to hide it under a brick in the alley outside. I didn’t know what Nighttrain was, I thought it was a train that existed at night, and that Mr. Brownstone was an actual old man that lived next door to Axl. All I knew was that it was badass. I became the kid that all my friends’ older brothers thought was cool, and they started giving me copied cassettes of all these metal bands. When I heard …And Justice For All…that was step two, and I wanted to be Kirk Hammett. I got a guitar for my ninth birthday and just played along to that record and the tab book nonstop. Soon after, it wasn’t just thrash, it was Nirvana, Soundgarden, Rage Against The Machine, Bad Brains, Faith No More. An amazing time to be a kid. A musical onslaught. A friend of mine started playing drums at the same time, and we would play Metallica and Nirvana songs, Slayer and Anthrax, anything we could. Soon we started writing our own, I started singing too, and then from that point on I’ve been singing and playing guitar, even though in Dillinger I only sing, which from a technical standpoint I’m much better at at this point.

If you had a chance to shoot a music video without any limits, what kind of video would you make and for what song?

I really have no idea. I don’t particularly think of video ideas ever. It’s not something that interests me as a medium, as far as creating them. I appreciate when they are done well though, so I’d probably just get a director that I really liked, throw money at him, sit down with him and brainstorm, hear his ideas, and then leave the direction in his hands. Ideally? I’d get Scorcese and whoever directed the Lady Gaga “Telephone” video, to sit down with Chris Cunningham (Aphex Twin, Bjork)…and have them bash out something really unique. I think I’d want them to do something like “Widower”, or maybe a new version of “Farewell, Mona Lisa”.

What are your most anticipated albums for 2011?

I honestly don’t really know what’s coming out until it’s already out and someone recommends it to me or I read a review of it. I just can’t keep up, especially being on tour. I’m psyched about Thurston Moore’s (Sonic Youth) solo album. Beck produced it and the song I heard is great, so that sounds promising. There’s a lot of albums that have already been released this year that I really dig, but I have no idea what’s on the horizon really.

Any last words for the fans?

Thanks for giving a shit. It doesn’t go unappreciated. We’re all in this culture together, whether we’re creating or listening, and we’re all equally valuable. See you soon.

James Shotwell
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