ADTR States Victory Threatened To End Their Career & Forced Them To Release ‘Old Record’

October 9th, 2013

Kriston McConnell

Over the last few weeks, Jeremy of A Day To Remember has been interviewing about the band’s trial with Victory Records and Common Courtesy. Earlier today, some audio was leaked that included a voicemail left by Tony Brummel for the band. If you haven’t heard it yet, I’d recommend checking it out.

Jeremy recently met up with our friends at Absolutepunk, and he shed some light on their relationship with Victory. He states they were threatened, and forced to re-release Old Record, something that Jeremy says he regrets doing. You can read that snippet of the interview below, and the entire interview is available here.

So now you get to this spot … and, hypothetically, say you lose this case when it goes to a jury – is there anyway this band could go back and work with Victory Records again?

I mean if we’re forced to by the court … but, I know what you mean and I’ll answer it: and the answer is no. But, really, we’re not even worried about that right now. The only thing he was trying to do with this is try and ruin our careers. He would always say that over the years when he would call us up, and we didn’t want to do something … for instance … he made us put out “Old Record.” And, what he would do is say, “I’m going to give you guys this much money to do this,” and then we’d come back with, “well, we don’t really want to do that because we would have like two days at home to re-record this entire album” — and he told us, “you have to do this or I will end your career.” And us, being young kids, touring in a van with no money, we absolutely were terrified. And what would you do? I mean we can’t do anything about this right now. And we were forced to go into the studio, in two days, and record our entire first album again. And we butchered it. Because it was two days. And it’s something I absolutely am ashamed that we put out.

And see, that’s where it gets crazy — he tries to control people. And, well, I won’t name the band name, but there was a band that we have been on tour with multiple times, that was an older Victory band, and they were putting out their last album … and, well, we were told that he kind of shelved it. As a way of forcing them to re-sign with Victory. And they said, “we’re not gonna do that,” so he did what he did and it definitely affected them.

So, the answer is if the court forces us to – yeah, we will – but eventually he will kill the career of our band. I mean that’s just the position we’re in. It was either let the guy do it, and he’s probably going to do it anyway, or do we try and stand up for ourselves? And hopefully the rest of the world will see what’s happening and not let this guy do this to people anymore.