Tag: bornstellar

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How To Kill Your Band #8 – Everyone Has To Start Somewhere

Hello and welcome to the eighth installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band. This column offers advice to up and coming artists from the perspective of a professional musician who has thrived with and without label support over the last decade. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

An Introduction:

I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How To Kill Your Band.

Part 8 – Everyone Has To Start Somewhere

To kill a band, you have to start one first. This week I’m going to be diving into the musical influences that hooked me on playing music. I try to write music in some form almost every day  and after a recent fit with writer’s block I went back to my early roots to get some inspiration. In past interviews I’ve almost always been asked about my band’s influences but not so much as my personal gateways that encouraged me to start writing my own songs. So here’s the chance to relive my own musical adolescents and discuss the artists that shaped the way I look at music.

Rufio – Perhaps, I Suppose (2001)

This was the first band that really motivated me to become a better guitar player at a technical level. There is simply no other pop punk band that shredded like these guys. Though I don’t remember what made me pick out their debut Perhaps, I Suppose in the first place, I vividly recall leaving the mall and popping the album in my discman as the crescendo into “Above Me” quickly filled my ears. Just fifteen seconds into that lead track was enough to leave me stunned and instantly inspired to figure out what on earth they were doing on their fretboards. I just never knew it was possible to do so much on guitar and still be maintain the ever catchy pop punk spirit that Rufio rooted themselves in. The moment I got back home I grabbed my guitar, booted up the Compaq Presario for a quick Dogpile (yes!) search, and stayed up all night learning that album.

Senses Fail – From the Depths of Dreams (2003)

Running through the gamut of Drive-Thru Records releases, I eventually landed upon Senses Fail’s From the Depths of Dreams EP in 2003. By now I had a large collection of the label’s records filling up my pseudo-leather bound CD booklet that included the likes of The Starting Line, New Found Glory, Allister, Midtown, Rx Bandits, and The Movielife. These were all great bands endemic to a profoundly influential period of pop punk at the turn of the millenium but there was something different about Senses Fail. This band was serious. While their peers were busy with self deprecating humor and the mistrials of high school romances, Buddy Nielsen was singing about death. The band gets right to the point as the lead track off that debut EP, “Steven”, is about a close friend of that name being killed in a car accident. That song gave me chills on the first listen. Buddy’s raw, unique but slightly out of tune vocal delivery coupled with the bands darker melodic arrangement was sort of a breath of fresh air to me. Senses Fail also clearly had hardcore influences and the metal tinged guitar riffs were a gateway into my discovery of early metalcore acts.

Further Seems Forever – The Moon is Down (2001)

Chris Carrabba was only barely in this band long enough to record their first album, The Moon is Down, but it is by far my favorite indie rock/emo release of all time. I’d assume this is a product of a perfect storm where I am going through newly turned teenage angst and Chris’s powerful emotionally soaked lyrics. His vocal delivery, while not tunefully perfect, is undeniably catchy. His choruses come to the verge of screaming several times on this album giving you the ability to tangibly feel the emotion he’s pouring out over every line. The instrumentation here is undeniably second fiddle to the vocally driven tracks but they are subtly complex and provide just the right atmosphere to push each theme to it’s climax. Listening back over the album now, I’m amazed at how much melody is hidden in the guitar tracks while still managing not to detract from Chris’s dense but soaring storytelling. Even when it wasn’t the focus, there seemed to always be something intricate going on guitar wise and that idea propelled much of my early songwriting. One secret gem of this album is Steve Kleisath’s insane drum work. While the guitar and vocal lines on the album conservatively tend to play around the same ideas, Steve makes each song stand apart with a complex yet song supporting drumming that fills the emptiness and creates variety in places where there otherwise are none. This is an album I go back to from time to time for inspiration and a refresher on how instrumentation properly supports vocally driven songs.

Thrice – Identity Crisis (2001)

I was introduced to the wonder of Thrice by Justin Brown, AHAF and Bornstellar vocalist, back in 2002 during our sophomore year of high school. He brought his super awesome mini-disc player to school one day and the first song on his latest mix was “Phoenix Ignition”. The track starts off innocently enough with frontman Dustin Kensrue singing softly over a single acoustic guitar before abruptly kicking in with the full band under the anthem of his now screaming voice. This was the first time I had been intimately exposed to screamed vocals and I was quite taken back by it. It took me a good half dozen listens to come around to the band but once I got past the nascent startle of this new sonic aggression, I realized how amazing and beautiful it all was. The viscerally raw rage that permeated Identity Crisis stoked an undeveloped side of my musical dexterity that changed my perspective of what songs could be. Up until that point, most of my library came out of the Drive-Thru roster who’s pop punk ethos contrasted greatly with this new post-hardcore purposefulness. Teppei Teranishi’s guitar playing was another major influence to my riff building framework. While bands like Senses Fail also had metal influences infusing their guitar sections, Teppei brought a technical level to the hardcore/punk band that was quite novel at the time. His instrumental prowess was a constant inspiration as I continued to develop my guitar playing early on and brings us to another band that Justin introduced me to:

Hopesfall – No Wings to Speak Of (2001)

Being a Charlotte native, I along with nearly all other aspiring local musicians were heavily influenced by the rise of Hopesfall in the early 2000’s. They were the first hardcore band to really put Charlotte on the map and their early success sparked a creative renaissance in our music scene. 2002’s The Satellite Years may have been the band’s most well known album but 2001’s No Wings to Speak Of  is the quintessential masterpiece of the entire melodic metalcore genre. This record showed me what was possible if you broke all the rules. There were no defined choruses, verses, or even a semblance of song structure but a weaving path of evolving melodies carried each song like it’s own separate story. The band freely rotates between aggressive hardcore sections and spacious reverb drenched cleans that taught me how much you could change the mood within a single song. This EP is probably the biggest influence to my writing on A Hero A Fake’s first release, Volatile. My fascination with abrupt transitions between heavy and clean passages, soaring guitar driven atmosphere’s, and the orchestration of sporadically changing time signatures is traced back to this amazing record.

Honorable Mentions:

AFI – The Art of Drowning (2000)

Boyhitscar – S/T (2001)

The Starting Line – Say it Like You Mean It (2002)

Underoath – The Changing of Times (2002)

A Static Lullaby – …And Don’t Forget to Breathe (2003)

Thursday – War All the Time (2003)

Misery Signals – Of Malice and the Magnum Heart (2004)

 

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How To Kill Your Band #4 – Don’t Tour. Yet.

Hello and welcome to the fourth installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band series. We run this column every other week and encourage anyone who enjoys the material found below to visit previous editions of HTKYB they may have missed. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

An Introduction:

I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How To Kill Your Band.

Part 4 – Don’t tour. Yet. 

Learning to book your own tours is perhaps the most important skill you can learn as you make your way in music. It’s not only useful because of it’s immediate impact on your ability to promote yourself on the road, but is also one of the few skills that can pay dividends after your own band calls it quits. Becoming adept at booking takes practice more than anything, but it heavily favors those who are a bit obsessive. Locking in a tour dates takes a certain neurotic tendency necessary to piece together a complex puzzle that never really has a exact solution. No tour is ever going to be 100% perfect from start to end, something that tortured me early on, though the key is learning how to adapt and work to the constantly changing variables – venue closings, promoter drops, competing tours in the area, etc. But before we get to the actual mechanics of tour routing, we’re going to spend this week answering just one question: 

Why would anyone book your band?

Every young band would want to be out there promoting their music nightly but it just isn’t something most should do. There has to be a reason for a promoter to book your band and you need to be able to communicate that clearly. As I touched on in HTKYB #2, being signed gives you immediate value to a talent buyer even if he’s never heard of you before. They can build a show around your band because local bands are smart and know every single label so it gives them a reason for sharing the stage with you – essentially something to put on their resume and the fleeting hope that you’ll be so amazed by their set you’ll personally recommend them to your label. 

If you’re not signed it’s still possible to tour diy, plenty of bands do it successfully, but you need to be able to offer another kind of value to the promoter. Here it helps to be different – why would a promoter in Toledo book an unknown metalcore act from out of state when there are plenty local bands who actually draw? Offering something not already saturating the market gives them an unique event to promote while also just supporting the basic economics of the situation. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need be genre defying but could also stem from having a distinct live show or an unconventional type of branding. If all else fails, you can even separate yourself by brute force through effort. Offer to set up your own publicity for the show with local radio stations, get posters hung at local joints, and even go out on foot to promote. On many of the early AHAF tours, we’d call ahead to Hot Topics and FYE stores at malls located near that days venue and set up our own in store meetups. We’d get to the store around noon to ready our merch table by the entrance where we’d handout show flyers and promo items to people as they walked in. During the holiday season it was even more valuable because parents would be rushing around looking for last minute stocking stuffers and it was it was easy to convince them they could end their search with an album or t-shirt. 

The long and short of it is that it all comes down to giving a talent buyer something they can promote. Whether that be through label support, originality, or meticulously growing your support region by region, you must understand the basic economics through a promoters eyes and give them something they can build a show on. There are bands that get insanely lucky by starting out with notable agent even before their first show (Woe, Is Me, Capture the Crown) but that’s rare and having the ability to book your own tours is a highly valuable skillset if you plan on working somewhere in the music industry post bandlife. Perhaps what I’ve learned most from my experiences on the road is that you shouldn’t rush into touring. I’ve witnessed many bands, who while sounding great, simply weren’t ready to be on the road and eventually succombed to the depleted morale and mounting struggles of unsuccessful tours. It’s much more financially and emotionally supporting to be patient before going on the road, as the consequences of premature touring could end even the most promising bands. 

Now if you’ve decided that you have a band ready to tour but unsure on how to get started, then check back next week when I’ll go through some tips and tricks from my experiences on creating your own promoter lists, negotiating prices, and communicating effectively in your offer sheets. 

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How To Kill Your Band #3 – Road Burn

Hello again. We may only be five days into March, but we have a good feeling this month is going to be something special. Our features thus far have been fairly exciting, and this afternoon we are rolling out the third – and perhaps best- installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band series. We run this column every other week and encourage anyone who enjoys the material found below to visit previous editions of HTKYB they may have missed. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

An Introduction:

I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How to kill your band.

#3 – Road Burn

In my last post, I discussed my ‘$200 Hump Theory’ and how breaking through that barrier signals the difference in a band’s financial outlook. However it can take a few, if not many, $100/night tours to get to that point. In that post I mentioned how important it is to tour smart, and now I’m going to give the five most important money saving tips I’ve learned during my time on the road.

1. Stick to water.

Probably the most overlooked facet of tour is it’s effect on your health – fast food, limited sleep, and catering exclusively from Little Caesar’s every damn night wrecks your entire body. Not to mention living and sleeping in a cesspool of germs that take advantage of your weakened immune system. All these things work together to do one thing – make you feel like shit. And when you’re under the weather, it’s a lot easier to justify superfluous purchases on comfort items like junk food and soda which only perpetuate the problem.

This simple rule is by far the hardest for me personally, but it really does make a difference. Not only does sticking to water make you feel better in general, it saves an easy $5 per day. A little trick I learned from Patrick Jeffers during AHAF’s touring days was to fill your water bottles up whenever you stop at gas stations. All the soda fountains carbon filter their water and we’ve never been given trouble from owners, though I reckon spending hundreds of dollars of gas at the same time helps.

2. Free Breakfast

Skipping a meal is an easy way to save money but it’ll just make you hungrier later and that only ends up countering your first move. Plenty of bands do their best to sleep through breakfast but we learned early on that there was a much (well, not that much) tastier trick – continental breakfast. Rather than sleeping in a Walmart parking lot, we always preferred the more serene quarters behind a Hotel Inn Express. In addition to not being tempted all night by Walmart’s endless spoils, there’s the benefit of being just a 30 yard walk from hot free breakfast. Even though the front desk clerk that watched you plow through their parking lot isn’t usually the same one working in the morning, you should still be smart about how you walk in – mainly don’t all half dozen homely looking dudes walk in at the same time. Stagger it.

This might sound sort of like stealing…and well I can’t really argue that. However in four years of touring, I’ve only ever been kicked out of one hotel breakfast. While I’m sure more managers figured out what we were doing, being a courteous and clean definitely keeps you from getting the boot. In fact we’ve befriended some pretty cool people working at these hotels, several of which even ended up coming out to shows.

3. Grill the fuck out.

We first learned the art of tour bbq from Dr. Acula on the RAGE Tour but it took a while for us to start grilling ourselves. A couple years ago my girlfriend gave the band her old portable charcoal grill and that was the spark we needed to finally start cooking on the road. From grilled wieners n’ beans to marinated chicken with roasted vegetables, we never ate better fourth meals than tours with the grill Not only was it delicious, but it ended up being significantly cheaper for all of us to pool our money on bulk items.

For touring bands, that fourth meal is more important than dinner in most cases. On your typical day the band loads in by 3pm, gets “catering” (Little Caesar’s) at 7pm, but doesn’t finish packing and settling with the promoter until after midnight. By the time you’re on the road scoping out the next sleeping lot, it’s been 12 hours since your last bite. Grilling out to finish off the night is not only an effective way to curb the hunger pangs, but it gives you something to do with your bandmates. The boost in morale and camaraderie are pleasant side effects of saving money grilling out and something that helped us all unwind at the end of the night.

Looking back at my tips, I think there’s an obvious theme here: food is expensive. Other than gas, it’s the most costly aspect of life on the road. This also means it’s the area where your personal choices can have the greatest impact on your bottom line. Being smart with your food choices can mean a difference of hundreds to thousands of dollars over the duration of a tour. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but if you’re just starting out touring I hope it helps keep some cash in your wallet.

If you have any tips of your own, please let us know below.

This column was contributed by Eric Morgan. Eric spent a number of years touring the world as part of the Victory Records band A Hero A Fake. He’s currently developing a new project,Bornstellar, which plans to release its first EP later this year. Click here to learn more about Eric’s time in music.

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Artist Spotlight: Eric Morgan (Bornstellar / A Hero A Fake)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the very first Artist Spotlight of the new year. we have been getting a large volume of requests for this series, and in the months ahead will be expanding its reach to include a variety of talent from all over the industry. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.

If you were to ask a teenage Eric Morgan what his dreams were for his future in music he probably would have confessed a deep-seeded desire to one day be signed to a top record label. If you were to post that same question to Eric Morgan today however, he would probably tell you he’s happy just being able to make music with his friends. He has spent the better part of the last decade on one of the largest independent labels in the world, and in that time seen the best and worst sides of the business, but in the fall of 2013 that project (A Hero A Fake) decided to call it quits. Now he’s returning to music with his new group, Bornstellar, and in the interview below he tells us about the lessons he’s learned along the way.

I first came into contact with Eric while covering A Hero A Fake debut album on Victory Records. At the time, I was merely a fan trying to learn more about a promising new bands, but in the years since I have been fortunate enough to know Eric on a more professional level. He’s a brilliant team player, but he also has the leadership qualities needed to hold a group of creative minds together. Further, he has the kind of always-positive outlook on things that one needs to survive the often turbulent waters of the music business, and it rubs off on everyone he meets. His future has yet to be written, but I am confident he has a long career ahead of him in the music business.

If you would like to learn more about Eric and his thoughts on the world we highly recommend following him on Twitter. If you want to learn more about Bornstellar, click here. Additional questions and comments can be left at the end of this post.

H: For the record, please state your name, job title, and the group you’re currently involved with:

E: My name is Eric Morgan and I play guitar for Bornstellar.

H: Thank you again for taking the time speak with us. We like to build these features from the ground up, so let’s dive in with a little bit about your history. When you think of a formative moments/experiences that lead you to a career in music, what comes to mind?

E: My fascination with music began fairly young. When I was seven years old, this traveling folk band came to my elementary school to perform in our auditorium. At some point they handed out all these different instruments to the students so we could play along with them. I ended up getting the spoons and it changed the course of my life (ha!). I completely lost myself in the music that day. We were supposed to stay in our seats but I HAD to get up and rock out. It was the first time I had ever played an instrument and the feeling of playing along with the band overwhelmed me. I actually ended up getting in trouble with my teacher for being too wild.

I still get that same feeling today when I go on stage. It would look 100x’s cooler if I picked a couple good poses and stuck to them but I just get so absorbed in the music that I have to jump around and go crazy.

H: Was music always present in your household growing up, or was it something you found later in life?

E: My father played guitar in a couple bands when he was younger and so we always had instruments laying around the house. When my brothers and I were young, he would sing us these songs with his acoustic before bed and would kind of just make up these silly lyrics that would have us all laughing. It was one of my favorite things as a kid and I would beg him to play me songs all day. He eventually taught me a few chords on guitar and from there I taught myself everything else.

H: What was the first album you purchased with your own money (and the format)?

E: The first album I purchased was All the Pain Money Can Buy by Fastball on CD. I had an older brother so initially I would just steal whatever he was listening to – Green Day, Butthole Surfers, Third Eye Blind etc. I also had this little boombox that I listened to the radio on while going to sleep. It had a cassette recorder and I would jump out of bed if a song I liked started playing to hit the record button.

H: The age of digital media has changed the buying habits of many consumers. Do you still buy a large volume of music? Do you prefer physical or digital releases?

E: I pay for an Rdio subscription and I love it. Before I had a streaming service, my music collection was growing quite stale – I wasn’t actively discovering new albums or artists. Being able to listen to new bands on the fly is great and it has definitely sparked my own creativity. It’s $10/mth so while it seems pretty cheap for an unlimited library of music, $120 a year is more than I was spending on CDs.

Physical releases have become more-or-less art pieces because logistically they just don’t make sense as a convenient medium. More and more bands are skipping CDs all together and releasing on vinyl with digital downloads. Vinyl’s collectability has proven valuable to fans and having great design can turn the larger vinyl covers into great pieces of art. I think this is where physical can still play an important role.

H: Onto your life in music. What can you tell us about the local scene where you grew up?

E: The scene in North Carolina, and Charlotte in particular, was booming when I was going through high school. Bands like Hopesfall, Between the Buried and Me, and all the Tragic Hero Records bands were starting to get national recognition and that helped churn out even more great local bands that went on to become national acts. Around 2005 when we started playing out with A Hero A Fake, it seemed like every weekend there was a local show that was packed. The scene died down a little around the end of that decade. However, in the last year or so there has been a resurgence of new and great sounding local bands that have started to pack out shows again and North Carolina in general is cycling back around to being a healthy music scene.

H: When did you first pick up a guitar, and how long was it until you started creating and/or participating in bands?

E: I started getting serious about guitar when I was around 12. It took a while for me to find other people that wanted to make music, my school wasn’t exactly the best place to find musicians. One of my neighborhood friends also took up guitar so I would always print out song tabs for us to learn. I would take them to school and hand them to him like homework. I don’t think he was as into it as I was…

H: You found a wealth of success with your efforts in A Hero A Fake, which we will get to in a moment, but I am curious about the bands that came before AHAF. What can you tell us about those groups?

E: Justin [Brown], also vocalist for Bornstellar, and I became best friends in high school and eventually met Lenin [Hernandez]. The three of us started writing music together and ended up spending everyday after school practicing. The first band we started was called Nothing Gold Can Stay and we recorded a six song demo that we passed around school. It sounded awful, the recording was garbage, but just having our own music on a disc was a dream for us at the time.

H: Onto the band that launched you into the national spotlight. When did A Hero A Fake form, and how long were you together before Victory Records came into the picture?

E: That core of Justin, Lenin, and I eventually became A Hero A Fake in 2005. The same year we recorded the Friends Are Family EP with drummer Evan [Kirkley] (who would rejoin the band in 2010) and shortly after added guitarist Patrick [Jeffers] and bassist Matt [Davis] to the band. In the fall of 2005, Justin and I went to college together at UNC and put the band on hold while Evan left to focus on his band Cambridge and later Seneca. In 2006 we got back together to record a new EP with Peter [Gwynne] on drums. Peter left soon after and that’s when Tim [Burgess] joined and would end up playing drums through our first two Victory releases. Justin, Lenin, Patrick, Tim, and I spent much of 2007 writing Volatile and in December of that year went to Jamie King to record our first full length.

A few months after submitting the album to labels, I was at work and got a call from Tony at Victory. It was one of those things that you daydream about but never really expect to happen. Many of my favorite bands were on Victory and at the time they were the biggest indie label around. We had a couple offers from smaller labels but this was the label we dreamed of being on and having the owner call me out of nowhere was one of my most surreal moments. We released Volatile at the end of 2008, graduated from college that spring, and then started touring full time.

H: You released a handful of albums while on Victory, but in the fall of 2013 A Hero A Fake decided to part ways. What can you tell us about the time leading up to the group’s decision to go your separate ways?

E: It’s incredibly difficult to keep a band together no matter what level of success they’re having. You give up so much to be on the road full time – money, relationships, a home – that eventually it wears you down. At the end of 2010 as we were coming off a tour with Texas In July and Like Moths To Flames, Justin and I weren’t seeing eye to eye on things, we both had issues outside the band that were stressing us, and then our van breaks down in Cleveland causing us to miss the last couple days of tour. We spent a few thousand dollars fixing our van, basically wiping away any money left in the band account. We drove all night back to North Carolina with this dark uncomfortable cloud over all of us and I remember thinking on ride down, “Did I just play my last show without even knowing?” Justin and I had been best friends for years but after that tour we didn’t talk for nearly six months.

H: During this transitional period, did you ever think your career in music was over? When did Bornstellar, your new effort, come into existence?

E: Right after that tour I definitely thought my music career was over. Evan had moved to Pennsylvania and it seemed like a long shot to try and get a band together again. However after several months of no communication, Justin sent me one of the nicest, most heart warming emails, and we ended up hashing it out and putting all the negative stuff behind us. It felt great having my best friend back.

We ended up talking about music and what style of songs we really wanted to write and how much we missed playing since we had stopped. Patrick and I then got together and started writing these new songs so we could test them out on the road. I ended up booking a DIY tour out to the west coast in December 2011 and we ended up having a blast so we decided to make a new album. That album was The Future Again and was the last one we put out as AHAF, though it has some of my favorite songs on it.

After that album, we really wanted to keep pushing in a new direction but felt tied down by the AHAF name and that style of progressive metal that was expected from older fans. After our tour last spring with the UK band Fathoms, we immediately went into the studio with Drew Fulk and decided then we would start fresh as a new band so we would feel free to write songs exactly how we wanted.

H: We have spoken to a few people who have told us about getting burned out on a specific genre after working in that area for a couple years. While Bornstellar is no doubt a new band with a unique sound, it’s likely the group will be placed in the same ‘hard rock/metal’ field as AHAF. What is it about this area of music that keeps you coming back?

E: To me, music is all about the energy it creates. There is just so much vigor and passion in the alternative genres that make it appealing to me. I have a little studio at my apartment and I’ll write anything from pop/rock to dubstep when I get inspired but the heaviness of metal and hardcore sparks something within me and I crave that energy.

H: Can you see yourself creating music in other genres down the line? Does that even interest you at this point?

E: Definitely. I write songs in other genres already and so if I ever had the time and met the right people to start a different style project I totally would. I’d love to do some type of pop/rock in the future.

H: As someone who has been on and off a fairly recognizable label, what advice would you offer to aspiring musicians/groups dreaming of creating a lasting career in the industry?

E: A lot of people define success in music by being on a certain label or management group but in reality that alone will never make you last in this industry. No matter what label you are own, you will be the one promoting your band the hardest and if it is truly something special people will take notice. It’s also important to define what exactly success means for yourself i.e. Do you want to just get your music out there? Tour? Try to make a living through music? Every step you climb will lead you to another so at some point you have to say: Is this working or not? I think if you can find happiness in the process and be open minded about learning every part of the business then you will enjoy being in the industry. Enjoying what you do is so important because it makes you willfully work harder at your craft and that is one of the keys to being successful.

H: What would you say is the biggest lesson you learned from your time in A Hero A Fake, and how has that changed your approach to Bornstellar?

E: The biggest lesson I learned from my time in AHAF was to be patient. I’m a pretty anxious person in general and tend to get pushy about having everything happen as quick as possible but that often isn’t the best tactic. With Bornstellar we took our time writing the songs, getting things right in the studio, working on our branding, and made sure we were presenting ourselves exactly how we wanted when we finally announced. You want to try and get your music out there as fast as you can once its recorded but it really does make a difference if you take your time and plan everything out in all the other areas (social media, publicity, artwork, etc) so that when you do get it out there it makes the biggest possible impact.

H: Piracy has been in the news a lot of as late, but we both know it has been a hot button topic for years. How has your career been impacted, for better or worse, by music piracy over the years?

E: I don’t think my career has been affected by piracy all that much. Maybe if we were selling 100k+ in albums it would come into play but even then the effect would be minimal. If you’re on a label, you’re not going to be making your money through royalties – even the biggest artist make nearly all their revenue on the road. With how easy it is to stream with services like Rdio and Spotify, I think it’s even less of an issue moving forward.

H: You have a new band and a new album prepped for release. Looking beyond 2014, what are your career goals at this point in life?

E: Bornstellar is all DIY for now and so we’re trying to build the band up carefully and take our time doing things the right way. The EP will most likely be self-released in the spring and I’m actually quite excited about that as we’ll directly see the results of all our efforts. Looking past the EP, my goal is to be able to fund a full length by the end of the year. I don’t think signing with a label is necessarily the only way forward, we are just working to make this project self-sustaining and put ourselves in a situation where we can balance life and music.

H: If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?

E: The music business, like all industries, can be cliquey at times. It can make it hard for talented younger bands to get out there if they don’t know the right people. I’ve built a lot of relationship from my years on a label and from touring so I have a lot of advantages now that I’m starting this new project but at the same time it’s disheartening to see how fraternizing it can be.

H: We’ve reached the end! Before I let you go, do you have any final thoughts or observations you would like to share with our readers?

E: First, I really appreciate what Haulix is doing. I’ve read a lot of the interviews through your Tumblr page and it’s fascinating to hear all these different experiences from within the industry. Bornstellar’s first single “Wake the World” comes out Tuesday, January 21st so please go check it out, we’ve worked so hard on the EP and I can’t wait to show it to everyone!

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