You want to find a way to filter it as a songwriter. It’s a bit of an old adage that gets overused, but the reality and the sentimentality behind it are true, which is your life and who you are as an artist are often at their peak when everything is coming at you. I had quite a lot of ideas and some of them made sense, and then there were other times I read what I wrote and it was just awful. When I was 18, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. It’s fascinating how you do dig deeper into that well as time goes on.ĪB: They always say it takes a lifetime to make the first record and however long to make your second, but that’s not entirely true. I think this record is better than the seven we put out, for sure.ĪS: As an artist, you do have to dig a little deeper over time, and maybe you have to look on the outside or look at what is happening in other people’s lives. For me, on this whole record, there was never really a day where I wasn’t sitting around writing lyrics. When you find yourself in a position where ideas are coming to you, it’s a really exciting proposition. I still feel like somebody who has a kind of an outside perspective, and I want to take those similar feelings and channel them into the reality that I see now. My life is not predicated on the angst of youth, but I still feel an innate rebellion. And the truth of the matter is, the really great artists are the ones who can find new places.ĪB: I’m 31 years old. A lot of times people criticize later-era music from iconic artists, and I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realize that sometimes people run out of space. If I read the lyrics from that record, I was just saying the same thing… slightly different. So I was really coming from a place of like, “I don’t know what else to write about,” and I started finding myself doing what I call self Mad Libs where I was just reading things I had written before. I was dealing with alcoholism, so I was drunk all the time and all I do is travel around the world and sing songs-eat, drink, go to sleep all the time. The only life experience we had was touring. We were just kind of rolling and succeeded to a level where there was an expectation that we would just keep making records. I’ve always said that on our fourth record, I really didn’t have anything to say. “Scarlett Cross” was a song where I had written out lyrics to a song with no structure or anything, then Jake came in the first day with a riff, and that became the first song of the record.ĪS: Do you feel like the idea for a song still comes to you in the same way?ĪB: It depends on the circumstance. We were ending this 10-year cycle of “what riff do we have” to making a record entirely where every day either a song needed to be written, or a part or tone or tonality or styling on the record had to come from within the room, or guys going home and writing independently and then coming back with something. In a symbolic way, that was the 10-year anniversary of the band at the time. We were constantly trying to make it work, and I couldn’t figure out what to write over it, so it never went anywhere. How was it moving beyond that riff-dependent stage?ĪB: “The Vengeance” was a song where we had five different iterations for the record.
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There were no more extra riffs lying around, and it was kind of exciting.ĪS: In a sense, you were basically relearning how to make a song from that point on. Then I realized after Vale was done that the well was empty. Then when we made the second record, we had all these riffs and said “let’s just write all this lyrical content.” So we did that for a while, and then we worked with John Feldmann on the third record and that was the first time somebody came in and said, “throw that out and write songs from scratch.” We didn’t really have any experience with that, but then it became a 50-50 thing.
In some cases, I was literally taking songs that I had already written separate from them, then going, “maybe this melody and lyric would actually fit directly over that.” It was kind of this Frankenstein process.
On our first record, we were essentially taking a fully fleshed-out song, musically, and just writing lyrics over it. American Songwriter: How did The Phantom Veil start piecing together from the time of Vale (2018) and The Night EP in 2019? Were some of these songs older or an entirely new concept?Īndy Biersack: Since the first few albums, we had this well of riffs that we would reshape and reform into songs.
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