SIC WAITING
Interview with Jared Stinson
By Mike Hallquist
Photos By Sean Rosenthal www.withinadream.comCombine the guitars of STRUNG OUT and the vocals of RISE AGAINST with the heart of Rocky Balboa and you get SIC WAITING. After 10 years of grinding it out this band has overcome fire, financial ruin, and personal loss to deliver their sonic awesomeness to you. SIC WAITING who? Find out!
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After ten years of being in a band, how has your sound changed from the first practice to your newest release Anchors Astray?
At our first practice we were 19 and 20 years old so we got drunk a lot quicker and didn’t get much accomplished. But style-wise from the beginning to now it’s been a pretty big evolution within the same sound, I think. You can hear slight similarities between our early material and this latest record but at the same time they’re night and day.
A lot of bands start out harder, faster, and more aggressive and get more controlled and mellower with each release but I think we’ve done the opposite. Our early material was poppier and not quite as technical, and the lyrics were shit. But with Your Name In Lights we started to focus more on technicality and lyrics and now with Anchors… we’re really happy with it lyrically, technically, and just proud of the songs as a whole.
A big part of that too is the addition of Dylan to the band. He joined about a year after YNIL was released. He’s a shredder who can play AVENGED SEVENFOLD and STRUNG OUT records front to back with his eyes shut, so that obviously influenced the songwriting a lot. The same thing happened when Brian joined the band before we wrote YNIL, and with every lineup change. I used to suck as a guitar player, but having to play up to them has taken me from suck to blow. So that’s nice.
How did the recording/production process of Anchors Astray differ from Your Name In Lights?
Overall, Anchors Astray was a more focused process. With YNIL, we engineered, mixed, and mastered everything ourselves in our studio in San Diego. We spent a lot of time on it and I think it came out pretty good for what it was. But we were limited in what we could do because of the equipment we were using and the fact that it was still a learning process for us. But with Anchors, we went to our friend and big time Hollywood porno sound dubber (and sometimes foley artist) Ken Cain to produce it. Ken is meticulous to a fault, so when we made the decision to isolate everything as opposed to tracking live to a click we ended up spending a lot of time tuning and toning drums, honing guitar tones and messing around with different amps, instruments, mics and outboard gear. Then after all the tracking was done Ken and I went up to a house in the mountains, during a friggin blizzard, naturally, to mix it. We spent two weeks tweaking the EQ’s, adding, subtracting, and just messing with everything pretty much. We left one time, and that was just to get some hard alcohol in us. Finally, when we were in the mountains, Jason Livermore at the Blasting Room in Colorado let us know he was down to master the record. This was pretty sweet since he’d just finished RISE AGAINST and NOFX. So he got it, did a fantastic job, and the rest is now a coaster on your coffee table.
It was the most enjoyable and the most stressful recording process I’ve ever been a part of, but the end product is like a huge sigh of relief because we listen to it and are proud of it completely, so it’s like all that stress and effort wasn’t or nothing. Next time I’d like to try live tracking to a click though, but that’s another ramble for another time.
SIC WAITING has been in some serious shit, what’s your best or worst tour story from the last ten years?
Oof. That can be a long ass answer. It’s the norm for things to go wrong on the road, so you learn to laugh at even the most unexpected, unfortunate things. We’ve broken down pretty much everywhere, driven through floods where people were kayaking past us, through snowstorms where 50 foot semis were sliding past us, and through windstorms where trees were blowing past us. Our bus once broke down in the middle of Nowhere. Literally, we broke down in the middle of the town Nowhere, AZ. The irony was not lost on us. They had only a bar, so we went there while the driver fixed the bus and I must say, it was one of the coolest bars I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was in Young Guns. It’s also where we learned that many people carry guns in Arizona and they don’t enjoy purple mohawks.
We’ve spent days in airports with standby tickets and no money, which is horrible. We’ve had a van catch fire, set fires in what was left of hotel rooms with shitty management, and often cooked with fire. We’ve seen fights, started fights, been the reason for fights, been thrown into fights, and broken up fights. We’ve toured in my truck, a friend’s Honda Civic, a van, a bus, and a plane. The point is that when we’re on tour we expect the worst and the unexpected to happen and it usually does, and it usually isn’t that bad.
Bad is when Frank from VOODOO GLOW SKULLS has you drive all the way to his club in Havasu City, AZ only to find that it’s not a club anymore and you just spent 300 bucks for a sightseeing tour of the desert. Or when your girlfriend tells you to fuck off because your band is more important than she is and she won’t be there when you get back. Or when a friend dies while you’re on the road and you hear about it 5 minutes before set time, and you can’t be around to be with friends and family. That is the truly bad shit, and it makes the other shit trivial and easy to laugh off. Really, tour is a working vacation; an escape from reality where things happen that you’d never imagine, but it’s harder to do than most people think. And if you haven’t done it and think it’s all partying and mayhem then you have no clue. It’s hard work, controlled chaos with a specific goal in mind. But who says it can’t be a good time as well?
If you could tour with anyone other than VOODOO GLOW SKULLS, who would it be and where would you take your brand of SIC WAITING awesomeness?
That’s a tough one because there are so many answers. We have some great friends in our scene that we do shows with but haven’t been able to tour with yet. Bands like DC FALLOUT, BLACK SAILS WESTERN SHORES, EKEN IS DEAD, THE GETDOWN, THE CORE, NOTHING WITH NUMBERS, THE BASTARD SUNS, 2CENTS… these guys are all our friends and drinking buddies and they happen to be in amazing bands so it only seems right to combine the two.
Then there are some of the bigger bands we’ve been lucky enough to play with that would be great complements musically as well as a lot of fun to tour with. A WILHELM SCREAM were some of the most mellow, fun dudes we’ve met and it would be fun to have the competition of rock, then the competition of drink with them. STRUNG OUT is an iconic band that we have learned a lot from as well as grown up with, so it would be great to tour with them. Ignite has always been a favorite of mine and we’d love to get on the road with them. Of course, touring with the NOFX’s, BR’s, DESCENDENTS’ etc are dreams that continue to dirty our sheets every night and we try not to set our goals that high, so the fall isn’t so far…
As far as where, everywhere we haven’t been and most of the places we have. Just getting out on the road and seeing the different identities of each place you go to is an adventure in itself. We are just lucky that every night we then get to go play some music and make some new friends (and/or enemies).
So what’s next for SIC WAITING? Cool haircuts? Skinny jeans? Any last words?
Well, haircuts are a pain in the ass and are never cool, so no, and all our jeans seem to be getting skinnier by the day as we eat our way through the depression of being in a struggling band, so yes.
We’ve got a big show with PULLEY in the South Bay and there’s an acoustic record coming out in January that Dylan and I will tour on so that’s a little different, but then my guess is another SW tour then back into the studio. We’re also planning to do a national tour in the New Year that takes us to the South, Northeast, Midwest and all our regular spots. Hopefully some Canada dates too…if they let us in.
Past that I don’t know; we’ll probably just keep doing what we’re doing. It’s been ten years all without any label or management support (or even attention) and we’re still here. We tour when we can and we record when we can, and we write constantly. We learned a long time ago that if you put all your hopes in your ‘next big step’ as a band, you’ll soon get sick of being disappointed and quit. We love playing what we play, where we play it, and who we play it to, and in some sadistic way I think we love the struggle, so what the hell needs to change?
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