Story of the Year

An Interview with Guitarist Philip Sneed

by: Brandon Evans
Photos by Jason Rowley

Its human nature for people to shy away from things that aren’t familiar to them or that they don’t understand.  For many people the simple avoidance of these things can be comforting and routine.  In the music business routine isn’t going to sell records and sticking with a comfy, cookie cutter formula isn’t going to keep fans begging for more.  On April 22 the guys in Story of the Year brought us a new record and delivered it to us on the wings of The Black Swan. 

The title of your new offering is The Black Swan.  I found out that a scholar named Nassim Nicholas Taleb has developed something called the Black Swan Theory.  He basically says that a black swan is an intense, undirected, unpredictable event that is beyond all previous expectation.  The explanation that he gives sounds like it could be the definition of this project for Story of the Year.  Tell me what The Black Swan means to you.

Pretty much you said it.  It originated in the 17th century by a bunch of philosophers that were talking about unpredictable events and it was referred to as the black swan because they had never seen a black swan before. I think it was like 35 years later when they discovered a black swan in Australia.  That guy kinda took it and ran with it and if you’ve read the book he talks about how Google is a black swan and how the internet in general is a black swan.  He just talks about things that you would have never seen coming but after they happen it seems completely predictable and easy to see.  Honestly the way it relates to us can go all sorts of different ways.  Just having success in the music industry in general holds pretty ridiculous odds…if I might say.  It’s probably even more unpredictable and difficult to accomplish success in the music industry just to see it bomb and then when the industry starts to recover to have success again and have an offering that you believe is worthy of some sort of success.  It definitely relates to us as a band as far as where we are and how long we’ve been in this business.  Being a professional band for five or six years now a days is almost unheard of and it feels weird being veterans only in our late twenties.  Just that comparison alone is pretty big in our minds and it’s pretty big in our careers right now.  On this record we also touched on some subjects that we haven’t touched on before and that not a whole lot of bands have touched on before.  The underlying theme talks about how little we really are in the grand scheme of things.  When some of us were reading the book and doing our research it all seemed to have some parallels to where we were as a band and our mindset and it ended up working. 

You guys made a big change from Maverick Records to Epitaph for the release of The Black Swan.  The crew at Epitaph definitely knows what they’re doing, but I’m sure there are going to be people that look at that move and think you’re crazy.  Tell me about your decision to do that.

Well…long story short we had a great team behind us for Page Avenue.  They believed in the band and they believed in our record.  They worked their butts off and so did we.  We toured solid for two years with that record and it was a great relationship with the people at Maverick.  When our second record was about to be released Warner Bros. swallowed Maverick and got rid of like 10 out of the 12 people that we were working with.  The rest decided to quit because of the way that Warner Bros. was handling Maverick.  So essentially for our second record we had no label.  We could have called off the touring cycle since they called off the record cycle and gone back and done something, but we decided to stick with it and tour on our own.  We wanted to give our fans a piece of that record live and that ended up working out fine.  When we got ready to do our third record Maverick was officially no longer and we were technically picked up by Warner Bros.  The relationship with them never really took off though.  There wasn’t anybody there that we felt believed in our band and we didn’t think that there was anybody there that had the passion for our band and our music like we did.  Things just didn’t feel right and I guess they felt the same and decided that we should split ways and it ended up being the best thing for us.  We were able to rediscover ourselves and we realized that we had a new found passion and outlook for what we could accomplish.  A couple labels came at us and we felt the passion from a couple of different directions but honestly Epitaph stepped up real fast and real good.  We had been writing for six or seven months before we had to make these decisions so when the time came we were ready.  We wanted to make a record man! Epitaph stepped up to the plate and it’s been the best thing that’s happened to the band in the last couple of years!

I read that you guys enjoy the freedom with Epitaph and that making this record felt like “starting over.” Assuming that you guys have the freedom to spread your wings, is there any subject matter that you guys want to write about, but are hesitant to?

I don’t think that we are really hesitant or anything.  We aren’t Rage Against the Machine so we aren’t going to go and pull a 180 and go all political or something.  We are not Blink 182 either so we aren’t going to go and goof off with the lyrics.  We love and enjoy what we are doing but at the same time the music is very important to us and something that we take very seriously.  Our music is something that we want to leave behind.  It’s something where once it’s done it’s there and hopefully it’s around for a very long time.  We try to pour our hearts into our music and our lyrics.  There is definitely nothing that we won’t touch on if we believe it’s worthwhile you know?  It’s always been like that even when we were a younger band five or six years ago when we did Page Avenue. And honestly speaking highly of Maverick, they let us do whatever we wanted to do as well. 

If I was to compare In The Wake of Determination (2005) to the The Black Swan, I would say that this is a much more mature offering from you guys.  It seems as if you guys are more focused on the message you want to deliver than repetition and hooks.  Was this a natural progression or am I way off?

I think it was a natural progression.  With our second record we had very little time to put it together and anytime you are under the gun and kind of rushed it’s not going to be as good as it could have been with more time.  We toured a lot into that record and honestly from a maturity level we were still a semi young band and we were still trying to identify ourselves and identify with others exactly who we were.  We felt that our first record didn’t really represent us as a live band.  The only goal that we had with the second record was to make something that would break us out of what these people keep lumping us as.  We were sick of being compared to bands that we didn’t think that we were similar to.  We didn’t have that much time to do this and we felt like Maverick was disappearing out from under us and we felt like we needed to get a record out.  As unfortunate as that was, it was the situation at the time.  With this record we had the time, the passion, we had all of it and we were able to accomplish exactly what we wanted.  It’s definitely a more mature offering but at the same time everything fell into place on this one. 

In the song “Apathy is a Deathwish” you guys have a lyric that really struck me.  The lyric is:

Tell us what you guys are getting at with this.

I just think that it is disappointing that our generation is so captivated by celebrities and that they hold people like that in such high regard.  From a musician stand point there are a lot of things that we can get off of our chests lyrically that may drastically effect somebody, but for someone to look up to musicians and actors is a scary thing.  These are people that you might not necessarily know and people are putting faith and education into media and celebrities rather than history, knowledge and books.  It was just a reference to that sad part of our generation I suppose.  It’s just a call for people to educate themselves instead of getting their political views from celebrities and TV or something like that.

I recently had the chance to interview über producer/Goldfinger frontman John Feldmann.  John had an interesting theory that I want to talk with you about.  In this theory John says, “Rock people kinda have 22 to 28 as sort of a peak song writing period.  I think that if you look back historically that’s when people get their most important and most creative stuff done.  Most bands make their landmark records when they are between that age.” You guys have worked with John on previous records and have paired up with him again this time around.  John is a smart guy, what do you think about his theory?

Um…I would have to think about it a little bit more to say whether I truly agree with it or not, but it sounds pretty accurate and it sounds like a good theory.  As you age you certainly get smarter and more mature and at the same time you do progressively tend to lose passion.  Everybody is born democrat and dies republican for a reason. You know what I mean?

(Laughs)

When you’re younger you look towards the future and when you are in the middle you tend to look at the present.  I think that when you’re older you tend to look more into the past.  The more that you’re looking at the past the less innovative stuff you may tend to come up with when you’re dealing with music and creativity and where genres are at the time.  So I think that if you look at the last 100 years John may have a point.  Don’t quote me as far as philosophy and books and that sort of stuff because I don’t think that its time for people in their twenties to be writing about that sort of thing. 

What was the biggest challenge that you guys faced in the studio this time around?

We had so many songs going in you know?  Ryan is a song writing machine.  Whether it was a song, an idea or a riff or whatever, we had so many things to choose from.  The biggest challenge was making the most cohesive record as opposed to the coolest sounding riff, the heaviest record or even the most appealing record.  The challenge was making it into the best collective that we could.  We ended up tracking like 17 or 18 songs and bringing that down to 12 songs was a challenge in itself.  Some of our favorite songs were left off the record because they may not have worked with the rest of the record. 

Tell me about any major touring that you have lined up or any other big news from the band.

We are going to be touring for the rest of our lives and we will definitely be on the road for the rest of the year.  We are going to be over seas for a while but we are going to try and do as many state side dates as we can.  We are doing Warped Tour this year and we also have a DVD coming out May 13th.  Its two and a half years in the life of Story of the Year and its called “Our Time Is Now.” Part one is the entire making of “In The Wake of Determination” and in my opinion is the selling point just because as a young musician I would have killed to have seen how my favorite bands actually made records.  We wanted to make it as accessible as possible so we filmed everything and put the entire writing and recording process on this DVD. 

What does the future hold for Story of the Year? 

I know our band and I know what we’re capable of.  We are going to do this as long as we can.  We want to keep on doing records and stay on the road.  If Epitaph is in, like it sure seems like they’re in, then we are going to have a good run with them.  They certainly have shown us that they have faith in our band and we have faith in our band.  Epitaph is a family that sticks with their bands through thick and thin as long as the bands are willing to give back and our band is certainly not the type of band that will throw in the towel for anything. 

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