Crossfade – Interview

Crossfade are a true success story. A little more than a year ago they were virtually unknown outside of their home state of South Carolina. Now, one year later, they have easily topped five hundred thousand album sales, two smash hit songs, over 260 live shows, and at least ten national TV appearances later they’ve become the artist development story of the year.

Crossfade were on the MTV2 Winterfresh Snocore Tour alongside Chevelle, Helmet, Future Leaders of the World and Strata. Founding members Ed Sloan and Mitch James share the story and vision of their band, Crossfade, prior to their January 29th performance at House of Blues, West Hollywood, California.

CROSSFADE – Interview by Charlie Steffens aka Gnarly Charlie
Ed Sloan – (guitars and vocals), and Mitch James – (bass and background vocals)

Your album went gold. I heard this a couple days ago.

Ed & Mitch: Yes

So on to platinum units here pretty soon?

Mitch: We certainly hope so. Multi-platinum, even better.

I had read that you guys put your record together at your home studio.

Ed & Mitch: Sugarstar Studios.

One of your names after The Nothing was Sugardaddy Superstar.

Mitch: We kind of took Sugarstar and worked it a bit.

Ed, after you had done the recording at your home studio did you envision that it would blow up the way it did?

Ed: No, absolutely not, man. We certainly had those hopes, and we knew we had something on our hands. We knew that people liked it, and the fans that we had liked what we put out. So, there were great hopes, but we never anticipated it would be quite like this.

Where is “Cold” right now on the charts?

Ed: I think it’s coming back down from the number two spot on Modern Rock, I think it’s like three or four.

You know the song that I really dig is “Starless.” There’s a line in there, and you wrote it, right? (to Ed) … “a cold gun that I kiss.” It sounds like you had a total breakdown, or maybe some woman put you the wringer. What’s that about?

Ed: That’s pretty much it, man. I never actually got that far down to where …you know, that’s not really me. I felt those things and I felt that way, but I never actually went through the motions.

But it’s the intensity of having those heavy feelings, right?

Ed: Yeah, absolutely. It’s just hating the situation, and hating somebody enough to just have those thoughts to feel that way.

Mitch, what was your first concert?

Mitch: My first concert was Kiss at seven years old.

Yeah!

Ed: Yeah!

(laughs)

Mitch: I started on the rock thing really early.

Now, was that the Destroyer tour?

Mitch: It was Kiss Alive II.

So we’re talking, like ’79?

Mitch: Yes

Ed: You’re old!

(laughs)

Mitch: You’re older than me!

Mitch, why the bass?

Mitch: It just always intrigued me. Bass always intrigued me. When I listen to Metallica albums I listen to Cliff Burton’s parts. I didn’t listen to what the guitar player did. That was why I picked up the bass – it was the instrument I was destined to play, I guess. Seeing guys like that you know, get up on stage and just perform and just not be that guy that who can’t play guitar playing the bass player just to see somebody stand out there and just master the instrument. That drew me right in.

What about Robert Trujillo?

Mitch: Oh, yeah. We’ve always been just fans of music and musicians more than performers, so I think we have such vast tastes. If you see our CD collections you’d be going “Wow, I can’t believe these guys play rock”. We just have some of the oddest stuff from jazz to classical stuff and anywhere in between. So, getting stuck with one title I think is really bad for us because there’s no telling what our next album is going to sound like. We have the mentality of like a Faith No More where you can put a heavy song that’s got death screams to a little jazzy Frank Sinatra-sounding song right after that. We just don’t want to be stuck with any title.

Ed, what about you? Who are your influences?

Ed: My influences definitely are Metallica, Soundgarden, Faith No More. That’s stuff that I still listen to today. I’m still influenced by it. It touched me at such an early age, and it’s always stuck with me.

I was just flashing on “Drawing up Flies” – anything from Badmotorfinger.

Ed: Yeah.

Mitch: Oh, yeah. That’s one of the top five albums of all time.

GC: When does this tour wrap up?

Ed: This tour wraps up in the middle of March – March 17th or 20th, somewhere in there. And then we got a 10-week headlining tour that we’re gonna’ be in. And, after that, we’re not sure. But by that time we should be into “Colors”, as the third single, and hopefully continuing on this year with headlining tours. This has been a really good year.

Mitch: And one of our favorite things this last summer, just being new out of the box as far as a touring band, is to be able to do all these summer festivals with these guys we’ve looked up to for years. And be able to stand on the stage and go right after them or right before them, usually. So we’re looking forward to a lot more summer shows, big outdoor festivals with 30 or 40 thousand people there.

Have you done House of Blues?

Ed: I think we’ve hit almost every House of Blues.

Mitch: Except for the one in Cleveland.

Ed: We’ve played this one, this will be our third time, I think. We’ve played with Alter Bridge and we’ve also played I think with Smile Empty Soul.

How do you like this one? (House of Blues, LA)

Ed: We love it. We love the place, we love the venue, but the city doesn’t hurt, either.

Mitch: The city doesn’t hurt, either.

(laughs)

Getting back to genre, what do you think about these other kinds of bands like Shadows Fall and The Haunting?

Ed: I think it’s really cool that those really heavy bands are starting to get more attention and more love. You know what I mean? It used to be that they just always remained underground except for the biggest ones.

Mitch: Yeah, like Slayer and a few other ones that were really that heavy and they never got out, and these guys are willing to still play the music that they love and they listen to. Even though it’s very seldom that they’re gonna’ ever make any money off of it. I think we found kind of a happy medium somewhere between writing songs that are going to be popular and still sticking to our metal background or whatever background it is.

The original band was you guys and Brian Geiger. And that was when you were The Nothing. You guys were basically a garage band, right?

Mitch: Yeah.

So, you were doing outdoor parties in your area?

Ed: Well, no, as The Nothing we really didn’t play out too much in that first incarnation. The first album that we recorded we tried to get to as many places as we could, but we couldn’t find too many places for our music.

Mitch: It was heavy and a little odd. It was a Dream Theater, kind of musician’s mentality music as opposed to fan music. We had a hard time reaching out to people.

Ed: We wanted to record but we wanted to do it a different way, because spending all that cash to be in the studio and coming back and not liking the product that we had was a big problem for us. We decided to start playing covers. We still played our own stuff, but we renamed our band Sugardaddy Superstar so we could go out and play under a different name to play covers. We still played out as The Nothing with all original stuff, but we didn’t want to tarnish The Nothing name out there playing covers. So we named this new band Sugardaddy Superstar. And then after a while The Nothing kind of fell off, we kept Sugardaddy Superstar, and then Tony joined the band somewhere in there.

So, you guys really are Sugardaddy Superstar underneath it all?

Mitch: No, actually we’ve written off that name forever.

So what are your favorite covers to do?

Ed: It’s been so long, like five or six years since we played them. I used to like playing Eagles stuff, man.

GC: Yeah?

Mitch: Especially that they had, three part, like three guys singing. Just replicating some Eagles stuff we’d be like “Oh, shit!”

Henley, Frey, Meisner, whoever?

Mitch: Yeah.

Ed: Love that stuff.

I do, too. What do you guys do for fun on your “off time?” Are you still in the rosy glow off this honeymoon period? What do you do anyway? What do you get off on?

Ed: Sleep, man. (laughs) To be honest with you – if we’re not playing music or doing something supporting the album, then we’re on the bus playing music, recording music, or sleeping.

Mitch: And the sad thing about being on tour is that a lot of these clubs are on the outskirts of town. So, even if you roll into a nice, cool city, you’re stuck on the tour bus in the middle of an industrial park, in the middle of nowhere. So, there’s never really a whole lot to do off the bus, so you kinda catch up on your sleep and you do the business things. You make the calls, you get on the computer, and once in a while you go outside and throw the football, but it’s kind of a lonely existence when you’re out on the road.

But you’re not burned on it. I can tell. You guys are fired up.

Mitch: We’re all good with it. It’s fine.

Ed: You know, if we’re out here supporting this album like this for another eighteen months, I could not be happier. We get so excited everyday to watch it grow and to see the wonderful things that are happening and just counting these blessings, man, everyday. Just not taking it for granted, you know?

I wish you guys a lot of success, and with that attitude you can’t go wrong.

Ed: Thank you.

Good luck with the show tonight.

+ Charlie Steffens