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Interview with lead singer Brandon Rike from Dead Poetic. Conducted exclusively for HM Magazine on April 30, 2006 by David Stagg.

Brandon Rike is the vocalist for Dead Poetic, a band that almost didn’t exist anymore. After a near break-up in the fall of 2004 on the heels of their hit record New Medicines, Rike speaks out, among a flurry of other things, about putting the band back together, the screamo genre he hates, and spirituality.

I understand the band now is not what it was back then. Can you give me an up-to-date history lesson in your band’s life? When we started, back in 1997, and we were just a bunch of dudes in school trying to rip off Green Day and Weezer and trying to be like Stone Temple Pilots—that whole thing. The band continued and we played high school shows, little shows here and there, and around 2001, we started getting courted by Tooth and Nail. So this little thing we were doing, this little band that played on the weekends, turned into something that generated label interest. We signed to T&N in November of 2001, and we were still just all a bunch of dudes, getting together… It’s like we were together because we’d always been together, you know? And then Four Wall Blackmail came out; the record kind of sucked but a lot of people were into it. And that worked out good. We toured our butts off for that record, living with each other on the road. Then we did New Medicines. Right around the time of New Medicines, things just started to get a little weird. We kind of realized, “You’re just with people because you’ve always been with people.” Your personalities might not necessarily gel very well. As I’m sure you know, you realize you’ve developed into extremely different people and wouldn’t be together if it wasn’t for the fact you started a band together. At that point, there was just a lot of stuff that went down around the time of recording New Medicines. The blank hit the fan, I should say. We started kind of analyzing ourselves, how this band was put together.

That was around the time of the recording of New Medicines? Yeah, and that’s when we realized things were getting a little tough. Anyway, we go and we tour New Medicines and it starts—New Medicines was a really good record, but we didn’t tour it how it should have been toured. We had so much internal stuff we had to take care of that before we started pushing that record. Things just started to fall apart around the Fall of 2004. That was kind of the point in time when I could have honestly said to you that Dead Poetic has broken up. Straight up. Done.

With no plans of continuing?
With no plans of continuing. That, or make some very big, drastic changes to continue. Basically fix the problem in order to continue. And sometimes when you’re in a situation like that, you realize it’s kind of a lot easier on your heart and on yourself if you just end it as opposed to pinpoint any single person.

To kind of save some face a little bit…
To save some face, to save some friendships. But the funny thing about being in a band is, you’ve got the four or five dudes in your band, but you’ve also got the 50-, 100-thousand kids that buy your record. And then you feel a pressure and a—maybe a responsibility to those kids who bought your record. Our fans dedication to our band is the single reason that we decided to keep it going. That says a lot for our fans. Dude, we haven’t put out a record since April of 2004, and we’ve still got these fans that are just stoked on our band. I see Myspace comments that say, “Dude we just got your new album! It’s awesome!” And I’m like, “You mean the new album that was released two years ago?”

It’s been two years, and people are still buying your record, thinking it’s brand new. That, and your core fans are still listening to it.
It’s so heart-warming and humbling—these kids are just into it. They don’t care about any drama or anything like that that we have, they just want to see us play. And without pinpointing any individual people, the band was pretty much torn down to myself, and Zach. Zach and I started the band way back in 1997. We were one of the main writers of the band. We were kind of the core of it, so I guess we felt good that the core was still there, although the other key members weren’t there. That was tough for us, but we knew we had to keep going. It went… I think Jesse Sprinkle called me up and said, “Hey man, I heard about your situation and I’m here for you.” And then, shortly after that, Dusty Redmond—after Beloved broke up—called and said, “Dude, do you guys still need another guitarist?” And I was like, “Yeah,”—we had done so many tours with Beloved, he was just a good guy, so we already had great relations with him. We get together, we don’t have a bass player yet, but we get together around April of 2005. We kind of have our first little jam thing together up in New York and it just gels, man. They’re just people you enjoy being around. You don’t necessarily have a deep history with, but sometimes that’s better because you’re able to enjoy each other’s company and find new things out about each other, and actually have new conversations.

Dusty was telling us about one of his friends, John, who was also one of the founding members of Beloved, saying he was a good guy, saying he was into Tool and bands like that who we were really into at the time—Tool was also a really big influence on the record. (We thought) this guy sounded up our alley, you know. We rang him the next time we got together—it was probably about a month later—and he just fit in. It was perfect. It was just fun. It totally felt like… Everything just came together. Everything just worked. I though, “This is the five guys I want to pursue this band with. This is the perfect line-up for what I want to do, and for what we want to do.” Everyone was on the same page musically. There aren’t heavy creative differences—everyone just gets it.

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