HM Exclusive: A Plea For Purging Interview
You’ve heard of the Whopper Virgin, but the guys from A Plea For Purging just found out that their producer, the much-sought-after Joey Sturgis, was like a Taco Bell virgin. It wasn’t exactly his first trip to the “think outside the bun” fast-food chain, but let’s just say that Sturgis was more a Golden Arches kinda guy. “We had to, like, talk him through a couple things with Taco Bell,” explains vocalist and frontman for the Facedown Records metalcore band, Andrew Atkins, “and we made him get a Volcano Taco, because we were all way stoked on the Volcano Tacos right now and the lava sauce. That was a really good time.”
We had a Taco Bell party the other night, where he took us all out to eat at some Taco Bell and it was really funny, because I don’t think he eats Taco Bell all that often. He’s really into McDonald’s, so we had to, like, talk him through a couple things with Taco Bell; and we made him get a Volcano Taco, because we were all way stoked on the Volcano Tacos right now and the lava sauce. That was a really good time.
I’ve got a couple of dumb questions here: First of all, do you think or do you like A Plea For Purging to be filed under the “A’s” or the P’s in the record racks?
I like the A’s personally, just because, like, it’s what I think of as our band, I think of it as A Plea For Purging. After they started doing the itunes with the Ps and everything, I thought it was kind of weird. I prefer the A’s, I guess.
Not many people have taken their body size and run with it as you guys have. What are the thoughts behind that? What kind of reaction do you get and how have you enjoyed or not that whole aspect of things?
I guess, like… To be honest, it’s like taboo in the music industry – or maybe like in any kind of media and stuff to be overweight or fat, you know? And, without, like, naming any labels or anything like that, I heard early on, like, in other bands that I was in and even when we first started shopping for this band that my weight was a problem and that would need to change to get anywhere in the music industry. So, being that where, it’s not like we’re blowing up or we’re huge or anything, but we’re kind of showing that odds or whatever doesn’t mean anything to us – that we can do whatever we want, despite how fat I am. Instead of it being some taboo thing, where it’s not cool to be fat, we just decided we’ll put it in front of everybody’s face and we’ll market it and make fun of the fact that, you know, I’m a fat dude in a metal band and I’m having a good time with it. It’s been cool. I’m not ashamed of who I am, so I don’t care that we’re, like, talking about being fat or putting me as the image of our band or anything. It kind of started out as a joke to make a couple shirts, but it seems like my face and my characteristics have become somewhat the logo or the face of A Plea For Purging, you know?
That’s awesome! I love, you know, rooting for the underdog and I love people that go against the grain and I love people that are happy for who they are, because, you know, I think that’s how God looks at things. He loves us and made each one of us unique, so that’s just awesome that you wouldn’t, you know, cower in fear to the weird fickleness of the world out there and the messages people send. That’s awesome.
Awesome.
Well, tell me how this new album is going, what it’s feeling like to you and what kind of experiences you’ve had in the recording process so far.
We’re really stoked. The record’s called Depravity and we took off about the middle of August ‘til the end of the year to really put a lot of work into this record. We feel like the first record, A Critique..., we feel like it was really rushed. We signed with Facedown and they were really, like, “You guys can do whatever you want. You can put it out early in the year and try to get it done before the year was over with or we had the chance to wait until this year to put out the record and we just really wanted to get the record done, so we basically didn’t have enough time on the last record and we got it out too quick and we weren’t prepared. Not that we’re not proud of it. It didn’t turn out as good as we wanted. So, with this record, we just really wanted to put as much time and as much thought into it – lyrically, spiritually, musically. So, we took some time off and our bass player’s parents own a lakehouse in New Concord, KY. It’s like the smallest little blip on the map. It’s so small, but we got away from everything and lived in this basement of this lakehouse for, like, three months and just wrote all day every day. Wrote more songs than what we needed for the record, so we could really pick and choose the best songs for it. We think we’re coming out with something really good. The lyrical content and direction that the record is going is a lot different than the last record. We’re really trying to touch on topics that we feel like Christian bands as a whole don’t really speak about, including ourselves. Like, on the last record and everything we’ve done previously. It just seems like it’s really easy to sing about, ‘Oh, how good God is’ and the normal, like, spiritual warfare stuff, but God always prevails, which is true. Our God is huge and He’s big. But this record talks a whole lot about actual sin and actual things in our lives that we’re battling and the feelings that we have against other people when their sins seem to make their way into our lives. It’s just like, it was a very emotionally-draining process to try to write the record, because we wanted to be as honest and true as possible on this record, and really help talk about our lives and there’s just so much in this record that’s…you wouldn’t say there’s a lot of admitting fault and admitting sin in this record that you wouldn’t just walk up to a random person and talk about the sins in your life, but we feel like as Christians that’s what we’re supposed to be to each other. We’re supposed to be open and able to talk about our lives with each other, so that we can hit that next step, which is accountability. So, that whole record is basically about life without God and where you take yourself alone in your little dark places. It’s all about finding yourself in depravity. So, maybe that wasn’t the question you were asking for, but that’s kind of what the record is about. Right now we’re in Connersville, IN, at Foundation Studios with Joey Sturgis and he is making this record sound so heavy. That’s one thing we were wanting to focus on, too, is getting a little bit heavier in the musical aspect. We’ve tuned down. We used to play in Drop-D. Now we’re Drop-B. We’re trying to play a little bit heavier music and just really have a whole different feel and mood to this record than we did on the last record.
In particular, what are some of the themes or songs on this album that you’re really stoked about – besides what you already talked about, with confession. Are there some specific songs or two that kind of express what your’e really glad you’re putting out there?
We have a few songs that really touch on hiding your sin, hiding who you are from your family and friends and just a little bit about our band. We’re five guys that live together all day long, every day, like 300 days a year we’re together. And it’s crazy how you can be so close to each other, but yet keep such a distance in your own life. We really had this turning point mid-summer this year, where we had to really get some things right internally with our band and our relationships together and decided, if we’re gonna be a ministry, we’re gonna be five Christians that are in a band together that are trying to reach other people, we have to, first and foremost, be honest and open with each other. So, there’s a couple songs that are really about that – that are about growing together as a band and about being honest with your friends and keeping your friends closer than your enemies. A couple of those songs, “Prevaricator” is pretty much about that. There’s another song called “Miss Anthropy,” that’s pretty much what that song is about. The title track of the record, “Depravity,” is pretty intense. It’s pretty much about feeling like you’re all alone and feeling like God’s left you and that you’re… No matter what any Christian says, there’s been a time in their life where they’ve questioned their relationship with Christ and questioned God’s existence. I think if you don’t do that sometimes, there’s something wrong – you’re not challenging yourself and you’re not growing and understanding why you say you have this relationship with God. “Depravity” is really just about feeling alone and feeling like God’s left you, when really you realize that you’ve left God, that you’ve turned your back on your relationship with God. I don’t know. That’s just a couple topics that we talked about on the record.
Cool. It’s pretty awesome that you had a chance to write songs for three months. I’m curious as to how that went and how you were able to choose some songs over the others and how hard it was, maybe, to let go of a song.
At first off, it’s like a blessing, for sure, to be able to have that much time. Like I said before, we wrote the last record in two or three weeks and this record we had, like, three months. We seem to have a problem with just writing riffs and riffs and riffs and then putting them together and they just sound like a bunch of riffs in a song as opposed to a song. So, at first it was really hard to get back into the mode of writing, because we tour so much that basically all our minds are just focused on touring, being on the road, playing the songs that we have. So, when you go from doing that from 280 to 300 days straight and then you have to hit this totally new mindset of, “Okay, now we’re creating,” it’s just kind of weird for us. It was seriously such a blessing to really hash out songs and we went about this record a lot different, from starting it from Blake, our guitar player. He’s basically the primary songwriter when it comes to music. He kinda hashed out a ton of riffs and a ton of songs and wrote it on a computer a lot with some drum programs, where he could get a vision for the song before he actually brought the song to the band. Then we’d take the song and play ‘em as a full band and all the guys would put their influence in musically and things would change. Blake would go back and re-write the song. It was really a lot of going back and forth to the drawing board, per se. Basically, it came down to we wrote well over 12, 13 songs for the record and we decided to use 10 of them. We were going for a 10-song record, originally, but we just decided to try and do some extra songs. What it came down to: we had about 10 songs that we thought at the time were pretty solid and we thought that they were going to be good songs, but our drummer, Aaron, had actually wrote a couple of songs on his own that he wasn’t really too sure about bringing to the band, but we started working on them after we had already had ten songs written and thought that both of his songs turned out a lot better than a couple of the weaker songs that we had already been practicing and playing. Lyrically, a couple of the other songs weren’t as great and, just structure-wise and music-wise weren’t just up-to-par with the other stuff that we’d been doing. Plus, we’ve kind of went a heavier direction and we’re still trying to do our metal stuff that we’re kind of known for, but we started writing a little bit different – a little bit heavier, so there’s a couple of songs that really stuck out, that sounded like old A Plea For Purging, as opposed to the newer stuff that we’re going for. We didn’t want to have a record that wasn’t cohesive, so we just kind of threw out those two songs.
How was it working with Joey Sturgis? And can you tell me any stories in particular that kind of describe or exemplify what it’s like to work with him?
It is such a good time. I mean, we’d heard so many different things and didn’t know what to expect. Then we got here. At first we thought it was going to be like … at first we felt like he was not talkative or shy or meek or something, but I don’t know. It seems like we didn’t way hit it off at first, but lately it’s been really funny – super good times. He’s just so fun to joke around with. The other thing, as far as the production and music side of the studio, it’s sounding great. I don’t think we’ve ever had drum tracks sound as good as these drum tracks do. We’re right in the middle of tracking guitars and vocals, kind of flip-flopping back and forth. It’s for sure the best-sounding guitar tones we’ve ever had. Today is my first day tracking vocals. He’s been very funny. I personally hate tracking vocals more than anything ever. I love being in a band. I love touring and what we do. I hate tracking vocals. It’s been a pretty good day so far. Joey’s really easy to work with. He’s really funny. If you screw something up or sound horrible, like, he’s not afraid to joke about it and kind of tear me apart, but not really, ya know? Really poking fun. We had a Taco Bell party the other night, where he took us all out to eat at some Taco Bell and it was really funny, because I don’t think he eats Taco Bell all that often. He’s really into McDonald’s, so we had to, like, talk him through a couple things with Taco Bell; and we made him get a Volcano Taco, because we were all way stoked on the Volcano Tacos right now and the lava sauce. That was a really good time.
I hope we’re doing okay having you talk during your break of tracking vocals.
Yeah, I’m sure we’ll be fine. I’d be in there trying to crack jokes if I wasn’t on the phone with you…
What do you look like when you’re tracking vocals? Are you closing your eyes? Are you spitting on the microphone? Is there a microphone screen? What are you thinking when you’re in the booth? Take us through. Get us in your head while you’re tracking a song today.
This is definitely a lot better session than I have most of the time. We’re so much more prepared this time. Normally, when we’re tracking a brand new song, there’s so many things I have to focus on. I have to focus on pronunciation. There’s screaming and everything. I guess there’s different styles and some people don’t really pronunciate and some people do. We really feel like, if I’m going to be screaming really loud, I want people to be able to understand it. Maybe my mom’s not going to get it, because she doesn’t listen to screaming, but we want kids to really be able to … within the first time or two listening to the music, we want ‘em to understand the vocals. Pronunciation is super key. Tonally, I don’t feel that I’m one of the best vocalists in our scene or anything like that. I feel very mediocre at best. I feel like I focus on my tone so much, like, ‘Man, am I screaming this low enough?’ Or, ‘Am I screaming this part high enough?’ We do a lot of stops. I really get everyone else involved and ask them to really pay attention, that ‘This isn’t my band. It’s four other dudes in our band have just as much say about my vocals as I do, I feel. So, there’s a lot of stopping and okaying certain tracks with everybody. ‘Did you like this take? Do you like this tone?’ But this session has been really cool, because we got to do some pre-production and demo out all these songs before we came in with Joey, so we spent a lot of time talking about that kind of stuff, like, ‘Am I going low here? Am I going high there? What’s the phrasing of this part and that part?’ It seems like there’s a lot less to think about on this actual recording, because we’ve already demoed it out and I pretty much know what I’m gonna do. It’s just really focusing on the pronunciation and the tone. So, it’s been cool. I guess I probably close my eyes a good amount. I’m basically just standing in this room all by myself and I’m used to standing on a stage, looking at kids, getting energy, with kids jumping up and down, dancing and stuff; so, it’s weird to try to recreate any sort of feeling or mood that you have live. So, I close my eyes a lot. This time around we’re working with a different microphone than I’ve ever worked with before. I’m getting to hold it, which is cool, compared to standing in front of a pop screen thing. So, that’s been really cool. It’s called a Shure SM-7. It’s a pretty cool microphone. That’s been sweet. That feels way sweeter than standing in a room by yourself and just yelling real loud into thin air, ya know?
I remember one time tracking vocals myself and the guy producing walked in and hooked up this microphone and goes, “This is a $16,000 mic from Germany.” It made me really paranoid that I was going to break it or something.
Yeah, I would be, too, man.
You mentioned this summer that there was like a crisis and stressful time for your band and real important. As much as you feel comfortable with, what would you like to explain or talk about that happened to your band? What made it such a difficult time and how’d you get through it?
Basically, we realized that… Like I said, we’re five Christian men before anything else. Before being in a band, before, you know, the professionalism of the band or business or anything like that, we’re Christians. And Christians are supposed to live by the law of God and we’re supposed to hold each other accountable to that. We just realized that there’s things slipping in our lives. There’s things we’re being complacent with and sin that… There’s a difference in sinning and realizing that you’re wrong and asking for forgiveness and striving to live across that ties(?) and then that sin where you’re just complacent and it’s always there and you don’t even think about it. You let it take over. We just kind of realized that the five of us should be holding each other accountable and we should be strengthening each other, not just calling out each other’s faults or sins or anything, but caring about one another and asking about the sin in each other’s lives, asking about how, you know, your relationship with Christ is. Having Bible study together, praying together. These are all things that you would think would be very natural on a very daily basis in a Christian band, but what a lot of kids don’t realize with other people is that you may start out all awesome like that, but once you get out on the road and you’re on the road all the time, all you think about is business, business, business. ‘What’s the next tour going to be on? Are we gonna make enough money on that next tour to put gas in our tank and to pay our bills? Are we gonna get a record out in time? And how many records are we gonna sell, so we can get on a better tour?’ So, all these things are on your mind, and the last thing you think about is your personal relationship with Christ or how your bud’s doing. It basically just hit us one day. It was just a realization of, ‘Holy crap! All we care about is band business. All we care about it is, you know, that whole side of our band, when it really is, for us, the reason we started doing this was to be a ministry and to be able to reach kids and hopefully make a difference in some lives and to learn about our own lives.’ We just feel like… I don’t know, so they were playing a tape and I was totally paying attention to it. But, yeah man, we just had this day where we’re like, ‘It’s now or nothing. We’re gonna start working on this. We’re gonna grow together like we used to be, or we’re not gonna be a band anymore and we’re gonna go home and work on our relationships with Christ, because that’s more important than playing a show to a couple hundred kids every night or something.’ Maybe that says what I was trying to say, but it basically came to a point where we all need to start paying attention to our relationship to Christ before we paid attention to our band. I think we really, really had some good talks and some real good points to get out to each other. It was really a growing spot in our band. It could have maybe been the end of the band. It wasn’t even kind of like I’m mad at this dude or this dude’s mad at me or nothing like that. It was really just as simple as it sounds, where we don’t care about each other. We’re not asking about each other’s lives. We’re not pushing each other to be greater men of God. We’re just a bunch of dudes in a band together, and we didn’t want that. Hopefully that makes sense.
It’s cool to kind of be in touch with that humanity part and not let a machine or something – even if it’s a ministry, like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association or something. If that got so focused on the task, rather than the people involved, that could be a bad scene. You talked about confession and accountability. One of the things I think about confession is, in the last couple years, this author named Don Miller, who wrote Blue Like Jazz, he kind of, at least in my opinion, he kind of made it cool to confess your sins – just to be honest – because he’s a good story teller. It almost made it feel like it’s cool to be real and honest. I’m wondering how or what confession kind of means to you.
I don’t know about confession being cool in the eyes of the world, like it’s trendy to be confessing. I almost don’t understand the question.
We’ll just skip on it. As far as accountability goes, how do you see the difference between beating somebody up to applying grace to their lives and how that works out on a practical level.
I kind of touched on it a minute ago. There’s a fine line or a difference between the sin that you’re holding on to and you’re living in and whether you realize it or not, it’s taking over your life and you’re just like really complacent with that sin, and then the sin where there’s things that happen and you get really pissed off and you go off on somebody or just these things that come up. There’s still … every sin’s equal, but our take on it is that we all know that we’re gonna fail in our relationships. We’re all gonna fail in trying to live Christ-like, but the reason that the five of us are put together … the reason God put these five dudes together was to hopefully strengthen each other in our relationships, as opposed to batter each other or anything like that. I don’t want to see one of the other guys falling behind and then beat them down with, you know, condemnation or anything like that. I just want to be able to let them know that my prayers are there for ‘em and that the things that I’m going through in my life. Maybe I’ve had the same problems or may be having the same problems that they’re going through. Our thing is really about trying to strengthen each other and be compassionate about the sin that’s making its way into each others lives and be understanding of it, but find the root of it to really… I guess it takes the first step of me or one of the guys in the band to be able to admit to things that are reoccurring and plaguing their relationship, so that that way we can continue to ask each other, you know, like, if I don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors in one of the guy’s lives or in their minds, then I can never ask them about it. But if they’re honest to me and I’m honest to them, then we can go from there and really, you know, question and keep it in conversation and bring it up in prayer, bring it up in Bible study and just be…have open lines of communication with that stuff.
How do you define your music and your sound? And how do you want people to relate to you musically? What kind of scenes do you want to be a part of or break walls down in?
I guess there’s so many sub-genres of this huge sub-culture of this genre of underground music and hardcore and metal. I mean, I could probably sit here and name 20 different styles of metal. We’re just really simple dudes. Pretty much, for the most part, all of us grew up – in different ways – in church and were Christian youth group kids and listened to Bleach and Skillet and all that. You know, played in our church praise bands and played Steven Curtis Chapman songs and stuff. So, for us, for the most part all the dudes in the band were Christians and were really into music and in growing up and realizing that, you know, after listening to the same artist samplers or the same Forefront samplers and you’re hearing the same bands all the time and hearing the same music, so a huge changing point in my life was hearing Tooth & Nail bands and Solid State bands and Facedown. I got the first Facedown sampler that they ever put out, like 11 years ago. So, it’s crazy to be on Facedown ten years later or whatever. Basically, we’re just a bunch of kids that want to play heavy music. We all started getting into heavy music in different ways. I think a couple of the dudes were really into nu metal for a little while, then hardcore like Strongarm and Overcome and stuff like that when I was young. We’re all from so many different backgrounds, so we didn’t set out to be, like, a specific type of metal. I wasn’t originally in the band when the band started. They, for sure, when they first started, they wanted to sound different from everybody else. There was no super-striving goal of being a specific type of metal, but they didn’t want to sound like every other metalcore band that’s in the scene. I think that’s a lot where the really high end guitar leads stuff that we used to be really, really into kind of set us apart a little bit from everybody. But after touring on the road for three years and playing with a bunch of bands that are a lot heavier than us and playing a whole different style of music, I mean, that whole deathcore, death metal type thing is really huge right now. So, that’s definitely an influence on us now as we’re writing our new record and as we continue to grow and change as a band. I guess as far as a genre of metal, we’re not really hoping to be called anything but just a metal band. I mean, there’s all these different sub-genres and stuff. We definitely don’t want to be classified as like a deathcore band. Hopefully we’re doing something a little different than most generic metalcore bands. I don’t know, man. We’re a metal band that has a good time. We’re just a bunch of dudes playing loud music.
What are some things that you would love to see this article get into, besides what we’ve talked about now, if anything? Or something you’d really like to communicate?
Hmmm. I guess, this is probably like a generic topic, but I feel like in the heavy music scene right now the violence is getting really big. I feel like you can’t go to a show these days without seeing a fight or seeing some kids wearing some t-shirts that are talking about slitting throats and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. I don’t feel like that’s what the scene is about or what hardcore in general started out as. I just feel like it’s really… I’m not the oldest dude in the world. I’m 27. I’m older than a lot of dudes that are in our metal scene right now. I wasn’t around when hardcore started or anything like that, in the 70s, but I’ve been in this long enough and going to shows long enough to know that this scene wasn’t created in violence. It was created to have a brotherhood of people that wanted to have somewhere to go and feel accepted. It just really bums me out that it’s super clique-ish. Even the music styles and genres have created walls in our scene. And, like a deathcore band and a band like Underoath play a show together, you’re gonna have drama. You’re gonna have kids picking fights with each other and stuff. That’s just something where, I remember going to shows when… I remember when the dancing, per say, the hardcore dancing… I remember when that was starting out and I remember kids push moshing and freaking out and headbanging and dancing all coinciding. That’s just stuff I miss. I miss going to shows and it being a real positive environment, as opposed to what it’s turned into today. That’s definitely something that I wish could change. I don’t know if five dudes in our band can be anything that changes that, but hopefully something can be said for that.
Cool. What kind of advice or message our encouragement would you want to give to people that come to your shows? As far as being at your shows, watching you play, or being around when a fight breaks out, or just hanging out?
We’re all five dudes living life and living the lives that God gave us and really trying to be positive in the world that we have right now and everything that’s going on. I guess that would be the biggest thing, just trying to spread love in every situation. There’s a love in Heaven, there’s a love from our God that’s going to provide, that’s going to be there for us, whether we feel like we’re alone or not. Like I said, this record that’s coming out is pretty dark and it talks a lot about this band, but in the end there is a God that loves you and that’s why we’re on tour is to basically just let kids know that… I don’t think that you can go to any corner in America these days without…and find someone that doesn’t know the story of Christ and that doesn’t know that there is a God, whether there’s some atheists in the world that say they don’t believe in God. I kind of don’t believe that. I don’t think that anybody can really say that they don’t believe in a god. Depending on what god they say they believe in or whatever, but our thing is not to try to prove people wrong or try to open these eyes that there is a God, because I think everybody, deep down inside really knows that; but we’re just trying to show that the God that is there and the God that created us and put us on this earth just put us on this earth so that we could have a relationship. That’s all we’re out to do – to just spread some positive good vibes and let people know that there really is a love that’s going to last longer than the love we have for ‘em, ya know?
Copyright © 2009 HM Magazine
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