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PART 3 (the next 2,142 words…):

But, I don’t know, there’s no, like, standard to what we say we wanna accomplish onstage or anything like that. But we do wanna… Each tour over the past, I guess, year and a half, we’ve tried to step it up and do something new as far as lighting goes and we’ve got projection and samples and stuff like that. We definitely weren’t the first band to have our own light show and even the kind of lights we use – we weren’t the first band to do that, but now, like… pretty much every band on Solid State I guess does it, cause the Solid State tour and I didn’t see it, but just a bunch of people have told me, “Hey, they had your exact light show.” So, we’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to figure something out new and different before our next tour, which is in February.

I was going to ask, “Are you telling me that the Kings of Craziness have retired from the onstage insanity?
No, we haven’t, but… (phone cuts out) I don’t think we’ve retired from our “craziness,” but it’s definitely not our… We’re not just trying to go out to be the craziest band, because it’s being done so much and it’s gotten kind of old. And we definitely don’t want it to be a thing that’s forced or anything like that. We do want to do something different and step it up on each tour, but like I said, with the whole lighting thing, we’re going to try and think of something more creative than what we had, because that’s being done more and more now. We’ve got to step it up again and step it up with the projection. We have a couple of other ideas in mind that we haven’t really seen done on this level yet, so we’re going to try and accomplish that on a tour that we’re going out on in February and March.

Here's a silly view-from-afar type question: Have you guys ever hurt each other onstage with the instrument swinging, rambling around, general mayhem that is a norma jean show? Please expound upon or describe the injuries and how they've come about... [medical insurance comes to mind…]
Yeah, for sure. We’ve head collisions in the head and a bass guitar resulting in, I think, 4 staples in the head and, like, 30-something stitches in the face. We’ve had… Josh, our old singer, he got water on the knee, because he was kind of always jumping off of high things. I think it was in Germany. I don’t remember where it happened, but he busted his knee up on some pipe on stage. He jumped off a really high speaker thing. His knee, like, swelled up really big and weeks and weeks later finally went to the hospital and came to find out that he had water on the knee. Whatever that is. I know that we’ve had our stuff, too, like I think we had a guitar break over somebody’s arm. It was either Josh or someone was kicking and, like… I think it’s happened on an arm and a leg. A guitar neck came down and just snapped over somebody’s leg. So, we’ve gone through, like, I don’t know, 10 or 15 guitars in the past couple of years. Scottie… Derr did like a kick and the guitar came down on his shin and broke over his shin. Pretty funny. There’s been plenty of things like that – chipped teeth and lots of fun little injuries to write home about.

Tell me about the new songs you've recorded for this new album. What do they sound like? What are your favorites?
Man, like I keep saying, I couldn’t be any more happy with how it’s all coming together and turning out. Some of the songs we just wrote last month, so they’re still brand, brand new. They couldn’t be any newer, so when I hear ‘em they’re still so new to me that sometimes I don’t even really remember what parts coming next and when I hear it, it, like, excites me and surprises me as if it were like a different band. Especially some of the songs that we had never heard vocals on. It’s almost like – hearing the vocals on them now that Cory’s done and we’re hearing it for the first time – it’s kind of like listening to it as an outsider, ya know? Just because it’s brand new. But, as far as my favorite ones, I wouldn’t know how to explain it to you, because some of them don’t have titles and I can’t even remember the titles that we do have. There’s a lot more vocal diversity, as far as just like yelling and screaming, but also there’s like singing. Not at all like a pop band or pretty singing at all. It’s more just kind of raw and emotional sounding, I guess you could say? But it definitely gives it a different element and brings a new aspect and a new level of creativity to the band, which is Cory’s doing. The guitar parts are definitely more technical, just, again, because we’ve grown as musicians and people over the past two or three years, between the writing processes of each of the records. But we have kind of strayed from just the straight-up crazy, never repeat a riff kind of thing, ya know? To more of an – I don’t know if you’d call it a laid-back song structure – more straight-forward maybe? Not saying that the songs are straight-forward by any means, but just kind of the layout of the songs. In that area I would say it’s more straight-forward, but I don’t even know if that’s something people are really going to even pick up on.

How does it feel to be growing with mainstream approval? And what have been some of your experiences with live touring? Like Europe, Hellfest, Furnace Fest?
I’m so happy right now how the band is being received. We have management now and a really good publicist. I know things are going to get taken to a whole different level in the next couple of months. We’re going to making another video. We’ve already made two on our last record that did pretty well and we went and hosted the show Headbanger’s Ball on MTV, which was just a crazy experience in itself. It’s unbelievable how it’s even true, basically. While we were there in Times Square at MTV Studios, to not even be able to believe it. But that was really cool and I know that’s helped to grow the band and stuff, but over the past couple of years we’ve all definitely grown as people, because we’re…

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