Dead Poetic

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.

This is the type of music we love, the type we want to play… and the kind of music we love differs greatly from the record that New Medicines was. New Medicines was a very screamo record, and it was an insult to us to be called screamo. I don’t want to talk cred or anything, but I will say that we’ve been singing and screaming long before all these screamo bands started coming out. We were writing our first record, Four Wall Blackmail—we were sitting there mixing that record watching MTV2 and a band called Thursday pops on the screen. And I’d never heard of this band before. I was like, Dang it. This is what’s about to happen in music right now. We thought what we were doing was original. At that point, we called ourselves post-hardcore or whatever. The word screamo didn’t exist. We basically watched the style of music that we thought was so original turn into the trendiest thing in music, and personally, the crappiest thing in music. I personally think music right now is at an all-time low. Not rock music, because rock music has a solidity that’s always good. But what we’re seeing on MTV and what kids are flipping out over is just the crappiest music I’ve ever heard. I mean, if I hear screaming over poppy guitars one more time I’m going to shoot myself in the head. I’m over it. I’m like, This isn’t rock and roll. This is feeding kids crap because it’s what they know. In the story of us, in May of 2004 our band was complete. Myself, Zach Miles, Jesse Sprinkle, and John Brehm were now Dead Poetic.

So now there’s the new and improved version (of Dead Poetic).
Totally. Freaking new and improved, back and better than ever, all of that. And Dead Poetic starts meaning a whole new thing. Dead Poetic to me, before, it was like, “Dead Poetic, Underoath, blah blah blah” you know what I mean? It was that whole thing. Now it’s like, OK, Dead Poetic is starting to sound more like a rock band. We’re doing what we wanna do. We’re starting to get gratification because we’re starting to write songs that fit with the reason we started to write music. Yes, now I’m finally paying homage to Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots and Helmet and all those bands that made me love rock and roll.

Like back in the mid-’90s when you started the band.
The ’90s bands were the last legitimate rock and roll bands. That was the last time rock and roll was legit was the ’90s. I’m starting to sound like an old man!

I understand, music evolves, and a lot of times it can evolve to where a lot of it is diluted, like you said. You hear a little of this, a little of that, soon, it holds no weight anymore.
That’s were it’s at dude. We’re hoping and praying that we can be a band that snaps everybody out of it. We’ll probably take a screamo crowd with us, I mean, we’ve sold x amount of records to screamo kids. I love those screamo kids. I appreciate those screamo kids. I just want to let them know there’s other music out there.

Do you think that when they hear this record, they will appreciate it? Reject it? Embrace it?
I think they’ll dig it because there are elements of New Medicines and elements of what we were—not necessarily screamo, but something that’s familiar to them. Therefore, they’ll be able to dig it. But there’s this whole new rock element to it that I kind of think is undeniable. I think there are elements of rock that any person, with any passion of music, that they have to latch on to. There’s emotion there—as with everything we’ve done, hopefully. There are things where you grasp on to, there are things for you to relate to, and there’s substance there. It’s not just music. There’s, “I’m trying to say something. I’m trying to get a point across” in every song. I’m trying to get those kids to understand where I’m coming from. If I can do that, then those kids will latch on to that album. Even if it’s not like the Hawthorne Heights stuff that they have posters on their wall of. It’s not that. But there’s something about it that they can still dig. But on top of all that, I want to be able to appeal to a radio demographic. I want people who dig Nickleback… I want to tune into that. There’s a lot more loyalty, sometimes, in the general market. Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes radio fans fall off the face of the earth if you don’t have a hit. Think about Tool. Those dudes wearing Tool t-shirts will wear them until they’re dead. You seem them all over the place. Those people are obsessed with Tool. It’s like they connected. There’s something there that people can grab on to. I’m stoked to see a dude wearing a Tool t-shirt, or a Slipknot t-shirt, or a Metallica t-shirt because I know they’re all about those bands. As opposed to a dude wearing a Fall Out Boy t-shirt because his friends at school are, because that’s the cool band to like at the moment.

I think the cool thing about Tool is that, not only were they more than just a band and more like an artistic endeavor, but they never underestimated the intelligence of their audience. They gave them more credit and could understand concepts of stories and art and music all combined.
That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to feed my audience crap. I don’t want to give them something they’ve heard a million times. I know I could sell 200-, 300-thousand records if I fed them the crap that they want. I’m not going to do that because I have more pride in this band than that. I have more of a purpose with my band than to just do what I know is going to work. I’m hoping to step outside the box in doing what I believe in and hopefully it works out. But if it doesn’t work out, at least I know I gave it a shot.

At least you’re not only pushing yourself, but also your audience to somewhere new. I feel like that’s where—with the way you’re talking—this band needs to go. If you’re going to re-invent Dead Poetic, you have to push it.
I feel like I’m pulling this big bandwagon with a rope. “Guys come be with me over here! It sucks where you’re at; let’s go over here.” This is better music, this is better stuff. This is a record you’re going to be able to listen to when you’re 50 years old and looking for a good record. I listened to Led Zeppelin IV so many times and I’m just like, This record rules. It always will. Pearl Jam’s Ten? Always awesome. Weezer’s Blue Album, always awesome. Stone Temple Pilots’ Core. You know what I’m saying?

Green Day’s Dookie. Alice in Chains in there.
All that, man. And you’ll hear that stuff in the new record. There’s heavy Alice in Chains influence. STP. Helmet. But anyways, that’s kind of what we’re hoping to do with this record. We pulled out all stops, didn’t care about any genre—and I know that’s a cliché thing to say: “We don’t care about any genre or blah blah blah, we don’t want to be labeled in a genre”—our genre is rock and roll. That’s the genre we want to be in. And we just said, Screw fitting into whatever’s happening out there, we have to do the record that we love. This is the most honest record we’ve ever done, both musically and lyrically. It’s an extremely revealing record, but the honestly of just the music on there… This is what we love. So, I think it takes a bunch of bands doing that type of thing to have a big change in music.

Do you know where you expect to go? Let’s say it blows up. Do you want to become a ridiculously hard-working band? Is that worth it to you?
Hardest-working has different meanings. Hardest-working for me doesn’t mean tours their butts off. I want to do smart tours. I want to do tours that are going to be effective, but more than that, I want to do radio. If we can get radio, then all that touring that you’ve done to get people into your band, well the radio kind of takes the place of that tour. Meanwhile you’re able to do five, six tours a year and be more effective than the bands who are touring ten months a year with no radio play. Bottom line is major labels have more money to push with the radio than independent ones do. We want this record to get on the radio. If this record doesn’t get on the radio, we don’t really have a chance.

It’s such a weird concept because music that comes out today… albums aren’t albums anymore. Albums become singles, and if someone hears a single on the radio, all of a sudden that’s not cool anymore. But where you’re coming from, ten years ago, it was cool to hear them on the radio and see them on MTV.
Yeah, I call them an ADD crowd now. Total ADD generation. These kids aren’t the type of kids who are going to get a record, open up the booklet, read every song in there and have it be the only record they listen to for like months. That’s the way I was with Green Day’s Dookie. Sat there and read the whole thing, looked at every little picture, all that. I obsessed over it. I learned every lyric to the whole album, tried to figure out what each song meant. But now, why would a kid do that when they can get on the band’s Myspace and listen to the one song, and then the next week it’s something else. Those kids, you have to cater to that ADD generation, but at the same time, you have to step up to the people in their 20s and 30s. They’re not the type of people who buy records all the time, you have to impress them enough to want to buy your record. We wrote an adult record. I feel like our record is an adult record, and I want it to be pushed to an adult crowd. And if it’s not pushed to an adult crowd, we’re pushing it to that ADD generation. And we’ll sell whatever amount of records, but we’re still going to be somewhat in the same situation as we were in after New Medicines. Not in the band situation—just a good record that sold some copies. And soon enough, you’re a slave to the way it always is. I personally don’t have the patience for that anymore. Four married guys in the band, you know, four different children between the band members… There’s a lot more riding on this than our own little high school dreams. Mouths to feed, bills to pay…

Did you want to talk a little bit about the name of the record?
The name is called Vices. It deals all those things about ourselves that we don’t like. It deals with—vice is defined as “not a crime against others, but a crime against yourself.” It’s nothing you do to someone else, but someone that you’re constantly doing to yourself. It’s the things about yourself that you’re constantly falling in to. It’s sin, or habits, or addictions, that whole thing. It’s falling in to that. The record goes through all the areas of ourselves that we don’t like. It’s kind of a real honest portrayal of who we are. We’ve been through different stages in our lives as far as our Christianity goes. You know, we started this band with the sole purpose to praise and worship God. That was the point. We’d do an altar call at every show because that’s what we knew. At the time, we were 15-year old kids. That’s your mentality. You think an altar call is the best thing in the world; you think that’s what’s going to work. Changing lives and saving souls for Jesus… And then you leave the day, and there’s no discipleship. You plant that seed right on freaking rock. Then we decide, “Let’s just say something about our faith.” We’re not necessarily going to do an altar call at every show, but let’s just say something. Then you just get to the point where you realize, this just doesn’t work. We don’t want to be viewed as this cheesy Christian band; we want to be viewed as a real band. Then you kind of go against it all. You don’t even care anymore about any religious affiliation that your band may have. You kind of want to avoid it completely. Then you grow up and you don’t care about—you know, you’re not so obsessed with people’s view of you. You’re comfortable enough with who you are and what you believe that you don’t have to change the world, but you also don’t have to hide yourself. So, now we’re kind of at a point for the past few years where we don’t care what people think about us. We don’t give a crap about what anyone thinks about what we believe. It’s just life. I believe this, you believe that, we’ll respect each other both ways. Respect is the thing that is often forgotten about in contemporary Christian culture, the respect for other people’s beliefs. Respect for other people’s beliefs in some cultures would be sacrilegious. If I told somebody, “Well this guy’s a Buddhist, respect the fact that he’s a Buddhist, you know, listen to what he has to say…”

The fact that I would say that to certain Christians, they would just be appalled. “But Buddhism is wrong! Jesus is the only way!”

“OK, OK, I understand that, but this person thinks the same way about his religion.” I call it growing up, but it’s not really growing up because there are still grown people who haven’t gotten this point through their head. It’s kind of just being intelligent. There’s a point where you just realize, they believe that, I believe this, we need to be able to coexist, and respect needs to be given to everybody. And Jesus didn’t come to condemn people; Jesus didn’t come to freak anybody out—

Yeah, he came and lived by example.
Exactly. And the hellfire and brimstone—it just doesn’t work. If you want to show anyone your beliefs, you have to live by example because that’s what Jesus did and that was the best framework we have for teaching, for Christian teaching, was Jesus’ life. And if you can show me a time where Jesus held a bullhorn and told people they were going to hell, you know, give me a time where Jesus told people he hated them—if you can give me that, then maybe I’d change my point of view. But Jesus never did that. He was a loving and accepting person and that’s the type of person I want to be and that’s the type of people we need to be. As far as how it relates to our record, where we’re at right now, we’re all Christian dudes and we’re not afraid of playing a Christian show for fear of what it’s going to do to our rep. We’re a Christian band, if you want to put us on Life Festival or Cornerstone, that’s fine, we still want to play for those kids. But in the same breath, I want our music to be universal. And I think it is. And I want people to know where we’re coming from. I want people to know where we’re coming from; I want people to understand that we have a belief system and that we do have substance because I think music without substance sucks. Even if it’s not substance you agree with, hopefully I can give it to you in an honest and respect way.

People tend to latch on to honesty. You’d hope that would be the case.
I mean Rage Against the Machine: I wasn’t agreeing with his political views, but I dug that they had something to stand for.

And even those that listened to them that didn’t know what Rage was talking about—they were already onboard.
When you see passion behind something, you have to kind of respect it. You have to kind of dig it. Rage Against the Machine, they’re one of my favorite bands and their music, it had power, it had conviction. It had substance to it. I didn’t agree with their political views—I could care less about most of them—but you have to be mature enough to filter what you hear. Me personally, I don’t care if someone’s telling me to worship Satan; if the song’s cool, the song’s cool. I’m not going to get convinced to worship Satan because they’re telling me to. But some people are. Youth pastors for kids and all, they have to be able to discern some of that stuff. I mean, I hate that stuff gets censored, but you just have to act responsibly. There are some people and certain young lives that aren’t stable in their belief system and can be swayed by something like that. Me personally, it’s music. It can stand for whatever it wants to stand for, it’s not going to affect me or get into my belief system.

But ideally, you want to be that beacon of hope for those younger people with your record.
Right, there’s substance to it. I want them to realize that and I want them see—first of all, I want them to respect the honesty. And after the respect the honesty, I want them to deep down try and figure out what the heck it is I’m talking about. A lot of them could be completely wrong—you know, “Oh this song was about this…” I get on the forum and I’m reading and thinking, “That song wasn’t about that!” That has nothing to do with what I wrote that song about. But if that’s what it means to you…

That’s the good thing about art.
Up until this record, I have not written a single song about—well, there was one song on New Medicines—but I have not written a single song about girls, you know what I mean, about like love, and girls, and that type of thing and like falling in love and breaking up and that type of stuff. Never ever ever wrote a song about that except “Modern Morbid Prophecy” and it’s on New Medicines. But, I got kids saying this is about this relationship thing and this, and I read it, and I’m like, It’s not, but the fact that it helped you through your break-up or helped you through your parents’ divorce—it means the world to me. I didn’t write it about divorce, I didn’t write it about a break-up, but if that’s what it means to you, then by all means, that’s the meaning of the song. And a lot of my lyrics are kind of cryptic; a lot of my lyrics are not extremely easy to understand. I know what they mean, but if I just feed it to them literally word for word, then they’re not going to take it to mean what it could mean.

That’s what I mean when I was talking to you earlier about underestimating your audience. Don’t underestimate the power of your audience to think.
Totally. It’s been such a blessing to my life to see what these people come up with about the songs. That’s just another reason to know that God exists and that he can mold and shape things into what He wants them to be and what He can do in other people’s lives. It makes me feel like my lyrics are out of my hands sometimes, and that’s pretty cool.

Dead Poetic - Finish this feature by David Stagg in the new HM Magazine. Available now, Issue can be found at select stores or for a reduced subscription rate.

Return to MAIN PAGE