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The Night Fell Silent
Honest Iago interview conducted June 2006 by Jackie Snow.| The Night Fell Silent is: Matt Higbee – Guitar Alex Saffiodi – Guitar Matt "Rainbow" Smith – Drums Michael Huffman – Bass Ryan Urquidi – Vocals SDP: So. About TNFS. Matt: Well, I'm Matt Higbee and I play guitar in The Night Fell Silent. I'm the manager; I basically do everything. |
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SDP: Are you signed?
Matt: We're signed to True Stance records. We've been on the label for about five months now.
SDP: What other bands are on that label?
Matt: None as of right now, but there are some that are in the works, which I can't explicitly name.
SDP: Are they local bands?
Matt: Yeah they're from further North County, Temecula area.
SDP: Tell us about the changes in your band and whether you would consider them an improvement.
Matt: Most recently, two of our members left at the same time. Our drummer, Christopher Thomas left due to the realization that he might not be the best drummer for the band and the lack of money (he didn't have financial stability for tour, or anything else for that matter). And our guitarist, Stephen Card, had ear problems. He was afraid of losing his hearing. I would consider it an improvement because the people we found to replace Chris and Stephen are both really good. Our new guitarist is Alex Saffiodi, also known as "Saffi," I believe he's part Italian, and he knew a guy named Matt Smith who is the drummer from a band called Exidiom, from Orange County. Saffi rocks my socks off on the guitar, he's got sweeps that could take out many other bands. He can play Dillinger and all this nasty stuff that I can't fathom of playing. He's incredible. He's 21 and (him and Matt) knew each other already, so we got hooked up with Matt Smitt through Saffi. And together we are The Night Fell Silent, reborn once again (laughs).
SDP: Now that you have new members, would you say that's renewing your commitment to the band?
Matt: My commitment never changed and neither did Ryan's, we never planned on ever stopping it. But having new members is definitely going to change the sound of TNFS because Matt came from a grind band.
SDP: What's a grind band?
Matt: It's like a mixture between thrash, like the Locust, and a hardcore/metal band. It's fast, super technical stuff, something more in the direction of The Dillinger Escape Plan. We're keeping the songs we have as a foundation but we're changing all of our breakdowns. We're making it a lot more technical and lot crazier, faster.
SDP: What did you sound like before the lineup changes?
Matt: I would compare our sound to something like Zao mixed with Dillinger mixed with Every Time I Die. But a lot of those rock and roll parts are now going to be leaving the band, thankfully. I would much rather get faster and way more technical. Everybody loves two-step beats and I love them as much as the next guy, but personally, I don't dance. I mean, having two-step beats doesn't really fit with the whole technical, fast aspect of hardcore metal and our sound in particular.
| SDP: Refresh my memory Matt, I haven't been to a show in quite some time, has the dynamics of the scene changed at all? And if so, is that for the better? Matt: The dynamics of the scene…(laughs) I would say has changed. In my experience, it's been way easier for bands to get shows because of Myspace. That's why really small bands are progressing really fast. We've been a band since the summer of 2003 and we're just now going on our first tour and we just got signed to our first label. SDP: Do you credit a lot of that to Myspace? Matt: I would say so. I don't really condone Myspace personally, I have one, but for band stuff and business activities it's really good for networking. |
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Matt: I would say it's re-defining the scene and our generation, because it's making it easier to connect and do things that weren't necessarily possible before because it was hard to find people that could actually facilitate these kinds of needs for shows and tours and different labels and getting things printed for merch. A lot of things are easier to do now because of Myspace. It's an incredible resource that you have and everybody tends to use it, sometimes exploit it… (laughs)
SDP: How many "friends" do you have?
Matt: I believe it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700. Yeah. We're huge in Europe (laughs). I'm just playin'.
SDP: So, upcoming tour dates and locations?
Matt: We're supposed to be playing the East Coast for the month of July. We're not sure with who, but there's a few different bands we might play with, which I'm not going to name because I don't know who they are. But we're supposed to be playing Cornerstone.
SDP: Could you give us a brief summary of what Cornerstone is exactly?
Matt: Cornerstone is a three day Christian music festival out in the boons of Illinois, and you can camp, and there's about seven different stages where bands play music. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest Christian festival in the world. It's basically Christian Woodstock. It's not any one kind of music, it's not just a hardcore festival, it's not just Indie, it's all Christian music incorporated into one gigantic gathering. We'd probably be playing on the impromptu stage because we got on the list way too late. We didn't actually sign up to play a stage because some of the stages charge you money just to sign up and we're pretty poor. They wanted $50 just to sign up and 20 percent of whatever we sold in merch. Merch is a big part of us eating and driving and not going bankrupt, so I wasn't too down with that. I figured we'd just show up and try to play the impromptu stage. We're driving all the way from California so I hope they say "Ok, you guys can play."
SDP: How much do you make in merch at a show?
Matt: When we play far away we get lucky sometimes and sell 10 shirts, that's doing really really good. When we play locally, we'd be lucky to sell 3 shirts. We made pins, but charging for a pin is ridiculous. We just set them out for people to take. We figure the more people have our name on them, the more they'll remember who we are.
SDP: Would you say there's anything that sets your band apart from other bands who are trying to make it?
Matt: We've been playing these songs for a really long time and we've put our all into it. It's not like we're trying to play music to have people know that we're in a band and know that we are The Night Fell Silent. We play music because we love music, and we're a Christian band so we want to convey a message. The thing that sets us apart from other Christian bands is that we're not trying to be in-your-face. We always say that if you have any questions you can ask us and that's what we leave it at. We don't ever tell someone that they're wrong. If you want to be a Satanist, I don't care, go ahead, be a Satanist. Independently we have different beliefs, but collectively, we are a Christian band.
| SDP: Has anyone approached you with questions before? Matt: People have approached us with questions and we've also been ridiculed for it, most recently by a band called Good Clean Fun. They're supposed to be a positive hardcore band and I don't see how ridiculing other people for their beliefs is positive, AT ALL. SDP: Amen (laughs). Matt: Yeah! Amen, Hallelujah! (laughs). We made our own choice to (be Christian), no one pressured us into this. That's why I don’t understand people who get angry about it. You can like our music just because you like our music. I think everyone in our band listens to way more secular music than Christian music. Good music is hard to find these days. But all in all I don't understand why people |
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SDP: Do you market yourselves as a Christian band?
Matt: Our label is Christian so I guess we kind of do market ourselves as a Christian band but we aren't forward about it. We tell people that we are (Christian) and just leave it at that. We don't give long, preachy speeches up on stage. We've never really been into that. None of us really like it when other bands do that at shows. I feel that if someone wants to ask you something they're going to ask you, you don't need to tell them your life story or testimony. You don't need to tell them about Jesus unless they want to know about it, then they can come up and ask you personally.
SDP: So you told me earlier you were getting into traditional style worship music, like hymns. What about hymns is appealing to you?
Matt: I've never really been able to get into the pop-rock worship stuff because it feels like your trying to make it more listenable for today's crowd. But hymns are tried and true. You sit around campfires and you sing songs that are over a hundred years old and everybody's still like "Hey cool, this is fun!" But I mean, I like the big feeling of the organ. For the longest time I've wanted to find a Southern Baptist church where they go off and say "Hallelujah!" and "Amen!" I think that's the coolest thing because white people at church are way too conservative! You should feel free to do whatever you want. At Black churches people go off and that's so cool!
SDP: What has TNFS's progress been like since the band first started?
Matt: When we first started we got together to write for fun. Now we piece songs together and we really think about it and try to better ourselves daily, musically. Now we make an effort to play as best as we can and put on a good show so people will like us. That's why we got the lights! We got these really big lights; we have about 3,000 watts of lighting up on stage. It's really, really bright. Me and Ryan spent two weeks wiring the system and putting it together. It gets incredibly hot! We have outdoor shop lights on stands on stage with us. It's cool because we start out on a black stage and then it gets really bright and the coolest thing in the world to me is when we first start playing and seeing kids go "Ugh! It's sooo bright!" And when we ask after the show if our lights were bright they go "Yeah! They were too bright!" And we say, "Excellent!" That's how we know that the lights were good.
SDP: Where do you see your band in five years?
Matt: Realistically, things take a lot of time. In real life, this tour could not be a success and we could play to 20 person crowds every single show for a month and come back poorer than we left. But I would still try. If it doesn't work with this band I'm just going to keep on trying because I like playing music. But I feel like we're going places more now than ever so I would hope that we would achieve some goals that were not attainable a year ago.
SDP: And optimistically?
Matt: If everything were to go according to my plan, in a few years we would be playing with really big name bands, going on tour for months at a time, like back when Norma Jean and Bless the Martyr toured for almost two years solid. I would hope that we could do something like that and play with bands like Between the Buried and Me and Haste the Day. A problem I have with Christian bands is that they only play to Christian crowds. If bands want to reach out to people, they have to play to more secular audiences. You have to play to people who aren't already used to hearing this kind of stuff. I want to play music and if someone wants to ask me something they can come up to me, but it's not my absolute goal to convert every single person to Christianity. But I would hope that in five years we could be either headlining or playing second to headlining with major, big name bands. I don't even care if people call me a sell-out! That doesn't matter to me. Everyone wants to be rich and famous, but I don't even necessarily care about the richness of it. I would like to have people see me and be like, "That's the guy from The Night Fell Silent!" I could be poor and living in a Geo and it'd be AWESOME! But to have people actually like the music that we write would be the most gratifying thing of my entire life.
official website: http://www.thenightfellsilent.tk
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/thenightfellsilent
Interview by Vanessa Chalmers and Natalie Strafaci
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