INTERVIEW: GET SCARED – October 2015

Layton, Utah’s favorite sons Get Scared are currently touring the US supporting headliner New Year’s Day on The Other Side tour, and I had a chance to catch up with them during their stop at Hatchy’s in Utica, MI.  They are set to release their third full length album ‘Demons’ on October 30th and have been featuring a few of the new songs on tour, to a rave response.  The band, made up of guitarists Johnny Braddock and Adam Virostko, bassist Brad Iverson, drummer Dan Juarez, and vocalist Nick Matthews, had a lot to share about the tour, their excitement about the new album, and much more, and our Mike Hubbard was more than happy to sit with the guys before the show…

MIKE: Welcome to Detroit!

BAND: Thank you!

MIKE: Well, this isn’t technically Detroit, it’s Utica, Michigan.  You guys have been through here a few times before.

JOHNNY: It’s always in the coldest seasons too so we have to bundle up here.

MIKE: Being from Salt Lake you guys are used to this colder weather.

BRAD: Sometimes, but it doesn’t have that humidity that you get from the lakes up here.

JOHNNY: It’s like bone chilling up here.  It’s a different kind of cold out there.

ADAM: We are by a giant lake.

BRAD: Well yeah, but we don’t get that feeling.

JOHNNY: Yeah, it’s a different.

MIKE: So you guys are about half way through the tour, a little over half way, you have another 10 days or so, it’s been pretty ambitious, how’s it been going so far?

BRAD: It’s been great.

JOHNNY: It’s been going really good.  The show turn outs, the kids that have been coming have been awesome, have been really excited and they know all the songs.  We’ve toured with some of the bands before so we already had some camaraderie so we were excited from the get go.  And everyone else on the tour turned out to be super nice people, very genuine so we’ve had a really good time all around.

MIKE: Cool!

JOHNNY: And nothing’s broken down yet and we’re still here.

MIKE: Knock on wood. Any particular shows stick out, any highlights so far?

JOHNNY: There’s been a few.  I know the first show in San Diego at Somo was awesome.  We were kind of nervous about how the shows were going to turn out, you know the first show on the tour, and that one was awesome and we love that venue.  Richmond, Virginia was very insane. New York was also insane.

BRAD: Yeah that one was really good.  Where did we play like two days ago?  That show was awesome.

JOHNNY: We can’t remember where we are at half the time.  So many new places.  Agora in Cleveland?  Cleveland was awesome.  We always have a good time in Cleveland.  Yeah, there’s been a lot of good shows on this tour to be honest with you.  It’s been fun.  We’re excited to see how the rest of the tour is going to do.

MIKE: Any strange stories to tell, anything crazy go on?  Or has it been pretty low key for the most part?

ADAM: The serpentine belt went out and Johnny fixed it like a man.

JOHNNY: On the side of the freeway in hot steamy weather.

ADAM: We paid a high school kid 50 bucks to drop if off for us from Autozone.  We’re like ‘dude if you get it to us we’ll give you $50’.

JOHNNY: We were literally stranded and towing was like 400 bucks.  Are you serious?  There were no auto shops around and it was Sunday so we were like ‘what are we going to do?’  There’s an Autozone but how are we going to get there?  But we figured it out.

MIKE: Wow, serpentine belt, that can be tough!

JOHNNY: We figured it out.

BRAD: It took three of us but we got it done alright.

ADAM: We also broke down a fence a couple nights ago to turn around.

JOHNNY: When you tour, always keep a thing of tools with you.  You never know when you are going to need to break through a fence.

MIKE: You said you’ve toured with some of these guys before, did you tour with New Year’s Day before?

JOHNNY: No, we’ve played one off shows with them but never touring full on so it’s been nice getting to know those guys.  We’ve had the same producer so we have a lot of mutual friends but we’ve never had enough time to hang out.

NICK: We’ve played shows with them.

JOHNNY: And Eyes Set To Kill.  We’ve done a tour with Aiden, was that 2011?

NICK: We’ve done like three tours with them.

JOHNNY: Yeah, so we’ve known those guys for years and they’re just kicking ass all the time.

MIKE: How did this tour all come together?

JOHNNY: It just worked.

MIKE: So you’ve spent some time with them before but you’ve got some new as well.  Have you made some new friends?

JOHNNY: That’s how it goes with every tour.  You make new friends.  There’s always those people.  That’s the hardest part of touring, other than finding showers.

DAN: One of the things that’s cool with this tour is with Eyes Set To Kill we’ve done a tour with them before so we’ve already had the ice broken.  So jumping into it and having friends right off the bat, that’s a cool thing to have.

JOHNNY: But then saying goodbye and not knowing when we’ll see them again at the end of the tour that’s the hardest part.

BRAD: Tears are shed.

MIKE: Just looking back at the last couple of years you guys have been on the road a lot.  What do you guys do when you have a little bit of down time to blow off some steam or try to stay sane, if that is possible?

JOHNNY: We do a lot of writing at home and we hang out whenever we have the opportunity to be home.

BRAD: Whenever we have down time we are at home recording.

JOHNNY: Any free time we have that’s like our hobby as well as our job and our passion.

MIKE: No free time when you are on the road?  You have off days every once in a while.

JOHNNY: We will have an off day, but usually it’s a day of driving. Or sleeping.

BRAD: Oil change!

ADAM: Laundry.

BRAD: We went bowling the other day.

NICK: Ya when we went bowling, that was a good day.

JOHNNY: Bought a pair of pants.

MIKE: Exciting stuff.

JOHNNY: When we get those days they are very special to us.

MIKE: So a week from today, October 30th is a big day for you guys. (The new album Demon drops on the 30th).

BRAD: Yeah, we’re excited!

JOHNNY: I don’t know what you are talking about.

NICK: Is that a week from today? Yay!

JOHNNY: We’ve been waiting a long time to get this one out.

NICK: I thought we already released the album.

MIKE: I have a feeling that this one has been in the can for a while now.

JOHNNY: Yeah the writing process alone took 5-6 months and going from there to recording it and getting the songs for the album to making the plan for how we are going to release it, it’s a long journey but we’re at the end of it, right at the finish line.  To have it all come together and finally show people what we have done for the past year of our lives is going to be cool.

MIKE: Anything special planned for Friday?

JOHNNY: Fireworks, we have a lot of fireworks.

BRAD: The fireworks are for tonight.  We’re going to celebrate our new single we just released.  Johnnie did a lyric video for it, songs called “R.I.P.”

MIKE: Ah!  I hadn’t seen that.

JOHNNY: “Rest In Peace.”

BRAD: It barely came out a few hours ago.

JOHNNY: So it’s out today and we’re seeing all the reactions from kids online and it’s been very good so far.  So we’re stoked about that and we’re going to light off some fireworks.  So if you have some free time you can join us.

NICK: And we’ll get a cheese burger or a chicken sandwich.

MIKE: So you’ve been playing some of the new songs on the tour, right?

JOHNNY: Three songs, “Buried Alive,” “Suffer,” and the “Rest In Peace” song we just released today.

MIKE: How’s the response been at the shows?

BRAD: It’s been really awesome!

NICK: Ya, it’s been awesome.  Better than most tours.

JOHNNY: It’s always nerve wracking playing new stuff on a tour because you don’t know if they going to be familiar with it yet because we had barely just released two of these songs.

ADAM: Giving them time to learn them.

JOHNNY: But they are excited for them, they are singing along to the lyrics, it’s been awesome so far.

MIKE: From the first two songs I’ve listened to it seems like there is a little bit of a heavier sound than the first two albums and maybe a little bit darker some in the lyrics.

NICK: We’ve always listened to a little bit of everything so playing a little bit heavier music wasn’t that big of a deal.  It’s fun and interesting to do something new.

BRAD: Our early stuff from our first EP was just as heavy as the stuff we are releasing now.  I think it’s just that since it is such an old EP, people kind of like forgot about it.  It’s like ‘you’re heavy now’, but we’ve always been.

JOHNNY: We’ve gotten a lot of response from the fans from the first of our band saying Get Scared has their sound again.

ADAM: They are going back to their roots again.

MIKE: So when you started into the writing and recording process with this one did you say you wanted to go back to that, was it a conscious decision?

NICK: We kind of just did it.

JOHNNY: We have so many songs at home that we just kind of doodle with and throw back and forth until we got cool ones that we wanted to work on, so we just naturally kind of want to go in this direction we’ve been a band for a long time and just grew into this.

BRAD: We wanted a record through and through with a lot of energy and excitement.

MIKE: This is produced again by Erik Ron, you’ve worked with him quite a bit recently.

JOHNNY: He did the last album as well with us.

MIKE: And I think one of the EP’s as well.

JOHNNY: Yeah, we’ve known him for quite a long time.  He was actually an engineer at first for our first album we did with John Feldman.  He was his engineer and we just hit it off as friends and he trailed off and did his own thing building up his producing career and we kept in touch and work together well so it just kind of happened that way.

MIKE: Does he have a lot of input into the sound and what you guys do or does he give you pretty much free reign?

NICK: With this album we brought a lot.

JOHNNY: Yeah we had a very strong direction with what we wanted before we ever went in and we communicated with him and he was ‘alright, I’m on board’.  It kind of went from there.

MIKE: It sounded like the writing process was a little longer this time for this album.

BRAD: We had a lot of down time at home.

JOHNNY: We were fortunate to have that time.

NICK: That’s all we kind of do is write.

BRAD: Our past records we’ve been thrown into the studio and rushed to write it right in the studio, but with this one we actually had time to not write it in the studio and were more comfortable and got to take a magnifying glass on all of the songs to pick them apart and make them exactly what we wanted.

JOHNNY: It’s been nice.

MIKE: So by the time you got to the studio you knew exactly what you wanted to do.

NICK: We had all the demos ready to go.

BRAD: Obviously there are changes here and there on stuff.  We wrote a couple of songs in the studio.

JOHNNY: Our songs are always being changed from the first second we start writing to the last thing we record.  You get a little light bulb of an idea ‘Oh wait!  Hold on!’ and little things change because of the constant writing process up until it is finally tracked, and then you can’t obviously write to it anymore.

MIKE: With the album is there a general theme to it or is it just a collection of individual songs?

NICK: 65% is down the same path, then there’s other songs that I have that mean different things.  A lot of it has to do with getting over some demons.

JOHNNY: Personal demons.  We actually have a music video coming out very soon that kind of explains that as well.  The visuals will explain that, the lyrics for “Suffer,” that’s what we did the video for.  That’s pretty much the epitome of what our whole album is.

MIKE: Demons is a pretty powerful image.  How did you come up with that?

JOHNNY: That was all Nick.

NICK: I had an idea of the name before we pretty much started with the record.  It was kind of cool to have a name for it before.

BRAD: It has nothing to do with demonic beings or anything.

NICK: It’s demons that I have personally, struggles with alcoholism and that was where a lot of it came from with the lyrics, and all the things I’ve been through over the last six years or so dumped into one album.

MIKE: I’ve been listening to “Buried Alive” over and over again.

JOHNNY: Do you like it?

MIKE: I love it!  It’s real powerful, it’s pretty intense with a lot of anger and some defiance in there.  Is that kind of where some of that is coming from?

NICK: Pretty much.  I wanted to get a little deeper on this album than most of our music.

JOHNNY: It’s been fulfilling being able to write it and then listen back to it.  We are very proud of this album.

MIKE: From what I have heard so far, you should be.

JOHNNY: Thank you, thank you very much.

MIKE: As I listen to you guys, particularly a lot of the older stuff, I hear a lot of influence from The Used, My Chemical Romance.  Are those guys some of your original influences?

NICK: Definitely.  We all listen to different stuff, Johnnie likes to listen to Korn, Brad and I listen to Blink-182 up to the Used.  It changed as we went.  So it’s kind of cool to have different vision from everyone.

MIKE: I think I saw an interview where Brad said you were into Refused.

BRAD: I love Refused, so does Adam.  Adam’s way into them.  And Dan does too.

MIKE: I am ashamed to admit I just heard The Shape Of Punk To Come for the first time a couple of weeks ago.  Where the heck have I been?  It blew me away.

ADAM: It’s a phenomenal album.

MIKE: What are you guys listening to right now?  Anything new?

BRAD: The Plot In You.  The new The Plot In You is pretty awesome.

NICK: I’ve been listening to that too.

JOHNNY: Happiness In Self Destruction, is that the name of the album?  If that’s the name of the album, it’s really, really good.  Everyone is listening to the new Bring Me The Horizon album.

NICK: Our merch guy is listening to Machine Gun Kelly.

BRAD: Machine Gun Kelly’s new album is actually really good.

JOHNNY: We listen to a lot of different stuff on the road when you are trying to drive, then after a while it becomes all a blur.

NICK: I wake up and listen to the weirdest stuff.

JOHNNY: Stand up comedy some times.  Jim Jefferies.

NICK: You run out of stuff after a while.

JOHNNY: There are so many hours on the road, I listen to everything!

NICK: I’ll randomly just put the radio on for like four hours when I drive just for a change of pace since I’ve listened to every band I feel like.

MIKE: So it sounds like Utah is still your home?

JOHNNY: That’s our home.  Nick is from Utah but he comes back and forth from Chicago, he has a place there.

MIKE: Where abouts?

NICK: It’s about 15 minutes outside the city, it’s called Elmwood Park.

JOHNNY: There’s a lot of squirrels.

NICK: Squirrels, raccoons, skunks.

MIKE: We lived in Crystal Lake, further out, for about 6 years.

NICK: Cool.  I’ve been there about two years but I don’t know the area enough.

MIKE: So that’s where you guys started in the music scene.  What’s the music scene like and how was it coming out of there?

JOHNNY: There’s always been very talented bands in Utah.  Adam’s very involved.

ADAM: Currently it’s a lot different than it used to be.  We were all in local bands over the last 10 years or so.  It was really, really fun.  There was quite a few local all ages venues that smash 30 or 40 kids in a room and call it an epic show.  You were playing for your first crowds at the same time getting to know people that little do you know you’re going to be spending the next 5-6-7 years of your lives together.  The scene now there’s still a bunch of camaraderie, I guess it’s just typical to say it’s not the same as it was.  It’s thriving and everything and the local scene is doing good but it’s more of a mature scene that’s really involved in Salt Lake City.  They do a lot of 21+ shows that stand out above all ages shows as far as turn out, and the people that are really excited to see you, but all ages shows do really well, like our bigger local venues like In The Venue or The Depot or The Complex.  You get bigger bands coming through and thousands of kids will come out.

JOHNNY: And they are always loud and excited.  The fans in Utah are phenomenal.  They are the loudest crowds we get. It’s our home town, but other shows we go to there have very crazy fans.

BRAD: Some of our fans in Utah don’t even know we are from Utah.

NICK: We started out online and tried to get everyone else’s attention and figured that Utah would come with that, and we put a lot of work into everywhere else at first.

JOHNNY: Kind of did things backwards but it worked.

BRAD: We do really good at home.

NICK: That’s what I’m saying, we got that later on but not initially.

MIKE: Nick, I am going to put you on the spot.  My family are huge Disney fans.  And I understand you’ve got a little something Disney related.

NICK: I’ve got a couple of actually, but I know which one you are talking about.  It’s terrible! (Nick shows a Walt Disney tattoo on his back)

MIKE: So what’s the story behind it?

JOHNNY: That’s when I very first started learning to tattoo.

NICK: It was prison style.

MIKE: Oh, so you’re the artist?

JOHNNY: Apparently not back then!  I’m much better now, I promise.

NICK: He did this one.  (Nick shows a Mickey Mouse tattoo on his calf)

JOHNNY: Ya that one’s cool, a little old school Mickey Mouse.

NICK: I have a few.  I like children’s shows.

MIKE: But Mickey Mouse in particular, and Disney.

NICK: Ya, Disney in general, I love Disneyworld, Disneyland, and all of that.

JOHNNY: The imagery is always beautiful and the songs they come up with are the most creative things I’ve ever heard.

NICK: I love musicals, even though I am older I still watch all those movies.  Actually I just watched all of Nightmare Before Christmas and Anastasia today.

BRAD: Nightmare Before Christmas is Disney?  I didn’t even know that.

NICK: And I watched James And The Giant Peach yesterday.

BRAD: But Anastasia is not Disney.  I want to be sure you know your Disney.

MIKE: My daughter is dying, because she usually comes to shows with me but she is at The Wonder Years who are playing downtown tonight.  She actually worked down at Disney for a few months.

NICK: I want to work at Disney!

JOHNNY: What did she do?

MIKE: She worked in food service in the Magic Kingdom.

JOHNNY: That’s awesome though, to be in that environment.  To see all that stuff behind the scenes.

NICK: I thought about wanting to work there but it would ruin it.

MIKE: She’s a bigger fan now than she was before.

NICK: Sucked her in more.

JOHNNY: That’s awesome.

MIKE: She is even talking about doing that again after school.  So I guess the obligatory closing question would be what’s next?  The tour is wrapping up here in a couple of weeks.

JOHNNY: We’re going to go home, we have pretty much the winter off and we want to do some more music videos.  We want to try to get as much visual content out as we can for these songs, lyric videos or music videos we’re going to try to get as much of those as we can.  We are aiming to do some Mexico / South America dates we are working on but nothing has been confirmed.  That’s what we really want to do in February or January.  We want to make a map for all of next year.

MIKE: That’s a good time to go down there.

JOHNNY: Ya, that’s our main plan.  Escape the winter.  It’s too cold up here!  We’re looking for any kind of supporting acts we can do before Warped Tour because we are really shooting to get on that this year and it sounds pretty promising, but also we have to wait until it is all figured out.  That’s pretty much as far as we have gotten so far.  We’re trying to map things out accordingly but things are always changing.  That’s how this industry is.  We can be offered a crazy tour two weeks from now and ‘Oh!  Got to go!’  So everything could be up in the air until then.

MIKE: You mentioned South America, you haven’t gone outside of the US, have you?

NICK: We’ve done Mexico and Canada.

JOHNNY: We played Mexico City last year and it was phenomenal.

BRAD: It was crazy there.  They treated us like we were the Jonas Brothers.

JOHNNY: It was the most intense thing ever.  We’ve been to Canada a few times and it is awesome up there as well.  We’ve still yet to go overseas but that is also highly in the plans.  Especially with this album, I think we can go pretty far with it.

MIKE: Thanks!  That’s all I have, I appreciate your time and look forward to catching your set later tonight!

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Category: Interviews