10 Quick Ones with ROBERT COSGROVE of SLEEP SIGNALS – September 2017

According to a recent press release: “Minneapolis, MN-based rockers Sleep Signals have announced their album, At the End of the World, produced by Justin Rimer (Saving Abel, 12 Stones) will release on September 8, 2017 to all digital outlets. The band, who wanted to do something special with this record, has set up a pre-order through Pledge Music where all (100%) proceeds from pre-orders through this campaign will be donated to Keep A Breast Foundation!” We get Robert to answer our 10 Quick Ones about new music, his influences, and more…

1. Tell us a little about your latest release.  What might a fan or listener not grab the first or second time they listen through?  Are there any hidden nuggets the band put in the material or that only diehard fans might find?

We went back down to Cross Trax Studios in Memphis with producer Justin Rimer (Saving Abel, 12 Stones) to record the new album. Justin killed it with our last single, “I’ll Save You”, so we were really excited to get back into the studio to work with him again for the rest of the record. We came into the studio with about 40 different song ideas and narrowed it down to the 6 that made it onto the record. We also had a couple of really cool features on the album from Josh Brown (Full Devil Jacket / Day of Fire) and Marty McCoy (Bobaflex) that I think added a lot to a couple of the tracks. I think listeners will surprised, we experimented a little bit with this record adding in more synth and strings, so there is a little more depth and layering than our previous two releases. We do have a little hidden “easter egg” in the first track, but we can’t say what it is!

2. What got you into music, and can you tell us about the moment you realized you wanted to be a musician?

I think most of us got into music at pretty early ages. We all came from pretty musical families. I have been involved with music since I was a little kid and started doing musicals when I was about seven. I started messing around with guitars when I was around 12 after discovering bands like Metallica and Pantera. I always loved music growing up, but I don’t think I really started getting the urge to want to be a musician until I started learning guitar. Once that happened, I had a pretty one-track mind and, with the exception of about a four year period where I stepped away from music to go back to college and everything, I’ve been heavily involved with music over the past almost 20 years.

3. Who would be your main five musical influences?

Personally, I’m very heavily influenced by a wide variety of music. Early 2000’s metalcore and hardcore has always had a really big favorite of mine. I loved the Orange County stuff that came out around that time, i.e. Bleeding Through, Eighteen Visions, older Atreyu, older Avenged Sevenfold, etc. Some other huge influences of mine are A Wilhelm Scream, older In Flames, Thrice, Poison the Well, and Brand New. You can hear a lot of it in our guitars and vocals.

4. If you could call in any one collaborator to do a song with, who would it be?

This is a tough one. There are so many talented musicians that we’ve shared the stage with over the past few years and we’d love to collaborate with a lot of them. I’d love to work with any of the influences I just listed, I don’t think I could ever narrow it down to just one.

5. How would you describe your music to someone who’d never listened to you before?

We are high-energy rock ‘n’ roll with some metalcore/hardcore influence. We tend to get a lot of comparisons to bands like Rise Against and Avenged Sevenfold from people hearing us for the first time.

6. What’s the best thing about being a musician?

For me, the best part of being a musician is the ability to share our art with our friends, family, and fans. Touring is amazing because it allows us to do that on a nightly basis as we travel to a new city every night. We have been fortunate enough to make great friends all over the country who we get to see every time we come back to their city. Getting to live that every day is my favorite part of being a musician.

7. When the band are all hanging out together, who cooks; who gets the drinks in; and who is first to crack out the acoustic guitars for a singalong?

I feel like Jamie would be the cook because he does it professionally. Joe definitely gets the drinks in, but none of us our really heavy drinkers. Tyler cracks out the acoustic guitar jamming covers.

8. If you weren’t a musician, what would be your dream job?

This is a tough question because each one of us have made several sacrifices and invested so much time, energy, and money in order for us to live our dream as touring musicians, that the thought of having another dream seems weird now. But if we had to choose another dream job, I could see us being a really awesome bobsled team.   “Team work makes the dream work”

9. Looking back over your career, is there a single moment or situation you feel was a misstep or you would like to have a “do over”?

Well if all of us would have taken ourselves more seriously as artists and musicians at an earlier age and actually put the hard work and dedication that we put in now, we would be even further in our music career now. If you don’t invest in yourself or your art, what makes you think a label or management will invest in you? That was a tough pill for us to swallow, so we all started putting in a ton of work and energy to make sure we constantly progress as artists and people.

10. If you could magically go back in time and be a part of the recording sessions for any one record in history, which would you choose – and what does that record mean to you?

There is no way we could ever pinpoint just one. We have such a wide variety of influences, it’d be really difficult to pick one over the others. A quick run around the room gave us the following albums though: Thrice – Artist In the Ambulance, Blink-182 – Self-Titled, A Wilhelm Scream – Career Suicide, Avenged Sevenfold – Waking the Fallen, and Linkin Park – Meteora.

SLEEP SIGNALS LINKS:

OFFICIAL SITE

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

Category: Interviews