Interview

Here is a recent interview I conducted with Vince Griffin (vocals) of Bear Colony. You can pick up their new album "We Came Here To Die" in stores now.

EP: What is your name/position in the band?
Vince: My name is Vince Griffin and I sing/play guitar/shake shakers, tambourines and beat on drums occasionally.

EP: How did Bear Colony get started?
Vince: It started from an idea to play music with everyone that I love and admire. I had a lot of songs from when I was in my room writing music when I was sick that I wanted everyone to play on. Once I had fleshed them out a bit on my laptop I came to everyone with the idea of a musical collective that held ties to nothing that we had done before. It seriously is a dream to play music with all these great people. I feel very fortunate.

EP: How did all the current members come together?
Vince: Through a series of e-mails I would send songs and have a recording project just for ourselves. The intention was never to release a record, it was more of an idea to have this collective that when we were feeling creative we would get together and record whatever we had written in our off time from the other duties in bands that we had. Before we knew it we had a handful of songs and lots of people who liked them.

EP: I read on your myspace page that you have a rotating group of members. Does the band still enact this policy and how does that work with touring?
Vince: Well, we are still working it all out. There are some people who can tour and some people who can't tour for various reasons. We know we have to go out and push the album but I think there are more than enough people playing that we can go tour with a certain set of people and still successfully pull off the sound of the album. We have always set up the collective to have people come and go as they can, it is not a typical band scenario where certain people do certain things always, it is more of us making up the rules as we go along.

EP: Your debut album We Came Here To Die was recently released; how did the songs for the album come about?
Vince: They came about from me being confined to my bedroom for a length of time while doctors were puzzled about what was causing me pain. Really, the only time I felt good was really late at night so after everyone was asleep I would get up and just put my headphones on and write these songs. In the really early demos I am almost whispering the lyrics as not to wake up my roommates or disturb anyone in the process.

EP: What do you find tends to come first in the writing process: lyrics or music?
Vince: I think more than anything with most of these songs guitar parts would come to me, or a beat and then I would just start overlaying all these textures until the song kind of took on a life of its own. I am not sure I am the best at writing lyrics so I have the tendency to just kind of hum a melody and sing nonsense until words start piecing themselves together and then I go back and make sense of it afterwards. I remember that is kind of how the song "Hospital Rooms Aren't For Lovers" came about. I had this guitar part and the beat and just layered and layered until it felt it had some movement and then I started with the chorus "vultures spinning around the room." So I supposed there is no "process" rather I just let things happen how they happen.

EP: What are some of your influences, musical or not, that may or may not show up in your music?
Vince: Lately I have become a bit obsessed more with electronic things, whether it is a drum machine or a recording program. I think since the onset of this project I have personally tried to embrace technology; becoming more familiar with it and try to make it more human. I think it is important to draw influences from everywhere and not just one central location like a particular band or something. It kind of broadens the things you can do with music in my opinion to open yourself up to be influenced by anything and everything.

EP: I also read that you had a stint in the hospital while being misdiagnosed with Crohns Disease. How did that influence the lyrics/sound of the album?
Vince: That influenced the album a great deal for me. I couldn't get a solid answer as to what was causing me pain or keeping me up at night and it was honestly a pretty scary deal. So I really wrote this album out of desperation. It was something I would do at night to force myself to focus on something else instead of how much pain I was in. I think during this whole time I was pretty much a recluse and didn't have very much interaction with most of my friends and at that point I had lost hope with music, I felt that I didn't really feel anything I was doing at the time so I kind of walked away from the former band I was in and said my goodbyes to music until all of the Crohns stuff started happening and these songs just started to come out. I don't really like telling people what to think with music or what ideas they should draw from what I am singing or what the music makes you feel but I know for me this whole experience was solely about hitting my fears dead on and trying to get rid of them; whether that is my fear of death or flight.

EP: The song "Holidays/No Feelings" seems a big departure sonically than the rest of the album's light sound. Was its dark sound intentional or was that simply a match up of vocals and sound that worked out well?
Vince: I am not sure anything we did like that was intentionally. I think each song on the album has something another song doesn't. The only intentional thing we did on the album was to try anything we had ever wanted to do while recording. I think "The Boy With Broken Arms" is a pretty dark song also. A lot of these songs are dark if you pay attention to the lyrics but they also have kind of a playfulness to them that in my eyes makes it easier to here different things.

EP: Yeah, I totally agree.

EP: What are the bands' plans for 2007?
Vince: To play music and just enjoy ourselves.

EP: Well, that is all I've got. Thank you for doing this interview; is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
Vince: Nope. I think we covered a lot of ground.