Intervista Trivium (Paolo Gregoletto)

Hi Paolo, how are you?
Very good, thank you.

You’ve started this year’s summer festival tours about a week ago, how is it going so far?
It’s been great, we’ve played Wacken, we’ve played Woodstock Poland, Vagos Open Air and each festival was bigger and bigger, you can’t really complain, it’s a great schedule.

As you are half-Italian I assume today’s show must be special to you…
Yeah, every time we play Italy I’m always happy to be in one of the country of my origins, I still have a lot of family here.
 

Anyone coming to see you tonight?
Not today, the live over near Venice and Treviso, so they couldn’t make it, but hopefully sometimes in the future we’ll play there again, it’s been a while.
But, yeah, it’s nice to be back!

Have you got any special routing when you come back here?
Eat a lot of food! [Laughs]

I guess the show will be special as well because you’re supporting Megadeth which, if I remember correctly, are one of the band’s main influences.
Definitely!

How does it feel to open for them?
We’ve played a lot of shows with them, but it’s always nice when you’re opening for a band that help, not only inspired you to play music, but really taught you how to play music, I mean it’s probably one of the archetypes of not only Thrash music, but kinda more Progressive, technical, and they’re incredible songwriters too, they really ran the gamut of playing really big Rock anthems to very technical stuff, in a way I feel like Trivium is a band born from that idea that you can be all of those things and one, you know, being technically proficient and also writing great songs, so it’s always good to be supporting them and to get to see them play.

A few days ago you released the new single “The Sin and the Sentence” and soon after you started playing it live; how are the fans reacting to it when they hear it live?
Surprisingly it’s been really great, every time you put out a new song, I always anticipate that, not that people don’t like a song, just that a lot of people don’t know the song, especially at a festival because, even if a lot of people hear it and cheer it online, it takes a while for a song to get around to people.
So the fact that it was so energetic ad so intense right away, just leads me to believe that the song has a sort of energy that translates to people that don’t know the song that well yet, so we’re really excited and happy that it’s sort of caught on with people so quickly and it’s getting better and better playing it live every night, so tonight should be even tighter.

The new album, still untitled, is coming out after 2 years since the previous one, “Silence in the Snow”; you’ve always been a very active band with the first 7 albums being released in just 12 years, do you ever struggle to write new music?
Not really, I think because we’re always sort of coming up with ideas in between tours when it’s downtime, so we always have enough music, it’s only really figuring out what we want the album to be, that’s kinda the toughest part of all this.
Writing riffs? Very easy, me, Matt and Corey all write, so it’s like, there’s always tons of material and it’s filtering out, the stuff is good but not good enough, and finding the great stuff and figuring out what the entire thing is gonna be, what it’s gonna stand for, what it’s gonna be in the back catalogue, and that’s always the tough part.

As you just mentioned that the tough part is choosing the direction of the album, I’ve just listened to some new songs and they seem to be generally quite heavy, I’d say more than the ones from the previous album. Is this the state of mind with which you approached the songwriting?
Yeah, I mean, the thing for us is like, I felt like we didn’t have to go into this thinking “It’s going to be heavy”, we just sort of reverted back into the default writing for Trivium, which is me, Matt and Corey all coming in with the music, unfiltered through any producer or anyone else, and then of course we brought Alex in and in November we started writing with him, so we kinda brought him in at the tail end of the demoing process and at the beginning of the pre-production.
So it was like Trivium just being Trivium, which is…we’re a heavy band, we like heavy music, all our influences are heavy and melodic.
So when we get in and we don’t have any other filters, like a producer, a label, anyone, this is where we go naturally, this is our north, where we phase, so it was…it felt good, it felt natural, it didn’t feel like we HAD to be heavy, it kinda came out that way and it was funny[5.18] how far we wanted to push it in that direction or the other direction, but when we got into the rehearsal room we are like a buffer and a filter for each other, like “Hey, is this a good riff?”, “Is this too heavy?”, “Is this part good?”, and that’s just how we went into this, and I feel we got some of our most natural sounding music, meaning, it doesn’t feel like we assembled it in a computer and just pieced it together, we played it, I mean, “The Sin and the Sentence” we’ve played it for about 6-7 months, so it feels like an old song even though it’s new.

How has the presence of Alex Bent, your new drummer, influenced the new album?
Yeah, I mean, we kinda had an idea of where we were gonna take the record, but adding Alex in the equation really changed how far we could push the music.
He’s such a phenom player, he has such an incredible feel and technique, he can play the slowest stuff tastefully, groove, play incredible fills, but also play blisteringly fast and he’s such an open mind to ideas, we could really throw some curve balls to him, “Hey, could you try something like this” and he would come in and he would be able to play it immediately and having a guy like that in the process it sped up how fast we could write and how much we could get done.
I think we kinda surprised the label with how far along we were with the record, you know, it takes time to write music, but we are always writing so we went into pre-production and were nailing a song a day; we split it in half, six songs in November, six songs right after our last European tour, right into the studio and that was it.

Can you tell me something more about the songwriting process?

Yeah, we all write a lot of stuff, there’s really no figurehead of how it’s gonna sound and feel, we kinda bounce the ideas off each other and we workshop the vision of the record.
I started this right after “Silence and the Snow”, some of the riffs and so some of the stuff people will hear was started a long time ago, some of it is newer, closer to the record process.
We don’t have clearly defined roles, like who can do what in the band, I mean, I wrote a lot of lyrics, a lot of vocal melodies, but again, it all gets worked in the rehearsals, everybody brings in the ideas and we try them and then if it works it works, if it doesn’t, if there’s a better option we try it; at that point the songs that someone brings in become Trivium, it becomes everyone’s song, and everyone puts their mark on it, which is what I prefer, because not having to worry about a drummers part is freeing for me, I can focus on the overall picture as opposed to getting into the details of what the drummer’s playing, going into a chorus I can be like, “Hey, try this, try that” and it comes out.
It was such a smooth process for us.

I said you wrote some lyrics, what are they about?
Well, “The Sin and the Sentence”, since it’s the only one that’s out right now, I kinda used the idea of which hunts and sort of mob justice as metaphor for how people interact one another online.
You know, it’s kind of a weird thing, but I think it’s inevitable now, especially with things like Twitter which I think allows mobs to kind of boil up; the thing is that you don’t realise that you’re a part of it, and the little bit that you do to maybe, I don’t know, say you attack someone that did something that you don’t like, that you don’t agree with, your small attack becomes part of a bigger attack.
The kind of idea behind is that just like, going back in time to a couple hundred year, with the witch hunts, or the inquisition…you might be part of the “in” group right now, but maybe you’re gonna be at the other end of it, maybe you’re gonna be the one called out and the one who is ruined, you know?
Thankfully we’re not putting people to death over ideas in our society, but you could really ruin people lives, and this was kinda the entire idea of the song, it’s not about a specific event, it’s about our society and about people nature to attack people who aren’t like them, and to think twice because you could be at the other end of that.

And what about the recording, how long did it take?
After pre-production we went out in L.A., our studio is in Anaheim, to record; tracking took about 15 days, it was the fastest we’ve ever tracked, but I mean, totally we were in Anaheim for about a month.
It was fast, we were just very prepared, we knew what we wanted to do, we knew how to execute it, there wasn’t a lot of changes in the studio because we did so much work in pre-production, we did all the nitty-gritty there which was preferable than getting in the studio and be like, “Wow, which way do we go?”, we just knew what we wanted and we executed it.

The opener from your last album, Snofall, was written by Ihsahn, a musician which not many would have associated to Trivium. Have you got any particular collaboration on the new album as well?
No, it’s just all us, all Trivium.

In this age and time when nothing is secret anymore, everything goes right away to the social networks, it’s quite peculiar to keep the details of the new album hidden, even after the release of a first single. Why this choice?
It’s so we can control how it comes out, we can do it in our own time at the pace we want.
I think because people are used to get everything they want right away, by staggering it a little bit and by holding back some we can retain a little bit of the mystique around recording a record.
You’ll never get the same thing we had maybe decades ago with the mystique around the band, but we can control the music side of it, what people hear and how people hear and what they see, so we’re just having fun with it and trying to make sure we reach everyone and get to everyone, get to their ears and eyes before the record comes out.