by Stefny! At the Disco
On the morning of October 21, I received confirmation that I would be granted the opportunity to interview the band Thrice before their show at Emo’s that night. After screaming to myself at work, I used my lunch break to come up with questions and mentally prepare for the chance to interview one of the best rock bands of all time.
When I got to the venue that night, I was able to hang out in the green room with Dustin Kensrue, lead singer and guitarist of the band.
I was curious because you guys have been together for 27 years, and your 12th album, Horizons West, just came out. How do you find new ways to keep evolving and growing as a group together?
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that all four of us are writing, in other words, so it’s not one person kind of stalling out at any given point.
Everyone is bringing a bunch of ideas to the table. Sometimes I’ll start to piece those together, and then we’ll jam them out and add new parts, but the harder thing for us, honestly, is just narrowing down what ideas to pursue, because there’s a lot. So, I think for any given record, we’re probably only, you know, using 10% of most of what everyone breaks in, so that’s the difficult part. But yeah, we’re all just, I think, big fans of music in general, all different kinds of music, and so yeah, it’s never feeling like we’re at the edge of losing inspiration, it’s just figuring out where we want to kind of point that at any given moment.
Are there any newer bands or artists that have come up that you find are really inspiring to you?
Yes. IDLES is a huge one for all of us; we love IDLES. Have you heard YHWH Nailgun? They’re someone we got into recently. I don’t know how old they are. I don’t think they’re super old. So, I don’t know how much that has influenced us yet, but it’s something that’s newer and exciting. Those are the ones that come to mind. I’m trying to think of stuff that actually is something that might have influenced something in a way that I can think of on the record.
But that’s the hard thing: we’re usually not writing something from a specific place; it’s just something comes out, and then something else gets combined with it, and it builds. And you might think at some point, “Oh, I’ll name this thing something to do with this band because it kind of reminds me of it,” but it’s never really coming from a direct influence. Yeah.
Do you still always feel just as jazzed to go out on stage as you always have?
Um, so the road is definitely a grind as much as it is fun. It is both.
But I think for us, I mean, this was a while ago, but probably like 2010 or maybe even earlier, we were on tour with mewithoutYou and Brand New. There was something in the way that they approached all of that that was, I think, reinvigorating for us and just reminding us that this is really unique, this is special. And especially just that it’s fun, like it has the potential to be really fun, like it should be fun. And, yeah, so it shifted our mindset, and I think from then on we always high five before we go on stage, like our whole crew and everyone high fives, and it’s just kind of a little reminder like, this is good, this is fun.
Yeah, so, generally, we’re all excited to play.
Do you think you’ll ever revisit any other albums besides just Artist in the Ambulance?
At this point, I don’t think so. I think there are just certain things that made sense about doing that record. I think the only thing I would even think about retouching would be Vheissu, and that’s probably only because I don’t like the way I sing on that record.
I don’t think anything after that I wouldn’t want to touch, and I wouldn’t want to touch Illusion. It’s just got its own thing happening. It would be weird to try to redo that.
Artist was a unique kind of situation.
After having 12 records, how do you narrow down a set list? How do you pick the tracks?
It’s very hard. I’ve used a program called Band Helper. If not for that, it would be really, really hard. So we’re dealing with, you know, I don’t know, maybe new songs from whoever we just released and then trying to get some deep cuts in there maybe, something that we really like that is off the beaten path or then trying to play songs that seem like kind of the hits that a lot of people want to hear and are familiar with and then we do tuning changes and trying to make it flow.
There’s no right way to do it. We’ll get feedback from our crew and stuff as it’s going and see how it’s going. But it’s always leaving something out for somebody.
Yeah. It’s hard.
Is there anything that you always feel like you have to have on the set list?
Not for me personally.
There are songs that we realize we really need to just keep on there because they’re important to a lot of people. It’s like, and I get it, I think it’s hard when it’s your band too.
I think we all know, when you go to see a certain band, there are songs you want to hear. And like, usually that’s because a lot of people that respond to that song just has a vibe or whatever. So we pretty much always play “Artist in the Ambulance” [and] “Black Honey.” They’re probably always on the list.
And now we came back to not fighting not playing “Deadbolt,” and just in general playing our show. And that’s fun too.
Do you remember anything about your first show as Thrice?
Yeah, I remember a lot about it. It was Band Aid, I guess it was like a food drive.
It’s just local bands from Irvine. It was at the community center, and yeah, we had, I don’t know why, but we had this foam microphone cover on all our microphones, blue and yellow. It’s just obnoxious-looking.
All of our guitars were running through metal zones, which is this metal guitar pedal. I had spiky bleached hair. There are pictures of it, so it’s kind of set in my brain. I think Riley was really sick. It just felt like Riley was out in the back of the stage. Yeah, it was wild.
We wrote all the songs in, I think, like two months or something, but we had like seven songs at that point. But yeah, it was just super exciting. I was probably just turned 18 or 17.
We were just going to shows all the time, and it was really exciting to do something ourselves and become a part of it.
Bringing it back to the current, is Horizons West meant to be a companion album to Horizons East, or was the title just kind of there?
No, it’s definitely a companion album.
It is more thematically, densely themed with the West stuff than East was, just because I had more time to play with the concept afterwards. We were basically recording Horizons, which was one record. Had a bunch of ideas, really liked those, wanted to make it a lot longer, so we were going to make two records with it, and kind of theme it that way.
We decided to push off West because we were just spent at the end of finishing East mentally, and figured it would be better later on. We were excited to do it, so we did the Artist stuff. Yeah, so there are tie-ins, there are little easter eggs of sounds that are present on both.
The biggest tie-in between them is the last songs, which are essentially the same concept and layout, but they’re executed with different instruments and different cues and moods.
Thanks so much Dustin for taking the time to chat with me before the show (and also signing the poster from that aforementioned Brand New tour). And huge shout-out to Lauryn Darci from Search & Destroy for being my show buddy and taking awesome photos from the pit!
