Walking Corpse Syndrome Interview

[Check this out, back in May, my assistant Bonnie interviewed Matthew Bile of Walking Corpse Syndrome. Enjoy.]

I moved to Missoula in 2009, I am a musician who started jamming with your local 406 DJ, AJ and have been ever since. Over the years in Missoula I have had the pleasure of meeting many of you other musicians at shows, hanging out at parties, watching Metalocalypse together, spilling beer on you, nearly getting my head cut off diving for the beer pong ball under the garage door….etc. I have always dreamed of being a Metal Journalist, and while in today’s industry that may not be a viable career for everyone, it is my heart and soul to write as a hobby. Ryan Bartek, a journalist and author from Detroit, in part was my inspiration to resurrect this dream after he traveled around the U.S. on his own dime interviewing bands and sleeping in gutters. (We actually had a brief adventure involving raccoons at one point but that is another story for another day) AJ has also inspired me to reach for my dreams, however many or however impossible they may seem. So after I put out a general request for interviews, Matthew Bile of Walking Corpse Syndrome generously offered to be my very first victim.

This made me leap for Joy, as this band has been one of my all time favorite Montana bands and has quickly joined the ranks of my other favorite signed metal bands. They have been around for many years, have played many shows, and earlier this year reached a huge milestone of having 10,000 likes on Facebook. That’s when I realized they were going to make it big, that they were among the Titans of metal. Then not long after, they released a music video, Angel Flesh that was featured on Revolver Magazine's website. You can imagine how ecstatic I was to have the honor of doing my first interview with a band rising to such greatness. Since then I have been chipping away at transcribing, living life, etc. Meanwhile, they gave a pre-view of the album to Metalsucks.net who gave them an honorable review, basically fanboying and giving them the honor kudos, top 50 metal album of 2015 etc.
THEN their album Human Delusion came out last weekend, making number ONE on Amazons Death Metal charts on its very first day. On September 29th, The Grim Tower said: "In no uncertain terms, I say to you that we might be looking at the next Slipknot here and they come without masks." (source:
http://thegrimtower.com/grim-observations-walking-corpse-syndrome-human-delusion-2015/) So, you can imagine how much excitement has been pumping through my veins this week as I have been putting the finishing touches on this. I just cannot express to you how awesome every single member has been, as people, as musicians, as almost big brothers. They are very kind, generous, and supportive to all of their fans which is huge today. They are pumped to play their shows, they are energetic as fuck, they will melt your face each and every time you see them. So I wrote down all of these burning questions that I really wanted to know about, hoping it was on some of your minds too. We spent two hours, and I would spend another two hours with every other band member as well if given the chance. So, here goes:

    “When and how did Walking Corpse Syndrome get started?”
    “So, Walking Corpse Syndrome rose from the ashes of another band. The band was called Prokaryon - we basically just played locally, maybe like went out, played like Great Falls or Kalispell a few times, Bozeman a couple times. Nocktis the drummer of Walking Corpse Syndrome and I were two of the members of that band, so when we lost our guitarist and our bassist, we basically lost half the band. I was the vocalist. We tried to audition for guitarists, couldn’t really find anybody that really clicked with us so I started playing guitar, and trying to sing at the same time. My voice is horrible, so after a while, we realized that the songs were just going in a completely new direction. We weren’t going to be playing any of the old songs anyway. So [it was December of 2006] we just said, ‘Look, we’re just going to say it’s a new band. At the beginning, we were saying we’re gonna do this come hell or high water, whether or not we could find other members. So it was gonna be a 2 piece if it had to be, but fortunately we found Greg right after that. Greg is Nocktis’ brother. He just got out of the army and he’d come and hang out with us while we were jamming. He plays drums too, so one practice we were just like ‘Dude, you should bring your drum set over!’ And he was like ‘Oh, that doesn’t make any sense having two drums and one guitar’ and we were like ‘No, dude, just do it. Don't worry about what anybody thinks or says. Just bring your drum set over.’ So for a while, for about a month we were just jamming, two drum sets and one guitar, and I would like scream some vocals every now and then. And then, like, all of a sudden we got a bassist…we got different vocalists who didn’t last very long. We played three shows and I sang two of those shows and then we took a little bit of a break, found a different vocalist, and we got a keyboard player, and that was the lineup that people around Missoula knew for a long time. But finally, I would say it was about 2012, we got Leif as the vocalist, and he’s been our vocalist since then. We put out Alive in Desolation and we’re about ready to put out a new album with him on vocals too."
    “Nice! …and Leif was from Mageddon too, so he already had experience.”
    “Yeah! We played shows with his old band, Mageddon. We really liked him, I mean he was a phenomenal front person. He’s got a great stage presence. He uh, you know he can spit out words like faster than most rappers, and he does it in a growling voice. He’s like a growl rapper. He hates it when we call him that; ‘the growl rapper’, but it’s true. He’s just a phenomenal vocalist. So Mageddon ended up breaking up around the time that we were looking for a new vocalist, and he changed the direction of the band. We started out as sort of a Goth/Metal band, or what we call ‘Dark Metal.’ We had a violin. We had a lot of slow stuff and he just came in and during his first audition, he just exploded! You know, we had this song we were working on that became Minion, and it was a so-so song. It was a song we were sort of jamming on. We were like, ‘ok let’s see what you can do‘, and he was just like; [imitating Leif] ‘Bha-bah-de-bah-bah, bah-bah-de-bah-bah’ and we were just like; ‘Woah, what the hell?!‘ so like after that we couldn’t play that song without him. We were auditioning a few other people at the same time on vocals. We were auditioning this one chick and she was more of a singer, you know, so sometimes people ask us; ‘Why didn’t you get a singer, why don’t you sing?’… it’s like we had a chance to get a singer, but we chose to go with Leif because that’s the sound we are going for, is that extreme metal sound [punches his hand] , just like pure energy - you know just the throat punching, boot stomping stuff that makes you wanna fight, and, you know, hit boxes of puppies with hammers. I guess, I dunno…"

    “I believe there was some controversy (or my own confusion) a little bit ago about what genre you guys are, like some people called it ‘Satanic (Black) Metal, some people maybe called it ‘Groove Metal’. In the past I remember you did call it ‘Goth Metal‘, and now on your Facebook it says ‘Dark Metal’. Thoughts about this?”
    “Yeah, you know genre names like that, just calling something - that’s something that marketers are worried about, you know? Like when we get in to write music, we don’t say ‘Ok guys, we need a Groove Metal song’ or ‘We need a Death Metal, or Melodic Death Metal, or Atmospheric Death Metal’ we just go there into the practice space, and we try to write the best songs we can - the songs that really resonate with us. Like… it’s sort of interesting. I haven’t heard any rumors that we’re a Satanic Metal band at all. Though back in the day, when we had our old singer, he wrote songs that were more Pagan oriented, you know? So maybe it came from that. Maybe people didn’t like it - I just haven’t heard anything or seen anything. But, you know there’s that saying:           ‘Whatever you say I am, that’s what I am.' How am I going to change people’s opinions, you know? Am I like going to sit down with everybody one on one and be like ‘No, this is me, this is my actual belief system, this is…’ you know? But Leif writes his lyrics to be ambiguous, so you can look at it different ways and get different interpretations. So it’s sort of revealing that if someone thinks we’re a sort of Satanic Death Metal band, that they’re actually looking at the world through Satanic colored glasses, you know what I’m saying? You know Leif is just one of the most happy-go-lucky, free spirits that I’ve met, he’s like a total Dude. He’s just, you know, he hangs out with all sorts of different people, different backgrounds; Metal, EDM, Ravers, like whatever. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about who you are, what you listen to, or whatever, he just wants to know if you’re chill to hang out with. So he does write his lyrics from a darker place, but we’re all in a metal band because we have that darker place inside of us. So whenever someone tries to pigeon hole us into a certain genre like Death Metal, or ‘You guys aren’t brutal enough, you’re not metal enough’…I’m like ‘Well thanks’, you know? Like if you listen to some of our songs, they’re not ‘Metal’ at all. Like we got Rock influences, Punk influences, Hardcore, um, if you listen closely, on one of our old songs we’re ripping off the theme to Inspector Gadget, you know? Like I listen to hip-hop a lot, so there are a lot of Hip-Hop Influence.
      So it’s interesting to hear people be upset with us because we’re not a pure Death Metal Band, when that was never our goal. Our goal was to be more like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones and just get in there and write something that like really spoke to us and spoke to people."

 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“Somebody told me that the key to success is to surround yourself with people that are better than you. “
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    “So there’s a couple new members in the band in the last year, has that changed anything, and how are they fitting in?”
    “It’s one of the controversies in music, especially in, like, rock music, to change members. If you’ve read Metal Sucks today - Axl was complaining about bands switching members, i.e. ‘How many members do you have to switch before you just call it a different band?’. There’s only three original members in Walking Corpse Syndrome, there’s me and the two drummers. And, coincidentally, those are the first three members. But since then every position has changed multiple times. It’s something that’s near and dear to me because one of the concepts in music, is that you have a core group of people and your fans - your audience - builds relationships with those people, you know? So it’s sort of like breaking up the family, it’s sort of like Mom and Dad getting a divorce when people leave the band or you have to kick people out. But we’ve always wanted to have a tight band. We’ve always wanted to have people on the same page. Our goal has always been to become a band that can tour full time. From day one, we realized that we had to set that expectation that we were going to be a band that tours. So sometimes we’ve lost members because they didn’t have an open enough schedule to go out and tour or even practice. It’s like…if you can’t show up to practices for a month, how do we know you’re ready to play a show, so…sorry good luck, but this isn’t the band that’s for you, you know? Other times, you know, people have been in the band, and they just haven’t been able to perform at that high level. You know, so they may have had a strong audition, they may have had a good body of work coming into the band, but then they just keep making a lot of mistakes, you know?
So as far as the new members go, the newest members, we have Steve on Bass, and we have Tana on Guitar… and our practices and our shows are the tightest they’ve ever been. It’s been a good energy and I don’t want to knock anything that the previous members have done because like, every iteration has been a positive step forward, you know… and I’ve really appreciated the time and work… money and everything that every previous member has put forward to the band. But you know like when people bow out, because, you know they realize that it’s not for them, touring is not for them or being in a metal band’s not for them. When we put out that call to audition, we sit down and we say; ‘hey, what are we looking for?’ And we realize as a band, as a core band, we’re never going to settle. We’re never just gonna like grab a new member because they look the part, or have good connections. At the core of it, they’ve gotta be able to play. So Stephen for example, who wasn’t even there for the songwriting part of the new album, went into the studio and had the least number of retakes. His right hand is just a metronome. It just like, keeps chuggin’ along and he can just lock into that groove better than anybody I’ve seen. He comes from a Punk background, so he’s not even necessarily a Metal head, but he enjoys playing the music that we have. Then Tana... Tana’s like, been playing for like 20 some years, like 30 years, like, I think she said it was like 28 years…She’s a better guitarist than I am. Somebody told me that the key to success is to surround yourself with people that are better than you. So like with Steve & Tana I feel like we’ve done that. They’re phenomenal musicians and they bring a great work ethic to the band, they bring a lot of positivity to the band…Steve last tour, like, he would jump in, help out, he took over merch… you know started doing all that stuff. There’s a couple shows where we showed up, like, a little late because of a cattle drive, or because of snow or something… and so like everybody gets out, unloads the trailer, sets up their gear, plays a show and then we get to about like, one or two in the morning and we realize we haven’t eaten dinner that night, you know …and I’ve played in bands with people, that if they don’t get their beer, or they don’t get their food, they turn into divas, you know. It’s like that Snickers commercial. So it’s really refreshing to have people be professional and know what the stakes are… that we have to put on the best show possible every single time. Otherwise it’s not fair to the people who got babysitters and are spending their hard earned money for a night of entertainment, you know? They don’t give a shit about what’s happening in our life, they just wanna come and have fun. Ultimately at the end of the day, we’re doing this, we’re playing music because we wanna have fun, too."
    “We’ve been over the literal meaning of the band's name via Facebook, I’m interested, however, in what you think it means to be a “Corpse Walker”.
    “(Ok, so talk about being a Corpse Walker -go: ) So being a Corpse Walker… when we chose the name ‘Walking Corpse Syndrome‘, we actually had a list of about 130 possible names. We went down the list…tried to find something that provides like, sort of a muse or a philosophical foundation for what direction we wanted our project to go. Hence, ‘Walking Corpse Syndrome’ - I love it when our fans like first realize that it’s an actual disease. They always write to me on Facebook: ‘Matt! Did you realize that Walking Corpse Syndrome is an actual disease?!’ …and I’m like, 9 years into this project and I want to be like: ‘No! I never realized, that in all my Google searches on my name, that Cotards Syndrome is an actual disease!’ It’s a disease where people believe that they are missing limbs…or that they are dead. That’s the essence, they don’t have a soul, or they’re dead, but - yet they still happen to be walking around. It has something like a 100% fatality rate because people will go out of their way to prove that they are, in fact, dead, that they cannot die. So they’ll throw themselves off buildings, they’ll shoot themselves, they’ll kill themselves, basically. Even though they’re not technically depressed, they’ll end up killing themselves. So I thought - you know, wow that’s a very interesting concept… a concept of people going through life believing that they’re dead I mean like, I’m sort of like Leif. I always hope that people can find their own meaning out of this, but the meaning that I find is this: how many times have you limited yourself from achieving greatness or your full potential, because 'it’ll hurt too much’ or ‘I’ll fail’ or ‘I Won’t Succeed’? In essence, rather than living life, or breaking all the boundaries that limit you, you’re keeping yourself in a tight little bubble. And if that’s not a version of death, I don’t know what is. You know, a refusal to grow, a forced stagnation. A Corpse Walker is somebody who challenges that idea of self-limitation, that you can never grow, that you have to stay the same person, that you can’t go up and achieve your full potential, you know… And it hurts when you push beyond your limits, because there are always going to be people out there who feel it’s their responsibility to tear you down, to keep you the same, to remain one of the Dead.”

    “How do you feel about bullying - have you ever had to stand up for yourself? Can you think of a good example ?”
    “I think everybody’s been bullied, right? That’s an interesting question…I might be going off the written track, the warm and stable path, you know that Bullies are bad: I don’t necessarily think bullies are 100% bad, 100% of the time. I was bullied, you know? I was bullied relentlessly when I was younger. I mean my brother bullied me, but it’s because he got bullied, and he felt that it was his job as my older brother to teach me how to be strong. So he used to just pick on me - and I was a fairly peaceful person, you know? Little 4 year old Matthew Bile… but he got bullied pretty bad, and he felt; “I gotta make sure my little brother doesn’t have to go through what I went through.” So it’s sort of one of those - like he became the monster, and then passed it on to me and then I passed it on to someone else you know- but it does have a sense…do you read Chuck Palahniuk at all? Fight Club, Lulliby…”
    “Yeah I read that.”
    “He wrote this book , I believe it was called “Ghost”, and in it he talks about this concept of the world being a rock tumbler. You get thrown into the world and it just tumbles you around. When you go into the rock tumbler you’re just this big unformed, dull, raw rock, and the more you get tumbled around, the more it grinds away the unnecessary parts. It polishes you up and it just keeps grinding you, making you smaller, more pure, more valuable, more shiny and just more beautiful. In a sense, bullies bullying us are like the rock tumbler. You’re going to encounter people who want to put you down. But if you read any kind of mythology stories, any kind of hero journey, the hero has to go against challenges. The hero has to go up against tests… so like, can you imagine how boring life would be if you never had to overcome anything? You would never learn lessons about yourself, you would never learn what your new boundaries are, you know? Sometimes the only way you can find that new potential is by being pushed to the very limit, thinking that you’re gonna fail, and then just getting up and finishing anyway - and then get through it - and you look back and you say “wow, I did it, wow it actually wasn’t that hard.” you know?
    I worked at a job…at a call center, where people called me over and over again…and people were abusive on the phone, and I had just got done graduating from college with an English degree, and I’m sitting there working for like $6.50 an hour or something like that, you know, and these people are just kept calling me up and being absolutely abusive and I absolutely could not be abusive back - and what it taught me after years of working there, is that like, people will try to attack you, they’ll try to grind you down; but ultimately your value, your self worth is not determined by other people. It’s determined by what value you assign to yourself. So as far as, going back to your question, bullies, do they suck? Yeah, it sucks going through being bullied. It always does. But when you have a choice between being bullied or standing up for yourself and becoming stronger…you know…always do the latter. Always stand up for yourself, even if they’re gonna destroy you, you know? You know sometimes you might have to cower down and let them walk away so you can train Rocky montage style, you know [sings theme from Rocky] da da da da da da da, get stronger and then come back, you’re gonna be stronger for it. But the worst thing you can do is say is ‘I give up.’ You know, even when you lose the battle you don’t lose the war. You should always be looking at the war, ‘How can I win this war?’…does that make sense?”
“Oh yeah, Totally.”
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“…it is important to build up those good habits of standing up for yourself and determining your own value, and not letting other people determine your value for you. That’s the difference between being a victim or a victor. “
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    “So do you have a theme for the upcoming album? Can we expect more songs like 'Angel Flesh', the new single?”
    “Oh yeah, the album’s definitely in the vein of angel flesh, it’s the darkest album we’ve written lyrically. Leif went to some reaallly dark places for this album. I mean to his credit there’s only like two songs that, like, have cursing on them, that have actual swear words. Like as ironic as that is, playing Extreme Metal, we’ve never been a band that’s resorted to like using swear words. We all cuss like sailors in our spare time, but like, we try to be a little bit more verbose on stage (at least Leif does). Leif writes the lyrics, throws it away, writes again, spends all this time on it, then he brings it in. By that time we’re doing pre-production, um, we’re running up against deadlines, and then he comes and he meets me. I’m like the producer person that helps do pre-production, and if there’s one thing I like, I like hooks. So this album has a lot of hooks. Like think Angel Flesh, the bendy parts; [makes guitar noise] mow mwow mow - so that’s a theme, like the string bands like that sort of southern… just real like syrupy parts. So I like hooks, most of the band likes hooks, Leif comes from a Tech-Death Background, think Pig Destroyer, bands like that, so he hates having choruses, and he hates having repetition. So I’ve told him, ‘Like Dude, whatever you want for the verses, you can go as crazy as you want, but I need a hook for the choruses.’ So there’s some songs where like we went back through and re-tooled it, and of course it came out. But as far as like, music-wise, genre-wise, it’s a lot heavier. You know for better or for worse, there’s a lot more deathcore influence on this, a lot of core influence. I always have these imaginary haters in my head, like ‘Oh you guys are like core now’ you know?
    But the thing is, is, I love music, I love, love music, and I love energetic music, and I’ll listen to anything if it’s energetic, you know like, from the hip hop to dubstep to dark drum & bass to any of the core stuff: metal core, hardcore, post hardcore. But I come from a punk background. I was born in 1981 so I was 12 years old in 1993. Nirvana was on the air and so was Salt N Peppa. So I’m watching MTV and it’s all [sings] ‘Shoop, shoop a doop, shoop a doop a doop a doop’ and then it switches over to like; [singing] “Hey, wait, I got a new complaint.” So, you’ve got this dichotomy of grunge with early 90’s hip hop, and my balls are just beginning to drop and this is before the internet was real big, before it was a thing. So you were allowed to sort of like what you liked. And when you’re like a freaky kid like I was (and I had some friends but not a lot of friends, and I didn’t hang out with those friends that much) I’d hang out in my basement and watch MTV for hours at a time, you know, and like none of my friends liked heavy music and none of them really liked hip hop either… I don’t even know if they liked music to this day.
    So when we write music we don’t go into it saying like ‘We need to make a deathcore album, or we need to make a death metal album.’ Like honestly I talked to a lot of bands, and a lot of bands do this too. They just go in and they just wanna write what they wanna write, they just wanna play what they wanna play. So we do have breakdowns on this album, like the middle of Angel Flesh, where you hear it and it’s just like [making guitar sound] ‘Cha-nuh cha-nuh cha-nuh’ and like the thought was; ‘How long can we take this? Can we just stretch this out and see if we can increase that tension?’ We’re all about that tension, bringing the tension out, making it more tense and then snapping it out of place and then giving it the gratification of a chord change, or slipping into like a nice groovy riff. So there’s some songs like our next single called Apocalypse. It starts out in 7/4 time, you know, and it’s just this weird off-kilter riff and if you know your music, you know that like March of the Pigs was 7/4, you know? So when March of the Pigs by Nine Inch Nails starts up and it almost seems to just be like tripping on itself, that’s that 7/4 time, that beat that doesn’t resolve. Then when the chorus kicks in, it’s 4/4, and it feels so good, and it feels warm and fuzzy and then it slips back into 7/4 and it feels like your tripping on yourself. So like that’s one of those things, we like to take stuff that sounds familiar and give it a twist, you know just a little bit. But there’s some straight up rock n’ roll parts. I call the chorus for Apocalypse our Back Street Boys chorus - it’s just so, syrupy, but it is what it is, and it’s what worked for that song for that part. And then we go into a breakdown and then there’s string bends and it’s just nasty. This is the first album where I’ve been able to write on my guitar in my drop G., I play on a baritone guitar, and I drop to G, below the E. So most bands think they’re all cool playing drop C, or drop A, I play drop G, and that’s rad.”
    “Wow, I thought it was drop D for some reason.”
    “Oh a lot of the stuff is drop D, like when you were learning Individualist, that’s drop D, but I was limited, I’ve been playing this Baritone for a long time, but the other guitarist, Kromdar, and whatever bassist we had, they always had 4 string bass, regular tuned, you know guitar…and you know nobody was ever willing to like follow me down to the G, but now Stephen, he’s got a 5 string bass, he’s followed me down, and Tana just bought a 7 string guitar, and she says she’s gonna drop that bitch down, and it’s gonna be sooo nasty. It’s so Nasty! Especially when you get the right tension strings on it, it’s gonna be great.”
    “Dope…Dope! I should have made note of what key you’re in earlier.”
    “Most of the songs are in drop D, some of the songs are in D flat, some of them are in G, you know. We do switch the keys around a little bit you know. So like a song like Forsaken is actually in the key of D flat. You know if you listen to it. Which is hard when you’re playing drop D tuning and you don’t re-tune for songs.”
    “Awesome! I’d like to know a little bit more about Angel Flesh. I have a quote here ; ‘Oppression is not protection, show me the real hypocrite.’ I realize now that Leif writes the lyrics, I wasn’t 100% sure, but if you know anything about the song, what could you tell me about it?”
    “I’ll just tell you, like Leif went through a really bad divorce, as he was writing this album, so about half of the time it’s about the breaking of trust. The other part of it goes back to what I was saying about people trying to impose their values on you. That's what Leif likes to write about too; it’s just like ‘hey, find your own way.’ We’re like Fleetwood Mac, right ‘Find your own way’ whatever, but yeah ‘Oppression isn’t protection, show me the real hypocrite’ it’s about like somebody in your life saying you need to live by these values, you know, and what we talk about, is that you’re the only person that can define yourself. You know? You’re the only person that can define your relationships and you’re the only person that can define your own value. You know and people will try to define those three things for you all the time. Especially like, for us being Metal heads or Goths or whatever, you know, for whatever reason our brains are wired just a little bit differently. We don’t fit in that system and then we’ve always got Mom or Dad or Aunt or Uncle or Grandpa who says ‘Oh this is just a phase you’re going through. Someday you’re going to settle down, you’re going to find a real job, you’re going to start climbing the corporate ladder, you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do that’ and that’s a form of oppression you know. But it’s not like the Nazi’s funneling the Jews to death camps kind of oppression, but it is important to build up those good habits of standing up for yourself and determining your own value and not letting other people determine your value for you. That’s the difference between being a victim or a victor.”
    “Angel Flesh was a pretty good Video, got featured on Revolver Magazine’s website, which is awesome, so what can you tell me about the making of that video?”
    “We went with a Missoula guy named Patrick Kirkley, he graduated from the Media Arts program here, and he reached out to us. He’s a drummer from a local band here called Cain & Fable, and he actually works with my wife. He passed along some videos… we get hit up from time to time by people wanting to work with us, we look at their portfolio and most of the time we never work with them, you know? But he had some stuff that was really cool, so we met with him, we talked about what we’re looking for out of a video and what he’s looking for, to do in a video, what we could do for collaboration. He said you know I’ve got this idea for a really cool stop motion animation, so like, he did some tests for us, you know screen tests. We approved it and at the time we didn’t really have the time to get everybody involved, and like for this video we didn’t want to get everybody involved. So you only see Leif in the band, and then there’s another local Missoula chick there, her name’s Katie…so it’s stop motion and they recorded it in Patrick’s basement… and I wasn’t there for it but I got to hear the summary of it which is that Leifs’ knees really hurt at the end of it. It’s a really time intensive arduous process to move just a little bit, move just a little bit, move just a little bit, picture, picture, picture. So they got done, they did like two days of shooting for like four or five hours a day and Patrick put together a first draft… and was almost there, the middle drags a little bit. So they went back in, and they shot more footage and that’s where you get the TV and all the crazy stuff. Ultimately it’s super low budget and I think Patrick had an assistant too, I forget his name, but yeah it was all Missoula made, Missoula home grown, Missoula shot, Missoula featured, and it débuted on Revolver magazines website which…it’s pretty cool. We got a lot of traffic from it, we got a lot of new fans from it, it was cool to show the world what Missoula, Montana could do, like we’re not just a bunch of redneck hillbillies (well, I mean we are…).”
    “…not every single one of us. Ha. What can you tell me about the technology aspect of being a musician in 2015?”
    “I sort of started learning about music and how to be in a band back in the 90’s, right, but I wasn’t in my first real band until 2001. 1999 I wanna say is when Google came out, Youtube came out in 2005, and I think that’s about the time Facebook came out. Myspace came out in like 2002 or something, I remember the first time I heard about Myspace, it was my other band - Prokaryon - it was our first show. We played a show in Livingston for our first show. We got paid $12.00 to drive three vehicles to Livingston, it’s just, you make so many stupid choices…but you sort of have to make the stupid choices so you know not to make the stupid choices. So we went to Livingston and there’s this band called Bomberman Awesome, they were from Livingston or Bozeman or one of those towns, and they were like one of the big bands in the state and they said ‘You can find us on PureVolume, MP3.com and Myspace, and that was the first time I heard about Myspace. Over the next few years it was very interesting because to book shows before then you really had to network. You had to like go digging, and it was a lot easier than it was for the bands that came before us, you know? For Myspace I remember doing research before I even got a viable band…like going and finding these pages. There was this page in Montana called MTpunk.com, but they welcomed the metalheads too. So it was just sort of a central hub where all the alternative/extreme musicians could go hang out and network, and they had forum boards and stuff…and then they had links to other forum boards from other scenes.
    So there was an Idaho one, and you would go down this trail and research, and try to find the people who were putting on shows in their own towns. So I was building up a list of places to hit up and go and talk. By the time Prokaryon actually became a viable band, I actually had a good band, and good music, Myspace was big. Myspace was just as easy as setting your search results to a specific town, finding the biggest band there and just direct messaging them and being like ‘Yo! We’re a band from blah-blah-blah’ and they could listen to your music right there. You know there’s no more sending out CD’s, no more snail mail, and you could do that. So when people talk about how the internet changed things and how it leveled things out, it truly was because no longer did you need a booking agent and their black book of contacts. You could find these people yourself and you could book shows yourself. In fact, that’s what we do now, like the devastation tour is a tour I booked for the band, you know? So I am a booking agent as well as a band manager, and a guitar player, and the social media manager. So if anything, like it’s become easier to move up, there’s still restrictions to access, like not everybody gets to be on Pandora, you have to have a good product and you have to submit it to Pandora and they review it and then they decide whether or not you get to be on Pandora. Not everybody gets to be on Revolver, not everybody gets to be on certain places but you don’t have to be. You can be on Youtube and you can make that connection one on one.
    So Myspace was the one that really changed the game, like there was a few websites before that but none of them were as easy to use as Myspace and of course when Facebook came around it was just an easier iteration of that social media. So it’s out there, it’s equal access for pretty much everybody and then it’s just a matter of like - in the music industry today there’s now a consolidation effort that’s going in where we’ve learned that not everybody is going to go visit your page, you know? Facebook has an algorithm that restricts how often your posts are seen unless you pay facebook to have your own fans see your post. Some people might see that as being bad, I see it as an opportunity, you know? So Myspace died in part, because bands were so aggressive going out there trying to find fans that they would like, message you all the time; direct message you, spam you, leave comments on your wall. Facebook is a very careful curator, and make sure bands can’t do that, they know that their client, their customer, you the user - using Facebook - will leave Facebook just like people left Myspace if it becomes too spammy. So they keep us bands in check… and us bands freaking hate it because we have 10,800 Facebook likes give or take and on any given day anywhere from 400 to 1,000 people see my posts, you know, unless I pay for people to see it. So it is what it is, but you know back in the day they talk about the good old days of record labels, it was impossible, like there weren’t bands from Montana that got signed to record labels, you know there just wasn’t.”
    “It’s hard to tell if there are any yet, still.”
    “Bands that are not signed?”
    “Yeah.”
    “There was a band called…I can’t remember their name, they ended up relocating to Spokane , you know, and that’s the thing about any kind of music, and this is something that we’re finding too, is that as you go up in the world, as you climb that ladder, you need more and more things to support yourself. So we’ve been fortunate enough in finding a videographer in Missoula that works with our style, but if we lived in a bigger city, we wouldn’t have just one, we would have several, you know? That’s why people tend to congregate in bigger cities who are artists. People tend to congregate in L.A., I’ve got a buddy in L.A., we went to high school together, went to college together, we were roommates in college for a little bit, and he’s playing in a band called ‘London After Midnight’. He actually picked up a job for a much bigger band than London After Midnight, I can’t share it quite yet, but he’s able to get these opportunities because he goes down there, he’s a confident musician, he’s reliable, you know he’s clean, he’s easy to get along with, and he can learn music really quickly. So when he got that job for ‘London After Midnight’, he met the Bass player at a party, and then like a few months later, a few weeks later, whatever, the Bass player gave him a call and said ‘Hey, our guitarist dropped off, we’re leaving this week, do you wanna audition?’. So he was able to get that opportunity and go out and travel the U.S., travel Europe, travel Latin America on tour with this band because he was in the right place at the right time. That doesn’t happen in Montana because Montana has just over a million people. L.A. has 16 million people in a very small area, you know, so that’s why bands in Montana don’t make it, because if you’re gonna make it, you gotta go someplace bigger. We’re hoping to prove that wrong. I like to think of ourselves as the Patron Saint of small places. We’re hoping to show that you can still live in Missoula, Montana or Wyoming or Idaho, you know there’s good musicians everywhere, sometimes you have that revolving door of musicians 'cause you don’t make money as quickly as these bands from L.A. do. You know, look at Butcher Babies, like how big they got, how quickly they got big, I mean we were playing down in Salt Lake, we were playing some of the same clubs that they were. You know they played that club the year before us and we’re still playing those clubs, but it’s all about how much money you can make for somebody, and you know we haven’t gone down that road yet.”
    “Where does all the badass artwork for your T-shirts and Merch come from?”
    “We do research, like there’s artists out there just like there’s musicians…you know there’s bands out there trying to make it big and there’s artists trying to make it big. So those artists have Facebook pages and all you have to do is just message them, see if they’ve got anything, or if you’ve got an idea for something, work with them…and it costs money. In the early days of the band we worked with Nocktis’ and Greg’s sister, you know she did the Cuthulu guy that we have. It’s a great design, it’s lasted a long time for us, and then there’s artists out there that have ready made artwork to put on a T-shirt 'cause the screen printing process is a little bit different, so you don’t just like, sketch on a piece of paper and take a picture and then send it to your screen printer and say ‘hey can you make this into an awesome t-shirt?’, you know. Sometimes they can do that but it’s better if you have an artist that knows what their doing, knows how to separate the layers, knows how to limit the colors so it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg, you know? I’m really, really stingy in our band, and I’m always trying to figure out ways to cut costs because ultimately the most efficient organization you can run is gonna go the furthest, you know? So when somebody comes back with a three color design, I ask Nocktis who does our graphic work, I say ‘Hey, can you make this two colors?’ you know? ‘…is there any way?’ and he like grumbles at me and is just like; ‘ahh, you’re an asshole’ and then he’ll usually be able to go back and make it work with our needs, or he’ll change the colors and he’ll make it like really pop, you know? So that blue alien design, that one that we just released, that actually came to us and it was gray, and Sean went and made it really bright vivid blue, and it just looks so amazing, like I love wearing that color cuz it just like pops off, it like visually assaults people…it’s like…rub your face in like day glow, you know? It’s rad. “

    “So how do you balance family/work/band life?”
    “Oh man. That's a tough one. Because it's tough, I guess. At this point in my life and career, I'm juggling a 40 hour per week job, raising two kids with my wife, and still finding time to work on band stuff while playing weekend shows. It's tough, because there's always something to do. I'd guess that I spend an extra 20-40 hours a week just working on band stuff. That's not counting practicing my guitar, jamming with the band, or playing shows. Since there's only so many hours in a day, something gets sacrificed. Most times it's my sleep. Sometimes, it's time that I spend with my wife. Sometimes, as much as it sucks, it's time with my kids. I have hope that one day all of the hard work will pay off and I can just focus on the band and bring my family on the road like a bunch of gypsies. Some people might call it quixotic. I call it better than Prozac. I mean, why's life worth living unless you can work towards filling your highest potential?”

    “What’s your favorite Movie?”
    “One of the only movies I’ve ever seen more than once is Fight Club, you know? Fight Club, Matrix, you know I’m a guy of my generation, but I also like weirdo movies, like Eraserhead, Naked Lunch, like pretty much any Cronenberg movie, or any David Lynch movie, if you put it on I’ll start watching it, there’s certain movies that are more inspirational than others, like The Hustler starring Paul Newman, That’s like what really started kicking my ass into gear when I watched that - He’s this pool shark, he’s one of the best but he just wasn’t a winner, you know? If you’ve ever seen the movie, there’s this line where they call him a loser, you know; ‘You’re a loser, you were born a loser’, you know, ‘It’s because you don’t know how to win’. and that’s such an interesting concept, that you could be good at something, but you don’t know how to be perfectly good at something. So life then becomes sort of a test of enduring, of like perfecting your craft. Sure I’ve played some of our songs hundreds and hundreds of times, but what’s my guitar hero streak? Can I play it like perfectly this time? Can I play it with perfect intensity, perfect energy, perfect notes, you know and if not let’s try to hit it the next show, you know?”

    “Favorite Band?”
    “Like the band that got me started in it was Nirvana, you know, like that’s what finally shifted me away from the pop music I was listening to, that I still listen to, but like just got me into heavy music, so like I’ve listened to a lot of Nirvana, lately I’ve loved Lana Del Rey, I know that’s bad to admit…”
    “Hahahah!”
    “…also Lamb of God, Septic Flesh, Decapitated, so when we got to open for Decapitated it was just a dream come true, I was just like ‘Oh my god that’s so awesome!’ …there’s this one band called Miseration that I’ve been listening to, uh, Suicide Silence, you know, it’s a band that’s like our age, but the younger people like them a lot more and a lot of people my age really hate them…and it’s just like, you know I can’t imagine going through life hating everything that wasn’t around when you were like 13 or 14 years old. You have like a two year window to like things, and then you have to hate everything that comes after that? Like god, how boring is life?”

    “Do you have a favorite WCS song?”
    “Right now Human Delusion is my favorite WCS song. It’s recorded, it’s also the name of our next album, it’s just got this nasty, nasty riff in it, it’s in G so I open load G, and then I end up just playing this riff and then coming down and bending the string, and it’s just so good.”
    “Awesome! Gives us something to look forward to then. Back to the topic of your feature in Revolver, do you have any upcoming PR plans?”
    “Not on the Radar. I’m working on it because we’re going to be having a new song coming out, so I’ve got some leads of different publications, different places to put out, but one of the things that we’re committed to, is, everybody chases after Revolver or Decibel or all those places, but one of the things that I’ll always wanna do is also pick like, some of the smaller outlets and debut stuff there because like, I mean we’re a small band, like Revolver gave us a debut, and that helped us become a bigger band. They’re way bigger than us but they helped us, so we’ve become bigger. So if we can take our stuff, and we can debut it someplace else, you know and help them become bigger, it creates a positive cycle, you know? But we’ll definitely try to like maximize our opportunities, cuz you only get to debut a song once. But yeah, there’s nothing concrete in the works, but I’ve got a few places that we’re gonna try.”

    “How can Fans buy the New Album?”
    “We’re actually going to start a fundraiser in July for the new album, one of the things that happens, is that it’s really expensive to put out new albums, and even though we’re the second richest band on earth…I’m just kidding, we’re not really rich at all… it just costs a lot of money, so we’ve been doing it piece meal, we’ve been paying for stuff as we can, so we just need like a little bit of a push, so we’re getting some stuff together, and we’re going to offer it as a pre-sale starting in July, and that way we can actually buy the discs, buy the physical copies of it, and then it can be ready to go because our plan is to start touring this fall, like around October, you know beginning of October. We’re gonna finally make the jump, and we’re finally gonna do a multi-week tour, so we’re gonna finally play Sunday through Thursday, not just go out on the Weekends, cuz that’s the other worst thing about what we’re doing now, is like, we all have jobs, we all have, like most of us have families, and we’re going out on the weekends and leaving work early on Friday, coming late Sunday and then going in to work Monday, so it’s like, doing that for two, three months at a time is getting old, and it’s expensive, but like it’s not as expensive as losing your job, but we finally have the right people in the band where they can get time off of work and still have a job to come back to, and our jobs are being accommodating (thank you jobs for that). So we’re going to try and go out and do sort of a bigger regional tour, try to get down to Denver for the first time, try to get over to Oregon for the first time, I know we have some fans like in Chicago, and Kansas City and El Paso, not to mention our fans in Boston, I know we have some fans in Boston and like the Baltimore area, South Carolina, and of course Florida, like Tampa, Florida, like there’s a lot of fans everywhere that have been waiting patiently for years for us to get to this point, and unfortunately we’re going to have to wait a little bit longer, cuz as much as we all hate capitalism, capitalism just describes the process of how you pay the bills. People want money, you gotta pay them money, so we gotta like build up our fan base. So boring, but that’s why I do it cuz I like boring things.”
    “I’m waiting for the 100,000 fan mark now.”
    “That would be cool, I’ve been looking at that, when we hit 10,000 that was like really cool, but seeing some of the bands that we’ve played with like Davey Suicide, when we played with him, he only had like 30,000 fans, and now he has like over 200,000 fans, two years later. So that’s one of my next jobs, is to figure out like how did he do it? You know, and I think it’s just relentlessly touring, like you’re always going to hit a glass ceiling until you can actually get out of your region and go and tour and start doing mix and match shows, you know? Playing with bigger bands. So we are in talks with some booking agents you know, to try and get some more industry support, we’re not in talks with labels at this point, you know, it’s just, from what I’ve read and researched, labels will take anywhere from 50-90% of your money, you know, it makes sense if you’re going to be selling a lot of albums but it doesn’t make sense when you have six people and you play melodic dark metal or whatever we’re gonna call it tomorrow.”
    “Do you like cats?”
     “As a general rule I do like animals, I had a cat for a while but the poor thing died…it got a liver disease, so it just really sucks to like have an animal that you really love and just watch it die earlier than you do because they’re animals and they die early, except turtles and parrots, and they outlive you. How horrible is that to be like a turtle or a parrot and be like ‘Oh, all these fucking humans keep dying’ you know? So yeah, like I’m not the biggest cat lover in the world, you know if I see a cat I’m not gonna go, like ‘OHHHHH KITTYYYYY!’ but if we go over to a persons house, I’ll be sitting on their couch and they’ll have a cat and I’ll be like ‘psst, psst, psst, here kitty kitty’ like rub your fingers, get ‘em to come over to ya, and be like ‘yes, good kitty’ but yeah there’s definitely people that love cats more than I do.”
     “First Show you’ve ever attended?"
     “Ok, so the first real show I ever went to, it was this band called DC Talk, they were like a Christian band, it was back in the 7th grade, and they came to Billings, that’s where I grew up, they played the Metra Park, and my parents will probably hate this, but going to that show changed my life, and not making me a more devout Christian, you know? Cuz I grew up Catholic, I grew up in the Catholic schools, and holy fuck there’s some wack jobs out there, they were holding up banners and crying, and I was just like Jesus fucking Christ people, it’s just Jesus fucking Christ…and there’s no reason to lose your shit over this…it’s just some musicians, so, it was a great show, they were great musicians who put on a great show, the light show was still one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, the first, non-Christian band I ever saw was the Smashing Pumpkins on the Siamese Dream Tour…uh - not Siamese Dream, the Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness Tour. They stopped in Billings, I bought a tour shirt, you know with all the dates on the back, and Billings was three days after the latest date, and I was like ‘Damn, so this was a last minute show’ I mean the show that they played, and it was great. Except for the end, there was all these people smoking weed in front of me, and I got a contact high, and I fell asleep during the third encore. So it was pretty great, it was after the O.D. thing, it was after they kicked Jimmy out of the band, but it was still like an awesome show and I still love Smashing Pumpkins to this day. I listen to Smashing Pumpkins all the time, I don’t listen to DC Talk all the time. But Definitely Smashing Pumpkins.”
     “What was your most embarrassing moment?”
     “You know when you’re a musician, you have these moments, you know, you’ve heard of Murphy’s law…anything that can go wrong will eventually go wrong. People always re-interpret Murphy’s law to be like ‘oh why me, poor me, I always get shit on’, but Murphy’s law is just understanding when you have a process, when you have a machine, like think about a car - you don’t expect to drive a car forever, you gotta put gas in it sometimes, you gotta change the oil sometimes, because if you don’t change the oil, that oils’ gonna get dirty and start corroding the inside of your engine, you know there’s things you gotta do to maintain it. Likewise when you have moving parts, eventually those parts will wear out and break. So if you start looking at life like that, that there’s going to be failure points in your life, it makes sense and it helps me cope with the things that go wrong. So here’s about one of those times when things went really wrong: We had been working hard to get shows in this town, in Missoula, we were barely playing outside of Missoula, we were working hard just to try to even get shows. This was during a time when there was only like one or two promoters, and they basically had a strangle hold on certain clubs. They would not let any bands other than their pet bands play those shows. So there were certain ways to get around it, you book house parties, you book your own venues, we booked the Union Hall a lot (above the Union Club) but we got an opportunity to open up for a couple bands from out of state, a big band from Salt Lake, a big band from Phoenix, and one of the bands was a band I looked up to at the time. We get there and it’s a Wednesday night show, and I’m trying to tune my guitar, and I’m not getting anything out of my guitar, and I opened up my guitar, you know you unscrew the port and one of the wires was broken. This is not as simple as just changing a string, you know? One of the wires broke, and I did not have a soldering kit, you know? So like ok, the lesson I learned, you bring a soldering iron, you bring solder, right? So it’s like, being a new musician, even though I’d been playing for 14 years by that point, I had never encountered that. So one of the bands let me borrow their guitar, but here’s the thing, like we’ve already talked about this, I have a strange tuned guitar. So I went to like ’Ok I’m going to try to like bring the guitar tuning up like this.’ because I don’t have a B string, I tune my B string to a C, so I tuned that B to a C and I broke this guys B string. I was just like ‘Fuuuck, does somebody have another guitar I could borrow?’ and they were SO cool, they lent another guitar. But I’m here trying to transpose music, onto a differently tuned guitar, and I sweated buckets the whole show, just sweating profusely, I was not giving a good show, just trying to play, and I hated myself after that show. I hated myself, I hated everything, I went out to my vehicle and I cried, I literally cried for like 5 minutes straight. I was like ‘This is it, I’m done, I’m the worst musician ever, I suck so bad, I had an opportunity and I blew it.’ and I came back in and the band was like ‘Matt are you ok?’ and I was like ‘This sucks, I’m gonna quit the band, I’m done with this, I’m done playing music forever, you know?’ I was just like; ‘Pack up the merch, nobodies gonna buy merch from us, we don’t deserve to sell merch.’ right? So we packed up our stuff, and like, we were just hanging around and this dude came up to me, and was just like ‘Dude, that was an awesome show, I really liked what you guys did, do you guys have any CD’s I could buy?’ and I was just like ‘Aw, fuck’.
       So what I learned from that was like it’s not a mistake if you learn something from it, is that even when you’re playing at like your worst, you could be playing good enough for somebody to really be digging it. So like you’re your own worst critic, cut yourself some slack, you know, and always have fun, because why else would you do it? So like obviously I didn’t quit the band that time, you know, I am an emotional type, so every six months I try to quit this band, you know, as weird as that sounds, I know some people look at this band and think that it’s all like sunshine and peaches and like rainbows and unicorns…but sometimes shit gets stressful, and like sometimes you look at it and you’re like ‘God, you know we’re never gonna make it, we’re never gonna be like Slipknot, we’re never gonna be like Lamb of God’ and so that’s why like, I came up with a different analogy, like it’s not about going to that final level and being that final boss, you gotta like move up your levels, you gotta find a new boss, you know? So as long as like we’re out there and we’re playing places like Twin Falls, were we had an awesome show, you know, we had some technical difficulties, got through them, and people loved it, you know? So we’re making a lot of awesome fans everywhere, you know, we’ve got this awesome fan in Bozeman that follows us to shows and helps us sell merch, you know?”
     “Dot Card?”
     “No Dot’s from Moses Lake actually. This is Nicole from Bozeman, she’s awesome, I mean we have these awesome people like Jen Johnson who lived in Missoula, lived in Havre, lives in Kalispell now, and like the world is just full of good people if you let them be good people, if you give them a platform to be good people. People like supporting good music, you know, so Dot Card is awesome, Chris Cook from Moses Lake, he’s been a huge supporter of ours. I feel an overwhelming amount of gratitude and just thankfulness that we find these people and these people find us and we help fulfill needs for each other, you know? It’s really cool."
    "We’re all a big family"
      "Yeah and it’s cool that you said Dot Card, because like one of the cool things about living in the Facebook era, is that we do have fans, we do have people that are legitimate fans, and it’s always funny like meeting these people, meeting people like, this woman started working at my job, right? I’m in the cafeteria, lunchroom or whatever you want to call it, getting some food or whatever, and she sees my shirt, and she says ‘Walking Corpse Syndrome, I really like that band’ and I was like ‘Oh yeah?’ and she was like ‘I grew up with them’ and I was like ‘How old are you?’ and she’s 22 years old but she used to go see us at the Union Hall shows back in 2009 when she was 16. So like she was a big fan, you know but there’s only certain people that reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter, or Youtube or whatever, so for every like 10 people we have, we only have like one person that actually like reaches out to us and says hi, and out of those 10 people we maybe have one person that finds me on Facebook and adds me, you know? So it’s always cool like meeting those people, but what’s even cooler is like when the Dot Card’s of the world meet up with the Siren Ambush’s, I mean you’ve never met each other, you know, or like Kami Johnson, she’s awesome and she’s friends with Dot Card now on Facebook, and they’ve never met each other. So it’s cool that we can make the world a little bit smaller by going out and playing shows in all these different cities, and then, I mean growing up in Montana, I never knew anybody that lived outside of Montana, and even Missoula. So making friends outside of Montana, I feel like a world traveler. I feel so cool, you know? And when I see my Montana friends making friends with my Washington friends, making friends with my Idaho friends, Utah friends, soon to be Wyoming friends and worldwide friends, I just think it’s the coolest fucking thing, I’m just like Yes! Everybody be friends with each other, I love it, you know? And I’ll be over here just thinking that I suck and trying not to slit my wrists or something."

    “What are some tips you might have for our newest budding musicians, words of wisdom to pass on?”
    “It would just have to be never give up, you know? 'Cause life is just going to keep throwing you shit, and since you’re a musician, you also probably play video games, right? So think of it as like a video game, you start out, things feel really hard because you’re trying to learn the controls, that’s learning your instrument, you know, it’s like you gotta put in the hours learning your instrument. If you hate practicing your instrument, you’re never going to get better at it, you’re just going to be a Noob and you’re just gonna like keep button mashing, thinking that you’re doing great, when you’re just like a weekend asshole, I dunno. So like, then you get to the boss level which is learning some of the songs from your heroes, you know, once you get those and you’re actually able to start playing the stuff, I mean you’re probably gonna start wanting to get in a band before that, and that’s great, like you should always be doing stuff that’s fun, you know, so if you’re playing your instrument and you think it would be more fun to jam with people, jam with people, you know? But it’s gonna feel really hard, like being in a band, trying to deal with different personalities, different egos, different musical influences, and it’s gonna feel like ‘I can never get beyond this, I’m never gonna get better, I’m never gonna find a group of people’ and you know what? We’ve ALL been there. We’ve all done it, you know? Like, you’re gonna feel like Skwisgaar, you know? It’s like ‘How many bands have you been in?’ and he just starts naming off all these bands that he’s been in, and Toki’s just there being like ‘uhhhh…this is the only band I’ve ever been in!’ you know, be like Skwisgaar. Be in a lot of bands. Get a new group of people, give yourself a new name, go to try and play a show, you’ve got three songs, go play a show, invite some people over, play a show, and THEN, then you get to the next boss level, how to book your first show. No matter what you’re doing in music, no matter how far you think you’ve gotten, [loud bikes go by] there’s gonna be assholes on motorcycles just racing each other, um no matter what you think you’re doing, no matter how awesome - like lets just say you’re a narcissist, and you think you’re awesome, there’s gonna be another boss at the end of that level that’s gonna kick your ass, and challenge you to be even more awesome. If you’re pessimistic and you’re depressive, and you think you can’t do anything, set the goals a little bit smaller, you know, find little things that you can achieve, little steps, like break down the big thing, don’t think you gotta be like Metallica or Slipknot and playing stadiums, be ‘like what can I do? Can I practice 10 minutes straight?’ you know? Just set that small goal, and achieve it, and give yourself the leeway to feel good about shit. I come from a depressed background, not a narcissistic background, so I’ve gotten good at making little goals for myself. So like when we made revolver, that felt good, that was like a goal, and then that lasted about 5 days and then I felt like shit again, I was like ‘God Matt, you suck, you’re horrible, you’re worthless.” Then I was like ‘Wait, wait, wait, no, I’ve played this game before. It’s ok because I’m just emptying myself of all this dopamine, all the happy chemicals are leaving my body, now it’s time to work, now it’s time to find a new boss. It’s time to find a new level to go to and compete at that’. So it’s all about never giving up, you know? So never give up when you achieve something, and never give up if you don’t achieve something.”

- Bonnie Bixler interview with Matthew Bile.