WATCH: Our exclusive interview with AFI

Interview by Richard Thomas

When your band has been in the trenches for 18 years mixing it up with both indie labels and international juggernauts, you’re bound to have some insight on what it takes to stay together while simultaneously pouring out album after album of emotionally charged musicianship.
    From the razor sharp punk rock of Very Proud of Ya to the maudlin, darkewave undertones of Decemberunderground, Northern California’s AFI have broken through the myopic constraints of modern rock to become one of this decades most versatile and successful bands. With Crash Love, their eighth full-length, they show no signs of slowing down. From the giant rock guitars and triumphal choruses of “Torch Song” and “Beautiful Thieves,” the album explodes with energy and urgency, as Davey Havok sings, “If there’s discretion that you’ve not abandoned, now’s the time,” on the 100 mph love song, “End Transmission.”
    Elsewhere, Havok dotes on an unsuspecting beauty from afar while guitarist Jade Puget lays down sanguine pop chords with an ’80s flair on “Veronica Sawyer Smokes.” Havok’s flair for the dramatic, both in tone and verse, gives the songs on Crash Love a buoyancy that separates the rich melodies from grinding dirge of the guitars and drums, especially on a song like “Too Shy To Scream.” Fresh off a trip to Japan, AFI sat down with ShockHound to talk about their fashion, their fans, and what it’s like to look back on nearly two decades of music making.

SHOCKHOUND: AFI has been around for 18 years, but only in the last six has the band really achieved mass popularity. Bands like Soul Asylum and No Doubt had similar career trajectories. How do you think that slow climb to popularity and major sales helped define you as a band?

DAVEY HAVOK: Slow growth was very important for us. We’re really lucky to have taken little steps along the way, rather than taking a big step a couple years into our careers, for many reasons. One that’s always at the forefront of my mind is that the albums that would be most recognized by the masses would be albums that I really don’t want to play! [Laughs]

JADE PUGET: We did the same thing as Soul Asylum, and Dave Pirner got Winona Ryder in her prime. We didn’t get that.

HAVOK: No, we didn’t.

PUGET: Where’s our Winona Ryder in her prime? What did we do wrong?

HAVOK: That’s true. I guess we did do something a little bit off, but you can’t go back. We got what we got.

SHOCKHOUND: These days, people are creating such diverse micro-genres of music by fusing different styles together. Adventurous is good, but do you think it’s important for people to still hear and appreciate very singular genres like punk, rock, and alternative? Do those categories still matter?

HAVOK: I think it’s great that genres such as punk, metal, and hardcore still exist and are still there to be looked back upon and appreciated. It’s just very rare that you find a punk band or a hardcore band that has the kind of exposure that allows people to realize that, “Oh, this is something I was unaware of.” I think it is important, if you’re interested in a certain type of music, to know the history behind it. But conversely, it’s not important to play one sound of music. Obviously we don’t think that because we don’t play any type of music. What we do doesn’t really fit into any genre. But for those people who are purists, I have a lot of respect for that.

ADAM CARSON: I think a lot of people when they’re young decide who they are and what they identify with. If you’re into a certain genre of music, it’s easy to say, “Yeah, I’m a punk.” I think as you get older you start to realize the contradictions of all the things you’re into, then broaden yourself to say, “I’m not really any one thing. I’m everything.” But growing up it’s kinda nice to grow up and say, “This is what I am, these are my friends, this is what we’re into.” It was definitely an important part of mine.

SHOCKHOUND: There were musically-defined support systems. I think it’s much less the case now.

HAVOK: Yeah. It’s hard these days to find those musically-defined support systems because I don’t think people really look for them. I think one of the main aspects of those support systems is the community and culture surrounding them. Because people aren’t searching for that human interaction and that real-life exchange, those communities have been breaking down. Not only are there not bands to support those types of communities, there aren’t communities to support those types of bands. The desire for that community has really disintegrated quite a bit, it seems, from generation to generation. That’s a shame.

SHOCKHOUND: Things like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook have created this illusion of intimacy where you have tons of “friends” and “followers,” but not really. Do you think that social environment has had an effect on the band, or the way in which the band is perceived?

HAVOK: I think our environment really created who we are as people and musicians, especially with all of us coming from a very small town at a time pre-Internet. You really had to struggle to find music, and all of us were sharing music that we would record on tapes. We’d hear about a band and talk to each other about it, and that’s how we learned about music. Because we were so detached from any sort of scene, we were looking to all sorts of scenes, both current and past, for music and culture and lifestyle. That community and that search for music and those common interests had an impact on us. We valued what we were into so much, partially because it was so difficult to access. “Oh my gosh, I found this new thing. Can you get it? I can’t get it. We heard about this band called the Germs and The Decline of Western Civilization, but we can’t find the record.” Every little moment of learning something new was an achievement, even if it turned out to be something we weren’t into.

SHOCKHOUND: You put a call out to your fans for video submissions with the Begin Transmission project, where winners got the chance to sing on Crash Love. That had to have been the most intimate look you guys have had at your fans.

CARSON: It’s the first time we’ve had empirical evidence. There were about 1,000 submissions, and as we watched them all it was very easy to see just what a broad fan base we have; all different types of people and ages and lifestyles and life experiences. It was really impressive.

SHOCKHOUND: Did anything surprise you?

HAVOK: The videos were really diverse. There were very artistic videos that clearly took a lot of time to make, and there were very minimal videos that were simply monologues explaining their lives of circumstance or perhaps what impact we had on them. It really reaffirmed what a diverse a group of people are into our music.

CARSON: Everybody seemed really intelligent and had things to say, or went about making the video in a very unique way.

SHOCKHOUND: How did the winner’s contributions manifest themselves on the record?

CARSON: They did backing vocals on “I Am Trying Very Hard To Be Here.”

HAVOK: Did they do backing vocals on something else?

CARSON: I think we had them do claps.

HAVOK: That’s what it was!

CARSON: They learnt their percussion skills as well. [Laughs]

SHOCKHOUND: Jade and Davey, I wanted to ask you about the relationship you have as writers, and how that dynamic changes when you’re writing for AFI versus writing for Blaqk Audio.

PUGET: The dynamic is completely different. In AFI, we’ve always written face to face in the same room. Always. With Blaqk Audio, we never do. I write the entire song, completely finished, and send it to him. I’m not there at all when he does the melody and the lyrics. When we’re in the studio recording is the first time I hear the vocals, so it’s a total surprise to me.

HAVOK: Surprise! [Laughs]

PUGET: And he gets to hear the music for the first time with no input on it.

SHOCKHOUND: Hunter and Adam, what are your thoughts on Blaqk Audio? What do you think of their music as a duo?

HUNTER BURGAN: I think that’s a good method for them to write.

HAVOK: Thanks! [Laughs]

BURGAN: If Davey was on the computer, it’d be a little bit weird.

PUGET: The whole song would be an email.

DAVEY: Maybe some chat noises.

PUGET: There might have been one or two things that happened that way on this record. I had the chorus on “Torch Song” completely written, all the parts, and I gave it to you to check out. Remember, you took it home?

HAVOK: Yeah, absolutely.

JADE: That was kinda Blaqk Audio style.

HAVOK: “Darling I Want To Destroy You” was similar that way, except it was a jam, and that’s never happened before with AFI. Those guys started jamming and the song became a front-to-back thing in rehearsal. Then I took the tape home and wrote the melody just off the music, which is more Blaqk Audio-esque in its creation. The methods are both very different, but both serve their purposes.

SHOCKHOUND: You switched producers at the beginning of the record, going from Dave Bottrill to Joe McGrath and Garret “Jackknife” Lee. Usually when bands do that, they scrap most if not all of the material that was created initially, but you didn’t. You kept it all.

CARSON: We didn’t scrap anything, and we didn’t write any new stuff with the new producers. We simply re-recorded it. It was always more of a sonic issue than it was a songwriting issue. We had an idea of how we wanted the record to sound, and we just weren’t getting there on the first attempt. So it really wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds.

SHOCKHOUND: We’re big Heathers fans...

HAVOK: Nice, as we all are.

SHOCKHOUND: So of course we were immediately drawn to “Veronica Sawyer Smokes.” Musically it stands apart from so many other songs on the record, so much so that the comments section on one of the UK sites that offered it up as an early download were extremely polarized.

CARSON: Yeah, if that was the only song people heard leading up to the record, it’d be easy to get a really weird idea of the record.

HAVOK: Which is great. [Laughs]

SHOCKHOUND: How did that song come together, lyrically and musically?

PUGET: A lot of this record was written on the fly, just off the cuff. But that one I had sort of the whole first part written. I had this Cure mindset , but it came out more Smiths-y, or maybe a combination of the two.

HAVOK: That melody that you hear on the song is the first thing that came out of me when hearing the music. I had the chorus first, and then it moved in that direction of themes of projection and misconception.

SHOCKHOUND: We definitely had a John Hughes moment listening to it.

HAVOK: That’s really flattering, thank you. There is an homage to him in the song, literally. There’s a lyric that name-checks him in there, so maybe that’s why.

SHOCKHOUND: And I think you “die” about five or six times between track one and track six.

HAVOK: Yes, and they’re different deaths! There’s the very melodramatic, metaphoric, hyperbolic death of “Veronica Sawyer Smokes,” and then there’s the spiritual death of “Okay, I Feel Better Now.”

SHOCKHOUND: Apparently there are a lot of people who are lamenting the loss of your long hair.

HAVOK: Is that true? I was really expecting a lot of criticism but I haven’t gotten it yet, so thank you. I was waiting for it. [Laughs]