[caedmonscall.net]

On May 5th, 2002, the three staff members of [caedmonscall.net] (Bryan, Megan, and Nicole) traveled to Dallas, TX (along with soon to be staff member Mark) to see Caedmon’s Call perform live at SMU. A few hours before the show we were fortunate enough to sit down with Caedmon’s Call drummer Todd Bragg and bassist Jeff Miller for what would be our first official interview with the band. The 45 minutes that followed were filled with candid opinions, rambling exchanges, and random observations that had us laughing for most of the encounter. We hope you enjoy reading the transcription of this interview as much as we enjoyed conducting it. And thanks again to Todd and Jeff for giving us their time.

Megan: So how’s the tour going?

Jeff: (in a mock british accent) It’s not really a tour.

Todd: Yeah we’re kinda doing a weekend warrior sort of thing. It’s been good. I guess this is the last of them. (turns to Jeff) Is this the last of them?

bryan, todd, megan, jeff, and nicole Jeff: This is the last show dog.

Todd: Until June.

Jeff: Woohoo. Well, we have crap in the, I mean, stuff in the summer.

Bryan: Festivals?

Todd: Yeah, we’ve got a couple little festival things. I think end of June is the first one.

Jeff: But this will probably be it for a while.

Megan: So are you going to be spending the time in between this show and your summer festival concerts working on the new album?

Todd: In fact we start tomorrow on the new album.

Megan: Really?

Jeff: Well I don’t. I have to go back home and go to work.

Todd: We’re loading all the gear in and all the drums and getting the drums down tomorrow and then Tuesday (May 7th) I think we start.

Megan: So what’s it going to be like?

Jeff: It’s gonna be cool.

Todd: It’s gonna be a conglomeration of everything we’ve done in the past. From worship to old…ya know, “My Calm Your Storm” vibe kinda stuff to some new stuff that I think will kinda give you a hint of the direction that we’re going in musically.

Jeff: It’s gonna be interesting. We have like 4,000 songs to choose from, I mean we have a lot of songs.

Todd: We do have a lot of songs to choose from, and a lot of them are mostly done.

Jeff: Well lyrically, there’s two songs that there’s NO lyrics for.

Todd: Yeah, there’s a couple songs that we have to write lyrics for. We have the whole song but the lyrics that we have we don’t like so we’re gonna rewrite them. The cool part about it is that we’re all working from the very get-go on all the songs.

Megan: So are you kind of writing collectively on this album?

Todd: Yeah, it’s the first time that we’ve done that.

Megan: So it’s not going to be an “Aaron and Derek” songwriting record?

Todd: Not at all. Derek’s got one, maybe two songs.

Jeff: Well Derek only has one, but Derek and Sandra together have submitted a whole bunch.

Todd: Right. Sandra has about 3 or 4 or 5. I don’t know if there all going on the album. I know 3 of Sandra’s are.

Jeff: Aaron Tate submitted 6 or 7. Aaron Senseman is submitting like 2 or 3. Josh has got like 3 or 4.

Todd: Randall Goodgame’s got a couple. They’re not all gonna go on the album obviously, but we got a good palette of songs to pick and choose from.

Megan: So how do you go about deciding which songs?

Todd: Well the neat thing about the studio, and with our experience, we’ve kinda gone from both sides of the spectrum. We’ve gone at it where we’re like “ok we’re gonna rehearse the songs and pick em apart so every little nuance of the song we’ll know so when we go to the studio it’s just a matter of getting a good take at it.”

Bryan: That was 40 Acres?

Todd: Yeah, 40 Acres was that way. That was the most extreme of the albums.

Jeff: Then the next album (Long Line of Leavers) was like the total opposite.

Todd: Yeah it was like, we went in at that day we didn’t know what we were gonna do. We just went in and kinda went with an idea and we had the songs, but as far as how we were going to play them…

Jeff: We had never played them together before, we had never rehearsed them.

Todd: And so, there’s good and bad to both of them, both sides. And then this last album (In the Company of Angels) kind of gave us the confidence to produce this new one on our own, because of the last album we did. And for some reason, with this band, we’re all so scattered and it’s hard to get us all to focus on the same thing for any amount of time. And with the worship album, we were able to do it, even though people were in and out of town and it was kinda crazy but it came out and there’s an energy there, there’s a personality to the album that we really haven’t had since “My Calm”. And we did “My Calm” the same way. It was that scattered, late-night, whatever…

Jeff: And this one will probably be between the two. Because we’re gonna try and track as much as we can live, just everybody playing. So it’s probably gonna be in between the two schools of thought.

Todd: But I like that because we’ll go in there and the songs that we don’t have complete, it forces you to be creative. And I think that can be good or bad, but hopefully it will be good.

Jeff: It could be dangerous. It’s like having seven producers in a room saying “No do this, No do this. This sounds good. No that sounds like turd.”

-everyone laughing-

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 19th, 2002 at 11:23 am and is filed under Dotnet Exclusives, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.