Exclusive Interview

Leo Garcia from the radio production The Hour Of Darkness interviewed Liam Wilson [Bass] of The Dillinger Escape Plan on November 29, 2004 Cardiff, Wales, Barfly. Minor editorial alterations were made by Justin St. Vincent on February 21, 2005.

Leo Garcia: I’ve just got a few questions about recording… Firstly, how are your songs arranged? Do you put different parts together to form a song, or do you work a song all the way through?

Liam Wilson: It’s a little bit of everything. It usually starts out as like a pattern, whether it be on guitar or drums or bass, even on laptop. And then we usually take those and flesh them out, introduce them to everybody else. Typically Ben [Weinman, lead guitar] and Chris [Pennie, drums] are the architects and Brian [Benoit, guitar], Greg [Puciato, vocals] and I do the interior decorating. That’s pretty much the way it starts. Songs like “Phone Home” and “Setting Fire [To Sleeping Giants]” started out on a laptop, with a really simple idea and come together from there.

Leo Garcia: Most magazines would describe you as ‘jazzy’ or ‘jazz-core’, but to what extent do you feel you are influenced by jazz and how do you let it affect your work?

Liam Wilson: I’m definately inspired by jazz. I think it’s one of the few styles of music where it’s OK to be good at your instrument. You’re almost SUPPOSED to be good at your instrument. The only other thing like that is metal. Although most people are turned off by a little too much sophistication.

Leo Garcia: I guess alot of people would be put off by your music initially because it’s so hard…

Liam Wilson: Intense… There’s really not a whole lot to relate to unless you’re a musician. But I don’t really think we use jazz structure, you know what I mean? We don’t necessarily have like a 12-bar blues, then we all solo. I think we’re of some of the tricks of the trade that jazz musicians use. I think we try to incorporate some of the dynamics, like some of ways we use to build tension. I think that’s really apparent…

Leo Garcia: How long ago did Greg join the band?

Liam Wilson: About two or three years ago.

Leo Garcia: In what way did he contribute musically to ‘Miss Machine’?

Liam Wilson: He was almost exclusively vocals, vocal patterns…

Leo Garcia: Are you happy with his lyrics and what he’s done on the album?

Liam Wilson: Yeah, pretty happy. I think there’s always room to improve. I think I would have liked to see better lyrics… But I always want to see better everything! I never believe a record is truly ‘done’. Yeah, I would say it’s the weakest part of the record.

Leo Garcia: I found a lot of the lyrics on Miss Machine’, compared to the stuff on ‘Calculating Infinity’, they seem very self-centred. What do you think caused that change in the lyrical content?

Liam Wilson: It’s two different singers!

Leo Garcia: Sure, but was it the attitude of the band?

Liam Wilson: I don’t think it’s the holistic attitude of the band. I don’t think any of us really demonstrate the band as a being. I think we’re all our own personalities. And I think that in a lot of ways, whether it be politics or things like that, most of that stuff stays off the record. We’re all our own people…

Leo Garcia: Yeah, you’re with PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] aren’t you?

Liam Wilson: Sort of… I don’t really know if I agree with them completely. Some times I feel closer to meat eater’s mentality than that of a vegan wacktivist. So to boil it back to the question, lyrical content is exclusively Greg’s project. That’s the one place where he can just express himself and do what he feels he needs to do. We all have slight checks on it. There’s things where I can say ‘Well what do you think about this? Do you think we should change this?’. And there are times when I have to respect his position, because he has to worry about phrasing. There’s different things he has to worry about when we’re practising. If I wanted to write lyrics, I would start my own band.

Leo Garcia: Dimitri [Minakakis, ex-vocals] did the artwork for ‘Miss Machine’, didn’t he?

Liam Wilson: No. He basically took the artwork that somebody else did and laid it out in a visual format.

Leo Garcia: So who actually designed the artwork?

Liam Wilson: Brian Montuori… a friend of ours.

Leo Garcia: What do you take from the artwork?

Liam Wilson: I think when we were talking to Brian about the artwork, we wanted to find a way to make it look like the music sounded. I think we tossed out a bunch of adjectives, little analogies. Some of the things we were talking about were kind of surreal, kind of Dali-esque. But it still had familiar things juxtaposed in unfamiliar ways. Something sexy, something deformed, something clinical and antiseptic. Something that kind of hints at metal, like old Carcass covers. Even like a “Dr. Feelgood” cover… Still like…

Leo Garcia: Mechanical?

Liam Wilson: Yeah, mechanical.

Leo Garcia: Do you feel ‘Miss Machine’ has a more human element to it than ‘Calculating Infinity’. That’s what I think of it as. The music has melodic parts and softer parts and in that way it’s more human. That’s why I presumed you called it ‘Miss Machine’, like a human machine.

Liam Wilson: A lot of things you do as an artist you don’t really understand why it erred this way or that. I guess in some way I would put it that way… I never really thought of it that way!

Leo Garcia: When Dimitri left, did you always plan on finding a vocalist through releasing a song on the internet, or did you try and find someone through other ways first?

Liam Wilson: When we had got together as a band to talk of some of those issues, basically ‘What are we going to do?’, it quickly came clear that that was the only way we could do it. We didn’t know anybody else! If we knew them then… But we didn’t want to be a [Mike Patton] pet band.

Leo Garcia: You never considered taking him as…

Liam Wilson: No, no. Well maybe, but it would be like ‘I’d be honoured’ and ‘You’d be honoured’ but at one point we all thought the internet thing would be the best thing to do and it turned out to be the best thing to do. But there was a time when we were like ‘Fuck, this isn’t going to make it’.

Leo Garcia: How long did the whole process take?

Liam Wilson: Less than six months, but longer than we thought. Some of the tapes we were getting were atrocious. They were horrible, just not unique, not half as sophisticated as what we were hoping for.

Leo Garcia: Greg did two versions [of “43% Burnt”] didn’t he?

Liam Wilson: Yeah, he did a normal version and a different version, where he changed all the phrasing and added vocal harmony and weird, random things. There were times when it almost had a Backstreet Boys part in there. And at the time, we weren’t like totally sold, like ‘That’s awesome!’ but at least like ‘This guy has potential’. He definately has a strong screaming voice and a pretty styled singing voice.

Leo Garcia: Was there a lot of material not included on ‘Miss Machine’?

Liam Wilson: No, pretty much everything we had went on ‘Miss Machine’. There was one little thing that we were trying to hurry up and finish, another faster one like ‘The Running Board EP’. There was some more electronic stuff, like a heavier Ministry kind of sound.

Leo Garcia: What sort of things can we expect from the DVD?

Liam Wilson: Yeah, well there may be a DVD, but we’ve been planning it ever since I joined the band! The hypothetical idea is to do two DVDs, one up to the point where Dimitri left and…

Leo Garcia: How is that going?

Liam Wilson: Well, there’s a hell of a lot of footage, but we want the best of what’s there. And then we want to do the second DVD with Greg.

Leo Garcia: Do you feel you appeal to a certain range of music listeners? Are you ever surprised by the people who come to your gigs?

Liam Wilson: Yeah, all the time. There’s a lot of times where we get older musicians and recently we’ve been having a lot of our inspirations show up to shows. We had someone from Fishbone and Tool. Danny Carey comes to our shows all the time! We had somebody from Cynic. I just wonder what it is that… I met Bjork at a Cannibal Corpse show. I guess people are really into a scene, interested in what goes on. Danny from Tool was like ‘I really dig you guys’. There are definately times when I’m surprised.

Leo Garcia: OK, last question now.. what exactly was Mike Patton like to work with?..

Liam Wilson: ..Definately a workhorse. When he came into the studio it would be like three in the morning and all our stuff was already recorded. With that stuff also the common misconception is that he helped write that stuff, but all of it was written, stuff that Dimitri was planning on singing on. When I first met him it was like ‘Hello Mr. Patton’ and twenty minutes later is was like ‘Hey Mike, want another beer?’. Coming from Philadelphia I get to hang out with him a lot. I respect him because he sees everything on another level, really sincerely involved in what he does.

Leo Garcia: Liam, thank you very much!