MEB staffer Sarah McGonagle recently caught up with vocalist Winston McCall of metalcore veterans Parkway Drive. They discuss all the details behind the band’s latest release Atlas, winning the Best Live Act award from Rolling Stone, their plans for new music, and much more.
MEB: Can you begin by stating your name and what you do in the band?
Winston McCall: My name’s Winston, and I am the vocalist for Parkway Drive.
Can you tell us about your current tour?
We’re touring the States, I guess it’s for the launch of Atlas, our latest record. It’s the first time we’ve been back in two years, I think. It’s taken us a while to get back here. Being from Australia, it’s a fair bit of paperwork to get out here, but so far it’s great to be back.
Are you close with the other bands on the tour?
Yes, to some degree we are. (laughs) We know them, yes, and that’s generally the reason we put the tour together. They’re all great guys and it’s been a really, really good tour. Every band sounds different and every band is being received differently, which is really cool.
What have you been up to so far in 2013?
That’s a good question. So far, this has been one of the laziest years for us (laughs) but that was kind of the intention. It’s been, like, ten years of doing this band so at the start of the year we took three months off to literally just say “no band stuff.” This is actually the first tour we’ve done in three and a half months, which is crazy, so you’re literally asking about three and a half months of nothingness. (laughs) We’ve really just been surfing and stuff, the whole thing has been building up to this. “What have you done?” “Nothing!” (laughs) I think that’s the first time anyone’s been able to hear that from us, to say that we’ve done nothing since the start of the year.
You released your newest record, Atlas, this past fall. What can you tell us about that?
The name came from the locations where it was written. We wrote it while filming the “Home Is For the Heartless” DVD around the same time, which pretty much took place around the world, so we figured the moniker “atlas” would fit in with the idea of traveling. It’s definitely written on a “worldly” level, in the sense of the lyrical content. The whole idea for writing it was to make something that sounded like Parkway and at the same time, drag in new elements that were surprising. I guess something that you wouldn’t expect, and at the same time would stick out, which was definitely a challenge. Very early on we wrote some songs and said, “okay, we can either write another Parkway record or we can write something that might make people go ‘I hate this band!’” (laughs) We wanted to trust the difference. We always like when things are different, and we did a couple of things different on Deep Blue and we figured we’d just elaborate on this, go a bit further this time. That’s basically just what we tried to do, drag in some influences and things that inspired us, like our travels, and put it into the songs.
Atlas actually ended up going gold, that’s pretty exciting!
Yeah! It was really, really crazy. Deep Blue was really successful in Australia as well, that took like a year to go gold. It was insane; that’s the first gold record we’d ever had, we were like “whoa, okay!” At that point we couldn’t believe that it had gone gold. Atlas went gold after like a month or something. Like, “what? Come again?” (laughs) That was pretty insane. It’s been the most successful release we’ve had, in terms of record sales or anything like that, which is not something we pay attention to that much. No one really tells us really what the hell’s going on with that. The main thing we’ve noticed, success-wise, is that the songs have been picked up incredibly live. From the word go, they’ve been massive. I think that’s when we know that songs go well. (laughs)
When recording this album, what were your main focuses, creatively?
We actually focused a hell of a lot on everything. It was the first time we wrote a record using direct tracking onto the Pro Tools program. So, generally, our way of writing was that we would jam out in a live environment, practice, and then record it, fiddle around with it a bit, and send it to the studio. This time, Jeff’s [Ling, guitarist] gotten really good at his computer editing and stuff, so all of our stuff was recorded on the road, mainly, then run through the computer first, and then we practiced. So it gave us a hell of a lot of time to go over every little detail we wanted. The focus was basically on everything, making sure everything gelled. And at the same point in time, it meant that we could bring in those stranger concepts and try them, like having a trumpet, or piano, or voices, or whatever, and try dodgy versions of that on the software. We could see if that concept would actually work and it would give us an idea of how to structure things, and structure things around there instead of just having it tacked on the end, actually making it a complete work of music. The idea, again, was to make a record that stuck together as a whole, but had the songs be different. The way Parkway seems to write these days is we seem to be pushing the extremes of melody and heaviness further and further apart so there’s more to cover in between. That’s kind of what it was about.
You’ve just recently celebrated ten years as a band. How have you changed as a person since being a part of Parkway Drive?
Oh, god. Ten years changes a lot in someone, first off, let alone being in this band. We’ve seen over 50 countries in the band’s existence, and for anyone, anywhere, that would be a lot of the planet to see. It’s a massively life-changing, life-defining experience to do that. It’s safe to say that the person that I would be outside of this band ten years down the track, as opposed to where I am now, would be so far removed that you probably wouldn’t even know me. There’s so much of a difference for me to gauge. It’s something you want to tell your kids, that you’re one of the few people to have seen a majority of the globe. It’s so life-defining for us, this band is who we are.
Did you ever expect that it would become this?
No, not even close. It’s so bizarre to even consider that this band has become as big as it has, let alone become the vehicle for the worldly exploration that it is. It’s one thing if someone had said “Hey, you’ll be in a band and that band will blow up,” you’d be like “Okay, cool. We’ll go to America and we’ll play. We’ll go to Asia, we’ll go to Eastern Europe, we’ll go to the Middle East, we’ll go to South America.” The idea that we’re in a band and going to those places is hard to register. It’s pretty gnarly. (laughs)
What’s the difference between touring in Australia and touring in the U.S.?
Distance, mainly. In Australia we have a very large country. The land mass is pretty similar to North America, but we only have seven major cities that we play in. So you’re talking about touring for a week and then being done. Whereas here, you can tour for like three months and still be commuting cities. That’s the major difference. But at the same time, that leads to I guess hometown pride. The shows in Australia are the biggest we play, although Europe is catching up pretty damn quick. But the States were always really hard for us to “crack,” in any sense of the term, simply because it’s so established and so saturated that the problem always was that we’re just a band from Australia. How the hell are you going to break it anywhere? (laughs) So we just toured and toured and toured. It’s great now that with this tour we’ve had so many sold out shows, it’s been ridiculous. It’s been so crazy, because to play 30 shows in a row in cities is very bizarre, to be seeing new cities day after day for us. We’re used to seeing, like, four big cities in an entire country. The weirdest thing for us is just dealing with the distance. It’s interesting to see how far you can go in one place.
You’re heading to Europe again in the summer, what can you tell us about that?
We’re going over for festival season, which, for people who are unaware of it, is absolutely enormous in Europe. God, how do I describe it? The closest thing I could compare it to is kind of like Warped Tour over here, but ten times the size. And not just one touring festival, there are different festivals. It’s insane. The biggest shows you will ever see, the biggest crowds you will ever see. They’re established festivals that people have been going to for a long time, and people in Europe save up the entire year to buy their festival tickets and will camp in these places for three-day festivals. You’re talking like between 30- and 80,000 people going to these shows and there only being a handful of stages. By the time the headliner plays, there will be a crowd that stretches over the horizon. So, we’re going back for that cause it’s really awesome. No matter what fest you’re playing, what time you’re playing, it’s always a good show and the crowds are amazing. This time we’re pretty established in Europe and we have some insanely good slots for these festivals. And we’re hoping that these shows are as good as they look on paper, because this has the potential to be the biggest tour we’ve ever done, audience-wise. It should be cool. We’re spending summer there, and then we’re playing some other bizarre places that we haven’t hit before on the off days, which is good.
You guys won the Rolling Stone Award for “Best Live Act”…
Yeah, that was funny. (laughs)
How did that happen?
I don’t know, it was weird. I went to the awards ceremony and everything. I don’t know how it’s voted [on] or anything, it’s just in Australia. Still, it was cool. And I’m pretty proud of it, to be honest, because we’ve always been a “live” band as opposed to a “recorded” band. We’ve always as a band wanted to make live music. I guess a lot of people don’t realize how alive our heavier music concerts are in comparison to other shows. And you go to another gig and you go see live music, and a good show is when people clap at the end or have their hands up, as opposed to when 500 people crowdsurf or jump off the speakers, which makes for a pretty wild show. The reality of heavy music is, I think, that live shows are way, way, way better than most other types of music. It doesn’t rely on the aesthetics as much as the raw energy of the show. For that to be acknowledged by Rolling Stone especially, because that magazine is amazing, is a really, really cool thing and something I’m really proud of.
There’s an infamous YouTube clip of a guy jumping off a speaker at one of your shows with a camera on his head that records the dive. Are your shows always that crazy?
Yeah, they’re kind of crazy. That was a friend of ours and we gave him the head cam, this was before Go Pros were around so he had a giant camera strapped to his head, and we said “go crazy, just go nuts,” so we’d have a different live perspective for the DVD. So he started scaling that massive speaker stand and I thought, “Oh Jesus, this is going to be bad. Try to look away so you can deny anything to the venue if they ask if you’re involved.” (laughs) He did that flip and the whole thing looked mental. The thing is, when there’s barriers the thing seems to be a little more controlled, but we like it being crazy in the first place. The crazier, the better. Our shows are generally pretty nuts. It’s rare that I tell people to calm down. I like people being safe and not getting completely fucked up, but at the same time I think people are surprised at our shows. You see signs like “Crowd surfing will kill people!” and stuff like that, but you’d be surprised how resilient people are, especially when they’re all packed in. The worst things we generally see are a busted nose or something. Considering we play to around 5,000 people and ten people come out with busted noses and someone’s twisted an ankle, it’s pretty damn good statistics considering what I’m watching from the stage. (laughs)
You’ve made your interest in touring foreign countries like Algeria or Egypt public in the past. Is this an attempt to branch out as a band?
It’s more just that we like playing wherever we can, and that’s what I meant about the spots that we’re hitting in Europe that we haven’t hit before. It’s literally become an obsession of ours to play wherever we can. It’s been weird because you see us on the DVD trying to go places where I don’t even think people know what metal or hardcore or punk is, and we go, and people actually know who we are and the show goes amazingly. We have yet to play a place where no one knows who Parkway Drive is, which is really ridiculous. We keep this going, “let’s try to play here, let’s try to play here, and play there.” There have been a few places that we’ve listed that we can’t because we don’t want to get kidnapped or have some kind of strife break out. We’re still searching. We’re still playing everywhere we can when we get the chance. It’s amazing to visit a place that you really wouldn’t associate with any kind of heavy music, and to play and have people show up. Those shows always go amazingly. The places you least expect it, you end up with the craziest show. I think it started out with us, because Byron Bay is a tiny town and no one would come through it and when bands did, we went berserk. That established that as a place to go, to go through Byron on the way through because you’re guaranteed a good show. That’s how it started, so for us to try to do that with other places around the world is cool.
You’ve recently released your DVD, “Home Is For the Heartless.” What can you tell us about that?
We’d already released our first DVD, and that was basically wrapping up seven years as a band, and that was to give everyone an idea of who we were and to make a connection – this is the band, this is what we stand for, this is why we do what we do – so people understood. “Home Is For the Heartless” was the idea that while we had this whole gnarly tour lined up, it was this whole European festival tour with a bunch of crazy places around that; we thought “geez, this would be interesting to film.” Then a couple of opportunities started popping up later in the year in South America and Asia and stuff like that, and we said, “let’s tour everywhere we can this year, and let’s try to document it.” It’s very rare that you get to see all these places on film and that these places get exposure – and at the same time seeing what it’s like being in these environments – as opposed to just being inside the club for the gig. That’s what touring is for us, so we wanted to film it and make it a story and a visual. In the visual sense, something that hadn’t been put into any documentary that we’d seen before. That’s why the style of it is a lot more cinematic, in a sense. We took someone with us and it was very good filming. We just wanted to capture everything. If you didn’t know the band or the style of music, you could still watch it and appreciate the concept and the story behind it. That was the idea of it.
So it’s as much about the fans and the different cultures as it is about the actual music.
Yes, 100%. And the thing is, that’s why the soundtrack differs as well. It’s not just the same thing. 70% of the soundtrack isn’t heavy music, and that’s because that’s [how] the culture was to us in those places, and that’s the music we listened to as well. It wasn’t designed specifically for a fan of the band, it was just designed for the experience. And that was what we wanted to get across – the experience.
From Deep Blue to Atlas, how have your musical influences changed?
Deep Blue, I think, the musical influence was less heavy music-based and came a lot more from ideas within the band, as opposed to looking at what other bands were doing. And again, that happened with Atlas, too. But at the same time, the influences stretched out further from the heavy base and I think the melody side crept in a lot more. And that’s always been there for us. Jeff’s an incredible guitarist and he’s really, really good at playing acoustic guitar, and that’s where a lot of the stuff came from. 99% of the guitar work was written by Jeff on the record. From there, the heavy stuff branched out as well, the details came together and everything. I think the progression was in the detail, as opposed to Deep Blue, where we were confident in what we wanted to do and we were like, “that’s it, we’re going to record this” and it worked very well. Then on Atlas, we said “okay, let’s take the complete opposite direction. Let’s have no idea what the hell we want to do.” When we put it together, we never said “okay, this is done.” The idea was always there, but we just kept an open mind and literally went to the studio wanting Matt [Hyde, producer] to throw ideas at us, so we went in the other direction with that as well.
What are your plans for 2013 as a band?
It’s 2013 now, isn’t it? (laughs) Jesus. (singing) Time flies. We go to Europe, then we go to Australia again. It’s ten years of being in Parkway, so we’re doing a ten-year anniversary tour in Australia, in which we’re scaling back the clubs and playing smaller amounts of people in venues. We’re also playing a really retrospective set of sorts. (laughs) So we’re going back over everything we’ve done and we’re learning, I think, like, 30 different songs or something, and mixing them up. There are songs I haven’t heard in, like, eight years or something. So the people who grew up listening to Parkway are going to be ecstatic. We’re going to be playing something off of every single release. Every night there’s at least one song off of every single Parkway Drive release. I think it’s generally more than that, but it’s going to be interesting. We have another release planned, as well, for the next couple months, which is something different from anything we’ve done before. So expect something to be coming out from us this year.
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