Exclusive Interview: Misery Signals’ Ryan Morgan

Misery Signals’ new album Absent Light is not only one of the best metalcore releases in 2013 or the several years that have passed since Controller, but also undeniable proof of the band’s maintained relevance and importance in modern heavy music, over a decade into their career.

I had the opportunity to speak with founding member and lead guitarist Ryan Morgan on the new album, the hiatus between releases, and the dynamics of being a crowd-funded band in this new era of the ever-shifting music industry.

First off, I wanted to congratulate you on the new record – which is absolutely killer. This is not the first string of dates you’ve done since the end of the hiatus, but judging by how that first show back at Santo’s went [in NYC in July] and the reception, it seems like people are pretty darn glad to have you guys back.

Yeah, yeah, thank you, man. We weren’t entirely sure how it was going to go because people were coming off a period of inactivity – we weren’t as active touring everywhere as we had been in the past.  Not every band is as fortunate to have people stick with them without being really active.  We weren’t really sure if we were going to be behind the 8-ball when we came back and did what we wanted to do with this record, but I think we’re in a position where we’re lucky to have fans who are willing to wait and stick with us and develop a bit of an appetite after that sort of break.  I feel really fortunate that that’s the way that it’s gone because I don’t know that every band can get away with having time off like that.

Yeah, absolutely.  You mentioned a sort of “appetite” for it, but at close to five years it might be more of a starvation.

[Laughter]

That could be more to the point.

As personal or as impersonal as you care to speak of, what were some of the details or the general situation going on in that five years between Controller and Absent Light? 

There were a number of factors.  One was band geography.  We had sort of split up to where we weren’t all in the same spot, and then a couple of dudes had left the band around then.  We were a little bit scattered as far as the members went, but also the band business was getting a little jammed up by our record label situation.  We were on Ferret Records for the last three albums.  They’re a cool label but things got a little weird over there because they were absorbed by Warner Brothers.  I think they were partners for a little while and then just sort of lost control of the company.  We didn’t really know anyone that was there anymore and didn’t really know what was going to happen with our next release.  The label thing became a little bit of a bummer.  It had been a great relationship that we had for those previous albums, but that was out the window once these different people took over who didn’t really know who we were and weren’t used to dealing with bands our size.  We are operating in a little bit different of a ballgame.  So that was another one of the main factors that led to the extra time before we were able to put an album out.  We eventually got dudes back in the band and found ways to write while living in different areas and got together like how we used to write and got back on track.  There was definitely a period of doubt there where we weren’t entirely sure that we were going to be able to make that happen.

Yeah, very understandable. What was the writing process for this album like?  As you mentioned, you had members leaving, you had new members coming, you had an old member coming back and you also recorded this at a bunch of different studios.  Correct?

Correct.  I can’t give you a singular answer on how the writing process goes because it’s taken place over a couple of years and the band had been very inactive or uncertain.  The writing process changed and that was to the benefit of the album because there were so many different approaches that we took that spanned those years. But we ended up with results that worked together.  We didn’t have too much of the same thing happening because we had different processes.  There were songs that we wrote our own parts for and sent them back and forth to each other and revised them and eventually got together and worked on them, and then there were songs that we started when we were all in the room together like how we used to write.  We had this varied degree of plans of attack happen all throughout those formative years for making this album.  I think that’s really made it be the best that the material could be because we drew more material than we needed for the recording.  I wrote a bunch of songs that didn’t even make the album that are kind of gone or rewritten or scrapped or whatever.

I think when you have that much time in between an album, it’s almost like the first album syndrome all over again – you have so much to draw from and you have so much time that you’re sitting on these songs and revising them — that when they’re finally released, they hit that much harder.

That’s exactly right, man.  I felt a little bit of that.  We were gone for a little bit.  We changed a couple of members.  We could kind of do whatever we want because people would expect it to be different.  I also feel like there is a danger in that because you don’t want to totally alienate what the band has created.  I didn’t want to write something that was totally different because I had some of those same forces that inspired my writing on the earlier records, and the other guys did too.  It was written in the same spirit [as our past records] and that’s a whole lot of the reason that it ends up sounding like the best of all the records—because it is.

I find it interesting that you tied this album back to the earlier records, because after Mirrors and Controller — at least to my humble ears — sounding a little more hopeful and uplifting, Absent Light, by no coincidence I suppose, given the title, seems to be a much darker record both musically and lyrically.  Even the lyrical content seems to have returned to that kind of sinister narrative quality that it had on Malice. Some of these tracks are a little unsettling as far as what they seem to say; “Departure” comes to mind.  Which songs or song on this album would you say is the most striking or meaningful and why?

I think you are onto something with the darkness on the album and the kind of hopelessness of it.  I think there is a tinge of hope in it, but it’s a little less obvious.  You have to really search for it.  It is a lot more of an album that’s written from a dark place the way Malice was, and I think it’s the most desolate of the albums.  I can’t say that there is one song that speaks to that particularly because it was written so much together.  “Departure” and “Carrier” are both stories out of songs about specific things, both of which are pretty unsettling, but the rest of the album is about being lost and having detached yourself from something that previously was a guiding light for you.  So there is definitely something happening there with a bit of confusion in it and a lot of it was written in a therapeutic manner trying to work something out.

Yeah, absolutely.  One thing that obviously played a huge role in Absent Light was crowd funding.  Indiegogo, I believe it was, which has been a point, interestingly enough, that has stirred up a lot of opinions these days.  I’d say that from the result of your campaign, it didn’t seem to bother anyone in the Misery Signals camp.  I do talk to people a fair amount about this topic because it seems like it’s a game changer, of sorts, for a lot of bands.  I come across some people who, for whatever reason, have this mentality that bands shouldn’t be asking people for money or it isn’t punk to do something like that.  What do you say to that?

I had those same apprehensions at first but thinking it though I think it’s way more punk to ask the fans for money than it is to ask a big company for money.  It’s way more punk for us to get the money from the people that are going to buy the album anyway instead of from Warner Brothers, borrowing it and paying it back.  I think a lot of the apprehension for crowd funding comes from bands handling it in a bit of a sleazy way and trying to cash in by setting the goal a little too high or offering perks that are a little bit exploitative to their fan base like “come out and have a pizza party for $1,000” or whatever.  That’s a little bit arrogant and I think some of that comes across in the way certain campaigns were handled.  I think we tried to be really humble with it and just offer things that people would legitimately want to pay for and basically treat it as a preorder for the album.  If it’s handled that way it’s because a) we stayed in control of the rights of the album and we’re not in the situation we were in with Warner Brothers, b) we make all the decisions on how the record is made and how the band is running the business and c) … let’s see . . . [Laughs].

You don’t have to have a C if there isn’t one. [Laughs]

Yeah, there was another point I was going to make but lost my train of thought.

No problem.  So switching gears a little bit, there’s an element of your sound which doesn’t often come up in your music and I don’t think is often talked about in interviews or whatnot, but it’s always there in some capacity and it’s always very different in how it’s presented.  I am referring to clean vocals.  Most of the time they’re executed in a harsh delivery by Jesse on the first album, and Karl from thereon out (and as anyone who has heard Controller or Solace knows, he has a pretty darn good singing voice).  There were clean vocals on a couple of songs on Absent Light but they sound completely different.  Were they delivered by different personnel or arranged differently? 

Karl is actually a really good clean, pretty vocalist.  It’s never been the focus in the vocals.  I think the danger there is that there are a lot of bands that have hinted at that and have gotten a lot of appreciation for it and then totally gone for it because people have latched onto that or whatever.  We always tried to keep it as a dynamic choice and not as a career choice to lead in that direction.  You mentioned that there is a little bit of clean singing but there is also a guest vocal on the last song by the vocalist from Bad Rabbits that added a cool R&B element. . .

Oh, from Boston? Really?  Wow, I wouldn’t have had any idea. I just knew that there was a note at the end of “Everything Will Rust” that you would just have to grab your nuts to hit.  I was like “that was Karl??”

Yeah. No, no, that’s a soulful black man doing that.

Oh wow, that’s an awesome connection.  I would never have guessed that.  I also think that’s very consistent with what you have done in the past as far as guest vocalists especially with people totally outside of hardcore like Patrick Stump on Mirrors.

Right, right, exactly.  I think we kind of treated the clean vocals the same as we have on every record.

Awesome.  This is a bit of a philosophical question as far as Misery Signals is concerned: it’s always struck me as a bit of an injustice that Misery Signals aren’t bigger than they are, especially given the number of bands that have come out with essentially the same sound that you guys had coined so many years ago.  Obviously you’ve had an influence, but do you think that there is an overall greater sense of recognition that has come at this stage of your career and within this current state of the metal/hardcore scene?

I’m not sure, man.  I feel that we do get more credibility than we do money or something.

[Laughter]

I understand the comment that you’re making and there are bands that are really big and are doing something similar to what we’ve done in the past or even have admitted to being influenced by us—certain bands that I won’t name at the moment that are monstrous.

I do feel like we do get a lot of credibility and recognition sometimes that we are maybe worthy of.  I do feel like we have influenced a lot of bands and I am proud of that.  I think that’s one of the coolest things about Misery Signals, that it was sort of a musicians’ band where people that are drawn to making music found things to appreciate about us, and that’s kind of flattering in its own right aside from any spectrum of how successful or how big we are as a band or whether or not that’s an injustice.  I would have to say that we’re pretty fortunate for what we have and I definitely wouldn’t want to say that we deserve to be bigger or anything like that.