DAYLIGHT DIES’ JESSE HAFF: THE EXCLUSIVE METALSUCKS INTERVIEW
When MetalSucks contributor Christopher Roddy phoned Jesse Haff for his scheduled interview, the Daylight Dies drummer was busy working — on a holiday. As much as we love Daylight Dies and continue to spread the word to the masses, Haff pays his bills as the sole web developer for a 60-person media firm in Los Angeles, though he works from Brooklyn where he’s recently relocated from his native North Carolina. Though Haff was busy juggling work with rehearsing daily for the then-upcoming 10-date tour with Soilwork and Darkane, he still found time to give Roddy an incredibly engaging interview, offering insight into the band’s early days with Relapse Records, the band’s current state of affairs, and their writing and recording process for Dismantling Devotion and Lost to the Living. Read the full interview after the jump.
How are the winter months treating you out there in N.C.?
Well I don’t even live out in North Carolina anymore. I live in Brooklyn nowadays. A couple of us moved actually. I moved to New York late last year, and I’ve been enjoying it. We needed something different. It’s a lot colder up there, and I’ve appreciated that. There’s a lot more winter weather, and I like that. Barre [Gambling] the guitar player just moved to L.A. so we’re all over the country now.
Wow. Do you do the whole passing song files back and forth and constructing songs that way or are you able to get together frequently enough to rehearse when you’re not touring?
Actually we’ve been doing the passing the sound files around thing for a long time including when we all lived within 10 miles of each other. So that’s not really something that is new, but thankfully we got used to that. So the distance isn’t really too much of an issue although we used to be a band that would rehearse 3 times a week for several hours at a time. We like playing. I wish we could still do that. We like playing and jamming, but as you grow older you cannot stay in the same place forever so we have to make adjustments. Now we’re sort of struggling to make it work where a couple of us live thousands of miles apart from each other. The question was when I moved to New York and Barre moved to L.A. or whenever anybody else moves anywhere else, are we going to be able to keep this going? This tour coming up is going to be the first test because now we’re all flying back to North Carolina to start rehearsing tomorrow. So far it’s working.
Going back to the beginning, what personally inspired you to head down the path of being a musician? Were there people who fostered and provided the influence or was it music itself that put the desire in your head to pursue this not just as a hobby but as a career ultimately?
All I know personally is that my earliest memories are of being obsessed with music. I had endless tapes of whatever my favorite song was from the time of my earliest memory and carrying around a little radio wherever I went playing songs. I have always been very into music, and when I was younger I played the violin and saxophone in school. I played the piano a little bit. So I always gravitated towards instruments. My sister, who is several years older than me, she was playing the cello. There was always a nice piano in our house. I’ve been surrounded by music, and I’ve had a personality that was drawn to it. Also from a very early age, I decided, and I’m not exactly sure what sparked it, is that I would always play the drums. I had a Muppet Babies drum kit, literally, and I graduated from that to some other amateur kit. As I grew older, I just took it more seriously. It came to a point when I was like 12 or something where I was like “am I going to continue spending my time playing sports like soccer and baseball during the day or am I going to spend that time playing drums and making music?” I made a decision at that point where I was going to play drums. It was only a couple of years later that I met Barre. I met him when I was 15 and very quickly after we started playing together, we were like “we want to do this for real. We want to really pursue this as something that’s an honest, real musical expression of ourselves. We want to see where we can take this.”
So how did you two originally hook up and did you have similar tastes and ideas regarding style and direction from the get go or was it something that evolved with the relationship?
Both actually. When we met each other, I was 15 he might have been 14 maybe a year younger than that, back then it was Slayer, Metallica, and Megadeth. It was the bands from back then. Right around that period, the Scandinavian metal scene was emerging. We were both lucky that there was a college radio station around this area that had a DJ who was super into this emerging scene and would play bands like Amorphis, Hypocrisy, Entombed and that kind of stuff. We were blown away by the sound and so we grew together and that became our influence from a really early stage. The way that we first hooked up is that it had something to do with me looking for a metal guitar player and through some friend of Barre’s hooked us up together. We jammed in my parents’ house a couple of times. We got along really well and both of us had the same sort of drive. We clicked immediately.
Originally you accepted the idea that Relapse Records was interested in diversifying their roster and Daylight Dies provided a key to reaching out to different audiences beyond grindcore and noise. In hindsight did you think that they dropped the ball with refusing to go all the way with you guys?
That’s a good question. Nobody intentionally fucked anything up. That’s for sure. I think their intention from the get go was sincere. Relapse did have other bands like Amorphis. They had bands that weren’t necessarily all grindcore. Granted I agree with you, you could say the label is extreme deathgrind and all that kind of stuff. We felt that maybe there was a little place for us and maybe it’ll work out. I think it was sort of a mix between not knowing what to do with us and at that stage we didn’t really knew what it took to push it as far as we maybe could have. By that I mean we didn’t accept every single tour offer that they sent our way. That was our first album, and it was a really critical period. I’m sure they could say that if we took every single tour and moved back in with our parents and quit our jobs and did that route (which some bands do), then maybe things would have turned out differently. We didn’t do that. We did do some high profile tours with them, but we weren’t comfortable with all of us losing our jobs. I don’t know, but I do think on their end they also didn’t know what to do with us. After a period of time the honeymoon ended. When it came time to do the next album, we went back to them and said “we need some money”. A lot of the bands on the roster back then, the style of music that they were playing required a very little amount of money to get the production they needed. If you listen to the productions, they are super raw. We were trying to do something that was much more grandiose in a way. It required a way more expensive production budgets than they wanted to give us. We tried anything we could do to get it as cheap as possible. You can listen to the first album, and it suffers from production issues. We didn’t want to repeat that again. We knew what it would take to get to the next stage, and that was ultimately the problem is when we came to that stage.
So when the end of your relationship with Relapse came to fruition, you lost a vocalist and were inactive for about a year. When you recruited a new front man and were looking to secure the funds for this new album, were there hard feelings when Relapse balked and sent you looking for support from another label? Did you feel a kind of disloyalty or stabbed in the back from them?
We didn’t feel stabbed in the back, but I would be lying if I said we weren’t upset. We wanted that to work out. We developed relationships with people who worked there, and we liked the people who worked there. We grew up listening to bands that were on Relapse. There were some hard feelings for a little bit with being upset that they wouldn’t take the chance and believe that our next album would be worth the money that we were asking for basically. That was short lived because you have to get over it. We sort of realized the reality of the situation, and like you said, we had other issues that we had to deal with: our vocalist left and we wanted to get a permanent second guitar player. We didn’t have one up to that point. So we had a lot of internal drama that we had to solve, any drama with Relapse was short lived.
At one point, The End Records were interested in signing you guys, weren’t they?
Yeah. We’ve been lucky. We’ve talked to several labels. The End was actually interested in us the same time that Relapse was. We literally had the contract from The End Records and we were days away from signing to The End for No Reply but a friend of mine said that he heard rumors that Relapse was interested. So we put everything on hold and said let’s talk to Relapse.
Were Relapse more established or were you more into the roster of Relapse at the time?
That had nothing to do with the roster. It had to do with Relapse offering a better deal and being more established. That was it. After Relapse we were close to signing with Earache. We had an Earache contract in our hands, and I’m glad that didn’t happen because they ran into some serious money issues. In the end we ended up going with Candlelight of course.
What’s your relationship with Candlelight like?
It’s good. It’s very chill. Paula Hogan is the ruler of Candlelight U.S. and we slept at her house a million times. We’re friends with her and other people at Candlelight. Whenever we’re up there and passing by, we try to crash there and save some money. The guys that work there are all super nice, and we can chat about politics or whatever. It’s like friends basically. So it works out really well.
With Lost of the Living, you haven’t necessarily made a tremendously heavy album as you cracked with an album with a significant amount of weight. Taking that contract into consideration, I’d like to hear from you describe Daylight Dies’ style and approach as though you were talking to someone who hadn’t yet heard your music.
I think I would say that we’re not a metal band that focuses on aggression primarily like many metal bands do. We’re more of a cerebral introspective metal band which is different. I think how you described is pretty accurate too. It’s not that it’s overwhelmingly heavy like some other death metal bands’ goal is to be as heavy as possible. That’s never our goal. Our goal doesn’t have anything to do with that. Our goal has to do with emotional weight. It has to do with introspection. It has to do with expressing ourselves in a totally different way than I guess the clichés. When you say metal to somebody who has never heard our stuff, probably the first thing that pops up into their mind is something a lot faster and maybe heavier and down tuned or chunkiness than we are. I would say that we’re focused on a more cerebral introspective variety of metal.
The songwriting has progressed so much since even Dismantling Devotion. Giving the arc of Daylight Dies’ career thus far, it has been pretty striking. I want you to describe exactly how a track such as And a Slow Surrender, which is a relatively brief instrumental. How does a song like that get written? It’s probably one of the most evolved and involving songs that you guys have composed for the new record with a string intro, gorgeous melodic leads, and it pushes into one of the two clean song tracks on the album. How do you put a song like that together? Where does it come from? Is the entire band involved or does someone actually comes up with these ideas?
Well that particular song was written, I believe, exclusively by Barre. We all contribute to the songs. For example, Last Alone was written exclusively by Egan. Then there are numerous parts on this album that were written by me. I play guitar, a little bit, as well. I play guitar, but I am not a guitar player. So we all contribute. For that song, what happened was Barre basically had all the riffs to that song. He had them compiled, and they really didn’t have a home at first. While we were working on A Subtle Violence, we realized the arc of that song could flow into all the ideas for And a Slow Surrender and essentially when we were rehearsing that song for months that was one song. And a Slow Surrender didn’t exist. It was A Subtle Violence and And a Slow Surrender was the ending of that song. We viewed it that way. A Subtle Violence is this real kind of brooding song of building intensity. It gets very intense and then sort of releases it and then builds up again. Then it has this end part where it was a total catharsis where you sort of let everything go. So we viewed it as the final release of that song. Then at the very final stages, I think literally while we were recording it we thought “we could still have it butt up next to the song as we have been playing it for the last couple of months, but why don’t we drop a track marker and give it a separate name.” So you are surrendering to the subtle violence is one way of looking at it. They were all one song until we decided to make it two because we realized that it could be enjoyed on its own. You might not want to listen to A Subtle Violence that comes before it. You might want to just get into it. It works with it, but it also works alone. That’s how that happened.
So you mentioned that you play a variety of instruments or have played a variety of instruments. You’ve added different stuff beyond the drums to the album. Was that you on the early EPs on the piano?
No that was actually Guthrie our vocalist. He also played some piano too. Like Barre is an amazing guitar player. He’s very competent with music and music theory. So are Egan and Charley. They are all extremely good at that. I can say that I am a drummer. I know how to play drums, and I think I’m competent at drums. I would never say I’m a guitar player because I don’t know notes very well. I don’t play smoothly that well, but I play well enough to record an idea and get it through clearly and have it be played competently by another member of the band. Like the last song on Dismantling Devotion, I wrote every riff of that song, but I could never have played it as nicely as it was by Barre.
I kind of miss the piano touches that were on those early releases. With this new album you added some strings or woodwinds? Any thoughts as to bringing back some piano?
We miss the piano too. If you ask Barre or anybody, we’re all like “I wish we had some piano.” We said that early on Dismantling. We wanted some piano on Lost to the Living. We’re the kind of band that has lots of ideas. So maybe at one point we had a couple of piano pieces that just didn’t measure up. I could easily see that returning in the future. I know all of us liked that dynamic as well.
You used the same producer [Jens Bogren] this time out, didn’t you?
Yes, the same as Dismantling.
What was his reaction to the new material as compared to his work on the previous album? What did he bring to the table on the new album that managed to surpass what he produced with Dismantling? Would you consider using him one more time in the future?
I certainly would. I think he’s phenomenal. I think that we’ve been searching for somebody to bring our music to life in the way that he has for years, and we finally found that so we don’t want to lose that. I think his reaction to Lost to the Living was really positive. When we first went to him with the previous album, we were sort of apprehensive about what his reaction would be. You would hope that he likes it because if he does you think he’ll do a better job. I had heard what he had done on like Bloodbath, and he had done some stuff on the Katatonia album. He hadn’t done Opeth yet at the time that he did Dismantling, but I could tell that he brought a really good production that was really different. Every album didn’t sound like it was the same album coming out of the same factory. That’s initially why we went to him. With Dismantling he actually went out of his way to tell us how much he liked the material. As soon as it was done he put it up as one of his credits on the Fascination Street Studio website. So it was genuine, and it was really flattering. That helped the relationship and helped ensure trust. He was into what we’re doing. It was sort of this unspoken thing. This time there was a lot less communication than Dismantling because it didn’t really require as much. It was sort of like “you know what we did last time. Here’s what we’re doing this time and here are the changes that we want.” We leave a lot of trust up to him because he is in Switzerland and we are in the U.S. We don’t have the money to all fly out there and stand over his shoulder nor do I think he’s the kind of person who would really want that. So there is a lot of trust. He’ll send us a mix back and we can comment back on what we want changed in the mix. There are a lot of bands who feel that they would never want to put themselves in that position, and we didn’t either for many years. That’s how much we trust and respect him with what he’s already done for us. We know that he’s going to hear our music in the raw form before it is fully mixed and produced. He’s going to say “okay I know exactly what they’re going for and I can bring this to life.” It’s very smooth working with him.
You guys have a little bit of a tour coming up here. It’s not too long. Beyond that, what’s on the table for the band?
No it’s pretty short. It’s like 10 days. Like I said earlier, we just in late 2008 moved to opposite ends of the country. Now is going to be a new era for the band in how we’re all going to get the motivation independently to write and collaborate with each other to come up with another album. At least for us, I read about some bands who are like “we wrote this album in a month” and I’m like “I will kill you” because it’s so enraging to read that. For us it is so not the case. It is this laborious process that goes on for a really long time. If you ask Barre about Lost to the Living I think he’ll describe it as a year long daily process of working with stuff and rehearsing all the time and sending tons of files back and forth. We are getting faster as we go along, but we’re all the biggest critics of ourselves. We’re the first to criticize anything that we do. That makes it hard to write quickly. As far as I see past this tour, I think it’s going to get back into figuring out building some momentum for writing and figuring out a flow that works. Lost to the Living came out in June in 2008. It’s been awhile now, and I think it’s hard to imagine that we’re going to be offered to go on amazing tours. We take things as they come at this point.
Lost to the Living was one of my favorite albums of last year of any band and genre. I absolutely adored that album. My wife is sick of it at this point.
That’s flattering.
It’s so fantastic. There are albums that you put on a certain mood. This particular album while it seems like it is meant for such a specific mood, I can put that thing on anytime and get lost in it. I really appreciate you guys and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to talk with me. I wish you guys as much continued success as possible. I will go on pimping your wares.
That’s the best shit I’ve heard in a long time. Thanks for saying all that. I can’t tell you how much it means to hear something like that. Thank you for the interview and the opportunity to get the word out about what we’re doing.
Take care and good luck with the work, and I look forward to hearing more from you soon.
Take care please.
-CR
