A brief chat with Wilson

Yellow Scene: What’s happening in Detroit?

Matt Puhy: Honestly, I’ve been talking about this quite a bit over the past six months. It seems like the city’s always changing, with how often we’re gone. When we come back, it seems like somebody’s doing some new project somewhere. The one thing that I’m at least hearing is that things are always progressing. It’s nice to hear, after all of the negative press that the city already gets, that every time I come back I’m hearing something positive about what’s going on, regardless of what it is. Nothing too particular stands out at the moment, but it’s definitely moving in the right direction which is good.

YS: People love the Right to Rise album – have you been working on a follow-up?

MP: We started recording demos for the next record about a week after we finished the last one. We’re constantly writing. Jason, our lead guitar player, he’s got this little ProTools rig on his laptop so he brings it everywhere we go. Whenever we get some spare time, he’ll knock out a couple of ideas and then we’ll sit down and just kind of mess with them. At this point, we probably have seven or eight new songs, maybe a few more. Right when we got out of the studio, we were still in the process. We had spent a few months out there, living in a house, and that’s what we were doing all day. As opposed to the first record – we went out and did the whole thing in two weeks. We had this whole process inrained in our heads so it seemed natural to keep going with it. All the while we were recording, we were still plugging away on some new ideas because there were a few songs that we had written for the record while we were in Atlanta. Working on the follow-up. Can’t wait to record that one, even though this has barely been out for a few months.

YS: Do you like playing Colorado?

MP: Oh yeah. We’ve done Denver quite a few times, and Colorado Springs as well. Within the last seven or eight months, this will be our third or fourth time in Denver proper. It’s a great city – we always love coming there. We actually have a lot of family and friends from Detroit that are living in Denver, so it’s a home away from home. We can stay with friends, reminisce and enjoy the city. It’s a great stop for us for sure.

YS: What can we expect from the set?

MP: Probably the same things that we try to provide every time we play, which is something hard, heavy, and leave the people wanting more. We’ve got thirty minutes on this tour, so we’re trying to get everybody properly warmed up. We’ve got a couple of songs from the first record, and then the majority are new tunes. We definitely put together a banger set because these two bands, Trivium and Tremonti, are bands that we didn’t really know how we’d fit in. They’ve got their own things, and we wanted to see if we’ve got something that would appeal to their fans but still something that’s high energy and unique in our own way. So we’ll definitely be trying to hit everybody with our best for those thirty minutes.

YS: When the tour’s over, what’s next?

MP: We’ve got a couple of pending tours that might end up taking us overseas at the beginning of the new year – nothing we can announce just yet. We have a couple of home shows with Pop Evil and some more one-offs.