Interview w/ SLEEPING IN GETHSEMANE at The Crucial Fest
NINJA TEAM GO Where are you guys from and how did yall meet?
Sleeping In Gethsemane - We are from Fargo ND. We all moved from small towns in ND & MN to go to school in Fargo & ended up meeting each other at some Fargo shows. NINJA TEAM GO! Whats the line up and whos playing what SIG- Shane Heilman - Drums. Brandon LaPlante - Guitar. Brandon Schiwal - Bass.
NINJA TEAM GO! How and when did Sleeping In Gethsemane come about?
Sleeping In Gethsemane- Shane & I (Brandon L.) had wanted to play together for a while after seeing each other play with our other bands. Schiwal was the odd man out who wasn’t in a band, but would heckle me that we should play together at all of my shows. We had a mutual friend who had lent me a book, (Hey Nostradamus) which she had also told him about. He saw it in my back pocket one day at a show and used that as his way into conversing with me about playing music together. I was in 3 bands at the time so I didn’t want anything more. After my other bands developed more I got stuck in the routine of only being allowed to play a certain style. It was very frustrating when all of my riffs were to heavy for one band, not heavy enough for another & all out too complicated for the third. So when Breather Resist came and played in Fargo I was floored at how they were able to be heavy in such a different way then what I was used to. Schiwal was at that show & I was so inspired to write new music that I told him to grab his acoustic bass so we could go write. We went and wrote until the sun came up. After we had a decent amount of material we brought Shane into a practice in which he liked the material but was fed up with playing with guys with shitty equipment, I.E. Schiwal. So after that practice we didn’t play together again for a good 5 months. The next time we all practiced together Schiwal had an ampeg rig & a new fender bass & from then on we have been Sleeping In Gethsemane.
NINJA TEAM GO! Your not a christian band are you? how did you come up with the name of the band?
Sleeping In Gethsemane - We are not a Christian band. None of us are religious. We use our name, which was derived from a Christian story, to deliver a positive message rather than the negative one that is normally given when telling the story of Gethsemane. We are all very studied in the realm of religion. We were all brought up in religious homes and we all moved towards more rational ways of thought when we started to form our own definitions of what our lives were about. There are so many different ways to look at every single thing in this universe & that is the basis for us using “Sleeping In Gethsemane” as our name. The story consists of divinity testing humans with a task that is impossible and then reprimanding us for not being capable of that said task. In all of our lives we experience someone or many people getting down on us for not living our lives the way they think we should. Everyone should have the self confidence to live out their lives in a way that they see fit. When we are bombarded with statements that we are not good enough and that we are doing it wrong how can we expect to even begin to live our lives in a positive way. In a shorter version, it is an affirmation of life. All in all, just “LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE!”
NTG- Good answer
NINJA TEAM GO! If you were gunna promote your own band to a magazine or someone who has never heard you before what would your answer to them be?…
Sleeping In Gethsemane-This is a tough question. Every time we try and describe our music to someone who hasn’t experienced it live we fall far short. Trying to use other bands to describe our sound doesn’t work, because there are so many instrumental bands, but none of them fit into the exact realm that we do. We definitely have something unique when it comes to the world of instrumental rock. Even in saying that I cringe at the sound of sounding arrogant. We are from the midwest, so one of the characteristics that define us is our inability to be outwardly cocky or pompous when we speak of what we do. Sometimes that is a huge crutch for us. We would love to reach more people that we can’t reach by just playing d.i.y. shows all over the world, but we don’t know how to transfer the experience of seeing us into any other form of media. So I am going to use a quote from a girl who saw us for the first time a few weeks ago and maybe that will help describe the importance of seeing us live. “Your shows are a whole new kind of live art.” I hope that explains it better than I can.
NINJA TEAM GO ! where do you guys draw insperation from?
Sleeping In Gethsemane- When we first started our influences were all over the place. Shane was really into more progressive music, I was into much heavier aggressive bands & Schiwal has always been the indie kid. Another thing that influences our music a lot is where we are from. Fargo is a pretty flat & barren place. It is now recognized as the city with the worst weather in the U.S. It is not an easy place to live and stay positive. That has been where a lot of the emotion in our music comes from. Now we are more influenced by the bands we tour with and the life we lead being in a touring band more than anything. We have been blessed with the chance to tour with some of the most innovative and interesting bands in our first few years of touring & because of that I think we have had the greatest chance to develop who we are and what we sound like through that way of life.
NINJA TEAM GO! You guys have a huge sound coming from only 3 people can you explain how thats done or maybe what your writing process is like???
Sleeping In Gethsemane- Another tough one. Our sound is derived from all three of us playing as hard and with as much passion as we can. Shane’s drumming is extremely intense and unrelenting, that along with the fact that he hits harder than THOR on drums that sound huge in the first place creates a need for Schiwal and I to be really thick, really loud & really intense. So I guess the way we all play just automatically created our sound. We didn’t ever really need to sit and think about what we wanted to sound like, it just happened. When it comes to our writing process it has evolved with every record we have written. Our first record “THE GREAT WHITE NORTH” I had all of the guitar lines composed before we were even a band. Then Schiwal came in and wrote his parts to mine & then Shane came in and he rearranged some parts & added a few and we honed in on our technique and sound & our first album was born. For our second record “BURROWS” it was more of an all together effort. We would jam on a new riff at practice and then we would separate into just two of us and work on developing it further, then we would bring the third person back in to finish it up. With our new record “WHEN THE LANDSCAPE IS QUIET AGAIN” which we are currently writing, we are kind of doing an amalgamation of both writing processes, just with a little bit more knowledge of how we work together. We are planning on doing a lot more production ourselves before we actually go into record the final product on this record though. So it will be a much more thought through representation of what we want to create.
NINJA TEAM GO! I know you guys were just on tour and played The Crucial Fest in SLC ,How was that?Are you guys planing on doing anouther tour soon? We need to get you to the west coast and tour asap ..
Sleeping In Gethsemane- The Crucial fest was amazing! Simply put it was all of our favorite people from our U.S. tours all in one place at one time. It was the coolest, loudest, drunkest family reunion of all time. All the bands were incredible & the fact that it went as well as it did for a first time festival is proof of how amazing Jarom, Jesse & Thomas are & how amazing the scene we are all a part of is. There is so much love & support in the SLC music scene & that is something to be very proud of! All of the bands and people involved in Crucial Fest are at the helm of something huge. We are a huge family that will support each other forever & I am very proud to be a part of such an amazing thing!
NTG! I agree
Sleeping In Gethsemane- We aren’t going to be doing any significant tours any time in the near future because we are working on writing our 3rd full length album “WHEN THE LANDSCAPE IS QUIET AGAIN.” So we have to concentrate really hard on making that our main thing. We really only did this tour to come and play The Crucial Fest. So once we finish our new record their should be lots of touring all over the world. We’ve toured the US multiple times and Europe once, so now we will plan on doing a full US tour, Canadian tour, another European tour, Japan & Australia. Thats at least what we are hoping to do to support this new record. Lets hope it all comes together.
Sleeping In Gethsemane- Other than all of that I really don’t think I have anything left in my brain. There are probably so many more things that I would like people to hear about when it comes to SIG, but I am at a loss right now. Lets just do another interview in the future to catch up.
http://SIGmerch.bigcartel.com
http://sigband.com
http://www.myspace.com/sleepingingethsemane
http://http://www.myspace.com/initrecords
http://www.last.fm/music/Sleeping+In+Get…
http://www.twitter.com/sleepgethsemane
