IWABO will return in the fall for a headlining tour.
With song titles like “Danger in the Manger” and “Tastes Like Kevin Bacon”, it is obvious that the guys (and woman) of the Louisiana based band Iwrestledabearonce are working from a stream of consciousness perspective. The band’s debut full length album, “It’s All Happening” was released last year, and the album is an dream for fans with musical ADD- with many different genres of music changing course several times throughout the course of one song.
The band has been touring since the album’s release, and have had tours with Dillinger Escape Plan and others before joining up with the Warped Tour for a slew of dates through the end of the tour. During the stop in Detroit, I had a chance to talk with IWABO lead singer Krysta Cameron. Krysta and I discussed the inspiration behind some of the very random sound drops on the album, as well as the band’s new 3 disc CD/DVD combo that just came out.
Here’s my interview with Krysta:
AM: With the band being on the road at least a year at this point, how is the band’s mood at the moment?
KC: We’re feeling happy, horny and drunk (laughs). We’ve been on Warped Tour for about a week now, and there’s been a lot of great times. A lot of male bonding, female bonding, you name it. The best part of the day is at the end of the day, where everybody is just kicking back, relaxing and drinking a few beers.
AM: What sort of musical background did you bring to the band originally?
KC: Well, I was always in a band that did weird s—. The guys I’m in the band with now came from a somewhat similar background, and we wanted to combine our weird sounds and styles. We decided to roll with it and if it people liked it- they liked it. If not, oh well…
AM: When recording the album, how difficult was it to meld all the different genres together?
KC: It’s always difficult because we don’t have the typical verse-chorus-verse setup in our songs, we’re always using different time signatures and different lyrics and melodies are different from song to song- so it was a struggle- but it was a good thing. You always wanna push yourself and you always want to do that in your life to create something better than the last time you worked on something.
AM: Where did some of the inspiration come from for the different sound drops on the album, and was there a lot of problems getting clearance for them?
KC: Take the Dixie Car Horn in one of our songs- it was pretty much a drunken mistake. It was like “let’s put that in there”, then we heard it and said that it sounded good- let’s go with it. Something like that is us in a nutshell. There’s some country stuff in there, we also used a part from one of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies. John, our guitarist, is a huge Freddy Krueger fan and it made his day. There were plenty of movie quotes that we couldn’t use, it was just a huge pain in the ass.
AM: The band recently released a special edition version of the album- who is on the remixes?
KC: We had Ben Weinman from Dillinger remix one song, David Isen from Horse the Band worked on another and also Jimmy Urine from Mindless Self Indulgence. The remixes are really cool, and really enjoyed them. If you pick up the CD and get on the internet and you can make your own IWABO remix. We haven’t done it yet, but we’re gonna have a contest for the best remix.
AM: What have you seen as the band’s weirdest gig so far?
KC: We were in Portugal, and we got there- there were dogs running around loose. There was a punky looking homeless chick that looked like she was trying to create her own “Jungle Book”. We get to the venue, and there’s hookers walking all around and people yelling at us. We start playing the show, and the kids knew all the words and were freaking out. It was amazing because it came from a place you didn’t expect that sort of show to happen, but it did.
Iwrestledabearonce continues their dates on the Warped Tour through August 15th. For additional band info and tour dates are available at www.iwrestledabearonce.com. The band’s album, “It’s All Happening”, is out now.
