Photo by Marms RTT

BLEEDING THROUGH front man BRANDAN SCHIEPPATI talks to BIANCA VALENTINO while doing laundry unwinding from a long (US) summer on the road supporting latest record Declaration.

Declaration is the Orange County, Southern Californian metal-core outfit’s fifth studio outing. A follow up to the 2006 released The Truth. “It’s about the last seven years of touring in this band,” informs Schieppati, “Being a band for ten years we’ve gone straight through the trends and straight through people’s opinions and that’s what the record is themed off. It’s about having confidence in your ability and moving forward. We’re considered an older band now and that’s all we can really do. We’ve gone through the trendy period of being a band, we’ve seen trends come and go with new bands here and there. We’ve been through the whole thing of bands being the new Bleeding Through that are supposed to knock us off where we are. We’ve been doing it for so long that’s what this album is about: the animosities and struggles of doing this for career.”

Asked when Bleeding Through realised music was their ‘career’ the tattooed front man replies, “In 2002 we were touring a lot but all still coming home to other jobs. We did a tour with one of our friends’ bands and they said that they just tour and they make as much money as they possibly can and they don’t live outside of their means and we just live and tour. We thought ‘Fuck we need to do that!’  We gave it a shot. We quit our jobs and school and just went for it. We made the ultimate sacrifice of having to scrape through for a while.”

The experience of touring was a topic that was discussed at length with the record’s producer Devin Townsend (Strapping Young Lad).  “He still is retired from the road for now, “says Schieppati, “But we talked about that a lot. He got burnt out on it and got sick of people’s opinions about his music. He just wanted to write the music for himself. He hated that when he went on stage every night he was being judged by somebody. I hate that too but it’s something that you just have to deal with because not everyone is going to like your music and not everyone is going to agree with your art you’re doing.”

Schieppati goes on to say, “That’s another thing with the record, not really caring about what people think anymore and having nothing to lose. We’ve proven enough that we’ve been a band for ten years and while people thought we may break up three years into being in this band we’ve proven to people that we can do this and tour at a high rate. With our attitude it’s like if people like this record cool if they don’t we don’t really care because we’re still going to be able to tour, we’re still going to have enough people that find Bleeding Through as somewhat important enough to their life that they’ll support this band. People’s opinion used to bug me and I kind of shook that off a bit. I still care but it was the sort of thing where I’d worry myself sick and couldn’t sleep. I had to calm down a little bit.”

http://www.bleedingthrough.com/