!nterview with Strata vocalist Eric Victorino and bassist Hrag Chanchanian
The End Of The World is coming! Don't worry, it's a good thing. Strata will release their new album 'Strata Presents The End Of The World' on July 17th, and it is a truly spectacular album. More focused and subtle than their previous releases, this will truly be one of the very best albums of 2007. It is bold and blunt, and deals with some rather uncomrtable subjects and emotions that all of us can relate to. I don't say this very often, but go out and buy this album! You won't regret it. I met up with vocalist Eric Victorino to talk about the album and Coma Therapy, his book of short stories. Bassist Hrag Chanchanian was around, and he was cool enough to hang out with us and offer his take on things as well. This interview took place on the same day as the concert we reviewed, which was an impromptu free acoustic jam after the headliner became ill andwas forced to cancel. I've worked with a ton of bands, but very few have been as giving and kind to their fans as Strata. The fact that the new album is absolutely brilliant is a bonus, so they deserve your support.
Anarchy Music: I’ve heard the album guys, and I’m gonna be honest...I don’t like this kind of music at all...but your album is badass!
Eric Victorino: That’s cool. That’s actually a better compliment, I think.
Anarchy: This album is such a growth for the band. What’s gone on over the ast few years to cause this more mature, less angry sound?
Eric: Well, I think you kind of got it with growing up a little bit, for sure, if you think about it a little more logically this is the first album we’ve ever written. We sat down and decided to write an album from beginning to end whereas the last two records that we put out were really just collections of demos. We’d make 3 or 4 songs and then 6 months later do a few more and those records would just be collections of those batches. This is the first time we’ve sat down and had that luxury of ditching songs that we didn’t think fit and tailoring the whole record from beginning to end. That and we’re all old men now.
Anarchy: Regarding the title of the album, ‘Strata Presents The End Of The World’, about midway through I was thinking that it was giving us different situations where it feels like the world is coming to an end, like your girlfriend dumping you or something tragic happens, but by the end of the album I realized that maybe the title is implying the literal end of the world.
Eric: You can look at it as a story. This is something we came up with while sequencing the record. We realized that “Night Falls”, the first song on the record, has a lot of double meaning where it’s describing a nuclear winter. It’s describing when the bombs drop. The rest of the story follows a couple being separated by World War 3. We have this whole concept idea that we’d like to make a film out of sometime. We’re just kind of kicking the idea around. It’d be kind of cool to do a little short film. It means both in context of all of the songs. It means literally the end of the world and the feeling that you get in your gut when the worst thing in the world happens to you. Think about all the times you’ve felt that feeling, and obviously it wasn’t the end of the world because you’re remembering that.
Anarchy: The album was supposed to come out in May, but it’s been moved to July. Any particular reason why?
Eric: Our label makes that call. We have learned to take that as a good thing. One time the artwork wasn’t done. One time we weren’t done with the record. The first time it waspushed back it was obvious that we weren’t going to finish in time. The second time we were still mixing. The most recent time, the album artwork hadn’t been painted yet. There’s a reason for each one.
Hrag Chanchanian: They’re all legit reasons. It has nothing to do with the label being uncertain or anything like that.
Eric: They do all their business things. Our business is to play shows and their business is to sell the record. We’re just doing our jobs.
Anarchy: There’s no way that this record isn’t going to sell. It’s really amazing.
Eric: It’s a dangerous thing to get too confident. What is it, hope for the best but expect the worst?
Anarchy: Tell me about the single. “Cocaine (We’re All Going To Hell)” is the most fun song I’ve ever heard that makes me sad.
Eric: That’s awesome, it means you’re listening to the lyrics. Some of the oldschoolers and Metalheads or whatever would say “it’s too poppy and it’s pussy emo shit” or whatever.
Hrag: We’ve been called emo! (laughs)
Eric: It’s hilarious. But how poppy can a song be that is about a girl getting date raped and dying and being buried?
Anarchy: It works on two levels. It’s got that poppy sing-along chorus but once you listen to the lyrics it blows your mind.
Eric: Hopefully people will pay attention. I think that song was put out there by the label to give our existing fan a taste of the fact that we are changing. The put out the most drastically different song to remind the kids that we’re out there and we are coming back.
Anarchy: And you’re not stagnant. You are changing as a band.
Eric: And get everyone prepared for that. I think as far as radio goes, I think we have some far better songs for that.
Anarchy: One of the most powerful lines I’ve ever heard is from the song “The New National Anthem” that says “I support the troops by asking what they’re really fighting for and I think that’s more patriotic than flying a flag from my front porch”. That hit me like a ton of bricks. A lot of protest songs are written, but few are able to put it out there so simply and bluntly.
Eric: They pull their punches. Why go there if you’re going to puss out?
Anarchy: Not only that, but it’s not an anti-American song. I guess this is leading towards how you guys feel about this, but even the people who voted for Bush and supported him hate this war...
Eric: It’s not about Bush anymore. It’s not even about the war anymore. It’s about the foundation of our country being completely destroyed. Habeas Corpus, that hundreds of years old document that says your government can’t imprison you without a trial, they got rid of that. What’s the motivation for getting rid of something like that? That line that you mentioned, I come from a military family, so when somebody attacks my patriotism because I’m speaking out, I just have to remind them that I think the most unpatritic thing you can do is to send people off to die and not care. Not care when they die, not care when they come back injured and you don’t give them a job. Being a patriotic is about supporting the troops themselves, not about blind faith with the president. It’s ridiculous. Letting him play with people’s lives is not patriotic.
Anarchy: I was all for the war, but I was for crushing the enemies with our bombs instead of sending our troops over there to get shot on the streets from people on rooftops.
Eric: That opens a much bigger debate because there were no enemies at that time over in Iraq. Unless you want to go and destroy the entire region. What they need to do is to sit down and talk to these people and maybe apologize for trampling on their religion.
Anarchy: They damn sure hate us now!
Eric: That’s a generalization.
Anarchy: When I say that I mean that people are angry with us for what we did and going to Iraq to fight us.
Eric: They are becoming more angry.
Anarchy: They are enlisting and saying “get away from our land”.
Eric: You can blame all of this on religion. None of this would be happening if we all believed in science.
Anarchy: (Realizing the another can of worms has been opened) ...okay...
Eric: It’s true. They are killing themselves over fictional characters and which fictional character they like best. It’s kind of unfair to those of us who don’t believe in that. I’m a supporter of the idea of people not killing each other. I’m a humanist. I like the idea of us communicating. It always fascinated me that people in red and blue gangs would fight each other based on which street they were from. That’s what this reminds me of. It’s just as senseless as that.
Anarchy: There’s two thing about your writing that hits me. Most of us let the minutia of life, the small details, pass us by. It seems like you absorb that stuff. A lot of your poetry and songs deals with those details. Also, there seems to be a fascination or fear of death. I may be reading it completely wrong, but it seems like those are recurring themes.
Eric: I’m not afraid of death, but it’s like an animal that’s always chasing you and is always n your tail. It is a recurring theme for me personally because you don’t know how long you have and I want to leave as much work behind as I can and make the biggest ripple in the pond. I think you can judge someone’s life by how many generations they affect. As an artist, that’s the ultimate goal aside from the money and all the other things you can get out of it. It’s how big of a ripple do you make? How long will they continue to care about you and listen to what yu have to say? Authors like Mark Twain or any of these legendary people who are going to be around forever because of what they accomplished. I think if you can do that lyrically or musically then that’s a good goal to have.
Anarchy: It’s much better than having “The Macarena” and being forgotten 6 months later. You might be rich, but you’re unknown.
Eric: The more people that cry when they read your obituary, the bigger death.
Anarchy: When I got the Coma Therapy book, I figured it would be a good thing to read in bed to put me at ease wen I was going to sleep. It didn’t put me at ease.
Eric: Good
Anarchy: I felt rather uncomfortable and dirty after reading it.
Eric: Nice
Hrag: Awesome
Anarchy: At first I thought you were just making shit up, but then as characters and scenarios would repeat or get mentioned I thought, “oh shit, this is his real life”. How much of that is you because you are really putting yourself out there with that book.
Eric: I regret a lot of what I wrote in there, as in getting a little too detailed with certain things. My mom wouldn’t let my little sister read it. My mom edited the book for me, but she was made really uncomfortable because there were a lot of things in there that she didn’t know about me. I don’t think I’m going to stop doing that, I think I just have to get used to it. Enough of it was true that I don’t know how I’m going to write another book because I put so much of my past stories into it. The ones that everyone seems to like are the saddest ones so I think that more horrible things have to happen to me so I can write another book.
Anarchy: In that case I hope you never write another book...
Eric: I’m actually experimenting with learning to write fiction but I keep putting myself into the book.
Anarchy: One of the things that made me the saddest when reading that book, and this is going to sound kind of stupid, but when you write about love, it is a pure unfiltered, complete kind of love, which is something that I’ve never experienced. So it hits me that, if the rest of this book is true, does that mean that this mythical kind of love is really out there?
Eric: I’m married. I’m married for a reason. Given my occupation, getting married is not the normal choice. Most guys would want to run around fucking as many girls as they could, which is easy to do. But if you love someone as much as I love my wife then you write about it, you marry it, and it’s a special thing. It’s definitely not something to pass up.
Anarchy: Are you married?
Hrag: No.
Anarchy: Okay, so you’re not on that side of the fence...
Hrag: Well, I have a serious girlfriend that I love very much, but I think I might wait on the marriage aspect a little bit.
Eric: To me, I imagined that if I was in a car crash and dying, I imagined her not being my wife and trying to visit me in my last 10 minutes and they say “sorry, only immediate family”. That’s one of the biggest reasons to get married is that that person gains access to a lot of things.
Anarchy: You also have what I feel is a very honest and realistic view of the music industry and fame. You’ve written about other bands that have achieved the success that may be coming for you with this record. Are you prepared for what is hopefully going to happen with this record?
Eric: Just as prepared to revel in it as I am to walk away from it. That’s not the reason for doing this. The reason is to make a big dent, to make the best music you can. I think I speak for the whole band, if we all hate where this takes us, then we have no problem stepping away from it and making music for fun again. You get into it for the right reasons and you get ut of it for the right reasons. We’re going to stay with it as long as we feel satisfied.
Anarchy: You’ve written about bands that you’ve toured with who have gone on to headline and how it changed them...
Eric: It happens.
Hrag: It happens a lot.
Eric: They could be victims of outside perceptions. I think people could say the same things about us.
Hrag: That’s true
Anarchy: You said in the book how you could be on the phone talking business and you walk past a guy and you just don’t have any time to spare and that guy thinks you’re an asshole for the rest of his life.
Eric: You think about how little time you have for yourself. When I’m at home I literally spend days without talking to anybody. I live very internally. I like to walk around and think. I can’t do that on tour and if I do then everyone thinks I’m going to kill myself and I’m all depressed. I just need time by myself. So, the very little time that you do have by yourself, someone may wnat to talk to you and you have your Ipod headphones in and for the rest of their life they think you’re an asshole.
Anarchy: We read about in Coma Therapy some of the weird fan encounters that Eric has had, what about you? No wrestlers with AIDS wanting to fight people?
Hrag: That definitely sticks out more than anything, but there have been some weird situations. Once or twice some fans would walk on the bus. The door would be unlocked and they’d just walk up and you’re like “what the fuck, hi”.
Anarchy: That’s cool and all, but what are you doing here?
Hrag: Yeah, and they’d be acting really weird. We were kind of scared. It could be some crazy dude with a gun.
Eric: Or it could be a jealous boyfriend who’s made that his girlfriend thinks you’re good looking.
Hrag: It could be a million things. Some of them aren’t realistic but are definitely possible.
Anarchy: And proven to be possible by Nathan Gale, who murdered Dimebag Darrell on stage.
Eric: I went to a Bjork show last week and I ended up in the very front row leaning up against the stage. It was a total stroke of luck. I was in the fifth row and they allowed all 5 rows to go forward. I ended up 2 and a half, 3 feet away from her. She’s had stalkers try to kill her. I didn’t get padded down on my way into the venue. I could have shot Bjork. That kind of stuff freaks me out. Hopefully nothing like that will ever happen again, but people’s motivations are strange. We had a song in the beginning of the writing process of this record and it’s lyric was “if you want to be someone, you’ve got to kill someone” and talking about the way people are. We cut that song off the record because what if it inspired someone to actually shoot us?
Anarchy: That line is in the book though. You guys have no problem with that, just halfway through a song deciding that you’re not feeling it and ditching the song. The book seems less structured and more free flowing.
Eric: Did you notice that the stories occur in alphabetical order according to title? That’s how little I thought I put into it. When I put them into the book file my computer had them in alphabetical order. I didn’t want to think too hard about people getting an overall statement from the book. That book is why Im still making music though. It reminded me of the power of the words themselves and to try to tell a story all the time instead of just thinking about the melody. Storytelling became a mission.
Anarchy: You can definitely tell that on the new album. You’ve become a much better songwriter.
Eric: I think we all did because we started paying attention to each other more. I kind of demanded that everyone pay attention to the words a little more and we started looking at the songs like a movie where you have a screenplay and a soundtrack. They are the soundtrack and I’m the screenplay.
Anarchy: Did you look at his lyrics and write around that?
Hrag: Sometimes we did. He’d have a set of lyrics and we’d try to write around that.
Anarchy: So you put yourself in the situations he’d write about?
Hrag: That’s happened a few times. Whenever we did it turned out really great. Most of the times it was like canvas and then the artwork on top.
Eric: Something interesting that happened with “Stay Young” is that one of our favorite sogs is 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins. We analyzed that and why does that song make you feel the way it does? A lot of it is simple stuff, like the drumbeat has this repetition to it and we started to look at the people we really respect and try to figure out what makes their songs so good.
Hrag: Not in a sense to rip them off, but just to get a vibe and an understanding of why they did that.
Eric: We’ve never really done that before have we, actually studied what makes something good?
Hrag: Actually, we did kind of a little bit to pick some stuff apart, but we wanted to get a better understanding of what makes something good.
Eric: Learn the rules before you break them
Anarchy: You’re a big John Lennon fan, right?
Eric: I grew up on The Beatles.
Anarchy: What a great songwriter to learn from. What about you Hrag, what are your influences?
Hrag: You know what, I say this a lot and it sounds very cliche’ and kind of lame, but writing this abum I wasn’t really listening to anything. I was listening to my band. I drew a lot of inspiration off of coming off of the band. When I was a kid I had a Metallica phase where I’d want to write some metal. This time around, my band was my inspiration. More and more as time went on, the more I got into my band. The lyrics he was writing, the stuff Ryan was playing. Adrian has actually come a long way. He’s actually been writing music as well.
Eric: Ryan and Adrian are the beginnings of all the songs now. They are hot and cold.
Hrag: They are opposite ends of the spectrum as far as personalities goes.
Eric: They battle and that clash is what makes the seeds for the beginnings of songs then he’ll write his part on top of it.
Hrag: Sometimes I’ll come in and completely change a song.
Eric: We wrote Cocaine because of his bassline.
Hrag: What’s cool is that it’s not one or two people in the band writing everything. Everyone writes different shit. We learned a trick awhile ago to switch off instruments mentally. Like, I’m holding the drumbeat with the bass and the guitar is playing the bass.
Anarchy: I can see where that would happen because when listening to the record it feels like something magical happened and everybody just clicked and said “oh my god, this is who we are”. This album flows better than any album I’ve heard in a long time. From song to song, it just feels natural.
Hrag: That’s a big complement.
Eric: That’s because we tried to take out anything that felt redundant. If there was a song where we said” oh, we’ve already said thator we’ve already felt that” then we got rid of it and save it for later but focusing on always moving forward and maybe shocking people. “Love Is Life” is the most straight-up happy love song. Just happy to be in love and there’s nothing wrong with that. Then right before that is the most sinister sounding electronic interludes. We just tried to have duality in everything.
Anarchy: Like you said before, it didn’t start out as a concept album, but it flows better than most that are intended as concepts.
Eric: Well, the first song you hear and the last song you hear describe strolls through empty cities. The one in the beginning is the city recently empty because everybody is dead. In “Daylight In The City” at the end is the feeling of everything coming back to life and everything getting green again. A new morning kind of deal. We thought that the way to have that little circle complete itself when you’re listening to it, so that when night falls again and the cd starts over you feel like you’re beginning the journey again. That’s what a good record should feel like.
Anarchy: So amid, the tragedy of loss on the album, it’s an album of hope?
Eric: It really is. If you compare it to our earlier material, there was always a little bit of optimism in there, but it was primarily self destructive, self loathing depression music, as far as lyrics and the overall sound of it. It was a dark filter. We don’t have that filter in place anymore. Everything just flowed naturally
Hrag: It took a minute to get used to that.
Eric: Dealing with people being mad because you can be happy.
Anarchy: You talked about Smashing Pumpkins earlier, when Zwan came out a lot of people said to me “Billy Corgan should never be happy”.
Eric: That’s fucking ridiculous! It’s like people saying “I’m just going to download U2 music because Bono has enough money”. What made you the decider as far as who makes enough money?
Anarchy: I think you’re making way too much money as a plumber so you should come fix my sink for free.
Eric: Exactly. My personal difference is that we’re all really focused on playing the best shows that we can. We’re not doing any partying. We have fun, but it’s not why we’re out here. I’ve got a sobriety thing going. I’ve got a non-smoking thing going. I actually do get that feeling from people sometimes that they did like me better when I was a dangerous drunk. That’s a really disrespectful thing to say. “ I liked you better when you hated yourself”. That’s kind of fucked up.
Anarchy: Not to kiss ass, but you’re such a talent, and it’s a talent that is just now beginning to bloom and I can’t imagine why anyone would say “I want you to die young”. Imagine if Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix had lived!
Eric: They wouldn’t be the legends they are, that’s for sure. They would have been forced to back up the hype for the next 30 years like the Rolling Stones have. We work in a really strange industry.
Hrag: I don’t recommend it.
Eric: I would love for my kids to play music, but I will not let them do what I did...to not have a plan B. I’ve always believed that if you have a plan B then you’re going to fall back on it. That no matter what you’re going to give p on yur plan A. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. I wish I had a college degree to fall back on.
Anarchy: This is a cheesy question to end this interview on, but it fits. If this is the end of the world as we know it, do you feel fine?
Eric: (Laughs) No, I feel real uneasy and scared.
Anarchy: Because you feel it may be coming?
Eric: I’ve had a series of I Told You So’s as far as people thinking I’m a conspiracy nut and then seeing it on CNN and going “Oh, well I guess now it’s mainstream information”. I just see more and more black death on the horizon and I’m kind of scared to see what happens. I really hope to god that nothing happens around the release of our record because you remember when September 11th happened, they banned all these records that had any sort of allusions to explosions or death or anything. With us calling it ‘The End Of The World’, if there’s some sort of nuke attack somewhere then we’re completely fucked. This weird Neo-Conservatism will completely destroy us.
Remember, 'The End Of The World' goes down on July 17th! This is an album that I truly hope everyone reading this will buy. It is beautiful and brilliant, features some amazingly powerful lyrics, and is far and away my favorite release of 2007. I want to thank Eric and Hrag for the interview, and I reccomend everyone check out STRATA ON MYSPACE to hear a few songs. Eric mentioned wanting to make as big of a dent as possible so that he will be remembered for generations. This album accomplishes everything that should be needed for that happen. Now it's your turn to be a part of the legacy.