Between the Buried and Me has been a well-respected band for 20 years. Their sound has gone through many evolutions throughout the years: from death metal, to progressive while throwing in pieces of many other genres along the way. BTBAM was gearing up for their 20-year anniversary as a band, before the Coronavirus shut down the music industry’s touring plans. In the wake of touring the band has also been working on the remaster and reprint of their self-titled debut album. I was fortunate to be able to speak with bassist Dan Briggs about the early times of the band and what they are doing to plan for the future.
GA: When I was approached about setting something up with BTBAM, the conversation sparked with the news of BTBAMs self-titled debut album being rereleased. Which was released 20 years ago, and the band had a tour lined up which has been unfortunately cancelled due to the Coronavirus. You were not a part of the original line up but joined years later. What was it like coming into the band at that time?
DB: It was still early on, the band consisted in some form for two albums. Three of us all joined up around the same time, 2004 to early 2005. It was like hitting the reset button, I think for Tommy and Paul. They have both said, that at the time they would not have been able to do another album with just the two of them, with writing the music and leading the creative charge. They were both exhausted from that idea, after releasing The Silent Circus. They brought in two twenty-years-olds, and a nineteen-year-old and we were all fired up. At that time, it was great. I was still in school for music performance, so when I had an opportunity to leave and join a group, that was my goal. BTBAM was a band I was familiar with. I have known Tommy and Paul for a few years, and it was like everything was lining up just perfectly.
GA: The self-titled album was the introduction of the band to the world. The music had a style of its own, incorporating technique with jazz, metal, and rock to have its own unique hybrid blend of music. What are some songs you like to revisit from the album and play? One of my favorites is ‘Shevanel Cut A Flip.’
DB: What I think is interesting about the 20-year anniversary and looking back, is that we normally do not go that far back in our catalogue. We usually do not go back to the first album, because I think it is such a disconnect from where we are now. I think we have a lot of fans that think it is a nice reminder and homage to that time. The people that have been around for that long look at us like, ‘cool they are playing those songs’ but to look at it realistically most our crowds probably do not know that record. Shevanel is a good song that you mentioned. That song was still working its way into our set as far back as I want to say 2015. That may have been the last time we played it. We have done the song in many different versions over the years.We used to use the first chunk of the song; before it goes into the clean section. We used to use it as a segway track between other points in the set; where we were linking different years and versions of the band and tying that all together. That song is a fun one, because that song has a lot of interesting stuff in it. It has all the dynamics; it has some weird fills, the fills in the swing section with the accents have always been bizarre to me.
GA: Even though it was the early years the band managed to throw the kitchen sink in there. I like to say that was more of BTBAM’s rawer sound, a bit more on the aggressive end, but now I think the band has a balanced feel to it.
DB: That album was also live tracked, which adds to the rawness. That album was born out of the days where they were practicing five days a week.
GA: You came into the band right before I would say the band got its big push in popularity. The music got more intense with the writing style, and we started to see BTBAM become this huge thing. What would you say are things that you would accredit the success to from back then?
DB: In those days it was nice, but no it is a little different scenario since we are all older and in different places in our lives. We used to go out for eight months of the year, we would pack up the van and we would be out there doing support tours. Every couple months, we would be in the same markets doing the same venues, with slightly different crowds based off of who you were supporting. It was a lot like this on the Alaska touring cycle. We really got to gel as a band and a writing unit when we were doing the Colors album. On that touring cycle we opened ourselves up to an entirely new crowd, since we were out with Dream Theatre, Opeth, and Meshuggah. The progressive music universe has expanded widely with these artists. Colors was the album where these ideas were more on the forefront. We have taken that over the years as the palate and ran with it.
I think we have been rather fortunate because I feel a lot of bands do not get the room to grow over the years. Our next full length is going to be our tenth studio album, most bands do not have ten full length albums to develop their sound. Most bands that I loved when growing up only have three or four albums. For instance, bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana only have a handful of albums to their catalogue. I think we are fortunate that our sound is different and has had the opportunity to expand and grow. It started to seem that every time the band was evolving it would get to a point where someone was like this is not my thing anymore, but there were new people interested in what we were doing at that moment to take their place. I think this is continuing as we keep evolving and growing, and it has been really great. I think BTBAM has been able to expose a lot of people to a lot of new artists, just by bringing out our influences in the music and people catching on to those. Peopleare getting interested in the bands from the 70’s we are referencing, and I think our audience has also grown and matured along with us which makes it fun.
GA: To touch on the Colors album, I think that was the start of the BTBAM renaissance period of writing music. The band changed its style, the band added all these different influences that really made you an original sounding band for that time period.
DB: There were bands doing progressive stuff at that time like Mastodon, Opeth, and Mars Volta, but it was not mixing genres like we were. We pulled from things we loved and were passionate about. It made sense for us, and we stuck out in the world that we were playing in. That album allowed us to have these different audiences, and to tour with a lot of different bands. The album also helped change the minds of many people that have heard our name and wrote us off like any other metalcore act and go no, these guys are legit musicians. They have weird arrangements, and there is something different about them, and I think I should dig into it. This was also a time in 2007 where a lot of people still bought physical cds, so I think that album benefitted from that as well.
GA: Personally, when Colors came out and the band I work in heard it, our whole perspective of writing music changed. We went from being, lets write the heaviest things we can come up with to, lets just be the best musicians we could be.
DB: Yea that is perfect, that was the whole idea. We always have done what we wanted to, and we are thankful for being able to do this. I think at the end of the day it is about not trying to adhere to any one thing. For us, there is no sound that is Between the Buried and Me. There is no one album that is Between the Buried and Me, and this allows us to really play off what is the true progressive idea. Which is you are trying to write music that is advancing your sound, your palate, by not repeating yourself and trying something new. Those are the types of bands that we love.
GA: The band’s last major release was 2017-18’s Automata I ⅈ is the band currently working on follow up material, if so, what can you tell me about the process?
DB: Currently we are trying to wrap up some things. In May, we were supposed to have our 20-year anniversary tour but now that is on hold. We are like everyone else trying to come to terms with this new reality that we are in right now. This hits personally as well, as we all are trying to get by in our daily lives with this change. We wanted to do the 20-year touring cycle and then access where we are at as a band and find a way to move forward. This is what we do every three or so years when we begin to write a new record. The time frame has shifted but we will get to that tour and move forward.
GA: When the band is coming up with new material, what is your writing process like? Do you all share ideas, or is there a primary song writer/ writing team?
DB: It is all different. Some people share short bursts. The way that I write, is more like seeing an idea through. I am usually presenting fuller ideas. Paul kind of writes like this. He strings a lot of stuff together when he presents the material to the band. The other guys may write shorter bursts, but also aid in stitching things together. It is nice when you get to that point where you have a lot of material and just have to fine tune it.
The fine-tuning process is a lot of fun, where we can question pieces and play around with them. They can be subtle things where you won’t lose any sleep on it, and its not going to change the world. It is just that one thing where it may make that one person feel a little more comfortable, and everyone approves. I think about that stuff, and thinking about it now with these little nuances, I can’t hear the songs any other way. Especially now that the songs have been recorded and we have played them over the years. It is like I don’t even remember how the original version of the songs were.
I think with a lot of the older music it was a lot of stitching section by section, we just don’t work that way anymore. It was an exhausting way of trying to create this organic thing. I think back to those albums like Colors, and you could be five to six minutes into a song and be like, “where are we?” It was section by section. You were just living in that section, then wondering how to we get to the next section.
I think one of the important things in songwriting is being able to step back. During demoing, it is taking breaks like car rides or walks, getting away from my desk so I can free my mind outside of the constructs of my instrument. So, I can come back and listen to it fresh, and know this is not working or needs changed. When you are going at it in the heat of the moment you cannot think about it clearly.
Going back to how we write, we don’t write in the practice space. It has been a long, long, time since we have done that. Even with that it was more arranging these parts in the practice space, not necessarily writing new parts. Thankfully because of technology, we don’t have to work this way anymore, because for one we all live spread out from each other now. For two, everyone has a lot going on in their lives, and we can’t commit for months to this getting up four or five days a week to meet up. We used to be able to do this in the past when we were in our twenties and lived close to each other, but now it is just not feasible.
GA: So, do you guys rely more on file sharing these days then?
DB: Absolutely. I have multiple bands with members all over the country, and all over the world. This is the time we live in now. Thankfully, you can sculpt songs easier now. You all canhave the same programs, and work within the same sessions, and share them back and forth. Technology has made it so easy.
GA: You mentioned you are also involved in several other projects musically, what can you tell me about these?
DB: There has been a lot over the years. I have worked with the groups Orbs, Trioscapes, Nova Collective, and I have my own stuff with Nightmare Scenario. My thing has always been music.I just live in the creative space always, regardless if I am working on an album or not. I am always writing or working on something. Since around 2008, I have always had other musicians to bounce stuff off, or they will send me something that will spark an idea. That is one of the great things about music, is through these collaborations, discovering these ideas that may not have existed any other way. No matter how much time I would have spent in my bedroom that idea would never have come, without someone else sending me something to spark that creativity.
Orbs was a group that released a couple records. I was playing guitar in that band and it was more space rock, with some theatrics and other worldly stuff. The sound was influenced by bands like Muse, and Radiohead. Trioscapes was a three piece, with tenor saxophone, bass, and drums, and we put out 2 records. The sound was wild, and free formed, not exactly like jazz per say, just fun wild music. A lot of the music was based off improvisations. Which is so different from a BTBAM performance, where the music has a base and is rigid; playing the songs the same way from start to finish every night. Which playing like that is great, but I also love the energy. Some nights it is not there and other nights it is the highest of highs. I also had a group I started around 2014 called Nova Collective, that consisted of Matt the drummer of Trioscapes and I, with Rich the guitarist of the band Haken, and his buddy Pete on keys. The music was like instrumental meets jazz, rolled in with some fusion. They were some scary players, just out of this world good. It was so fun to play with them. My own stuff I don’tknow how to describe it. I put out an EP last year, and some small singles since then. It is hard to describe the sound, it is like everything I have ever heard and digested comes out in the music, because it is not filtered through any one band. There is nobody else, it is just me.
GA: When you are playing/ practicing on your own what are some pieces of music you like to play through, and what are some pieces that you could say helped attribute to your playing style?
DB: I have never been big on learning songs. I have a video that I did with some friends where I did a version of the Weather Report’s song ‘Teen Town.’ When my buddy Chris who is the drummer approached me about doing the song, I thought about it and it occurred to me that I have never learned a Jaco Pastorius bass line before. I have imitated his phrasing, and his styling, and the way that he plays, but I have never learned any of his bass lines before. So, I learned the lines for this song, and it is fucking insane. It was so cool to dig into the sheet music and learn his thing, and get to play along with this song that I have known. What a trip that was. I usually don’t have the time to do this.
About five years ago BTBAM did a recorded and live version of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ When I dug into the piano score, it blew my mind. We all know Bohemian Rhapsody is this epic song, it is almost like a song within a song. When I was going through the music and splitting up the parts amongst our instruments, it was blowing my mind. I could not believe it. It was so cool to dig into that song and digest it, and we got to reinterpret it as the musicians that we are. That was really fun, but honestly, I don’t do that anymore, it has been many years since I have done that.
In my high school years, Dream Theatre’s ‘Scenes from a Memory’ was a record that all my friends and I loved. It was our gateway into progressive rock and metal. I had the song book; I still have it and it has all my markings all over it. I could play it front to back and even some of the songs on guitar. It shaped a lot of my understanding of how to apply a musical way of playing with time signatures and phrasings. They had so many stylistic ideas. There were so many things you don’t think about, but are digested (when you listen to them), and as a composer you start to inheritably do these things. I would never look at BTBAM material and be like that came from Dream Theatre, but if I was really thinking about it I could be like, oh shit in theory, it is a conceptual idea that I may have learned from that time.
GA: When I listen to BTBAM I can hear bits and pieces of other bands, but it is still your style and your creative influence on the song.
DB: I think if we were to do a song purely inspired by the Beatles, it still wouldn’t sound like the Beatles because it is running through our filter. Tommy is still singing that song, Blake is still playing the drums, so it is still not going to be exactly that.
GA: We have time for one more question. You mentioned about the 20-year anniversary tour being postponed earlier, in what ways has the band been trying to recoup since everything has been shut down due to the coronavirus?
DB: Well honestly, stuff like these reissues, which thankfully we already had planned on doing. It is a nice thing because it helps us to have something to push during this time. It gives us a monetary source, but also keeps our name out there. The whole point of the 20-year anniversary, is to be looking back, appreciating all the records during our lifetime. If all of a sudden, we are talking about the first album being remixed, remastered, and reprinted, these are all things we have control over. That is just putting out the idea we had for the whole year anyways.
Who knows maybe by staying home and putting this tour off till whenever, it may boost the profile of everything? Since we are spending all this time up until being able to tour promoting the back catalogue. It is rather interesting. The last three years have been long. We got out of the studio when we recorded Automata in the summer of 2017. That fall, we did the10- year tour for the Colors album. Automata came out I believe January or February of 2018. So, we have been going nonstop since we got out of the studio in 2017. Everyone is bummed because we just want to do this tour, but at the same time I think it’s also the first time we get to relax even if its for a bit. It has been great because we can recharge. We are 20 years in and with all these records, I think everyone is enjoying having a little bit of time to themselves. It is a bit of a forced vacation for a lot of people but in a way, I think it is good. When we do get the thumbs up to return to touring, we will spend a month learning and prepping the set. We already have the set for the tour, so we will work on that and then be back on the road.
Thanks to Craft Recordings
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