Andy spoke to one half of Set Your Goals after their set at Reading Festival ‘09.
PT: Right, introduce yourselves guys and what you do in the band.
Matt: Hi I’m Matt, I sing.
Junior: I’m Junior and I play guitar.
Jordan: I’m Jordan, I also sing.
PT: It’s your first Reading and you played a great set. How was it for you guys?
Matt: Fucking awesome man, we had a great time. It was bigger than we expected, and a lot better than yesterday even.
Junior: They know how to circle pit here!
Matt: Yeah that’s really cool.
Jordan: The circle pit was the most crazy circle pit I’ve ever seen. We’ve never had anything like that at any of our shows. It went around the base of one of the poles holding the tent up!
PT: Do you guys have anything like this back home?
Junior: We do, we have Hoodwink, which is kind of like Bamboozle, and Warped Tour. We’ve played a lot of those big radio station festivals, but nothing really like this.
Matt: Most of the big ones are overseas!
PT: You’re a band that’s used to smaller club stages – do you have to prepare differently for a show on this scale?
Matt: Yeah, you just have to make sure you sound good. It’s hard not having a sound check at live show.
Junior: Something can always go wrong here!
Matt: Yeah, also it’s weird being that far away from the crowd, it’s a completely different atmosphere.
PT: You’ve just released ‘This Will Be The Death Of Us’. Tell me how hard or easy an album it was to write.
Matt: Jordan, you want to take this one…
Jordan: Yeah, ok, so the writing process? With this album, our drummer and I would get the ideas going, we’d bring them to the band in the studio and every week we’d have a different crew of people. The first week was our drummer Mikey and I and our producer and engineer, the next week would be Junior and I, Dan and Joe – the guitar section. Then we’d do like a solid thirteen days of vocals and everyday belted out a different song. We were doing like twelve hour days. We did seven weeks recording with three days off in those seven weeks. It was just non stop and really intensive, but the best experience ever.
PT: You’ve got a bunch of guest vocals on there as well – how hard were that to organise?
Jordan: Well we’d already spoken to everyone about doing parts before hand, then as we were working on the songs and the ideas, we’d just send out demo tracks to everyone we asked to sing guest parts. We actually tracked the songs out ourselves, sent them out and then kind of worked back and forth over the phone and through email and so on. It was super fun working with everyone on it.
PT: The Hayley Williams rap breakdown – brilliant. Who came up with that idea?
Matt: We came up with it, but she was definitely very into the idea! She was really up for doing something a little bit different.
Jordan; She actually took the song and added things to it that we hadn’t even thought about.
PT: It’s coming out on Epitaph as well. When you first started talking about the album you had ideas of self-releasing it. Why didn’t you go through with that?
Jordan: If we had been able to get out of our contract with our management which we were discussing, we would have done it, but the sum they were asking was so large that it wasn’t feasible. It was a cool idea, but looking back it would not have worked out like it did. Epitaph really have been our saviours for this album. All the pieces fit with them.
PT: How did the Epitaph deal come about?
Jordan: Well Brett came and saw us play Warped Tour last summer, and a lot of his staff had been calling us for a few years. We were talking with them on the phone while we were recording the album in the Spring, and all that time they were coming to see our shows. As the record developed they just fell more and more in love with our music so it was perfect.
PT: Ok, you’re set’s over – what are you getting up to for the rest of the day?
Junior: I wanna watch the Bronx, Thursday, Rise Against!
Matt: I’m gonna definitely see the Prodigy!