Taproot
Lump This!
2008-01-23
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When you're a band doomed to be included in a niche whose glory years (if there ever were any) are but frail memories in a new millenium full of less-than-poignant highlights, what steps do you take in order to appease your inner artiste? Most cases find bands freefalling into the void; forever lost within the rubbish of yesteryear’s headlines. But if you’re Taproot, you take a few years off, write over 80 songs to choose from for inclusion on your new album and incorporate the infallible talents of the smashing Billy Corgan to help produce a few songs. All in a career for these metal bruisers. Synthesis briefly pondered such intricacies with Taproot vocalist Stephen Richards.
What do you feel is the most important point in a band’s career?
The third album. Most bands that have long careers, it’s usually the third album that’s the kind of album that made sure you knew they were gonna stick around for a while. We went through the rap-core phase, which we beat out, then we went through the nü-metal phase, which we beat out and this time I don’t really think that there’s anything they can lump us into because Taproot just wanted to prove that we’re a good rock band.
Was it at all difficult to deviate from the sound that you had on Welcome for your new album Blue-Sky Reasearch, structure-wise?
A little bit. That’s one of the few things that really stuck with us when we went to go work with Billy Corgan. He wanted to get us together to show how people work as human beings as well as musicians. He wanted to point out that we kind of got into a habit of how we approached our writing process. You know, the first and second verses don’t have to be the exact same, you wanna try to keep the listener’s attention as well as make it seem like there’s something new going on the whole time.
How different would the songs that Corgan co-wrote have sounded had he not been involved?
There’s one in particular that’s probably the most oddball, left-field song on the record called “Promise.” It’s real pop-y. Billy kind of steered it in that direction, but when we went and played it for him, at the time it was our heaviest song; it was a fucking bone crusher. He understood why we loved it, but he pointed out that he thought the lyrics and chord structure were amazing but it was being swallowed up in these bad habits of having a heavy song just to have a heavy song. We just took it from there and it turned it into probably the most positive, happy sounding song on the record.
In what ways did getting lumped in with the nü-metal genre shape the way that Taproot writes songs?
I’d say it’s been more the bands that we’ve toured with that got us lumped into the nü-metal category. I don’t even know what nü-metal is. When I look at bands like Disturbed, I don’t think we have too much in common, other than the fact that we toured with them.
What do you feel is the most important point in a band’s career?
The third album. Most bands that have long careers, it’s usually the third album that’s the kind of album that made sure you knew they were gonna stick around for a while. We went through the rap-core phase, which we beat out, then we went through the nü-metal phase, which we beat out and this time I don’t really think that there’s anything they can lump us into because Taproot just wanted to prove that we’re a good rock band.
Was it at all difficult to deviate from the sound that you had on Welcome for your new album Blue-Sky Reasearch, structure-wise?
A little bit. That’s one of the few things that really stuck with us when we went to go work with Billy Corgan. He wanted to get us together to show how people work as human beings as well as musicians. He wanted to point out that we kind of got into a habit of how we approached our writing process. You know, the first and second verses don’t have to be the exact same, you wanna try to keep the listener’s attention as well as make it seem like there’s something new going on the whole time.
How different would the songs that Corgan co-wrote have sounded had he not been involved?
There’s one in particular that’s probably the most oddball, left-field song on the record called “Promise.” It’s real pop-y. Billy kind of steered it in that direction, but when we went and played it for him, at the time it was our heaviest song; it was a fucking bone crusher. He understood why we loved it, but he pointed out that he thought the lyrics and chord structure were amazing but it was being swallowed up in these bad habits of having a heavy song just to have a heavy song. We just took it from there and it turned it into probably the most positive, happy sounding song on the record.
In what ways did getting lumped in with the nü-metal genre shape the way that Taproot writes songs?
I’d say it’s been more the bands that we’ve toured with that got us lumped into the nü-metal category. I don’t even know what nü-metal is. When I look at bands like Disturbed, I don’t think we have too much in common, other than the fact that we toured with them.
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