Miss May I (19/09/2012)
The 59th Sound recently spoke with Ryan Neff, bassist for Miss May I, who will soon be hitting our shores for Soundwave Festival 2013.
Hi I’m Olivia, thanks for talking with The 59th Sound today! Where abouts is the band at the moment?
Jerod [Boyd, drums] is at his house; Justin [Aufdemkampe, lead guitar] is in New Jersey helping Machine record the new Clutch record; B.J. [Stead, rhythm guitar] is in Troy, Ohio at his house; I’m at my house; and Levi [Benton, lead vocals] is in Cincinnati, Ohio, at his house; everybody is in a different spot right now.
Getting straight into things: you left the band in 2007 before returning two years later. Can you talk us through what happened there?
I am from a town that didn’t really have a music scene; it never had a signed band come out of it. I pretty much got all my understanding of how the music industry worked from videos that bands had posted online and coming up with my own conclusions. In my mind I came to my own conclusions that if I wanted to make it in a signed band I had to go that that moment. In my mind I thought, “the second you join this band, your life is made. You’re going to be going on tour with these real, big-time bands.” The guys in Miss May I were young – three of them still had to finish high-school – and it was going to be a while before anything could happen there. I honestly just felt like I was going to get too old if I didn’t go soon.
So when the opportunity presented itself, I had to make the tough decision to leave Miss May I – who were all great friends of mine – and join this band [Rose Funeral] of people that I had never met before. Or I could turn down this opportunity and then, if that band got big, worry for the rest of my life about where I would’ve gone if I had joined Rose Funeral.
I chose to join, and it didn’t work out as planned. It was a good learning experience; I still talk to one of the guys from Rose Funeral – one of the only guys who are still doing it.
It just wasn’t the right band for me; it wasn’t like Miss May I. When I was in Miss May I, I helped write everything. It was my friends’ and my band and I had a say about the music. When I joined the other band, I was pretty much just a fill-in. I was just the guy playing the bass part of the CD. I had nothing to do with the musical input or the musical taste; it was strictly, “You play the part. You go on tour with us. That’s how it is.” It really wore on me after a while and that made me decide that I didn’t want to do it anymore.
What made you go back to Miss May I in particular? Why didn’t you go on your own path instead?
I had actually pretty much given up. I came home, I sold all my touring gear to Miss May I for Josh [Gillespie], the guy who replaced me, who [played bass on the album] Apologies Are for the Weak. I was like; well I’m not going to do it. I had missed my chance and I thought that there was no way I would ever join Miss May I ever again. There was no way they wouldn’t have some level of success after they toured America. They’d see all these cool places and put out a couple of records, which is all I wanted to do anyway.
But yeah I sold them all my gear and I worked at a pet store; I literally just gave up. Then Josh left the band after a couple shows of the tour. Once he bailed I got the call and I learned all the songs I had to for that first tour. I was just lucky enough that they asked me to come back – I guess that was part of the advantage of being such great friends when I was in the band the first time. They had faith in me to have me come back. I learned the songs, quit my job, and flew to Houston, Texas to tour three days later.
Cool! Do you know what you’d be doing now, if you weren’t in a band?
I have no idea. I knew I wanted to be in a band ever since I joined my first one. Having things go bad when I left Miss May I was pretty crushing. I literally did nothing. I would go to work at 8 or 9 in the morning, I would work ‘til 3 or 4, I’d come home and hang out with my friends, and at around 8 or 9 I’d go to sleep because I had work the next morning. I honestly didn’t have anything I wanted to do. I had no goals anymore; I didn’t have anything. I was trying to start a band with my best friend but it was like starting from square one. I had no industry friends because the band I had joined was on the bottom of the totem pole. I didn’t really get to make any of these great contacts; I took two to three steps backwards and I had no idea what I was going to do. If I hadn’t gotten the opportunity [to rejoin Miss May I]… who knows.
Earlier this year the band released your third album “At Heart”. What were some challenges that you had to overcome both personally and as a band?
We had put a lot of pressure on ourselves when we did our second album, “Monument”. The first album did so much better that anyone had ever expected; it sold so many copies, we made fans, and we got to go to the UK on that very first record and then all over America. It was so crazy that we got to do all of that stuff that when we got back into the studio, we were so stressed out about writing a bad record that we felt like we only wrote four good songs. We just felt like we had put ourselves in a box when we wrote that record. Instead on focusing on writing what we wanted, we would question everything.
We wanted to do the exact opposite on “At Heart”. We wanted to just write whatever, we wanted a new producer with a different outlook to critique the music and help us make all the things that we wanted in order to make Miss May I to be the best it could be. That’s why we chose to go with Machine and we wrote the record the same way we did the others: as a group, just sitting down writing the songs. But this time we did it in a studio so we could record the stuff live as we were writing it. Machine would help work on the melodies of songs so that they’d resolve better, and help patterning of the vocal placement and such.
We basically took all the ideas we had and made them come to life instead of sitting there and picking at one idea to the point where it was so watered down that it didn’t come out the way that we had planned.
How do you personally contribute to an album or song? We always hear about the lead coming up with lyrics and such. What was your input?
As Miss May I is a screaming band, the singing parts are usually not the main theme of the song. Levi will do most of the songs at the beginning. He’ll do all of the screaming parts and we’ll all have designated spots where we know what we want to do, or at least have a rough idea. Levi will do all his part and he’ll explain to me what he’s writing about and where he’s going with it. I’d basically try to make my lyrics resolve what he’s saying and basically restate what he’s saying in my part and give the meaning of the song in the chorus.
I write all of my own singing parts, I write all of my lyric parts, but the meaning of the song comes straight from Levi most of the time. We’re a lot like every other band – Levi is really the heart of the band. He’s the one that comes up with the themes and names of the songs to begin with and then I’ll add my singing parts. We’re pretty equal, though there are a couple of the songs on the record where I came up with the names or the lyrics of the songs.
“Day by Day” we wrote one way, then we’d come back and we’d be struggling to fit his idea for the song and my idea for the song – it just wasn’t working – so we rewrote the whole song. I wrote my part first and I said that this was what I thought the song was about, this is the melody I would love to have, and this is what would work perfectly for Levi to do. We actually did the some the complete opposite way of our other songs. I think that’s why it’s my favourite song because it’s the first time I ever got to have the lead input on the structure of the song. He came up with the original theme and meaning behind it and we stuck to that when we rewrote the song, but on this record I feel like I’ve had a bigger part in it because we worked together the entire time. We were the only two people there when we did vocals. Everybody else had finished up so it was just Levi and I for a few weeks with Machine. It was just the three of us bouncing ideas and lyrics and melodies and patterns off each other the whole time. Basically extracting everything on the record for two and a half weeks, ten hours a day.
You must get really sick of each other after that!
Yeah! [Laughs] Levi is the hardest one for me to get sick of so I guess it’s good that we were relaxed and that we were able to bounce ideas off each other so it worked out well. I think it would be a real pain if we were at each other’s throats all the time.
What would you say is the best tour you’ve been on? Why?
The first headline tour we did in America back in 2010 I believe it was. It’s always wild to do your first headlining tour because it’s the first time you get to see if your band actually has a leg to stand on and has made an impact on fans in any way. I would say that any time we do a headlining tour for the first time somewhere; it’s always a big thing for us. That first American tour was the first time we had ever headlined, besides from little shows where we played to a small amount of kids. This was the first tour where there was a full bill underneath us, a full thirty-day tour. To see all these shows selling out at venues where we were a supporting band a year earlier was amazing.
Then we did our first headlining tour in Europe and the UK last year and it was the same situation where we were playing at these venues where we had supported at and weren’t filling out at all, then all of a sudden we’re headlining them with bands that we thought were great and the shows were selling out.
I think whenever we do a headlining tour and we see the pay off of what it’s like to be a headlining band, to be the band that the kids are coming to see, is always the most exciting.
Are there any crazy stories from tours? Can you tell us about those?
Any bad stuff that’s happened to us?
Bad or good!
There’re a million bad things! I had an interview earlier where all I talked about for fifteen minutes was about bad stuff that has happened to us vehicle-wise. Transmission ripping out of the van, having to pay for that, not having a van with a tour schedule two months later and having no idea how you’re going to do it. We got dropped off at a gas station once in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
There’s been a lot of bad stuff that’s happened but the good things definitely outweigh it.
I think being jumped at the gas station will always stand out as being the worst moment for us so far. There were three giant dudes who had a problem with the way some of the band members looked. We were at the wrong place at the wrong time and we just got jumped, we thought we were going to get robbed too.
One of the dudes almost got a couple of teeth knocked out, another had a huge scar on his face that needed stitches, and Rick – a friend of ours who was with us at the time – got a bunch of his ribs broken and his head busted open. It was a pretty miserable night.
We got back in the van to drive home, because we were on our way home from touring, and the van broke down. We were stuck in Tennessee, six or seven hours from home, with three guys who needed stitches and one with broken ribs, with no money and no way to get anywhere.
Man, what did you do?
Rick’s the ultimate handy man and had a friend who had a small bus that he drove for work. He drove seven hours in the company bus to pick us up.
We broke down in Memphis and we had the van towed to Nashville, then we had to back out to Ohio to pick up the trailer. It was a mess!
To finish off, are there any good stories that counteract the bad?
Yeah! Any time we go on tour and the shows go well, it makes up for it. In summer we did the Vans Warped Tour on the main stage, which is a tour I would go to when I was in high school to see bands that I looked up to. We were one of the headlining acts on the same stage as The Used, which was one of the biggest bands for me in high school and we got to perform with them this summer and talk to them. We also did 30 minute to hour-long signings for hundreds of fans – having people tell us how much the band means to them is always a big pay-off.
There’s not a lot of money in this industry right now so it’s good to be able to do stuff like that. The band does matter to me, all the hard work we put in does matter, and this is the biggest reward for us.
Thanks for talking to The 59th Sound today Ryan. It’s been great talking to you and we’ll be sure to catch you guys at Soundwave next year!
Hi I’m Olivia, thanks for talking with The 59th Sound today! Where abouts is the band at the moment?
Jerod [Boyd, drums] is at his house; Justin [Aufdemkampe, lead guitar] is in New Jersey helping Machine record the new Clutch record; B.J. [Stead, rhythm guitar] is in Troy, Ohio at his house; I’m at my house; and Levi [Benton, lead vocals] is in Cincinnati, Ohio, at his house; everybody is in a different spot right now.
Getting straight into things: you left the band in 2007 before returning two years later. Can you talk us through what happened there?
I am from a town that didn’t really have a music scene; it never had a signed band come out of it. I pretty much got all my understanding of how the music industry worked from videos that bands had posted online and coming up with my own conclusions. In my mind I came to my own conclusions that if I wanted to make it in a signed band I had to go that that moment. In my mind I thought, “the second you join this band, your life is made. You’re going to be going on tour with these real, big-time bands.” The guys in Miss May I were young – three of them still had to finish high-school – and it was going to be a while before anything could happen there. I honestly just felt like I was going to get too old if I didn’t go soon.
So when the opportunity presented itself, I had to make the tough decision to leave Miss May I – who were all great friends of mine – and join this band [Rose Funeral] of people that I had never met before. Or I could turn down this opportunity and then, if that band got big, worry for the rest of my life about where I would’ve gone if I had joined Rose Funeral.
I chose to join, and it didn’t work out as planned. It was a good learning experience; I still talk to one of the guys from Rose Funeral – one of the only guys who are still doing it.
It just wasn’t the right band for me; it wasn’t like Miss May I. When I was in Miss May I, I helped write everything. It was my friends’ and my band and I had a say about the music. When I joined the other band, I was pretty much just a fill-in. I was just the guy playing the bass part of the CD. I had nothing to do with the musical input or the musical taste; it was strictly, “You play the part. You go on tour with us. That’s how it is.” It really wore on me after a while and that made me decide that I didn’t want to do it anymore.
What made you go back to Miss May I in particular? Why didn’t you go on your own path instead?
I had actually pretty much given up. I came home, I sold all my touring gear to Miss May I for Josh [Gillespie], the guy who replaced me, who [played bass on the album] Apologies Are for the Weak. I was like; well I’m not going to do it. I had missed my chance and I thought that there was no way I would ever join Miss May I ever again. There was no way they wouldn’t have some level of success after they toured America. They’d see all these cool places and put out a couple of records, which is all I wanted to do anyway.
But yeah I sold them all my gear and I worked at a pet store; I literally just gave up. Then Josh left the band after a couple shows of the tour. Once he bailed I got the call and I learned all the songs I had to for that first tour. I was just lucky enough that they asked me to come back – I guess that was part of the advantage of being such great friends when I was in the band the first time. They had faith in me to have me come back. I learned the songs, quit my job, and flew to Houston, Texas to tour three days later.
Cool! Do you know what you’d be doing now, if you weren’t in a band?
I have no idea. I knew I wanted to be in a band ever since I joined my first one. Having things go bad when I left Miss May I was pretty crushing. I literally did nothing. I would go to work at 8 or 9 in the morning, I would work ‘til 3 or 4, I’d come home and hang out with my friends, and at around 8 or 9 I’d go to sleep because I had work the next morning. I honestly didn’t have anything I wanted to do. I had no goals anymore; I didn’t have anything. I was trying to start a band with my best friend but it was like starting from square one. I had no industry friends because the band I had joined was on the bottom of the totem pole. I didn’t really get to make any of these great contacts; I took two to three steps backwards and I had no idea what I was going to do. If I hadn’t gotten the opportunity [to rejoin Miss May I]… who knows.
Earlier this year the band released your third album “At Heart”. What were some challenges that you had to overcome both personally and as a band?
We had put a lot of pressure on ourselves when we did our second album, “Monument”. The first album did so much better that anyone had ever expected; it sold so many copies, we made fans, and we got to go to the UK on that very first record and then all over America. It was so crazy that we got to do all of that stuff that when we got back into the studio, we were so stressed out about writing a bad record that we felt like we only wrote four good songs. We just felt like we had put ourselves in a box when we wrote that record. Instead on focusing on writing what we wanted, we would question everything.
We wanted to do the exact opposite on “At Heart”. We wanted to just write whatever, we wanted a new producer with a different outlook to critique the music and help us make all the things that we wanted in order to make Miss May I to be the best it could be. That’s why we chose to go with Machine and we wrote the record the same way we did the others: as a group, just sitting down writing the songs. But this time we did it in a studio so we could record the stuff live as we were writing it. Machine would help work on the melodies of songs so that they’d resolve better, and help patterning of the vocal placement and such.
We basically took all the ideas we had and made them come to life instead of sitting there and picking at one idea to the point where it was so watered down that it didn’t come out the way that we had planned.
How do you personally contribute to an album or song? We always hear about the lead coming up with lyrics and such. What was your input?
As Miss May I is a screaming band, the singing parts are usually not the main theme of the song. Levi will do most of the songs at the beginning. He’ll do all of the screaming parts and we’ll all have designated spots where we know what we want to do, or at least have a rough idea. Levi will do all his part and he’ll explain to me what he’s writing about and where he’s going with it. I’d basically try to make my lyrics resolve what he’s saying and basically restate what he’s saying in my part and give the meaning of the song in the chorus.
I write all of my own singing parts, I write all of my lyric parts, but the meaning of the song comes straight from Levi most of the time. We’re a lot like every other band – Levi is really the heart of the band. He’s the one that comes up with the themes and names of the songs to begin with and then I’ll add my singing parts. We’re pretty equal, though there are a couple of the songs on the record where I came up with the names or the lyrics of the songs.
“Day by Day” we wrote one way, then we’d come back and we’d be struggling to fit his idea for the song and my idea for the song – it just wasn’t working – so we rewrote the whole song. I wrote my part first and I said that this was what I thought the song was about, this is the melody I would love to have, and this is what would work perfectly for Levi to do. We actually did the some the complete opposite way of our other songs. I think that’s why it’s my favourite song because it’s the first time I ever got to have the lead input on the structure of the song. He came up with the original theme and meaning behind it and we stuck to that when we rewrote the song, but on this record I feel like I’ve had a bigger part in it because we worked together the entire time. We were the only two people there when we did vocals. Everybody else had finished up so it was just Levi and I for a few weeks with Machine. It was just the three of us bouncing ideas and lyrics and melodies and patterns off each other the whole time. Basically extracting everything on the record for two and a half weeks, ten hours a day.
You must get really sick of each other after that!
Yeah! [Laughs] Levi is the hardest one for me to get sick of so I guess it’s good that we were relaxed and that we were able to bounce ideas off each other so it worked out well. I think it would be a real pain if we were at each other’s throats all the time.
What would you say is the best tour you’ve been on? Why?
The first headline tour we did in America back in 2010 I believe it was. It’s always wild to do your first headlining tour because it’s the first time you get to see if your band actually has a leg to stand on and has made an impact on fans in any way. I would say that any time we do a headlining tour for the first time somewhere; it’s always a big thing for us. That first American tour was the first time we had ever headlined, besides from little shows where we played to a small amount of kids. This was the first tour where there was a full bill underneath us, a full thirty-day tour. To see all these shows selling out at venues where we were a supporting band a year earlier was amazing.
Then we did our first headlining tour in Europe and the UK last year and it was the same situation where we were playing at these venues where we had supported at and weren’t filling out at all, then all of a sudden we’re headlining them with bands that we thought were great and the shows were selling out.
I think whenever we do a headlining tour and we see the pay off of what it’s like to be a headlining band, to be the band that the kids are coming to see, is always the most exciting.
Are there any crazy stories from tours? Can you tell us about those?
Any bad stuff that’s happened to us?
Bad or good!
There’re a million bad things! I had an interview earlier where all I talked about for fifteen minutes was about bad stuff that has happened to us vehicle-wise. Transmission ripping out of the van, having to pay for that, not having a van with a tour schedule two months later and having no idea how you’re going to do it. We got dropped off at a gas station once in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
There’s been a lot of bad stuff that’s happened but the good things definitely outweigh it.
I think being jumped at the gas station will always stand out as being the worst moment for us so far. There were three giant dudes who had a problem with the way some of the band members looked. We were at the wrong place at the wrong time and we just got jumped, we thought we were going to get robbed too.
One of the dudes almost got a couple of teeth knocked out, another had a huge scar on his face that needed stitches, and Rick – a friend of ours who was with us at the time – got a bunch of his ribs broken and his head busted open. It was a pretty miserable night.
We got back in the van to drive home, because we were on our way home from touring, and the van broke down. We were stuck in Tennessee, six or seven hours from home, with three guys who needed stitches and one with broken ribs, with no money and no way to get anywhere.
Man, what did you do?
Rick’s the ultimate handy man and had a friend who had a small bus that he drove for work. He drove seven hours in the company bus to pick us up.
We broke down in Memphis and we had the van towed to Nashville, then we had to back out to Ohio to pick up the trailer. It was a mess!
To finish off, are there any good stories that counteract the bad?
Yeah! Any time we go on tour and the shows go well, it makes up for it. In summer we did the Vans Warped Tour on the main stage, which is a tour I would go to when I was in high school to see bands that I looked up to. We were one of the headlining acts on the same stage as The Used, which was one of the biggest bands for me in high school and we got to perform with them this summer and talk to them. We also did 30 minute to hour-long signings for hundreds of fans – having people tell us how much the band means to them is always a big pay-off.
There’s not a lot of money in this industry right now so it’s good to be able to do stuff like that. The band does matter to me, all the hard work we put in does matter, and this is the biggest reward for us.
Thanks for talking to The 59th Sound today Ryan. It’s been great talking to you and we’ll be sure to catch you guys at Soundwave next year!