I don’t think anyone doubts that getting your foot into to door of the music industry is anything less than a nearly impossible venture. Up-and-coming pop punk outfit, Firestarter, know this challenge all too well. The four-piece from Albany, NY made up of guitarist/vocalist Matt LaPerche, bassist Jeff Henlin, drummer Matt Bliss and guitarist Tyler McMullen, found a chance to pursue their dream with one another and took off from there.
I had the chance to meet up with the guys from Firestarter during their stop at The Demo in St. Louis, Missouri on their “End Of Summer Tour” with pop punk/ska band Survay Says! and talk to them about the struggles they’ve faced trying to get their name out there, the new EP they recently released and the hopes they have for the future.
It sounds like forming Firestarter was a leap of faith and a fresh start for you guys. How did you all come together and how did you see this opportunity when it was still new?
LaPerche: Well, I made the grand old mistake of moving up to Albany [NY] for a girl and I did need a new fresh start. I’d recently just left a band under a really bad circumstance, so I moved to Albany. I started working at a shitty job. I met [Bliss] through one of them; we man-delivered calzones to drunk and stoned college students that didn’t tip us. Then, a friend of ours from the Albany area introduced me to [Henlin] and [McMullen] came a little late to the party because we had lost our original guitarist. We were on a tour just like ‘hey we need a guitarist’ and he was the first person to hit me up.
Looking back on it now, how do you guys see your progress and how you’ve grown as a band?
LaPerche: I hate to be this way because I’ve been in bands for six years and touring and everything like that, but we’ve done a lot for what we can. We were on the Glamour Kills sampler twice; we toured the country last year for almost 170 shows. We try and work hard and try and get our music out there in whatever way possible.
You guys seem to have a very hands-on approach to how you run your band: managing yourselves, doing your own booking, etc. Do you prefer to take on these responsibilities? Do you think they make you a better band?
LaPerche: Yes and no. I do all of our management and booking. I would love to just be able to show up to a show and not have to worry about anything business-wise, just play the show and hang out, but I always have to make sure we’re there on time, get what we need like guarantee-wise once we get to the show. Even when we’re home tryting to make the next contact, the next band for us to tour with and booking the tours; that’s a lot.
That sounds like a really complicated process
La Perche: You have no idea. [laughs]It’s hard to explain and have it make sense.
Do you think it maybe helps you guys as a band to have some of that knowledge that maybe a lot of other bands don’t?
Bliss: It’s like a life experience sort of thing.
McMullen: Like [LaPerche] knows how to book a tour. If the opportunity ever came up where somebody came to him on a business end and was like ‘hey help me book this tour,’ that’s good for him. Other bands don’t have the knowledge to book their own tours, they have somebody bigger do it for them.
LaPerche: It’s like a beauty of the beast sort of a deal. I guess we know that everything is going to go the way we know it is because we have direct contact with the bookers. With someone bigger, like an agent, they can apply for support tours. We were lucky we were able to hook up with [Survay Says!] because they’ve been awesome so far and they work with Ted from the New Gold Agency and he’s been awesome too.
Is having that DIY feel to how you function as a band an important aspect to you? Is it something you hope to maintain?
LaPerche: We want to do this are our career. We love playing music. That’s the main reason we got together. It was like ‘yo, forget about the shitty jobs.’
McMullen: DIY can only get you so far, and it sucks to say that because you want to be able to handle your music and do everything you do as a band on your own. Nobody wants somebody else to tell them how to do what they’re passionate about, but at the end of the day if we want to make this our day job, our nine to five per say, we’re going to have to have a boss.
It seems like there are a lot of bands that are switching to a more DIY style and they’re not relying on labels and kind of have to pick up the slack.
McMullen: But they’re relying on crowdfunding which is just as terrible.
LaPerch: It’s like a very small, tight rope.
McMullin: Because it’s easier for an established band to go off and be like ‘hey we don’t need a label anymore,’ whereas, on our side we need to get to that point. We need a label to even wink at us.
LaPerche: I forgot who made the analogy: ‘working with people in the industry is like trying to get the attention of a hot girl in a bar.’
McMullen: There’s a million other people doing the same thing.
LaPerche: When you’re in the music industry, you either love it or hate it or both at the same time.
You just released your third EP, A Life Inconsistent, in two years. Is it important for you guys to keep fresh music out there for your fans to enjoy and for new people to hear for the first time? How do you keep that creative process going?
LaPerche: To be honest, I think A Life Inconsistent is a little different for us. With all of our other records it was just me and Matt [Bliss] mainly doing a lot of the song writing and Jeff [Henlin] would add his bass and everything like that, but Tyler [McMullen] added a new dynamic. We obviously changed our sound a little bit. Honestly, since we are DIY we have to have something to keep people’s attention and we know that music is a big point to that.
McMullen: It’s good to consistently keep putting music out especially on a DIY front because, yeah, we don’t have the bigger tours or the bigger name to draw people’s attention. If we put out a CD every year it’s going to keep us fresh in people’s minds. It helped that I was new to the band, and the second I joined the band we started writing a new record to show for what we had changed and how we had changed.
LaPerche: And where we were going.
Along with that, so far you’ve only released EPs. With accessibility increasing and attention spans decreasing do you think there is still a place for full length releases, or are they a dying breed? Do you see a full length in your future at any point?
McMullen: Definitely not. Full lengths are a great thing. There are so many records that I have to listen to front to back.
Bliss: We know with our next stuff we want to write a full length. That’s what we want to do next. We know that’s what people want.
LaPerche: Everyone’s like ‘where’s the full length?’ We want to make sure that we’re comfortable sound-wise with what we want to do before we pump out twelve songs. I think we’re getting to a point where ‘alright we know where we’re going, we know what we want to play.’ Now we’re ready, now’s the time.
McMullen: A full length is a huge commitment emotionally and financially. Recording a three to five song EP is not a big deal, a band can save up for that in weeks, but recording twelve songs with a producer and all those things, it’s a long terrible, terrible process.
How do you feel your sound has progressed now that you are three releases in? How do you hope to continue to develop your sound?
Bliss: I feel like every release we’ve done we’ve tried to step it up a little bit each time.
LaPerche: [A Life Inconsistent] was the first record we all sat in a room together and organically wrote the songs. In the past it was me and Matt [Bliss] in front of a computer exchanging ideas back and forth. Then, Jeff [Henlin] would throw his bass ideas on top of it. It worked, but it wasn’t us and when Tyler [McMullen] came into the picture all four of us were organically in the same room writing what we wanted to write.
McMullen: Standing in a room, somebody would hit a chord and then we would figure out where we were going from that chord to the next chord on the fly. You don’t have time to think about it. When you’re sitting in a room and you’re just playing what comes next. I think it gives the organic vibe. You can build such strong vibes from writing that way
Right now it seems like pop punk is finding itself back on top. How hard is it to stand out when new pop punk bands seem to be popping up right and left?
McMullen: There’s so many smaller niches inside of pop punk. You have bands that sound like Real Friends, you have bands that sound like New Found Glory, you have bands that sound like State Champs, you have bands that sound like The Story So Far, you have bands that sound like The Wonder Years, Blink 182 and you go on and on and on. It’s broken up between like regions and… It’s a nightmare, it seriously is a nightmare.
Bliss: There’s like hipster pop punk.
McMullen: I have a feeling we’re going to stand out with our full length based on aggression alone. What you hear on A Life Inconsistent, we’re just going to take that sound and multiply it by like ten million and then just make twelve more songs.
LaPerche: We all grew up listening to bands like Underoath, Silverstein, Bayside, Boys Night Out, Armor For Sleep. As we’re getting older we’re like ‘yeah pop punk was cool, pop punk was fun,’ but the only records that we ever listen to from start to finish are those records.
Pop punk has changed quite a bit since its glory days 10-15 years ago. You guys seem to have a sound that kind of blends the new and the old. How do you find that balance and how do you feel you fit in this new era?
McMullen: We all love older pop punk bands. We’re in our early twenties so we understand so we understand what’s fresh in the music scene, so we just take those two things and we just do it. I guess that’s the only way to do it.
LaPerche: We sound like what we want to listen to.
You guys have come a long way so far, but I’m sure you want to keep moving things forward. Where do you hope this band takes you in the years to come?
LaPerche: As far as we can take it. I know it’s a very generic answer, but honestly, as we said before, we want this to be our career. We want to be playing music as much as we can, whenever we can.
McMullen: What’s the name of the guy from [The Rolling Stones]? It doesn’t matter. You know how old they are? Yeah, I want to be that old.
LaPerche: I want to look like a fossil on stage. I want to look like a zombie, like I should be rotting parts off.
What would you say has been the most difficult part of your career for you all personally and collectively?
LaPerche: Honestly, Finances are the bane of a DIY band. The money we spend on tour for food and drinks and all that, we have to make enough money for that and bills at home. We wish we could make enough to be like all we have to worry about is going to the show and playing. At the level we’re at we sacrifice a lot to do this.
McMullen: I hate talking about it because it sounds like such a sob story, but we tour a lot and I’m diabetic. It is the hardest fucking thing to maintain. It still suck have to be places like [St. Louis] where it’s 100 degrees in the sunlight and we don’t have AC in our van and I have to keep my medication at a decent temperature.
LaPerche: Touring without AC…
McMullen: That ties into finances. If we had money, we’d have a working air conditioner.
How did you, or do you continue to, overcome these struggles?
LaPerche: I work two jobs when I’m at home. Everyone else works jobs. Between the time we have tours and we rehearse and everything like that, we are just working.
McMullen: Finding new and creative ways to make money.
LaPerche: That is how we do it. Obviously we’re all working hard so we can finance what we want to do: tour and play music with this band.
What is the ‘highlight’ of your career so far?
Bliss: That’s tough. I don’t know what the highlight is. We played Warped Tour; that was awesome.
LaPerche: We played the local stage in Massachusetts last year.
McMullen: We had a blast.
LaPerche: We followed Warped Tour. We sold at the lines every morning and we pushed as much as we could. We got lucky that we got into the barbeques afterward. It was an experience.
Those Barbeques are infamous.
LaPerche: Yes, and now we know why. One of the nights, you know the band Bad Rabbits? They played a set at the barbeque. They played a cover set and at one point the singer from Strayed From The Path came out and they did a [Rage Against The Machine] cover and it was insane.
McMullen: People from every band that we listened to just casually drinking and dancing. We were just so star-struck.
LaPerche: Like ‘is that Chris [Conley] from Saves The Day?’
What is the one dream the moment at which point either personally or collectively you would be able to say yes I’ve achieved this, I’m living my dreams?
LaPerche: Play a show with Blink 182?
McMullen: Not even, bro. Let’s not even talk about it. I wouldn’t even be able to play that show because I would be dead.
LaPerche: We start loading in and you just have a heart attack.
McMullen: No, I wouldn’t even have a heart attack loading. I would have a heart attack the second you’re like ‘hey we’re playing a show with Blink,’ then dead.
LaPerche: Being able to say that we’re touring all year round and we’re able to be with bands we love listening to and we would love to hang out with.
McMullen: If we’re on tour and I don’t have to beg for Chipotle. We’ve made it if I can comfortably afford Chipotle almost every day.
Bliss: It’s such a hard question to answer, honestly. When we are comfortable doing what we’re doing.
McMullen: When my bills are paid and I don’t have to work a day job.
LaPerche: Doing Warped Tour. The whole tour from start to finish.
