IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, WE CAUGHT UP WITH ANDY BIERSACK A.K.A. ANDY BLACK ABOUT HIS NEW SOPHOMORE ALBUM CALLED THE GHOST OF OHIO, HIS MUSIC CAREER, HIS DIVERSE POOL OF INFLUENCES AND HIS UPCOMING SHOW PARADISE CITY.
A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THAT THE BLACK VEIL BRIDES FRONTMAN IS ACTUALLY LOWKEY HUMOROUS AND BENEATH HIS CALM TOUGH EXTERIOR IS A POSITIVE GUY WHO LOVES SPORTS. READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AND GET TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE TALENTED SINGER, SONGWRITER AND ACTOR.
What’s your story? Who is Andy Biersack?
I am a person who is a person from Cincinnati, Ohio. I moved to Los Angeles when I just turned 18 and wanted to become a Rock musician and lived in my car and did all this stuff to try to make it and have been fortunate enough to be able to play rock music for my entire adult life both in my band Black Veil Brides and as a solo artist. But apart from that I’m married, I’m anxiety ridden, I try to be funny. I try to be a good person. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke cigarettes and I don’t like going out.
How and when did music start for you? Have you always been musically inclined?
It was synonymous with everything else for me when I was a kid. I started finding a through line from comic books and stuff to music so the first bands I got into were probably for aesthetic reasons honestly because I was 3-4 years old. I loved KISS, and Alice Cooper and that kind of stuff. But I also loved musicals like family opera and Sweeney Todd for similar reasons. And then as I got older, I started to fall in love more with singer/songwriters and the craft of writing songs and it kind of just all coalesced and was my entire life at the time. I was very young so I supposed I was always musically inclined but I was also heavily interested in kind of the whole package so to speak.
How would you describe your style?
I guess all of it is hard to describe. It’s like asking what does rain sounds like. I think for everybody it’s a little different but I would say for mine, I wear my influences on my sleeve and it’s a combination of all the things that I loved growing up aesthetically. I’ve always liked darker imagery and more “gothic” things so it’s a little bit of that. I love sports too so there’s a little bit of athletic thing in there and a little bit of all of that.
Who are your music idols?
I’ve always been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen, and like I said before I love KISS. My favorite band growing up was Alkaline Trio. I loved The Misfits, New York Dolls, kind of all over the place I guess. Generally speaking in the Rock world but you know I also like Hip Hop when I was kid like Outkast and stuff like that.
Can you walk us through your process as an artist? How do you usually come up with songs?
Every song is different. Sometimes it starts with an idea and then it’ll be a lyric and sometimes it’s the melody and I write something around that. I’m not someone who has a constant creative process, it’s kind of always depending on the song or where it’s coming from. Some of the time, I’ll come up with a concept and then write lyrics around it and try to figure out a melody and other times it starts with a melody or a piece of music.
If you could collaborate with an artist dead or alive who would it be and why?
I mentioned Springsteen before. I would love to be able to work with him just because he’s such an influence on my writing style.
What’s the story behind your new album, The Ghost of Ohio?
I grew up in southern Ohio and I was deathly afraid of everything growing up. I couldn’t sleep in my room by myself. Sometimes I’d sleep in the hallway outside my parent’s bedroom when I was a little kid on the floor. I would set booby traps for ghosts in my room. I was obsessed with the idea that something was out to get me and as I got older I didn’t really have that as much anymore but I still had an interest in what was so frightening and so I started doing research into my hometown and found all these crazy ass ghost stories and stuff and so I just decided that I kind of wanted to write my own folklore. It was influenced both by my childhood and a podcast called, “Lore” with a guy named Aaron Mahnke, who is a wonderful storyteller, and that was hugely influential in kind of the writing for the bible so to speak for this story and just kind of taking actual parts of folklore and applying it to this new story.
What inspired you to create the tracks in it?
Every track has a different inspiration. This album in particular is really speaking about my upbringing and growing up kind of being a loner and feeling like I didn’t have a lot of place to belong so finding my own fun and ways to navigate life.
Is there a specific track that’s closest to your heart?
There’s a song called, “Heaven” that I wrote about my relationship with my wife and how much she means to me. For me it’s very difficult because, day to day, I have 3 or 4 emotional freak outs and I’ve always had her there to talk me off the ledge and be my rock and I try to be there for her as well on the same capacity so we’ve gone through a lot in our life and it was just kind of a song about how much I appreciate her.
Top 3 music in your playlist right now.
I’ll pull up my spotify and see what I listen to.
David Bowie - Let’s Dance
The entire Alkaline Trio Crimson record
Our Lady Peace - Burned
Foxy Shazam Self Titled Record
Tell us about your upcoming show, Paradise City and your character, Johnny Faust.
There’s a film, American Satan, that came out in 2017 and I play a character who wants to be a rockstar but unfortunately things go awry and he makes a deal with this devil like character that makes him ultra famous but also becomes a drug addict. His whole life blows up. The series takes place after the film and it’s not about the supernatural element but more about what it would be like to follow this guy who risked everything to become ultra famous but now that he’s so incredibly famous, has to pick up the pieces of all the lives he’s’ affected in a negative way.
What’s something that people don’t usually know about you?
Sometimes people don’t necessarily know that I played a lot of sports growing up and I was a hockey player from my adolescence. It was a big part of my life.
If you’re not creating music, performing or acting, what usually keeps you busy?
I follow sports particularly Cincinnati sports, so that’s kind of a hobby of mine. I collect sneakers. When I’m on tour, we just play sports video games all day and then just sitting alone (laughs)
If you’re a book, what kind of book would you be and why?
IKEA instruction manual. Impossible book.
Any advice that you can give to any aspiring artists/musicians/singers/songwriters out there?
Don’t be afraid to suck and don’t be afraid to have people tell you that you suck. When people start, the hardest thing to do with is deal with criticism and I feel like if you’re able to build a kind of teflon suit around yourself and let criticism bounce off you, you’ll have a much larger likelihood of being able to succeed because you won’t be inhibited by the negativity.
American Satan: An Interview with Andy Biersack, Ben Bruce and Ash Avildsen
Interviewer: Sam Rivman
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
Sam: What is the film’s plot rooted in? Is this someone’s personal experience?
Ash Avildsen: With the exception of the physical manifestation of Satan, everything in the film is based on real events. Either myself, or these guys, or the producers have had these experiences in the rock music scene. It didn’t take that much crazy imagination, even though when people see it they’ll say “how did they think of that?”. Specifically when it comes to rock music craziness, truth is usually pretty important.
Ben Bruce: It’s a pretty accurate metaphor I think, the devil and selling your soul.
Andy Biersack: Personally, my character in the movie is from the Midwest and goes out to L.A to be a big rock star. In that regard it’s very similar to my own life. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and left to make it in the rock world. The difference is I didn’t make a deal with a deity. When there’s so many divergences in paths that you can take to success, I think without a doubt you lose a part of yourself in those early years. You can sometimes forget where you came from initially, and the characters in this movie are right in that stage where they’ve given everything to become rock stars and they’ve been given the opportunity to get a shortcut. Hard work pays off, but I don’t know what I would have done if I had the chance to become very successful out of nowhere. When you’re hungry and you want nothing more than to have that success, who knows what you would do if someone presented you with the keys to the kingdom?
Ben Bruce: You’re very much thrown into the deep end quickly and you either learn to swim or it does consume you. Over the years there have been countless iconic rock and roll films, but the characters were all actors. I think one of the wonderful things about this film, that we’re all musicians. We have lived this life, we have been through it, so when you watch this film its a unique perspective.
Sam: What would you say are some of the musical influences for the film? Tell me about some of the composition.
Ash Avildsen: Once the band explodes, I wanted to have the music sound like what a big band might sound like today. There are a lot of bands on rock radio right now that are imitating the greats.
Ben Bruce: (to Ash) It would have been really easy for you to go down that route and pick some old hits, but you didn’t do that.
Ash Avildsen: I wanted to be like “Okay, what if Tool was a more mainstream heavy metal band with more raspy punk vocals?”. So I strayed away from having the band sound classic rock, I wanted it to sound modern and relevant. We weren’t ambiguous with the time frame. A lot of movies wont tell you the time frame, “It Follows” did a really good job with that. We wanted to make it clear that this was present day.
Andy Biersack: The truth is for us, as career musicians emulating these musicians playing these songs, one of the coolest things for me and I think for Ben as well is that these are not our bands. We got to be these other people with this other sound, and that was a great way to get lost in the character. It didn’t feel like this is what we had done everyday for the last decade.
Ben Bruce: I did an interview not too long ago where they asked about that, and the craziest thing about this for me is I’m not necessarily in the place that my character portrays in the movie anymore. It really did take me back, the movie for me was very nostalgic. It made me look at how I was when I was young and think “I can’t believe the place that you’ve come to in your life and the person you’ve become”. Because it did feel very familiar, and its scary.
Sam: What are some of the directorial influences in the movie? What works did you study while making “American Satan”?
Ash Avildsen: This is really a coming of age story, and one film I loved growing up was “Dazed and Confused”. That doesn’t get too dark, but if it got way more gnarly that would be similar. As far as music film influences go, “The Doors” is really the best one. There’s another film called “Sing Street” that we looked at, I thought “Straight out of Compton” did an excellent job. I really wanted the audience to be along for the ride, feeling like the sixth member of the band.
Sam: What do you want your audience to be thinking after they see this film?
Ben Bruce: There’s the age old thing of people saying “Ah, you’ve got the best job in the world!”. This movie just shows that isn’t factual, that’s not the case. We love our jobs, we have a great time, but there’s so much that goes into it, so many things that can drag you down as a person. I want people to step away from this movie and say “I get it”.
Andy Biersack: One of the things that I’m most struck by and that I hope people will see is that people can change. When you’re young and living fast, whether or not its rock music, you might do things before you’re able to put real thought into who you’re going to be. I think that by the end of this film, Johnny is ready for change and the next chapter of his life. I hope that if nothing else, maybe some young people that see this who are going through something similar see that it’s okay to grow and change.
Ben Bruce: You’re not destined to live a life of your past, and that speaks loudly in this film.
Andy Biersack is in the Rock Sound 50! Here he talks about what's changed and why he keeps himself so busy.
WHAT’S CHANGED FOR YOU OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS?
Says Andy: “When you’re young, you can only see what’s right in front of you. That’s one of the reasons young art is so beautiful and visceral, because you’re so in the moment and why people’s first records sound so true.
"What perspective does is it kinda softens you to all the things you thought were the most important in the world. As we continued on there has been such an interesting ideological and political shift in the country we’re from and honestly around the world, that the relevance of being true to yourself and fighting against the power and not letting people corrupt you is true whether you’re 35 years old working a corporate job or you’re 13 going to high school.
"We’ve never had to change the content, so to speak. We’ve never had to pander. My lyrical feelings have changed to fit my life more. I’m not fighting against the guy who’s talking shit and throwing beer at us so much as I’m fighting against the feelings that I still have or that bother me in some way.
"The truth is I had the same feelings of anxiety and loneliness as a lot of artists had. I used to just channel them into being a drunken asshole and flip people off on stage. As I get older, that’s not something I’m as interested in. I’m more interested in being true to those feelings, being more in touch with them and writing about them. Because I have a wife, a home, responsibilities and many joys in my life that are genuine, I don't feel the need to act out in every moment.
"But those feelings still exist. Politically it’s a very divisive time in my country. People are at each others’ throat and there’s a lot of crazy shit going on. That’s as relevant a thing to need music for. Just as a human being. There’s always a reason for rebellion. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll is all about. I can listen to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’ and it still makes me feel like I want to get in my car and drive really fast, even if I’m having a really great night and everything’s going well and it’s a quiet night at home. If I put on those songs I’m still fucking hyped up. That’s why you keep making art the way you do.
"If we ever did pander, it was never intentional. And it’s certainly something I’ve tried my best, as I’ve gotten older to really be genuine to my ideals…”
IT WOULD BE LAME IF YOU WERE STILL TRYING TO WRITE LIKE YOU WERE 16, PEOPLE WOULD SEE THROUGH THAT...
“I think there’s a lot of that around though. One of my biggest pet peeves is selling loneliness to lonely people. Around the time Black Veil started getting popular, there was a wave of bands who came through who seemed like they were being told, ‘Sell this ideal to young people’ and write songs about lonely kids. It was frustrating at the time. You don't see it so much now because it’s not so in vogue.”
IT’S TELLING THOSE COPYISTS FELL AWAY THOUGH WHILE YOU’VE SURVIVED…
“Like you said, people can see through. One of the things people misunderstood early on was the feeling of self-pride for being too egotistical.
"One of the only magazine things I have in the house my wife and I moved into together in 2011, is a Rock Sound Black Veil Brides cover. I have that framed because it’s an interesting snapshot of our youth, and one of the pages there’s a headline that’s me saying, ‘I believe we will change music’. This was early in our career. It's interesting because I walk by that and sometimes I laugh at myself. But in some ways, I think we have been able to aid the shift in alternative rock.
"We’re amongst a generation of bands that have helped carry the genre. It’s why bands like Pierce The Veil and All Time Low are still incredibly popular and almost become more popular by the day, because they’ve been an important contribution to the genre. Or look at someone like Brendon from Panic! At The Disco – obviously on a different scale to myself in terms of popularity – but he comes from the world we all come from.
"While it might be said that Black Veil didn’t directly change the scope or history of music, when it comes to our genre and this feeling of an army of friends in a safe place, I like to think we were very instrumental in moving the genre along. And maybe that’s me saying another crazy, braggadocios thing, but to me it seems genuine. But I don’t give a shit. I am after all the guy that claimed our second record was better than anything Led Zeppelin ever did! At this point, me saying we’ve been instrumental is mild!”
PEOPLE DEFINITELY ALLOW YOU TO SAY SUCH THINGS MORE FREELY THESE DAYS, ALMOST LIKE THEY UNDERSTAND YOU BETTER NOW. WOULD YOU AGREE?
“Yeah, I think they’re a little more ‘in on’ my feelings towards myself these days. I’m constantly self-deprecating because I find it all to be a little bit funny. But I do believe in everything I’m saying, which is an interesting tightrope to walk.”
SO YOU HAVE VANS WARPED TOUR, THE BLACK VEIL BRIDES ALBUM IS DONE, YOU’VE GOT AMERICAN SATAN COMING AND YOU SEEM TO BE HEADING INTO ANOTHER REALLY BUSY PERIOD. ARE YOU EVER GOING TO TAKE A HOLIDAY?
“I mean what the hell else am I going to do? I don't have any education!
"The truth is it’s romantic to think, ‘Oh this guy just can’t stop working!’ but I don't have any other way of surviving, making an income. Just on a surface level, I have a life and responsibilities that I have to maintain. But equally, I’m obsessed with doing stuff. There’s always a little bit of a dark cloud that hangs over my head that through doing stuff I’ve been able to knock away. But through periods of inactivity, it starts to come back and I start to feel like I need a purpose.
"Doing stuff, writing songs, playing shows, being creative is my purpose. All that stuff is the reason I get up in the morning, in terms of my career. And then my wife and my family – to me it’s not mutually exclusive, it's one and the same – my wife is a musician, we talk about music constantly, we write together. All of the bands I got into because of my family. I talk to my mom and my dad about records they should get into.
"To me, music and art and entertainment is all one and the same. If I’m working on my comedy show every week, I’m working with my cousin, and my best friend since 2006. It’s all family and life wrapped into one. It’s hard for me to see it any other way. What the hell am I supposed to do, take a vacation? I guess at some point I would love to, but the truth of the matter is, if you’re lucky enough to get to do what you love in the world then just shut up and do it. Paul Stanley once said something in an interview I read when I was a kid that stuck with me and it changed my life. It’s a very simple sentence but it means a lot to me. He said, ‘If you’re lucky enough to become President, don't complain about having to wear a tie.’”
