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#WSTW 2013 - Andy's Story

I remember sitting on the floor of my first apartment in Hollywood, the carpet was once grey I believe but at this point it was more of a brown/black after being soaked in spilled wine and cigarette ashes….cockroaches crawled up and down the walls, leading into a kitchen that was often more of a trash collection room than a place to store or cook food. It wasn’t as if we could afford groceries anyway…just to eat we’d have to pool our money and make a trip to the nearby 711 to split a day old taquito slathered in whatever dipping sauce we could find to try to hide the taste. More often we would buy a bottle of seagrams or a handle of cheap vodka and sit around talking about the the career we were planning…at this point there was a fair amount of people in the world that knew who Black Veil Brides were..we had released a video on a shoestring budget after pulling in some favors and through that video we had gained some momentum. It was enough to garner a manager, booking agent, indie label deal…all the things you dream of when you are starting that seem unattainable… but for us…no matter how destitute we may have been…we always believed that it was just the first step haha.

It’s interesting what perception does…given that only a few months prior I was living either in my car in a parking lot in North Hollywood or I was sleeping on an ex bandmates floor for 100 bucks a month (no easy feat to procure haha) but now I had a home…we had a place to write and drink and be a band. This was an incredible feeling. That “home” was nicknamed “The compound” as it resembled more of a Manson family esque bomb shelter than an apartment…but we loved it. It was ours. Its there that we sat and wrote songs like “Heavens Calling” and “Children Surrender” and its on that floor that I wrote the lyrics for a song called “Perfect Weapon” which became a song that would further help to define the ideals of the band and the relationship we would come to have with our fans (not yet the “BVB Army”)

As we grew as a band a clear message started to form between us and the audience…our songs and “Never Give In” attitude would serve as a means for all of us involved to break free from our past or the things that effected us, we could help people that were in the battle of life and hopefully give some strength to those who needed it. This was the beginning of the “army” mentality. The paint we wore on our bodies started to become “war” paint…something that would signify someone who was outcasted from society for having different interests or beliefs from what was considered “normal”. This was of course long before the notion of body paint became a commonplace idea. You need only to have an internet connection worthy of a google search these days to find many bands that now utilize this same image, some for theatrics and some..alarmingly…for corporate financial gain and social manipulation. However at this time in our history..our image, songs and “gang” vocals started to become a calling card for the disenfranchised…and amongst this we found something that we all yearned for, a true calling.

It’s important to note that while this was forming we by no means had it all figured out…we knew what we wanted to do and we knew our hearts were in the right place…it was genuine but we were still just barely sliding by with no money, lots of booze and what we thought was a badass idea. This was “We Stitch These Wounds”. The collected works of the first half of our lives combined into one 12 song LP.

The recording of WSTW took place (as with everything in our lives at the time) in modest means, we had a minuscule budget and I got horrendously sick the week before I was supposed to track vocals and was forced to delay the process causing all vocals to be tracked in 3 days with about a gallon of flem, mucous and whatever other random gross sickly fluids one could have in their nose and lungs. We didn’t care though…we were putting out an album and it was all we ever wanted it to be.

The record was released, the army grew…the critics absolutely hated it and we knew we were on the right track. I started thinking about this time period tonight as I was on twitter looking at some of the mentions I was receiving about how the “band has changed” or how our recent actions “are shitty” or what have you. It intrigued me because as far as I know the only thing thats changed among the 5 of us is that we now get to enjoy the success of what we have worked for.

This record and everything that surrounded it continue to this day to be the single most important thing collectively in the career of Black Veil Brides and I want to say that in the remaining months of 2013…you, the BVB Army will see something very exciting happen surrounding it.

WSTW is going to take on a new life and I hope that this record, the record that took us from being punk street kids to members of a band that tours the world can be heard by each one of you in the light we believe that it deserves.

#WSTW2103

-Andy

#andybiersack #blackveilbrides #wstw2013