Recently, I got the chance to sit down with Within Reason on the night they were playing the legendary Machine Shop in Flint Michigan. Chris Dow (vocalist) and David Koonce (bass) took the time to chat with Side Stage, after a teaser question about the bands love for red onions from a close friend we got down to business.
Side Stage Magazine: So you are planning to head to the studio after this tour?
Chris Dow: We are. We’ve been writing, doing our own preproduction. Basically, as we are writing, we record acoustic tracks of each one of us doing our parts to it, so we can learn the songs better. And play it together as a band and be tight with it when we go to the studio and not waste a lot of time. We don’t really want to take any time off touring. Any time we are in the studio, that’s at least three weeks that we would miss of touring – which is the most important thing to us right now to stay relevant and to stay in front of our fans.
Is there an ETA or a time frame of when you will have new music out?
CD: We are trying to get the single to radio by March, at least before April if possible. For us to be able to captivate a lot of those festivals, there are certain things we need touring wise and we need to have a single going first. As the single starts to hit the radio we will finish the rest of the record. I would look for the record to come out, if all works well, May or maybe the first of June.
What is coming up in the future for you guys? Any festivals lined up?
CD: They are talking about a couple, but nothing is confirmed yet. So I can’t say or speculate. I do know that some of the ones we have done before we will do again, and a couple we have never done before. I know one that we are looking forward to, and I hope we get, is Earth Day Birthday in Orlando. That is a big one. They have a big station down there. We just played a big festival down there with Rise Against, Hollywood Undead, Killswitch Engage, and Atreyu. We spoke to the radio station and they mentioned bringing us back for that too. I know our agent is working on that one.
What is the biggest challenge for your band?
CD: Being independent and having to overcome adversity of daily life as a musician, the fact that we have to fund everything ourselves. Everything else that labels and bands have, we also have, which means we have to find a way to pay for everything up front.
David Koonce- A lot of times labels are like a bank. They loan you the money and you pay them back. In our case we have to find the money. It’s hard to compete with bands that have two or three million dollars behind them of someone else’s money.
CD: A lot of time those labels have that political power, and leverage, to bully people like us off the bill and get their bands in our place. Blow jobs is what they are, and we don’t do that shit. This isn’t Adam Lambert’s band [laughs]. That’s a bad joke. He is badass and a great vocalist. My point is, as an independent band, it is sometimes tough to compete with labels that have more resources.
You guys have had a lot of big moments. What has been the biggest highlight of your career?
CD: The red carpet at the Grammys would be mine.
DK: I think cracking the Top 40 on the radio chart because that officially gives you a hit. That felt kind of nice. The Grammy thing was really cool, I’m not gonna lie, that was pretty awesome to taste the upper echelon of the industry. I think the radio thing kind of topped it for me. Its several months– or years- of your work starting to pay off.
CD: Going back to what we said a minute ago about “Here Comes the Light” hitting Top 40, for us, that was so great because we didn’t have anyone with political power or funding. It was just about a band, the underdog coming in and a great song working to make top 40, and it wasn’t about the budget. If we had a budget it would have gone a lot higher. That was the problem. We couldn’t pay a team to work the song to go any higher. We do fund it ourselves. The fact that it did cross the top 40 without all that was something that we felt really good about.
Do you have any tours planned after this?
CD: We are working on one.
I know this tour was delayed due to the Hinder bus accident and it messed you guys up a bit.
DK: It kind of pushed back our recording. The initial plan was to do this tour in November and December and then go to the studio and get the record out by March – which is still our goal but the window just got a lot smaller. We spent a lot of time in December working on music for the record. Hopefully we will still get caught back up on the year.
CD: We are always working on something. Right now we are in talks with the Shaman’s Harvest guys, who were on the first half of this tour, about doing some stuff with them. There is another band that may go out with us – Aranda potentially. It would be a three band bill in March. We would hit some markets in the South East where we are from and some in the Midwest and they discussed adding more to it. Then again we are still trying to figure out when we are going to get into the studio and we will do it all around that. I would love to get in the studio at the end of February and start the tour in mid-March. That would be perfect because then they can get the single ready while we are out touring.
If you could put together a tour, what bands would you want on the tour?
CD: Rage Against The Machine and Led Zeppelin.
DK: I think on a realistic front [laughs]
CD: Meanwhile, back to earth…
DK: I think a good fit for us, we have talked about it several times, is Theory Of A Deadman. We all get along, that is important, touring with people you get along with.
CD: They always seem to be prevalent on the radio and their crowds are a similar demographic to ours, guy, girls, all ages and types, that seems to be the same demographic that we have with our fan base so that would work well. We played recently with Three Doors Down, that was a great bill because we felt that was our exact demographic too, our audience that we seem to see on social media on all of our analytics, shows similarities to their demos.
Is there a question that you’ve always wanted to answer and have never been asked?
CD: What would we do if we had billions of dollars? Two chicks at the same time. [Laughs]
I can’t remember what movie that is from but I thought it was funny (Office Space).
I think one that we hear from fans is: what can they do to help us in our journey? If fans were more aware of what they could do that would help artists, I think that would be beneficial. Everyone has bands that they love, and when they disappear, they wonder, what happened to that band? Passive fans are what happened to that band. And they don’t even realize it. That’s not every band, but it is a lot of them. People started stealing music, whether they just went to Spotify or whatever else. If artists would just explain to them there are certain things that would help, like on Spotify- if they are getting it for free, that is destroying the industry all over the place. If they get the $9.99 deal there was an attorney that said we would need 20 million people around the country in order for them to pay out the same dividend that iTunes does. It’s not going to happen, but eventually they will get taken to court. But all the artists are going to have to team up together. It’s really about the fans. If they like a band, seriously they should just find a way to purchase the music, or go see the shows, or buy t-shirts, whatever. So many people are always saying to us, “when are you guys playing?” We just played your town last night. They say, “well, we didn’t know.” If you’re a fan of the New York Yankees, you go look at their fucking schedule. That is how you know the Yankees are playing. How else are you going to go see the baseball game? [laughs]
You know the thing is too, all artists, we are all consumers too. We love music, we buy it. A lot of artists are guilty too. I hear some people say just take this, I say don’t even… that’s what is hurting everyone else. I don’t know, the labels still haven’t figured it out either and that is why they are still losing money on bands. They won’t take the risks they used to. They are definitely screwing over all the artists. All of the current label deals I have heard are terrible. We won’t even take a meeting with most of them. We know what they want from us, but what they are offering in return isn’t explicitly written out. It’s a recipe for disaster.
DK: We’ve had to get our own education. When a lot of artists get to a label, they give you a manager and an attorney and they handle it. We had to get our own education.
CD: Exactly
DK: I remember the first record deal that we ever got. We sat down and read it and I said “this looks pretty good” and then we had an attorney look at it and he said, “I won’t wipe my ass with that contract.”
CD: Fucking terrible! I said, “What part?” He said, “All of it!”
DK: So that is what we decided, right now we gotta get an education in the business. We had a situation with a management company. We were with them for a year and our record got shelved and never came out. We ended up getting the record back and out of the contract. The silver lining of all of that was that we got a free education for an entire year with the top people in the business. So now there are things that we know to look for. Every band we have ever played with, we always ask them, “what’s the biggest mistake your band ever made?” Now we know their mistakes, and now we don’t have to make their mistakes. We call it, collecting pearls (of wisdom). For some, one wrong mistake, that’s the end. The education is just as important as the art.
CD: Back in the day that’s what he (David Koonce) and I did at every show when we would play with every artist we talked to them and we would learn from their mistakes. We could cut a lot of time in half. It might have taken us twenty years to get here if we didn’t ask all of those questions. It was always different and sometimes it was really funny. I don’t think that anyone ever gave us the same exact answer except “fuck the labels, fuck the management”. That’s the funny thing, labels don’t exist without artists. I don’t know a single artist that would rush you to go sign with their label. So we have our own situation. We had to read and ask a lot of questions and just– trial and error, make our own mistakes too. So far, speaking on the business side and fan base side, it’s all growing really fast. It’s at the point where it’s really hard for us to keep up.
DK: I can also give you some advice to pass on to any other independent bands. You better get an education in large diesel engines.
CD: No doubt, we spent five grand this week.
DK: We’ve been through it so many times with so many vehicles, at least we can trouble shoot the easy stuff. I told someone, that you know you’re in a real band when your knowledge of engines is equal to the knowledge of your guitar, you know.
CD: His business cards say “Within Reason Caterpillar Diesel Engines”.
DK: Allison transmissions. I can handle them.
Last question, Is there anything to pass on to your fans?
CD: Thank You! I mean, that is what we are built on and we appreciate our fans more than anything else because I firmly believe that bands don’t exist without fans. So the bands that don’t take the time to let them know how much they appreciate them, I think that’s the downfall. Sometimes I think those are the same artists that would never be able to do it independently because they are too fucking stupid. The reality of it is that many people in this world are pretty damn oblivious.
DK: You’re right, we see artists all the time, and they definitely don’t get “it.” I hate going back to the education thing but that’s what it’s all about. You got to learn how to do this business. There is an art to it, but the majority of this business you gotta know how it works. If you don’t know how to drive a racecar – you’re not going to be successful being a racecar driver if you don’t learn how to drive the car.
CD: I certainly don’t want it to come off like we think that we know everything, because we certainly don’t. We are still learning every single day. We still ask every artist we play with what we can learn from them. I think the main thing is, just try to educate yourself a little more each day, to get an edge. It’s certainly helpful, but no one has the industry figured out right now. That’s the problem. Labels are going under too.
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