The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die Interview

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    Back in the wilds of early 2013 when I still got paid to write about music I interviewed The World Is at Suburbia in Brooklyn, an interview I intended to submit to Razorcake. It was turned down because: "I'm serious when I say I don't know much about popular culture (or the internet) because I've invested two decades into building zines and vinyl records." Frankly I have no idea what was going on with that intro but here's a long interview from before all you nerds got into the band. Have fun, Ben.

 Music journalists are pretty famously a hype-obsessed group, the kind of people who can be re-convinced they’ve found the savior of rock every month, or that a bunch of mulleted dudes with laptops are the future of recorded music.  We get into internet fights about the authenticity of pop singers with two songs to their name, and treat interviews with sullen Danes like events.  I’m, obviously, no different.  Albums I couldn’t care less about a year after their release were once my favorite parts of a band’s catalog.  A well-done PR campaign can get me chomping at the bit for new tracks, even if they’re terrible.

            So, with all this in mind, I’m going to make a pronouncement that I’ll hope you take seriously: The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die are going to blow up.  Hard.  The seismic shocks of their newfound popularity will cause coastal Asian countries to slip into the ocean, drowning millions.  It will make the world’s population deaf in the part of their ear that allows them to hear white-boy blues.  Monsters living at the bottom of the sea will reconsider their record collections.

            At least that’s my prediction.  I’ve never been able to put my finger on just what excites me about the Connecticut-based band, but that’s probably because their songs bring together disparate genres to produce droning pieces that you can shout along to.  It’s been said before, but never with more honesty: they sound like no one else. This group of hardworking, crucial ladies and dudes have been hounding the forests of the Northeast, tearing down the Midwest’s highways, and making noodley, even twinkly, music in one form or another for a few years now.  With a new album due out on Topshelf Records this spring, and in the middle of their most extensive tour yet, I sat down in January with Greg Horbal (guitar, vocals) and Derrick Shanholtzer-Dvorak (guitar, shouting) at Suburbia in Brooklyn, New York.

-Rob Rubsam

Rob: I remember seeing you guys at Death By Audio (in Brooklyn) a year ago, and while it was a great show, the audience seemed pretty distant.  But then I saw you again at CMJ this year, and the crowd was going nuts. 

Greg: Well also, that lineup was awesome.  That’s something we’ve loved about this tour: all the shows have been great, we’re playing with bands we love every night. And Brooklyn, when we were playing Death By Audio, that was the show that tour we were worrying about, but it turned out being great.  That place is awesome, I hope we get to play there again next, or this, year.

Rob: I was just gonna ask, have you seen that people have been reacting more enthusiastically than they used to be to the music?

Derrick: This tour has been some shows where it’s been unexpected that people weren’t as into it.  I guess we kind of get used to the sing-alongs and stuff, and there was a chunk of the tour that was pretty tame.  But there were a lot of kids and they were really into it, and we played well.

Greg: And it’s also that we’re not really an appropriate band to be jumping on top of people to. [laughs]

Derrick: I was a little surprised by that, yeah.  We’ve played shows where there’s stage dives and crowd-surfing, like we’re some real hard band.

Greg: So then when it doesn’t happen, I kind of step back and think ‘wait, this actually isn’t appropriate at all, so it’s fine.’  We’re pretty.  That’s the thing too, we have eight people now, but we didn’t practice with one of them for this tour.  I think we’re still sounding really good, but we’re really excited to go home and really incorporate or new cello player, and really teach her how to get in on the jams, the little interlude things and whatnot.  So next time we go out, we’re hoping to just be wild.

Derrick: Plus, it’s hard to give out a lot of energy when there’s eight of us on the stage, and any move is gonna knock someone in the face.

Greg: Exactly.

Rob: I understand.  Sometimes, do you feel like you’re the weird band on shows, when there’s a lot more bands where moshing is more appropriate?

Greg:  Derrick and I have booked a lot of shows, and people will be like ‘why would you put x band on y show, because they don’t fit.’  And I don’t care, I want to see Sleep and Good Luck on the same show, that sounds awesome.

Rob: I would go to that.

Greg: I would definitely go to that.  We’ve played a show with Kitty Pride this year, and that was wild, that was the most diverse lineup.

Derrick: On the other end of the spectrum, we got offered to play this one-day fest, a DIY fest, that the Cro-Mags were headlining.  Which was really fuckin weird. We unfortunately didn’t do that, but that would have been-

Greg: That would have been awesome.

Rob: Sounds like it.

Greg: But I mean, bringing the weird, I guess we’re weird, but we’re all weirdos, so-

Derrick: We obviously have a background in punk, we all played in punk bands and shit, so I guess we kind of are used to it, because that’s the way a good show goes, the crowd is supposed to jump on one another.

Greg: What’s the point of writing music that isn’t to get people to jump on top of each other?

Rob: Fair point.  Going with the punk thing, if it is a ‘punk’ thing: you put all your stuff online for free.  Why do you choose to do that?

Derrick: Just so people have easier access to it.  You know, the digital thing, it’s sort of an intangible product, it just seems kind of weird to sell it.  Our first EP (Formlessness) did so well because I posted it for free on a bunch of message boards, and the internet was really into it, there was no other promotion for it or anything.  I don’t really purchase digital shit, so I don’t see the sense in selling it.  I mean, Topshelf sells some of it, and put it on digital distributors, but they put money into our record, so it helps them recoup.  If someone really wants it, you can get it for free.

Greg: Google’s there.  A lot of bands when I was first getting into stuff like that they were doing that, that was the model.  And it was like ‘oh, okay,’ because really, what’s the harm?  We want people to hear our band, so go find it, I guess. [laughs]

Rob: That kind of leads into my next question.  Do you think you’d be as widely-heard as you are if you weren’t putting your stuff online for free?

Derrick: Well, I mean, this band, before Greg was even in it, we played shows without recordings for about a year, just throughout New England.  And more and more people started getting into it, I guess word of mouth, ‘oh, you need to go check out this band.’  I think the stupid name helps, you know, it’s not some forgettable thing like ‘Placemat.’ [laughs]  It’s, ‘oh, here’s this fucking audacious name, these guys are assholes, they’re pretentious,’ or it creates some kind of conversation, like ‘oh this band has a fucking stupid name, I’ll check them out, and see whether I can weigh in on whether they’re terrible or not.’

Greg: When I was in another band, I saw the name in a zine my friend made, and I was like, ‘what the fuck is this thing?’

Derrick: What was it?

Greg: Elise Granata wrote a zine called ‘Inkwell Mags.’ I still have it.

Derrick: It also was all dudes who had never played in bands or had anything to do with what was going on in Connecticut, it was just Josh (Cyr), Tom (Martinez), and me, who had just moved to Connecticut, and Tyler Bussey.  It was just a weird group of dudes that didn’t have any connections to what you guys were doing.

Greg: Exactly, and once Steve and I came in, it really settled, I think that was when everything started to move.  Everyone was like, ‘okay’, because we’d all come from punk band backgrounds too, and Derrick and Josh and Tom were just ready to go, and that was awesome.  And then Chris (Teti) ended up joining, who played in Steve and ours old band (My Heart to Joy), and it’s been awesome ever since that point.  And this is the only thing any of us really care about at all.

Rob: Expanding on that, how did the band get started, and how do you choose to add members?  Is it a choice, or is it a thing that just kind of happens?

Derrick: Tom and I started the band together.  We had been playing solo shows together for about a year, we each had our own project, it was mainly acoustic, and real quiet, and it had been a while since either of us had been in a loud band.  We started talking about starting an instrumental, atmospheric band, and talked about the name being ‘The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’ as a joke about post-rock song-titles.  And then we never dropped it.  Josh actually was my roommate at the time, and we were all drinking, talking about starting the band, and Josh is like, ‘yeah, I’ll play bass,’ and Tom and I were like ‘uhhh’ and he just picked up this broken bass guitar and started shredding.  And then I called Tyler, and told him he was in the band, and that he didn’t have a choice.

Greg: That worked well.

Derrick: And he quit after the first tour. [laughs]

Greg: It’s actually funny, when he quit, I was at the last show that he played, and he came up to me trashed, I mean really drunk.  And I’m straight edge, and he’s like, ‘I’m quitting because everyone drinks too much.’  And in my head, I’m just straight edge fury, “you piece of shit.”  So, it went well.  I always liked seeing that early formation of the band.  And I’m glad that I ended up in it, and everything since then has been awesome.  Really, I think that, it was a slow start up with this lineup, but this record that we just did, as long as it’s been taking, we’re all really happy with it.

Derrick: My old band had played shows with Steve (Buttery)’s old band, he played in this noise band like Daughters, and he was the best drummer I’d ever seen. I was like, ‘I want to be in a band with this dude.’  And as soon as our drummer from the first EP quit, he was the first person we asked, and he was down to do it.  Chris was the dude that Greg was friends with that was on tour, and we were like ‘you might as well play an instrument, since you’re with us everywhere we go.’  So that’s when new first started adding unnecessary shit, ‘let’s have three guitars.’  Julia, she’s from the DC area, and she had played cello on the records of some bands that I was into, and I asked her to play cello on our record.  After doing that, and playing a show with her, we decided just to have her play with us full-time, or as full-time as she can with school.

Rob: What’s the writing the process like in the band? Has the process changed over the years?

Derrick: Nobody prepares riffs or anything; we just set up and start with something, and build from it, and make all the changes spontaneous.  I used to smoke a lot of weed, and then we would write songs.

Greg: Yeah, we usually do that, demo it out, and then Derrick, Tom and I would get together and work on vocals, very much a group thing.  Then demo it out, sing it into a microphone, make demos of everything, and then edit it here or there.  At times things will vary, but usually that’s how it goes.  So we’re also excited to go home and actually start recording again once we get back.

Rob: You have your own studio where you record yourselves, right?

Derrick: The first two EPs I recorded in my basement with one microphone.  Chris works at a studio (Format Audio), the split (with Deer Leap) and the LP were recorded there.

Rob: I guess I misunderstood your tumblr posts.

Greg: I don’t usually re-read.

Derrick: He doesn’t edit anything.

Greg: I can’t spell.

Rob: I’ve seen people online, that should be a warning flag right there, talk about you like you’re part of a Connecticut sort of scene.  Is that a fair description?

Greg: It is and isn’t.  In Willimantic right now, there’s a lot of stuff in Eastern Connecticut.  I used to play in a band called My Heart to Joy, and we were very central CT. It was awesome, but it wasn’t really a house show thing at all, we only played with hardcore bands.  What we have going on in Willimantic is a very separate thing.  Derrick lives at a house called ‘The Handsome Woman’ and books a lot of shows there, and a good chunk, probably half of the band lives at the house.

Derrick: At one point, the entire band lived there, but people come and go.

Greg: But shows there have been awesome lately, and I think it’s getting stronger and stronger.

Derrick: Definitely more and more people showing up, even though it’s in the middle of nowhere.  When I first started doing shows there, it was hard to get anyone from Connecticut to come out, because it’s 45 minutes from the nearest interstate.  And now, my house will be packed whenever we do bigger shows.

Rob: About the eastern Connecticut thing, I see you do Broken World Media.  How did you get started with that, and how do you pick people to work with, if that’s the right way to describe it?

Derrick: I mostly started putting out our tapes.  I’d had similar projects before, like DIY record labels; they were just sort of a mess, but I decided to do this one with other members of the band.  We have a print shop, started doing all of our own shirts and flat-stock printing.  I mostly made tapes for The World Is, and bands that live at my house and friends, and am starting to branch out now.

Rob: I saw things online, about a racist incident (at a Connecticut show) and my question is: do you think it’s a band’s responsibility to take on racism and sexism in their scene?

Greg: I think it’s important…

Derrick: It’s important to tell dumbasses when they’re being fucking stupid.  Like in your scene and community, it’s important to at least, since we’re a more public voice for the Connecticut scene, to address those things.  I mean, bands can take on the responsibility, bands cannot, but I guess we choose to.  People can do whatever the fuck they want, but we were about to play a show with the band, and a dude that collaborated with us as a spoken-word artist is a person of color, and he took a lot of offense to it.

Greg: And thing the too is that it’s an educational process.  A lot of those kids come from Connecticut public high school, so possibly someone has never told them that’s it’s not okay.  There was a fight where those kids were like, ‘we can say whatever we want!’  But it’s now gotten to the point where we’re cool with that band, they know, and honestly it takes a while for people to get it.

Derrick: And I think the situation was only a big deal because of the way they reacted to being called out.

Greg: Oh my god, that was wild.  So yeah, it was interesting.

Rob: I’ve seen that with people, obviously I’m not from there, but from other scenes, where when people get called out they get very defensive and say very stupid things.

Greg: That’s your instinct, it’s unfortunately the punk rock mentality to be like ‘fuck you, I can do whatever I want,’ even if it’s wrong.  You’re not even thinking right away, ‘why is this offending someone?’  You’re just like ‘fuck you, I can do whatever I want.’  Really, most people grow up, and you just wait for that to happen.  Sometimes, if we can basically influence someone to get it a little quicker, that’s awesome, so I hope that we are able to do that.

Rob: Do you choose bands to tour with, or is it a thing that just kind of slots into place?  I know you do booking, so does that help with it as well?

Greg: Yeah, this tour was awesome, because we got to do little stretches with a bunch of different bands.  Empire! Empire! (I was a Lonely Estate) and Saint Seneca are both really old friends, and doing the Midwest with them was awesome.  We’ve known the Adventures guys from Code Orange Kids for a couple years now, so to get to be on the road with them for a couple of days has been great.  The Self Defense Family thing kind of came out of nowhere; my really good friend plays drums for them, which is kind of crazy, as they really don’t play shows at all, so I wasn’t expecting them to say yes to this. We’re doing some shows with Sundials pretty soon.  I want to either tour with bands that we’re friends with, or that I’m in love with, because that makes for the best tours.  There’s no one saying ‘you have to go on tour with this’, which is awesome, because I know bands who are in that position, who have someone dictating what they’re going to be doing at every moment, and I don’t know how you could function that way.

Derrick: It takes a special level of cluelessness in the early stage of being a band to get a manager to decide where we should go, who we should tour with.  Those things are very easy to figure out.

Greg: Exactly, and honestly it takes away most of the fun of it, running around like a chicken with your head cut off, trying to figure out what’s going on.  We honestly want to do as much as we can with this band-

Derrick: But it’s on our terms.

Greg: Exactly, it’s very much, we want to make the music we want to make, and see where that takes us.  And it’s been awesome so far.  If you told me I am doing this now when I was 15, you would have blown my mind.

Derrick: Everything we’ve done and everything that’s happened for us has been pretty organic.  The first EP got a lot of interest, so we got someone to put out the seven-inch, toured a little bit.  We’ve never done anything like getting on a big tour as the support or had a manager or anything, like most promotional things we do ourselves.

Rob: Segueing into that, what is your relationship with Topshelf like?

Derrick: They’re friends.  Greg’s old band had a relationship with them.  Before Greg was in the band, he told me that Kevin Duquette (of Topshelf Records) was interested in putting Formlessness out as a seven-inch, and the label we had been talking to before had just stopped talking to us.  So I talked to Kevin, I’d met him once or twice before.  They’re good dudes, they get all the shit done when we need them to do it, they run their label really, really well, so it’s a really good relationship.  They help us out a lot, and I’m sure we help them out a lot too. 

Greg: Yeah, they are really good friends.  I feel like I at least talk to them every couple days, so the label is awesome, and I’m glad we’re a part of it.  I actually think I’m going to start working there in a couple of weeks, which is awesome.

Rob: Do you have any bands that are really important or influential to you that you think other people wouldn’t notice?

Derrick:  I always talk about this: my absolute favorite band, called The White Octave that was from Chapel Hill, did two records in 2000 and 2001 and then broke up.  That’s been my favorite band since high school, they’re my favorite records, and I try and rip off their guitar tone.  I take a lot of the dynamics that I would work into our songs from that.  And then Rush.

Greg: We have a song that definitely sounds like Rush.  We’re on this 4-way split (with Self Defense Family, Code Orange Kids, and Tigers Jaw), and the intro guitar lead is a Rush part.

Derrick: Greg wrote it, he tried to make it softer and put a lot of reverb on it, sort of bury it so just the melody was there.  And then when I recorded it, I put high-gain, layered the track and tried to make it sound like a ‘Tom Sawyer’ lead. [laughs]

Greg: That dude, the lead singer of Self Defense Family (Patrick Kindlon), loves Rush, and when we were emailing about the split, he just told my friend Alan that he thinks it’s the best song we’ve ever written.  And it’s like, ‘ok, he likes Rush, this makes sense!’  All I can think of is Mr. Bungle, because they were wild, and that’s all I’ve been listening to for the last three days again, I go on a kick every year.

Rob: I’ve noticed that bigger indie sites like Pitchfork and the AV Club ignore big swaths of labels and scenes.  I wrote down ‘is this fair?’, but that doesn’t seem like the right question.

Greg: I mean, fuck ‘em, I don’t read Pitchfork.

Derrick: Yeah, I don’t read Pitchfork, I check out the AV Club every now and then, just seems like it’s for dads, ‘yeah, I listen to cool music.’ [laughs]

Greg: Both of Steve’s bands got on the AV Club lists for worst band names, so we were pretty stoked.

Derrick:  The AV Club, if you’re reading this-

Greg: Fuck you.

Derrick: I was gonna backtrack, but yeah.

Greg: I don’t really wanna talk about this, but the AV Club ran an article on ‘twinkle daddies’, which is our fault, a joke that was taken so far that it’s real, and it’s horrifying.  They wrote an article askin, ‘what is this?’, and we were referenced.

Rob: You seem to do a lot of meme-related stuff, or stuff that becomes memes, like twinkle daddies or ‘emo is a gang’ and stuff.

Greg: [laughs] Let’s not even talk about that.

Me: My point is just, why do you think that stuff catches on with people online?

Greg: We’re fucking horrible.

Derrick: Yeah, we’re idiots.

Greg: Our lives are jokes, clearly. 

Derrick: When we ride in the van, the shit that comes out of our mouths is just dumb.  We just talk about the dumbest shit, constantly, trying to make absurd jokes.

Greg: It’s funny, because our music is so serious, but as human beings, we’re a comedy routine.

Derrick: We don’t really talk when we play live because usually when we do it goes bad. It’s either really awkward or we just say dumb shit that we said to each other in the van. [laughs]

Me: But I mean, why do you think that stuff catches on with other people?

Greg: I don’t know, I really don’t know.

Derrick: Because we’re fucking hilarious.

Greg: [laughs] Yeah!

Derrick: We’re the funniest motherfuckers on earth.  And you dumbass kids are gonna buy all our shit!

Rob: Back when I was younger and big on internet stuff, because I’m totally not now, I was really into precise genre characterization, so I’d just go all out on stuff.  Later I’d realize just how stupid I was in doing stuff like that, and that is probably when I just started describing everything as rock’n’roll, which is also a very reductive way of putting it. [laughs]

Greg: Whenever anyone at work asks me what my band is, I just say rock’n’roll!

Derrick: I just say rock, of if they look like they’re in their twenties, I’ll say indie rock.

Greg: I found out one of the guys I work with’s favorite band is the Promise Ring, no, Jimmy Eat World, and I was like, ‘on our new record, we have a part we dubbed the Jimmy Eat World part,’ and he’s like ‘oh, maybe I’ll like that.’  So I’m excited to give him that before I depart.

Derrick: ‘This is what I’m going to go do, have fun rotting in this office.’

Greg: ‘Have fun with a proper adult life, I’m going to go ruin everything.’

Rob: I have a couple random questions, the strange ones.  Why do you think punk singers make country records after their bands break up?

Derrick: [laughs] They probably think, ‘I need to take myself seriously, I spent a fucking decade in a punk band,’ and they’re just old and boring.

Rob: It’s probably the farthest thing they can get from punk.

Greg: Punk rock will never die, but you will. [laughs] I put out a limited Dishwasher seven-inch, so we all have dark folk-punk roots.  I have 300 of those sitting in my basement, so if you’re reading this article, come get ‘em.

Rob: Do you think that dubstep is the Nu-Metal of the 2010’s?

Derrick:  Oh my god, yes.  That’s a good way to put it.

Greg:  I really like that ‘Scary Monsters Spirits’ song.

Derrick: Don’t put that in.

Rob: I just thought of that the other day, and it just kind of blew my mind.

Derrick: Don’t fuckin mall-creatures listen to dubstep?  Who is dubstep marketed to?

Greg: Mall-creatures.

Derrick: I don’t know, is there a dubstep kid?  Like, you see the kid with thirty-two-inch cuffs and you’re like ‘he loves Slipknot,’ but I can’t look at someone and be like ‘that dude’s really into dubstep.’

Rob:  Dubstep’s kind of everything.  There was definitely a period where every pop-song had a dubstep section.

Greg: I don’t even know, I just know that one Skrillex song has a really tight melody for a second, and the rest of it I don’t care, I don’t get it.  My friend used to drag me to dubstep night in Hartford, because his summary of it was, ‘all the misfits from all the other subcultures,’ like they don’t necessarily fit in.  There were some punks there, there were some ravers there, they just went there, no one was really getting along.  There’d be a DJ going but no one was actually dancing.

Derrick: The first time it was ever mentioned to me, we were on tour, this kid in Morgantown was like ‘yeah, I might go to this Dubstep party tonight, it’s kind of like noise music,’ and I was like ‘alright man.’ I had no idea.

Rob: I remember last year I went to the last couple Thursday shows, and I went to one at Toad’s Place (in New Haven, CT)-

Greg: I was there.

Rob: And they emptied Toad’s Place out, and announced ‘next up, dubstep night,’ and all these club people came in for about a half-hour.

Greg: I was there, and because the show was going late, they pushed them into the upstairs, and my friend and I actually played this game where we’d see who could run to the back of the room, touch the wall and get downstairs first, and it was fuckin’ wild.  We took all these pictures while we were in it, just fuckin’ colors and people on drugs, and it was great.  But yeah, that’s how Toad’s Place makes their money.

Rob: Yeah, there’s a venue in New York called Webster Hall that’s bigger than Toad’s Place, it gets bigger acts than Toad’s, but they do the same thing.  They actually methodically clean out the whole floor to bring people in for clubbing.

Greg: There’s no money in rock-and-roll!  You know that we’re the legit motherfuckers, we know there’s no future in this.  You make dubstep, that’s how you get paid.

Rob: What do you think of the quote ‘Sell-outs?  We’re selling out arenas!’  That’s Black-Eyed Peas, by the way.

Greg: It seems people care less about that shit now.  When I was eighteen and Against Me! signed to a major label, I remember my heart being broken, but now I feel like kids don’t care.

Derrick: I mean, we’re never going to have a song in a car commercial.

Greg: Yeah, exactly.

Derrick: We’re never going to be pushing fuckin’ Toyota Camries or anything.    But I would like to stop delivering calzones to drunk college assholes, or stop working at fuckin’ Wendys for two months then walking out.