interview with MindMaze
What´s the name of your band? MindMaze
How was the band formed? Jeff (guitar) met Kalin (drums) when they were in the 8th grade, and shortly after decided to start playing together, soon enlisting Sarah (Jeff’s sister) on vocals.
Can you tell about your band? We were originally formed under the name Necromance in 2004 when we were just teenagers. After cutting some demos and maturing a lot through gigging, we decided to change our name to MindMaze around the time we set out to record our debut album Mask of Lies, which was released independently in February 2013. We’re now promoting our sophomore album Back From the Edge, which is being distributed by Inner Wound Recordings.
Where are all band members from?/Who does what in the band?
We’ve always been based out of the Lehigh Valley area in Pennsylvania, in the USA.
Sarah Teets – Vocals
Jeff Teets - Guitar, Backing Vocals, Keyboards
Kalin Schweizerhof – Drums
Mike Lepond of Symphony X played bass on our newest album, and occasionally plays live with us, but when he doesn’t, Rich Pasqualone does.
What was the ambitions of the band when you started? I think when we were young, I think that we really thought that anything was possible in the back of our minds, but were honestly only expecting to ever be little more than a local band. It was only after a couple years of gigging and recording a demo that we started to have more legitimate aspirations of something bigger.
Could you explain your music to someone that haven't heard you? Our sound is a mixture of traditional, power, and progressive metal elements, along with some slightly more melodic/hard rock edges. The vocals are more in the vein of singers like Russell Allen, Bruce Dickinson, and Steve Walsh than most other female metal singers, as we don’t do any form of symphonic/operatic stuff or harsher elements.
Where was your first gig? Our first gig under our old name of Necromance was on March 13th, 2005 at a place called Kate’s Kafe in Phillipsburg, NJ that has since closed.
Where was the latest gig? As of writing this, our last show was at DeLand Rock and Metal Festival in DeLand, Florida on November 9th, 2014.
Who writes your songs?/ who writes the music who writes lyrics? Usually, Jeff writes the majority of the music, or at least gets the ball rolling, and Sarah wrote all of the lyrics on our new album Back from the Edge.
What genre do you feel you are? I’d say we’re a mix of a few different genres of metal. Some songs lean more in the progressive, where as other songs lean a lot more towards power metal. We also blend some traditional metal in there as well.
What are your songs about? We tend to write a lot about human emotion and real-life experiences. Each album has an epic track with roots in a Sci-Fi story, but each story actually is somewhat tied into the concept of fighting against a force trying to suppress emotion and the human element. A lot of the rest of our songs are at least somewhat inspired by real-life events or experiences.
Do you write your own material or mainly covers? Obviously our number one priority is writing and releasing original material, but we do occasionally perform covers as part of our live shows, for fun.
Have you made any albums?/If yes what are they? Our debut album Mask of Lies was released independently in February 2013, and our follow-up Back From the Edge was recently released in Oktober 2014 through Inner Wound Recordings.
Do you have any clips on YouTube? We don’t have any official videos just yet, but we will be filming and releasing a video for our song “Dreamwalker” early in 2015.
How old are you?/What got you started in music? Sarah is 26, Jeff is 24, and Kalin is 25. Aside from Sarah, who was very involved in music programs in school, we all have very limited formal training and basically just got started in music around the age of 11 or 12 when we began to fall in love with metal music.
How old were you guys when you first stood on stage? The band ranged from 14 to 18 when we played our first gig.
What year was the band started? Necromance was formed in August 2004. We changed our name to MindMaze at the beginning of 2012.
Best/worst gig you've played? It’s hard to say what the single best show we’ve played was. DeLand Rock and Metal Festival just recently was right up there, along with our CD release shows for Mask of Lies and Back from the Edge. It was also awesome getting to share the stage with bands like Saxon and Primal Fear, as well as perform on a huge stage opening for Motley Crue.
What places will you be playing in in the imidate future? Our next gig is the Flight of the Valkyries 6 festival at Metro Gallery in Baltimore, MD on January 10th, which is a small-scale female-fronted metal fest which will also feature A Sound of Thunder and some other great bands.
Is it always the same songs live? We try to change up our setlists as much as possible from show to show, especially with two albums of material to choose from now. We like to know what people want to hear and try to make them happy, but we usually will open with the same pair of songs and close with the same pair, just for the sake of consistency. Aside from that, anything goes.
What has been the best/most promising gig so far? Being selected out of well over one hundred bands to open for Motley Crue was pretty cool. The gig ended up not going down quite the way we imagined, but just to have been selected and perform on that stage was pretty amazing.
Have you had any bigger tours from start to now? No, sadly. We’ve only done one-off gigs as a support band for bigger touring bands, and have only done some very minimal touring of our own. Doing more touring on our own as well as possibly a support tour are big goals for us in the next year or two.
What are the plans for the rest of the year? Not a lot, really. We have one more gig, but we’re mostly going to start working on new material for our eventual third album.
Where do you usually play? We primarily play in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Delaware, but we’ve recently started expanding and plan to continue playing in new places like New England, the Midwest, etc.
How do you get psyched up for a gig? It kind of depends on the gig, but usually it’s not really necessary to work up any excitement. Just being in the environment of gigs makes us excited. Seeing the stage and the people in the crowd does a great job psyching us up.
What are your goals with your music? Right now, our biggest goals are to just continue to build our fanbase and reach new people all over the world. More specifically, we’d like to do some more legitimate touring here in the US and make it to Europe soon.
Is it easier to get your inspiration from older bands or from bands more modern? It’s usually a mix of both. I think it usually starts out with a lot of inspiration from older bands, some of the classic metal staples like Iron Maiden or Saxon, but I think it’s important to be influenced by newer things as well. It really helps create something more unique and relevant, especially because so many of the conditions and the scene surrounding some of the older bands back in the day was completely different than things are now.
What are your sources of inspiration? All the bands we listen to, but especially going to live shows and seeing great performances. Seeing a really tight and exciting live band can really inspire us to want to practice and work on new material. We’re pretty equally inspired by bands from the “old school” (Iron Maiden, Queensryche, Riot, Fates Warning, Kansas, UFO) as the “new school” (Evergrey, Firewind, Avantasia, Seventh Wonder, Primal Fear, etc.), and we always try to find a balance between those two elements in our sound.
What's the first step when making a new song? Most of our songwriting begins with noodling around with one or two riffs, and then building them into something bigger. After we get the general structure together and maybe throw a demo together, we’ll start to work on lyrics and vocal melodies.
How do you feel about the downloading of music instead of buying albums? This is such a difficult subject to really address. I definitely don’t believe it’s right to illegally download albums because you are stealing the music and not supporting the artist. On the other hand though, some people download music, using it as a way to skim through bands and check out albums and then turn around and buy them. I don’t think that’s really right either, but it’s getting the music out there and sometimes creating big fans out of people who do support the band after that.
What would be your dreams for the band? Immediately speaking, I think the next big dream we have is really touring. We’ve traveled around a bit for shows here and there, but we haven’t really toured supporting a band or anything and we’d love to do that. As far as long term dreams go, finding a way to make a living off of music would be an amazing thing for all of us.
Besides your own music, what genres and bands do you listen to? All sorts of Traditional Metal, Power Metal, Prog Metal, Prog Rock, Melodic Rock, Proto-metal, etc… Everyone’s got their own favorites, of course.
What do you hold most dear? Our fans are the most important thing in the world to us. The people who actually spend their money and time supporting what we do mean everything and we can’t let them know that enough.
What would be your greatest fears for the future? I guess failure is the big obvious failure. As long as we keep increasing our profile and seem to get bigger with each successive release for now, we will definitely still be here and continue doing this.
When you are on stage, what do you fear most then? Technical difficulties, haha. You can practice and practice, but you can never really be adequately prepared for a cable coming unplugged, a stand breaking, or something like that, especially when you don’t have a proper crew to help you.
Have you been part of any other projects? None of the three of us officially in the band have ever done anything else that was particularly legitimate. In 2008, Sarah sang with a Florida-based Prog/Power band called Alexandria, but they never recorded any material together. Jeff has been involved with an Iron Maiden tribute band formed between friends, and both of us appeared on the Sinister Realm album The Crystal Eye from 2011.
What do you work with outside of the band and the music? Sarah works at a bakery, Jeff is a delivery driver, and Kalin is a manager at an auto parts store. Nothing terribly glamorous.
What would you do if there was no music? It’s hard to say, but life would certainly be a lot more terrible and mundane!
How important are your fans? They really mean the world to us in every sense. Obviously, thanks to crowdfunding, they give us a lot of financial support, but the emotional support is absolutely immeasurable.
What's the funniest/most memorable thing a fan has done for you? The most amazing thing to us is usually the distances people have travelled to see us perform live. There are several people who have travelled up to 10+ hours by car to come gigs, as well as a few that have flown from other parts of the country. The funny stuff always comes along at the gigs when we’re hanging out with people offstage.
How often do you rehearse? It’s hard to measure how many hours we rehearse individually, but as a group we generally will get together once a week and practice formally. We actually all live together, so there’s a lot of downtime to discuss all things related to the band , but yeah, we usually spend a few hours each weekend working on either new material or setlists for live shows.
Where do you rehearse? We practice in the basement of our house. We converted the basement into a pretty nice practice space where we keep all the gear the majority of the time.
Name 2 of your own songs you like at the moment? Everyone has their own favorites, and they change regularly, but “The Machine Stops” is a heavy favorite from the new album. Kalin has always been a big fan of “Destiny Calls” as well as the new sequel to it, “Onward (Destiny Calls II)”.
What do you feel is the best live band you've seen? Very tough question, as there are lot of dimensions to a great live performance. Some of my favorites for various reasons (Stage show, performance, technicality, entertainment value, etc.) include: Iron Maiden, Saxon, Primal Fear, King’s X, Accept, Symphony X, DGM, Firewind, and Pain of Salvation.
What drives a band that isn't all that famous and renowned to try to make a living on their music and to keep playing? Different bands would probably answer this question differently, but for us it’s the support of our fans and the love of the music itself.
Do you have any webpages?
Official Website: www.mindmazeband.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mindmazeband
Twitter: www.twitter.com/mindmazeband
Describe your show, visually and musically Our big priority as a live band is always to try to make up for what we can’t reproduce from the studio recordings with a lot of energy and interaction with the audience. We try to also keep the energy flowing as much as possible, usually segueing from one song to another with very few pauses. We don’t use any backing tracks live, which has become very common lately.
How do you view the music industry of today? It’s in a very difficult transitional period right now. Labels are losing relevance, but they are still relevant, at least to a decent extent. It’s increasingly difficult for bands to actually make money because so many people see such little value in the music. However, speaking from experience, we believe that if you put out a quality product and strive to connect with your audience, there’s still a lot of headway to be made.
What advice would you like to give other bands? Don’t listen too closely to cynical people who are only trying to get you down because their own dreams crashed and burned. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt.
What is best/worst with playing the clubs? The intimacy and intensity of the shows on small scales is usually the best, but often the sound and sound people are just not up to par with what you encounter at larger events.
How would you describe your sound in one sentence An exciting mix of new and old school traditional, power, and progressive metal elements that defies typical conventions of female-fronted bands.
What was one of the most quarrelsome times for you in the band? The time period before we decided to actually change our name and record our debut album Mask of Lies was a time of great uncertainty in the band. I think everyone was pretty much ready to actually get this thing off the ground or hang it up. I think we chose wisely.
Whats your Pre-show ritual? We usually just like to spend time together having a good time, keeping a positive energy around us. We don’t drink much, if at all, before hitting the stage so everyone performs to the best of their abilities. A little light warming up is also usually done right before the start of the show.
Do you have anything to add? Thanks for taking the time to write these questions and express interest in MindMaze!