interview with Fuck The Facts

Have any of you played in other bands? We’ve all been playing music for over a decade and have had many different bands and projects, way too many to mention them all.
How is it that you started playing music? My older brother got me into music. He was into metal and gave me Metallica “..and Justice For All” on cassette. From that moment I was hooked and I wanted to play in a band. My best friend was a drummer and his dad played guitar, luckily at the time my brother played bass in a punk band so he lent me his bass to jam with my friend and his dad. My first gigs even were playing Christian songs in churches.
Have you had other previous members? Yeah. A lot.
Did you make music even when you were young? From when I was 15/16-ish my best friend and I started writing songs for our own metal band that never amounted to anything. There’s actually a riff on our “Stigmata High-Five” album that I wrote when I was about 16 years old.
Where are you from? Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.
What year did the band form? I started Fuck the Facts as a recording project in the late 90’s. It’s hard to pin down an exact date, as some of the recordings where made as early as 1996, but I don’t think I named the project until 1999. In 2001, the first band formation of FTF started.
What's your style of genre? I would say that we’re a grindcore influenced metal band with some experimental leaning. We call it “Bastardized Grindcore”, whatever the fuck that means.
What inspires you? I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from different forms of art like movies, books, images, etc… but my main source of inspiration to pick up my guitar and create comes from other music and musicians. Sometimes it’s an old album that I loved when I was younger and sometimes it something new that I just discovered. A lot of the time it’s just seeing a band do something a little bit different or “outside of the box”. I’m really motivated by keeping what we do interesting and fun. I can get bored pretty easily, so if things start to feel too much like a cycle of the same things then I lose interest. I also love to see really great live bands. That’s something that so few bands have really developed, let alone mastered. When I see a band get on stage and totally crush it, it gets me stoked and motivated to play.
How often and where do you reherse? We spent about 10 years rehearsing in the basement of a tattoo shop 4 days a week. Now we practice in my mother’s laundry room whenever we need to.
How have you developed since you started with the music? Hopefully 20 years in, I’m better than I was when I started. I’ve never stopped pushing myself to get better, weather it’s what I do with the band or my production work. I don’t have a lot of natural talent when it comes to music, so I always feel like I need to work harder and longer than the next guy. I would like to think that that dedication has paid off, but I’m not really interested in looking back to find out.
Do you have other interests of work outside the band? Hockey, and I have a small basement recording studio where I work with a lot of bands. The studio actually started as a place for FTF to record an album and then it just sort of blew up, and it’s become my lively hood along with working as a live sound engineer at a local venue here. I guess my interests mostly revolve around music.
Are you looking for a booking agency, and what are your thoughts around that? We’re not looking for a booking agent. For us I have found that it works best when we are in direct contact with the people that are booking our shows. We are able to find the promoters (or sometimes just people with a DIY space) that actually like the band and are stoked to put on a show for us. Booking a show is a lot easier than booking the right show, and for us the right show could possibly be in someone’s basement or through a bar, you never know. We’re such a small band that no one is going to make money with us, we have to find the people that are stoked to put on a show for us and knows what it’s going to take to make it successful. I’m not saying booking agents are bad. For some bands it is a necessity, and in many case it can really help your band get on the right tours and shows, but for a small band that’s starting out you should really get your hands dirty doing it yourselves, not only is it a good way to build up contacts, but many promoters also prefer to deal directly with the band, especially at smaller levels like this.
Are you looking for a label, and what are your thoughts around that? We’re not currently looking for a label, but if the right opportunity popped up we could definitely be interested. We spent about 6 years on Relapse Records and put out 3 albums on that label. It was a great experience and there are definitely a lot of people that discovered our band just from that time on the label. Unfortunately, when our contract ended they weren’t interested in renewing us, and we didn’t get any interest from any other labels that we could have been interested in working with. So currently we are completely independent and it actually works quite well for us. We released our first independent album last year and for us it was a success, I actually think we get a bit more support because the people that like our band know that they are supporting us directly and not through a 3rd party. For me labels are similar to booking agents, in the way that you have to be working with the right one. To be on a label just to say you’re on a label, doesn’t really make sense. There has to be a reason that you’re on the label. For us the exposure and distribution of our albums that we got through Relapse isn’t really something that we are capable of doing on our own.
What made you decide to make this music? Through my musical journey in life, it’s what ended up resonating with me the most.
What are your songs about? The songs are about a lot of different things, but it’s pretty much all based on current events and personal situations. Our vocalist Mel handles the bulk of the lyrics, so I’m probably not the best to answer this questions, but I know that she always has an eye out for different subjects, and 15 years into doing this has to be tough, but she does an amazing job and keeping the lyrics interesting and even does it in two different languages.
Who does the composing and writes the lyrics? Everyone in the band writes music except for our vocalist Mel, but she handles the bulk of the lyrics and vocal

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