Scurrying About

"We've been a band for three and a half years, and we've been on tour for three years.”

When he sits down to talk with The Music, Austin Carlile is holed up in a New York studio working on the band's new record. The vocalist agrees, it is unusual to him to be off the road. He says that's basically how things go in Of Mice & Men. Stay out on the road until it's time to do the new record.

Case in point, when Carlile needed heart surgery and was forbidden by his doctor to deal with the rigours of the road, the band brought in a replacement singer and carried on until Carlile was healthy enough to take back his vocal duties. Still, after all of this, the rigours of being a full-time band haven't seemed to diminish Of Mice & Men's enthusiasm.

“It's still like Christmas morning to us, every single day. That I'm in a band with guys who think about playing music like a ten-year-old would think about Christmas, that's one of my favourite things.”

Even as Of Mice & Men have continued into their career and faced off with the kind of clichés delineated in Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll), their enthusiasm has remained. Carlile laughs, maybe that just means they're stupid. “It takes its toll, sure... The whole driving eight hours in the van, sleeping on the side of the road in some mountain pass, and every 20 minutes you have wake up to turn on the heat and then turn it off because you don't have enough money to fill up your tank.

“[But] that's the thing with our band; we're still just young, dumb kids. I'm the oldest guy here and I'm 25. And that's what I love about my group of guys, none of the fun, none of the fire has been taken from us.”

There's no plans for the band to slow down their crazy touring schedule. “We have two days off between when we're done with the album and when we go to Australia, and then after Australia I go back to the studio to help with mixing. Then I finally get to go home in November and I'll get a couple months off before getting right back out on the road when the album comes out in mid-January or early-February.”

According to Carlile, the trick to dealing with the hectic schedule is just to focus on what you're in the middle of doing, and what's going to come immediately after it. Right now, that's making a killer record and then coming down to Australia with Bring Me The Horizon and Crossfaith.

“We have to outplay and outperform Crossfaith, which is hard because they go harder than most bands ever, and then we have to try and show up Bring Me The Horizon who are just legends when it comes to this stuff. So all the nights are going to be pretty wild.”