Feet First

A day off on tour for The Maine is a chance to catch up on sleep, shower, relax and contact loved ones. And while their tour bus has more than suitable bedding, drummer Pat Kirch is somewhat uneasy at the thought of sleeping on it when he picks up his phone.

“Under one of the bunks on the bus there's a generator that runs all the air-conditioning and the solar stuff, and some kind of a wire caught fire and sparked up underneath one of the beds on the bus and it just completely burned through the entire mattress, and I was actually asleep on the bus alone,” he explains.

“The guys came back in from the bar and just smelt some kind of burning smell and so I got up and we just ran around the bus trying to figure out what it was, and we picked up this particular mattress and there was just tonnes of smoke and shit.”

After their driver patched up the fault, they fuelled up and headed forward. Having played to a sold out crowd in Connecticut the previous night, they're soaking up every second before heading to New York the next day for another sold out show. One of the main things he'll be looking for in fans is their response to tracks off Forever Halloween. Recorded live to tape, it's a different beast to previous releases.

“You always are concerned how people are going to perceive that and if they're going to get it, because it was done in a different way to most albums being made these days…I think we just got sick of how a lot of what's being made right now in rock music, and music in general, has just become so perfect and put to a grid, so we just thought that we're a band and that's what we want to be perceived as and that's how we want our albums to sound, and there's that human kind of thing to it that you just can't get when a computer gets in the way.”

Breaking free from the constraints of modern recording techniques, Forever Halloween also sees a newfound independence for the band. While this album is cited as their second release since departing Warner, that's not entirely the case. “The first time that we did it, we did it when we were on a record label still, and we recorded the album out of our pocket, but we did it behind the label's back, and then were able to go and get released from our deal. But with this record, this is the first time when we were going into it the whole time just completely free, and were able to do exactly what we wanted. It has been the best thing that could have ever frickin' happened for this band. It's just the artist freedom that we get to make the album that we want to make – that simple fact, that the five of us are the only people that have to be happy with the album. It's great to have 100% control over our career.”