WEB-EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: EVERY TIME I DIE’S KEITH BUCKLEY ON LOSING A DRUMMER AND ‘LORD OF THE RINGS’

In Revolver’s November issue, we interview Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley about his band’s new album, New Junk Aesthetic (Epitaph). For those of you who didn’t get enough (or are too cheap to buy the magazine), here’s the best of the rest of our wide-ranging chat.

REVOLVER Have you spoken with your former drummer, Ratboy, since he quit?
KEITH BUCKLEY Nope. We used to practice in his basement, so we had to go over there to get all our gear out, and he wouldn’t even talk to us. He used an intermediary to relay us messages while we were there, standing, like, 10 feet away from him.

You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.
[Laughs] Nope. Definitely not.

Did his departure throw you for a loop?
Yeah, kind of. I don’t know. To be honest, I hate to say it, but as I look back on all the years he was in the band, I never even knew the dude. I wasn’t friends with him off-tour; I never called him; we never had real-life conversations about anything meaningful. He was just a dude that I was in a business with. So I’m very much looking forward to getting someone in the band that actually cares about our personal lives and whose personal life I care about.

Your brother recently moved to California. Has that changed the dynamic of the band?
I think the distance has been good for everybody involved. I mean, we all spend so much time together—especially me and Jordan, being brothers. We have the same group of friends back in Buffalo, [New York], so we were essentially spending every minute of every day together even when we weren’t on tour. He’s doing really well out there and he’s really happy, so I think it’s added a new dimension of friendship to the band.

In immediate pop culture terms, the cover art seems to reference Pan’s Labyrinth—the hands with eyes—and the anthropomorphic trees of Lord of the Rings. Were those references intentional?
Definitely not Lord of the Rings, but the Pan’s Labyrinth thing came up when Jordan finished it. The cover art is very representative of the idea that there’s so much stuff everywhere that you don’t wanna look but you kind of can’t help but look—and can’t even comprehend what you’re seeing because it’s sensory overload. You try to block everything out, but you can’t. It’s like you’ve got eyes on the back of your hands. I don’t think that’s what Pan’s Labyrinth was going for, but it’s definitely what we were going for.

Interview by J. Bennett