Image courtesy of www.mementoband.com


Justin: We went out and tried to play golf today.

How'd you do?

Justin: Yeah, emphasis on tried. [Laughing]

Not too good?

Justin: Well, I don't know. It's a beautiful course though, so, it was nice to be out there, but it was frustrating.

[Laughing] So, should we start?

Justin: Sure.

We've experienced both Memento in a small club and Memento at Ozzfest. Which do you prefer?

Justin: I prefer, sonically, the club, myself, and the intimacy of the club show a little more than the outdoor shows, but the Ozzfest crowd is particularly a fantastic crowd, so, I mean, it's six of one, half dozen of the other, but, I guess that at a club show the people at the club show are specifically there pretty much to see you. But, you can't deny, it's pretty much amazing to play to 6 or 7 thousand kids a day on Ozzfest. I wouldn't trade that for anything, but the intimacy of a club show is pretty hard to beat. Yeah. What do you prefer?

The same thing.

Justin: Yeah. Cool.

Well, Ozzfest, yeah, it's fun. There's so much more to see at Ozzfest, but just being up close and personal with the band is...

Justin: Yeah. It's a little more personal and I think that suits some of the songs we play a little better than a largely, kind of heavy or sort of metal kind of crowd, definitely.

So, do you know how long your set time is tonight? Are you going to get quite a bit more than on Ozzfest?

Space: Forty minutes. Yeah.

So, you'll get to play quite a bit.

Justin: Yeah, we'll definitely have double the set.

Okay, cool. Is the competitive tension between the second stage bands on Ozzfest, would you say that's helping you realize how much you guys rock or does it show you how much you have left to reach the caliber of some of the other bands?

Justin: I don't feel any competitive tension at all with any of the other bands. Mainly because, I mean, they're different styles. I mean, we play an acoustic song live there and we play "Beginnings." We're kind of in our own little niche, so we're really just in competition with ourselves in terms of show to show. We know when we've done a ten out of ten as opposed to an eight out of ten, for us personally, but we only ever use that yardstick against ourselves, never against other bands.

Are your audiences ever expecting something else and then kind of pissed off when they don’t get it from you guys?

Justin: I haven’t experienced that. I mean, you always get people that kind of wish you had played a certain song that you couldn’t play, like ‘Figure 8’ we can’t really play at Ozzfest. We’ll play it tonight though.

That’s great.

Justin: Yeah. No, I just find people, they’re not pissed or anything, they’re just kind of left wanting more, which I think is a good thing sometimes, you know? But no, no disgruntled fans thus far. No drunken, stupid shows ala Creed where fans want to sue us or anything like that. No.

That’s great. How would you compare your Midwest shows to bigger shows like in L.A.? Are there notable differences, crowds or dedication-wise?

Justin: I think there’s a bigger dedication. I think the fans, they’re really, at nine in the morning there’s a big crowd down here. I think those metropolis kinds of setups, the people are so numb, they’ve had so many opportunities to go see a concert or, you know, there are a lot of other distractions out there, they don’t really appreciate as much, necessarily. It’s not hard and fast rules; everyone’s different. I can’t say that the L.A. crowd is not into the music, because they are, but I think on average more people turn up earlier to the shows. Once they’re there, they’re all as into it as any other town, but the more rural areas, you know, get there earlier and are more obsessed with seeing a rock show. It’s been a while since they’ve seen a big show. It’s a bigger event in their minds.

Do you ever get depressed on tour for different reasons, or has your touring experience been completely upbeat?

Justin: Space?

Space: I look forward to every single day, playing. Me, personally, I get bored not doing anything when I’m not on stage. I love the road. It’s, you know, I get bored a lot. It’s just waiting until you get on stage. That’s the hard part.

Justin: Yeah, I get depressed on tour, but I get depressed when I’m not on tour. So, it’s not real tragic.

Human nature.

Justin: Yeah.

What do you think your best touring experience has been so far?

Justin: I’d have to say Ozzfest, despite the fact of the intimacy of a smaller club is hard to beat, the amount of people that we get to play to and the positive responses we’ve had is like a huge reward. So, I’d say being on Ozzfest, playing Ozzfest, has been the biggest fallout for us so far.

What about venue-wise, what have been the best and worst? I mean, this place [The Warehouse] is pretty small…

Justin: Well, the worst venue we’ve played was in Canada, the city can remain nameless. [Laughing] But it was a, there were a lot of stairs. The crew had to break their backs to get all the gear upstairs, and once they got it up there they were using sub-par equipment, which didn’t really justify the kind of torn muscles in their backs from lugging the gear up there. It was kind of harsh on them.

Space: There was water leaking from the ceiling.

Justin: Yeah. [Laughing]

That’s not good. [Laughing]

Justin: Yeah, it’s hard to say where the best venue is, any club where the P.A. is decent and the audience is listening and into you, it’s hard to say which is the best.

With three-fourths of you being from Australia, how does that work with visas and passports, going to other countries?

Justin: Basically, you get your visa, and once you’ve got it you’re just like any other working person in the U.S. I guess. Yeah.

What are you thinking when you are performing? What thoughts are going through your head?

Justin: Means over my hammy. [Laughing] I love Denny’s. I get hungry a lot. [Laughter] No, I’m pretty much committed to the song at any given time, whichever song we’re in is pretty much where I’m at unless I’m having a bad day. Once every fifty shows you’ll find yourself drifting off, distracted by a heckler, or something that happened that day, but generally speaking, when the wheels are in motion, you’re just in the moment and you’re thinking about the exact lyric, singing over the exact guitar part you’re playing or, you know…

Space: I think, for me, there isn’t anything going on upstairs at that point in time. Other than, for me, I have the most fun when I’m not thinking about anything. It’s just, like, tumbleweeds just blowing through there.

What do you think is the factor that makes your music real to you and the audience?

Justin: I think the fact that all the songs on the album were pretty much born of instinctual jam sessions and they grew from jams into songs and they weren’t constructed as such and they weren’t overly thought about. I mean, at mix stage or production you’re going to analyze sounds a lot, but in terms of the song, and the essence of the song, it’s pretty much true to how they were first born in the moment in the jam room. Yeah, you can’t really get more organic than that, than the song being born off four guys playing together in a room.

You describe your music as ‘heavy mellow,’ due to all the emotions besides hate that you explore on the album. What would you say some of the other emotions are?

Justin: That’s a good question. [Laughing] There’s a real yearning to improve. I don’t know what emotion that falls under, but there’s definitely a striving to not just acknowledge sorrow or anger or excitement, there’s definitely a desire to push through, to break on through to the other side, as Jim [The Doors] would put it. But there’s definitely a positive aspect at least once in every song on that album, where it’s actually not necessarily a solution, but at least there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, which I’ve always been fascinated by.

What was your goal on ‘Beginnings?’ What feelings did you want to invoke in the listeners?

Justin: I wasn’t really thinking about the listeners. I think we were thinking about the listeners as such. I think the listeners like listening to what a person is going through and then later identify whether or not they’ve done it, you know, so we didn’t really end the game. What we wanted people to feel, I guess in retrospect at least a sense of healing and a sense that, you know, there are a lot of other people out there feeling the same things, and, you know, there is that positive aspect of, it’s not just, things are hard, so therefore we must wallow in it. There’s a definite push to get out of it, and I guess to encourage people to have a good look at themselves and not blame everything around them and maybe start from the inside instead of starting from the outside. That is probably what we would like our audience to feel.

Would you say it was a dream come true to work with Toby Wright, David Campbell, and Brenden O’Brien or were you pretty confident that you would be working with major names in the industry on your first album?

Justin: No, it was a dream.

Space: It was a dream come true.

Justin: We’re big Alice in Chains fans, that’s one of the major reasons we were excited about Toby. It’s not the name game thing either. When we listen to Alice it’s fairly unanimous in our band that we all get tingles up the spine to know that the guy that worked with them helped produce a lot of those tingles, literally. So, to work with a guy who’s in touch with humanity and is as emotionally deep as he is, he’s a pretty deep guy, you know, it was a dream come true. You know, of course the artists that Brenden has produced and/or mixed are bands that we grew up listening to back home in Australia. So, we definitely felt lucky and a little bit spoiled. We weren’t expecting it, so it was, we were definitely open with it.

What was your first impression of Campbell’s addition to your music? Were you surprised at how much it added to or changed your music?

Space: I remember tears. [Laughing] Like, I remember sitting back after one night. We recorded the strings all in one night, song by song by song. We’d pretty much given him the songs and said, ‘Come up with whatever you can come up with.’ I just can remember us four sitting there with the rest of the production crew and staff watching through the glass and it was like a ten or twelve piece orchestra.

Justin: Yeah. Ten piece.

Space: Yeah. And just, it was just crazy, like watching this whole thing happen on top of stuff that you’ve already put down.

Justin: It was definitely a fifth member of the band on those three songs: ‘Beginnings,’ ‘Blister,’ and ‘Figure 8.’ We felt like we were a five piece.

And Sarah Hudson did back up vocals on ‘Blister?’

Justin: Yeah.

Are there many songs that didn’t make it onto your album?

Justin: Yeah.

Are you guys planning on releasing those any time?

Justin: There’s maybe two, maybe two that probably should have been on the first album. But, you know, you can only have so many songs on your first album, and at worst one of those songs will be on the next album.

What do you want to change on your sophomore album? Is there anything in particular or do you believe in a natural evolution?

Justin: Yeah. I totally believe in an evolutionary sort of process. We’ll definitely be a lot less nervous. Your first album, you feel like it’s life and death, and it’s not, but at the time you feel like it is. So, I think, just process-wise, we’ll just have a much more relaxed recording environment. We feel like we don’t lose as such, and there’s a lot of pressure on the sophomore album, but I think if anything it’s going to work in reverse for us. We’ll feel a lot more confident and grounded. There were times in the studio where we felt out of our league, you know? But, I think it’s going to be a more relaxed confidence. Musically, I can’t really say if it’s going to differ that much, but we’ll see. I can’t really answer that yet. [Laughing]

Your lyrics several different subjects. What are you trying to accomplish through the messages? Are you trying to reach anyone in particular or just…?

Justin: I’m just trying to be true to myself, basically, and admit certain things that have kind of gotten to me. There’s no message, as such, other than the reoccurring theme of not giving into pain, or hate, or all of those negative emotions, and actually looking for the faults within yourself, and taking the focus off looking at other peoples’ faults.

Do you believe that messages are passed through certain types of music that could possibly cause the listener to react in a violent way? Or do you think that doesn’t really make any difference? There are a lot of theories about it.

Space: I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I think if the listener has any issues that are easily provoked, you know what I mean? It’s a short fuse there that’s just waiting for something; it could be anything. It could be the way the sun shines on a particular day.

Justin: Yeah. I mean, whether it’s a death metal song or whether it’s a subway jingle, [Laughing] when people are in that zone, there’s not a lot that’s going to stop them. So, I think a lot of what happens to people like that is they are focused on the peripheral i.e. what was going on in their lives leading up to it, and they look at all the external instead of the core of that person. That person was depressed beyond belief, regardless of the last song they listened to before they killed themselves was.

Do you ever worry that anything in your music could cause someone to react that way?

Justin: No, I actually don’t. I think there’s too much of an effort to break through the cesspit you’re in for someone to want to stay in it.

You state that a lot of your songs are about not becoming the things that you despise.

Justin: Yeah.

What are some of these things to you as a human being, and as a member of a rock band trying to make it?

Justin: Violent, being violent, being critical. Making excuses. Basing your life around having an excuse for being an asshole. Having enough history to justify becoming an asshole, but using it as more of an education as opposed to a fuel to become an asshole. Forgive me for using that word, but it’s a fairly Australian general term for an aggressive dick-head male.

It’s American too!

Justin: Yeah. [Laughing]

Okay. In several instances people try to get over feelings in tough situations and actually end up indulging those feelings instead by trying to solve them. I personally have, and I always go back to the final song on your album ‘Figure 8.’ What does the song mean to you?

Justin: It actually examines how realistic our attempts at healing actually is, because to heal a lot of times you have to go to the source and a lot of the time going to the source hurts, and revisiting that hurt can spiral you off in the same feelings that, you know, got you off on the wrong foot in the first place. But, you have to go there in order to deal with it, so every time you get through one barrier or one issue or one level of a particular issue you realize ‘I thought I got through that’ then you realize ‘okay’ the next bit of skin you have to shed involves going back again and reexamining the depression or sorrow or anger, so it’s definitely questioning whether you can actually heal, I guess.

Several of your songs share a similar theme of religion. Did you do this on purpose or am I reading too far into the words?

Justin: You’re reading too far into the words. [Laughing] No, no, no you’re not. I’m just being a dick. [Laughing] A lot of that comes from just growing up in a Catholic school and the metaphors being stuck in your head. I think there’s a lot of merit in a lot of the fables, the stories, whatever you want to call them, in the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, whatever. I still think there’s a lot of validity. I mean, you know, the Ten Commandments pretty much make sense on just a day to day kind of level, but it’s that dogmatic, that same topic that we all talk about, you know, at midnight on the weekends with all of your friends, and you’re talking about what’s out there, and does God exist, and if so why isn’t he or she down here helping clean up, and it’s more examining those kind of feelings than having a strict following of the Bible, or anything like that. I mean, I’d like to think that someone’s out there, but I have some questions for that being. [Laughing]

So, would you consider yourselves devout Christians, or the opposite, or just somewhere in between, or… just hanging out?

Space: Hum…
Justin: [Laughing] No, we’re not a Christian band. We’re far from it.

Space: Me personally, I don’t know. I think growing up in a Catholic school and all that kind of stuff; I had so much rammed down my throat now I’m the complete opposite. But, I mean, you know, each to their own.

Do you consider yourselves brothers in a sense?

Justin: Yeah. There’s a lot of history. Space and I have been together on and off playing music together for seven or eight years. Steve and I worked out yesterday that in three-and-a-half years, coming up to four that the grand total of time spent away from each other is about eight weeks. So, eight weeks in four years. You do the math. I don’t think it gets more family than that. We’re definitely family, and that’s reflected in the way the band is set up, the way that we get paid and the way that everyone contributes and everyone’s opinion is of equal value to the other guy. I’m not sure if it gets more family than that. AND WE LIKE EACH OTHER, DAMNIT! [Laughing]

Yeah. That’s a good thing. What was it like leaving Vast and starting up again? How did it feel after you’d realized you’d done the right thing?

Justin: It felt good. It felt good before there were any rewards because I knew I was doing the right thing before we even got Memento started. Leaving that situation was a really good decision, regardless of whether Memento got signed, or not. It was the best decision, and whenever you make a good decision for yourself it feels good, regardless of the reward or the price you pay. It was a good feeling.

What was the reason you left Vast and started over? Was being a member of the band a bad experience or was it just that you wanted to get out and do your own thing?

Justin: It was a good experience. I learned a lot, a lot about music, I learned a lot about the music industry. I learned a lot about, the most important reason is this, and that’s that I learned what it means to be in a band by virtue of not being in a band as such that it was just more of a solid project and I was hoping it would turn into a brotherhood type-feel. We were just talking about that. It just became apparent that it wasn’t going to be that kind of a setup. That was the main reason. I love the music. The music to this day, especially the first album, the first Vast album still holds firm as one of my top ten albums of all time and I don’t think it will get knocked out of that position. You know, it’s one thing to like the music it’s another thing to live, eat and breathe the people.

You played guitar in Vast. Why did you decide to sing instead?

Justin: Because that’s what I’ve always done. Pretty much playing guitar in Vast was a way to get out of working in a bar cleaning ashtrays. [Laughing] And, it was also one of my favorite bands at the time. I had the first album already. I knew all the songs. For me it was just going to be a fly by the seat of my pants experience and see what happened and I was hoping for a collaboration, which didn’t really get an opportunity to happen. I mean, the collaboration started happening between me and Steve and just, it was pretty clear that that was the way the real team was, so we went with the positives.

You and Steve bonded over your like for bands like Tool and U2. Was that the entire base of your friendship or were there other factors?

Justin: He had really nice eyes. [Laughing] I could look into them for hours on end and not get bored.

It’s true!

Justin: Yeah.

Did you both have similar goals coming into the music business?

Justin: Yeah, we just liked the same bands. We both liked the idea of a real band and not a solo project.

You claim to have musical influences from all over the map. What are some of the bands that you all have found a common interest or a common distaste in?

Justin: U2, Alice in Chains, Tool, The Police, The Beatles…

Space: Yeah, The Beatles, Hendrix.

Justin: Pink Floyd.

Space: We like Zeppelin.

Justin: Yeah, definitely Zeppelin.

Do you think your music develops towards or away any of their styles?

Justin: You always want to have your own sound. Hopefully, we do. We don’t really know that yet. It’s hard to know what you are when you are in the middle of the tunnel. All I can say to that is just that I know we are definitely true to what we like.

Space: It makes it a lot easier for us, while playing. Everytime I listen to the album I love it, you know what I mean? We’re doing what we love. We’re just having fun and throwing our inhibitions to the wind. Songs that you would love to have other bands write and play or whatever.

You knew Space prior to Memento through the band Tower and Lats from Devolved.

Justin: You’re very well researched. [Laughing] You guys know what’s going on!

What made you think of these two for your new project, Memento?

Justin: Space is the best guitar player on earth. [Laughing] Lats was the best bass player Space knew. And Steve had pretty eyes. [Laughing] No, Steve’s a great drummer and he’s focused and he’s disciplined and his work ethic…everything about everyone in the band is the ideal scenario, so that was actually really easy. [Steve and Lats enter] Let’s see your eyes, Steve. We were just talking about your eyes. [Steve bats eyes] [Laughing] It was really easy to decide on the line-up. And to a certain extent, not that I had to fight for Space to be in the band, but yeah, there were outsiders trying to help us along. You know, there’re fifty billion guitarists in L.A. and this and that. And I’m like, you know, there’s only one I’m interested in and he’s not in L.A. so we can stop talking about it, you know what I mean? And all that’s got to do with, in L.A. there’s a lot of virtuosos, and they can play at an extreme pace, which should probably be at a circus sideshow or something like that. We wanted to play with someone who knew about songs and knew about emotion and who could shred when necessary, so…into Space. [Laughing]

When did you know that Memento was something special and could seriously go somewhere?

Justin: I don’t know that yet! [Laughing] No, I knew it was special just when we had our first few jams, and I knew it was something really, really special for me personally and not for anyone else and not in a commercial sense. But for me personally I knew everything I wanted in a band had arrived when we wrote ‘Figure 8.’ Not even the lyrics, I’m talking about just the music, when we were all in a room, had our instruments on and that song got jammed out. The end of that four hours was like, ‘Alright, we’re for real. This is for real.’ That’s me. Not that I had a doubt before that, but you always wonder where the limitations are on anything in our lives, so to know that there were limitations for virtue of ‘Figure 8’ I think was the moment when it crystallized it. ‘Wow. We’ve got something special.’ Everyone feels good, but we’ve also got something musically that is beyond what we thought we might have.

What do your friends and family who have been there from the beginning have to say about what has been happening to you guys as a band?

Space: Heh! [Laughing]

Justin: My mum and dad are stoked. My grandparents, who I grew up with, are moderately not stoked. Yeah, which is a bummer, but it’s a different generation, you know? I still have a lot of respect for those guys and they are the reason I’m still alive, so, it definitely stings when they don’t dig what you’re doing. But, you also know that they’re putting your best interests at heart and they know what you’re getting into. They’re not naïve about it and they’re not going ‘Why are you playing that Satan music?’ They’re just looking out for you going ‘We know it’s tough out there and, you know, one day you’re going to want a house to live in, and chances of you getting a house to live in are limited in this business.’ So, I understand where they’re coming from, but I don’t really mind.

Have any of your relationships gotten weird as far as like all of the sudden you have a million other cousins or…?

Justin: No, no one’s come out of the woodwork. I think the quite opposite. I think people are kind of like ‘No, I don’t know that guy’ [Laughing] which is kind of weird when it’s your auntie. But, no. No one’s come out of the woodwork trying to get a piece of it. Generally it’s overwhelming support from people who have always been supportive, and that to me is what family is. You know, they are supportive of you when you are up, when you’re down, or when you’re in between, so that’s luckily stayed fairly consistent. But, you know, we’re not really at that level where that question could be as potent as I’m sure it is, deep down, because we haven’t hit that stage where it’s crazy, you know? I’m sure for bands who are huge you really have to work out who your friends are, but we’re not at that point yet. We still trust our friends. [Laughing] There’s nothing to mistrust them about, you know?

Not yet.

Justin: No. It means a lot too, like the people we’ve played with previously in the years, there are frequent kinds of issues about whatever we’re doing and they’re actually, genuinely proud of where we are right now, and that’s a good feeling.

Space: Especially in this industry, there’s a lot of cutthroat, and there’s a lot of jealously, a lot of emotions being tossed around. It’s good that there are still a lot of people out there.

Justin: Yeah. There are people in bands back home that actually feel like, you know, if you’re friends from previous bands it’s actually kind of a small victory for them as well.

Space: Yeah.

Justin: There is the exception to the rule. You can still get a record deal in this crazy life and we know for a fact because our best friend got one. You know, it’s like, I was really pleasantly surprised at how well my friends, who I’ve been in bands with in the past, were actually like stoked for us, I mean really genuinely happy for us. You know, like, ‘It didn’t happen in our band, but you did it. Congratulations.’ And again, that’s within the context of reality which is we aren’t really anywhere yet, but we’ve taken our first little step, thus the title of the album ‘Beginnings’ which was our first modest step towards wherever we end up.

Well, you seem to be very humble people who have a love for music and are lucky enough to be able to do what you love for a living. Are there any other passions that you guys have besides music that people wouldn’t assume or know?

Justin: Golf. [Laughing] That’s why I’ve got this shirt on right now.

The polo shirt.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, golf. Golf is the antithesis of our music. If you let your emotion run your golf game, you’ll play much like I do, which is pretty erratically. [Laughing] I get some good shots in, and them some just horrible shots. I love it. I love getting out there and playing, you know, being with the trees and the mosquitoes.

Wisconsin…

Justin: Yeah, mosquitoes really like Australian blood, I found out today.

[Laughing] Okay, so your next single is going to be Saviour.

Justin: It looks like it will be.

Do you know when it’s going to hit radio?

Justin: I think late September. We’re going to be doing a video for it in September, so, probably the latest October for that song to come out, yeah.

Looking forward to it. Well, I think that’s about it for us.

Justin: Okay. Yeah, thanks!

Space: Thank you very much!

Interview By: Gabby and Nicole