Micha: Did you have to rent the house (Glasshand Recording Studio, located in the historic Church Hill district of Richmond, Virginia) out for the recording of Fulton Hill?
Bryan: No, we didn`t have to rent the house. We wanted to record in a house this time as opposed to an actual studio, and it just so happened that our engineer had his stuff set up temporarily in a really cool old house here in downtown Richmond, so we decided to just do it there. Worked out great.
Basically all of their shit (recording equipment) was there. Relapse paid them whatever they asked and it was cool because we`re friends with those dudes. We did go well over budget, and because we`ve worked with Mark Miley on every record we`ve made, he was cool. We were like "Dude, here`s how much money we`ve got to spend, and here`s what we need to do with it." He made it happen, and it worked out great.
Micha: Did you have a bigger budget for this album? Knowing you guys, I would guess its safe to say you didn`t soak it all up.
Bryan: It`s kind of hard to say what you`ve spent. I mean, we spent all of it. We didn`t keep any and it went straight from Relapse to the studio. It`s not like they sent us a big check, and we got some cocaine and hookers and spent the rest of it on a four track machine. We went in there and took as long as we needed to, and the record label took it from there. I will say this; we definitely owe Mark big time because he went way over budget.
Micha: Is this the longest you`ve ever spent recording an album?
Bryan: Absolutely. The longest we had spent before this was two weeks, although Staring At The Divine was broken up into two sessions. We did the initial recording, and then when we got Ryan and John in the band. They came in and put their parts on and we remixed it. We were in there for almost six weeks for this album.
Micha: How much time did you spend experimenting with different amp configurations, mic setups, etc?
Bryan: We spent a lot of time with that, and we had a game plan. We all sat around a lot of nights after band practice and talked about the songs and threw ideas back and forth. I went in a couple of day`s early and spent two days working on drum sounds. Setting `em up, mic�d `em up, tuning `em right, and getting the right heads on them and all that shit. It`s a good house with old plaster walls and wood floors, and this particular room had really good acoustics, and it ended up making the drums sound really big. This was the first time I had recorded with my new drum kit, which I got about a year ago, and this was the first time I had an opportunity to use them.
Micha: Did you get sponsored?
Bryan: Fuck no, and I ain`t gonna tell you what kind of drums they are because I`m not going to give anyone any free advertising, but I`m really happy with them.
Micha: Did Virgil (guitarist Erik Larson) do the workload of writing for Fulton Hill?
Bryan: He writes the majority of the guitar riffs, but this was the most holistic experience we`ve had as far as everyone else contributing. Our bass player came in and contributed the main ideas for a few songs, which is pretty rare for us. We`ve haven`t had too many bass players that could do that. Ryan wrote a lot of really cool shit, and this was a cool experience, because we felt like everybody had a lot of input, and everybody really thought about what they were playing way more than any other record.
Micha: If you listen to the last album, Ryan sounds simply like he played on it. With Fulton Hill he really seems to be involved.
Bryan: That`s exactly what happened. On the last record those dudes came in way late in the game and weren`t part of the actual writing process. It was a lot more fulfilling for them and for me as well to work together on this album. Plus we had done a bunch of touring, gotten used to playing together and when we started writing new shit it was really fun. I had a lot of fun writing this record and recording it too. The addition of both the new guys has been an inspiration for us as a band because they`re both so good and I think we`ve finally found the right people for this band. It took eight years to finally nail it down, but we figured out who needs to be in the band to make it happen.
Micha: Do you think any of the new aspects will be hard for some of the hardcore ATP fans to wrap their ears around?
Bryan: I hope not, man, because we`ve always mixed it up enough since the first record that people will definitely be surprised and a little bit taken aback by some of it, but that`s good. We don`t want to keep putting the same record out over and over again, and we`ve always tried to push the borders of what and who we are as a band within reason. I think with this record more than any other record we`ve pulled that off.
Micha: Basically, you don`t want to paint yourself into a corner?
Bryan: We get painted into a corner enough as it is by the media. If I have to read one more review that`s reads "these good old asswompin, hillbilly, whisky drinking mothers from Virginia play some ass kickin music..." It`s like, goddamn man, come on with that shit. I mean, we are who we are, but it`s like do these people actually listen to the record, or do they just look at the fact that we have beards and long hair? People don`t use a whole lot of creativity when they`re critiquing rock bands.
Micha: What do you have to say to folks already making comparisons between old and new Johnny?
Bryan: I`ve been sniffin` around and people are going to think this and that, and I don`t really give a fuck, man. You can never play that game, or you`ll get fucked in the ass. It`s the same thing musically. We`re confident as shit with our decision, and thus far Johnny Weills has done nothing but impress the shit out of us. If you`ve got any kind of sense of taste you`re going to see the improvement.
Micha: The old cat was cool but this guy brought in melody, vibrato, what have ya... I`m not saying the old cat couldn`t sing a balled, but I never heard him do it.
Bryan: He brought a whole bunch of different shit to the table. He`s got a different voice than the old dude and he can do a whole lot of different stuff in general and pull it off. Nothing against Throckmorton, but he`s probably a better guitar player than a singer, and he`ll probably be the first to tell you that, and that`s why he`s doing what he`s doing now (Last Crash). He came up to us after the first show and told us "Damn, that dude`s better than I am." You`ve got to recognize talent where it lays, and I think Johnny Weills has talent. He`s got a real bluesy approach to things, and that`s something Throckmorton wasn`t into. He wasn`t into old blues-rock, and that`s another thing. As good as a vocalist as he was, he really didn`t have anything in common with us other than metal. As far as bands like Captain Beyond, Cactus and old blues, he didn`t like that shit. That was one of the first things that attracted us to Weills. Before he joined I got on his old bands web site and looked at his influences and it read like my CD collection.
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