Interview and Photos: Chris Rugoswki
MGM: I saw you in Madison. You broke a guitar string and got all the way through your set – it was amazing.
Jamie van Dyck: I was just gonna say that’s the show on the tour where I went five strings, bringing a string halfway through the first song with no backup guitar. It’s a good workout for the brain though, having to do the math, carry the one, figure out alright, five frets up on that string is this string. I could play it here kind of or I can just come up with something new that will still sound good because I can’t play the thing I originally wrote in that spot.
In the past I’ve broken a string and I’ve then had to look super tough with the string hanging from my teeth. I pull it out of the way just so it doesn’t get in the way of the other five strings. But yeah, that’s how I get my metal credit because I don’t really have it in any other way. This upcoming tour we’re preparing to bring a backup guitar that will be on stage. So if I break a string mid-song, I can just walk over to wherever my handy guitar stand is and swap out the one that I’m using for the one that is ready to go.
Part of why I don’t easily have a backup guitar is I write every single song pretty much that we do in a different tuning. So if our set list is long enough, I have four or five different guitars. It was absurd. So the guitar I had for the first time, this is the first tour I had a Line 6 Variax guitar where I play through a Helix. Between the Helix and the Variax, they communicate to each other and it’s able to control the tuning of my guitar. Each string is individually pitch shifted. So it’s not like a capo or tuning the whole thing up or down – a pitch shift pedal can tune one string up an octave and the next string down an octave.
MGM: You had the different videos with everything and I felt like it brought a different feel to the show or the night than just different lighting. Having videos behind you is a totally different experience.
Earthside: It’s hard to get to the gist of what we do to say we’re just a post-rock band or we’re just a progressive metal band – there’s a very visual element to it. For me especially, I went about 26 years of being a musician before I realized that other people don’t see stuff in their head when they’re listening to music. I’m synesthetic, so I always see shapes and colors and all that sort of stuff. For Jamie and Frank, they grew up with Hans Zimmer soundtracks and loving the Gladiator OST. For all of us, music and visual they’re endlessly entwined and they do so much to elevate each other.
That was a big part of what we wanted to bring to our show – to not have that would not be giving people the proper experience. Earthside shows, I like to say, are actually pretty rowdy. As you saw on stage, we’re not just sitting there with our monocle on, toying with musicality. It’s a pretty high energy show, but we want to make sure that there is always a strong consideration for putting together a holistic experience that really pulls you in.
MGM: When you’re writing a song, does everyone come to the table with their own bits?
Jamie: So I think every song’s a little bit different, but I think for the most part either songs kind of come about organically in rehearsal together where maybe somebody comes to rehearsal with an idea, maybe it’s totally spontaneous, but it’s us kind of jamming on something. And then the songs that are written on a DAW, for the most part, it’s like one person having a vision and maybe someone else brings their own spin to their part.
Earthside: Jamie has a particular role of being especially good at working with other people’s ideas. I can have a drum beat that I maybe have no vision for and another member might be like, “that’s a silly beat, we’re not going to do anything good with that” and Jamie will bust out this really cool lead that makes the whole thing sound suddenly like “Wow, this is a piece of music, this is amazing.”
Jamie: And if I’m in a little bit of a drought with creative inspiration, having somebody else’s idea I see potential in can kind of get the brain firing. Having the combination of somebody having an idea that I think is cool and then having someone else in the band – before the idea has even been able to be expressed – be kind of appalled and disgusted and even offended that the idea is being brought up… I’m like “I’m going to salvage this thing so hard that person’s going to eat crow that they ever doubted this idea.”
MGM: What about collaborating with other artists? Because obviously with your last album and the one that you’re going out to tour with, you collaborated with a ton of people. Was that easy to do? Was it fun to do?
Jamie: You answered a good chunk of your own question there. These two albums were eight years apart, so I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Having had a degree of success on that first record, I think we felt that we would have an easier time finding vocalists on the second record. And it ended up being the opposite where we either kept getting ghosted or turned down, or we had vocalists who said yes and then the pandemic hit and their situations changed and their collaboration with us was the first thing to go.
Going forward, not to say we wouldn’t want to work with a well-known vocalist if it works out and if it fits the song, but I think getting to start some of our collaborations with the idea of from scratch – we have this relationship and we write a song with that person in mind or they’re even involved in the creative process where the collaborations are a bit more organic from the get-go. As opposed to we wrote this song and we have this dream of a singer who’s never even heard of us and we’re just gonna hope to blindly reach out to them and inspire them to sing this song we wrote with them in mind.
MGM: What about headlining a tour? How does it feel to finally have your headlining tour?
Jamie: It definitely feels accomplished. It’s a little bit vulnerable and scary – alright, we’re not relying on some more established other headline band to be who brings in the audience. Let’s find out in each of these cities how many people know us and kind of what we’re worth in these places. But yeah, I think it’s a real opportunity to also give the show we want to give as far as okay, this is a priority. We really want the lighting to feel like this, we want our stage setup to feel as such, and to have our set list be able to feel a bit more like a beginning to end journey.
Earthside: I think having been a band that is so between extremes for as long as we have been – touring with bands that are very decisively metal and bands that are much softer than us and bands that are much more concise in pop structure in their songs – there’s definitely something really cool about a show that has an arc to where there’s a consistency in the spirit of the bands, like the atmosphere and the emotions that they’re hitting on, but they come at that from completely different angles. We’ve gotten feedback certainly, I think as much of being a support band as long as we have for different tours, that people are impressed by what they hear, but it’s like “you guys played four songs, like what was that?” And yeah, I mean our songs are on the longer side and if you have 40 minutes that’s kind of what you have time for, but I think it’s going to feel really cool and also from an audience perspective to get the full experience rather than just the first 40 minutes of the movie.
https://earthsideband.ffm.to/frozenheartburningworld
Cinematic rockers Earthside and Mascot Label Group have announced plans to release a new recording titled “frozen heart ~ burning world” in front of the band’s first headline tour of North
America. That run begins at Boston’s Middle East on February 21 and will play its final show on March 8 at Brooklyn’s Meadows. They’ll perform songs off their latest album alongside their
debut A DREAM IN STATIC. Tickets are available here: https://earthsideband.ffm.to/na-headline-2025.
Earthside are Jamie van Dyck [Guitars, backing vocals, programming, keyboards], Ben Shanbrom [drums, backing vocals], Frank Sacramone [Keyboards, synthesizers, programming, percussion, guitar] and Ryan Griffin [Bass, backing vocals].
Confirmed appearances include:
2/21 Boston, MA Middle East
2/22 Montreal, QC Bar le Ritz
2/23 Toronto, ON The Drake
2/25 Detroit, MI Sanctuary
2/26 Cleveland, OH Foundry
2/27 Chicago, IL Beat Kitchen
3/01 Nashville, TN The End
3/02 Atlanta, GA Purgatory
3/05 Orlando, FL Conduit
3/07 Baltimore, MD Metro Gallery
3/08 Brooklyn, NY Meadows
About Author
