Nonpoint
Interview with Zach Broderick of Nonpoint

Interviewed By:

Eric: We actually first met you guys back in 2000. I understand you recently joined the band?
Zach: About two years ago, yeah.
Eric: Since then you guys have toured a lot with some big names in the business; Papa Roach, Disturbed just to name a few… In what ways from the earlier days of Nonpoint and even since you’ve been with them, have you seen the music industry change from 5-10 years ago?
Zach: Oh dude, it’s changed even from 6 months ago, you know? It’s separating. The world is going digital. I mean the cd collection now at best buy is like nothing now. We’re trying to make our cd as attractive as we can for the fans. We’re trying to make it really cool, you know? Some cool artwork, I know Mudvayne just did their thing with a black light which is pretty cool. We’re trying to put some cool promos together to get people to buy a cd but if you want to buy it off of iTunes that’s cool too. That’s probably the biggest you know, and the major labels too. We left our label, we went to ah, we had offers from the majors and what not but the offers we did have from the majors weren’t the most ideal… deal, if I can say that, if you want to have any longevity in your career. You’ve heard the horror stories back in the day when they were still making a ton of money. Imagine that but a 100 times worse. We’re very happy that we started our own label which is called 954 records. We have full control over it, we have a great radio team, great marketing team and it’s really exactly where we want to be right now, you know?
 

Eric: For sure, we’ll come back to the new album in a little bit. Back onto some of the bands you’ve played with in the past, are there any bands you’ve played with that kind of get you more pumped and more excited than others?
Zach: Yeah, that’s kind of a personal preference. I mean you mentioned Papa Roach, any time we have a real high energy show like Papa Roach or Sevendust, bands like that it’s like you’re going to immediately have a friendly competition between the two bands. It’s good because it pushes each other’s bands to throw down really hard and what not. If you’re playing with a band that you’re a fan of and you’ve been a fan of for years, I mean, I listened to Sevendust in high school you know what I mean? It’s always super fun to play with a band that influenced you. I gotta say, it does make a difference sometimes.

Ben: What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you while on tour?
Zach: Ummm, jeeze (laughs). Definitely not something I want written on your website. I guess maybe you could hang out with us one night and see if anything crazy happens, then you have free reign to write about it. Until you catch us doing something, I can’t say.

Ben: That leads into me another question. What do you guys do after the show? Do you hit the town or go back to the bus and chill or go to sleep or what?
Zach: You know, I think everyone is a little bit more refined these days. It takes a lot to actually be on the road and travel and do this night after night. I personally can’t go out and get hammered every night anymore. If I do then the shows going to suffer and that’s not cool, people pay with their hard earned money. But you know, it depends if we’re in a different town like Milwaukee for instance, I want to go see the Miller Brewery. I’m a huge Miller Light Fan you know? When you’re in Milwaukee you have cool stuff to get out in Milwaukee. We can also go to Vinnie Paul’s house or hit the strip club and hang out. In New York you’re going to go hang out in the city you know? But when you’re in – I don’t want to mention anybody’s cities that aren’t that cool but use your imagination for a small town you’ve never heard of.
Ben: What about weekends?
Zach: Well, every day is kind of a weekend you know? (laughing) It’s like I hardly know what days Friday and Saturday are. But yeah, we’ll go out, it depends kind of what area we’re in. Sometimes we’re in the most rural place in the world and there’s nowhere to go for miles except for the Quick Stop to get a 12 pack maybe, I don’t know. Like I said it depends. We all like to go site seeing and find little cool attractions. It’s a pretty cool job, you get paid to travel around the U.S. and the world and play for an hour then the rest of that time do some interviews, hang out with fans you know. It’s kind of like a big vacation in a way. It’s work and a vacation and a vacation at the same time so it’s kind of confusing. Definitely not too bad of a gig. Definitely not.

Eric: The new album Miracle is supposed to be released this spring right?
Zach: Yeah it’s going to be released May 4th.
Eric: What’s the inspiration for the name?
Zach: That was Elias, he comes up with all the lyrics and a lot of the time I don’t know what they’re about but this one he talks about on stage all the time. It basically says through the bands turmoil with changing managers, changing labels, guitar players, the ups and downs the bands had in the last 10-13 years that we were signed. And you know, through all that, it’s one of the bands from 2000 in this genre of music that are still around and you know, not flipping burgers or something like that. So it kind of says it’s a Miracle that this is all still happening and our single is doing great. I mean, we’re not surprised we wrote a good record. We’re just more excited that the fans still come to the show night after night and people are still buying records and we’re still getting great tours. It’s a bit of a humbling experience, you know? The actual song is about – Elias actually told me about this – it’s about going to a fight… it could be a fight about anything you know? A fight with yourself or work, doesn’t have to be a physical thing but going in against the worst odds and coming out on top.

Eric: That first single from Miracle, did you guys work with Chad from Mudvayne on that?
Zach: Yeah, Chad and Greg. Chad Gray from Mudvayne and Greg Tribbett from Hell Yeah. They actually produced the entire record. Chad does sing on Miracle. He sings on the chorus and the bridge, it’s really cool. His voice ties it together nicely with Elias’s. We were touring with Mudvaye a year ago to date on their New Game tour and they tossed around the idea of setting up a production company and we were tossing around the idea of having them produce our record. This type of producer get’s you the most fired up and you know, the most geared up to to do this. That’s what we wanted to see, that fire in somebody, not just somebody who wanted a paycheck or whatever. We love to work with them, they actually know a thing or two about writing a good song. Basically when we got back to tour we just started writing and with technology we were able to send our songs to them over the internet and then they would say “Let’s change the bridge or do this, or make this chorus and make this the verse and blah blah blah.” We went back and forth and then we met up in Racine, that’s where we recorded the record, Racine, Wisconsin. For no reason, don’t ask “Why Racine, why’d you go there in the middle of Winter? You live in Florida.” It was just a really cool studio, it was a cool vibe. The band wanted to get out of Florida because they had done every other record previously in Florida.
Ben: Are you from Florida?
Zach: No, I’m from Chicago. I live down there (Florida) but yeah we took off to Racine and then Chad and Greg met us up there and we basically just started right away. It was really seamlessly easy, how easy the songs came together with them. They’ll tell you the same thing. We had one day of pre-production, we just went right to the songs, made a few changes and the next day we started the tracks and got the whole thing done in about 3 weeks. Yeah, they were great. It was their first time producing our band and I think they are going to have more success doing what they’re doing with their production company. The company is called YEP! productions.
Ben: Yeah Racine is a really weird place to record and album (laughs). Where did you record it, what studio?
Zach: Belle City Sound Studios. We had no cars, of course we just flew up there. It was cool to just to sit there and concentrate on the record . It wasn’t like we were in Las Vegas where there’s a million things to do which is cool either way because that could really influence you more or derail from your inspiration. It was on a little side street with a Pizza Hut… we ate a lot of Chicken Wings from Wing Street. There was also a gas station across the street and a couple little local bars but they didn’t like us too much.
Ben: Didn’t they?
Zach: Yeah a couple locals didn’t like these new guys with tattoos coming into their bar trying to have a good time.
Ben: Well, you know how the Midwest is with those places.
Zach: Yeah and I’m rooting for the Bears all the time against their stupid Packers – Oh don’t print that one!
Eric, Ben: Ohhh (groaning). We’re definitely not printing that one.

Eric: We talked about the new album, what else does the future hold for Nonpoint? Should we expect any soundtrack material? WWE stuff? Any GNR covers?
Zach: Ha, GNR covers… Well, we did Pantera “5 Minutes Alone” on this record, which is awesome. That’s our cover for this record which is really cool because Dime Bag is my favorite guitar player and Pantera is my biggest inspiration. But for the future, our song is doing great. It’s moving up in the charts every day and basically we plan on being out for the next year and a half straight. Going to Europe, doing all the festivals over there, we’re doing Rock in the Range in May. It looks like we might be getting with Cold at the end of this tour and thought we might have a break but it looks like we’re probably going to be hitting the road with some really cool bands – I won’t say who yet. It’s basically going to be non-stop touring and I’m not complaining about that. I’d rather be busy than slow, I love touring, it’s the only thing I live for. As far as soundtracks, nope. If someone calls us up we’re more than happy to write a song. We want to put out a record right after this one. We don’t want to take time off and lose the motivation and upward momentum that we have to keep getting stuff out to people.

Ben: What’s your favorite Nonpoint album?
Zach: Ummmm, not to be too generic with the answer but I like a little bit off of each one, you know? I don’t really have a favorite. There’s little parts off of each one that I like. You know, the rawness of the first one; you could tell the band was really hungry and waiting their whole life to write that. To the Pain was tuned down real low and a little bit more progressive and a lot of different time changes and a different kind of unorthodox structuring of songs. The one thing about this new record and the one thing about this band is, and I think other people will say the same thing, no two records sound the same which is kind of cool. But like I said, I don’t really have a favorite, I just like bits of each one.

Ben: CD sales are down for everyone. What is your biggest outlet for getting your music out now? Back in the day there was Streetwise which promoted the hard rock music scene and did a good job with that…
Zach: Streetwise you said? That’s a homeless people magazine in Chicago.
Ben: Really?
Zach: Yeah the homeless people sell Streetwise on the street in downtown Chicago.
Eric: (Laughing)
Ben: Oh yeah, back in the day Streetwise was the biggest company for getting bands names out.
Zach: Anyways, the biggest outlet? Itunes is great, tuneCore. The marketing company that works for our label has really cool ways of getting the stuff out in different ways and giving incentives for getting the record or buying it online. I know a lot of people don’t care and are going to download it (steal it). There’s nothing you can really do about it. It’s dumb to fight the public on downloading it. I don’t think it’s cool, I personally don’t do that. If most people hear it, I’m happy with that but at least if you’re going to steal our record, come to the show and buy and ticket or a t-shirt and make up for it, you know?
Ben: Is that where you make your money then, concert ticket sales?
Zach: Absolutely. Touring and merchandise, yeah. And that’s every band, not just us. Unless you’re Led Zeppelin, they probably make money off of everything in the whole world (laughing). But yeah most bands, that’s pretty much a known fact that you make all your money off touring and t-shirts so that’s why we tour all the time and sell lots of t-shirts.

 

Ben: When you took over for Andy did you have to learn all the songs previous to 2008?
Zach: I didn’t learn all of them, I think I learned about 30 or so. Yeah we pick and choose and if we hear on our Myspace page or Facebook that we should start playing this song all the time, we’ll take it into consideration. We like to take people’s suggestions and learn a new song for a new tour. We don’t want to go around hitting the same market playing the same songs over and over because I hate when bands do that, it’s like you’re getting ripped off every time. It’s like “You were here two months ago and you just played the entire set from front to back the same, come on.” We try to make it fun. We have different set lists for different nights, we throw in different songs. We understand that people are probably going to be coming to shows when we play in a two hour radius of another place. But there going to come to shows when we play repeatedly so we like to throw in some new stuff.
 

Ben: How did they (Nonpoint) find you?
Zach: Basically, I was in some other bands and Dan Donegan from Disturbed was working with one of my old bands, he was their executive producer. He was friends with a band and my friend Shaun Glass from Dirge Within was friends with Nonpoint and basically I think Rob was asking around and Shaun recommended me and said, “Hey, this guys legit and he knows his stuff.” They came to my apartment when they were on tour and I set up some drums and guitars and mics and we jammed some songs, it felt right. More importantly, they weren’t in terms so much with “Can you play this song?” You know, a lot of people can just play a song. They were more concerned with how I would write. So I started writing songs for them and sending them over songs and we meshed with writing so we immediately went on tour. Basically, that whole tour we just wrote every single day. We’d just be in the back lounge writing songs and recording everything, a little 10 second guitar lick can turn into a huge song. We wrote a lot, a lot, that first tour we went on and a lot of those songs are on the record now.
Ben: Cool cool, we can wrap it up on that.
Zach: See you guys at the show?
Ben: Yeah we’ll be there.
Zach: Stop by, we’ll be around all night. That’s another thing about our band, you can always find us hanging out by the merch booth. We don’t like to crawl back into our bunks and be anti-social so yeah, we’ll be around.
Ben: See ya around.
Zach: Ok thanks guys.
Eric: Take care.
Zach: Yep see ya.