Carpe Diem at 20

Written by: Tom Wilson – Sense Music Media

It seems only appropriate that the album that cemented WILL HAVEN’s ascent into the halls of heavy music greatness was called Carpe Diem (that’s “seize the day” for those who don’t speak dead languages). Released in what was a bumper year for metal – featuring career-highlight releases from TOOL, SLAYER, SLIPKNOT, SYSTEM OF A DOWN and SEVENDUST – Carpe Diem was a unique beast. If you had to compare it to anything else that year, you could start with Jane Doe by CONVERGE. Both were examples of bands with hardcore origins mutating into something harsher, less easy to define. Both were harrowing trips into the abyss – escape not guaranteed, earplugs highly recommended. Both set the music press ablaze, and allowed each band to thrive for years to come. At home in Sacramento, in the midst of creating a new album, founding guitarist Jeff Irwin looked back on this unique, devastating release.

I wasn’t sure which city in California you were in. Sacramento … I’m starting to see how you knew DEFTONES back in the day.

Yeah, we grew up with those guys and FAR, CAKE, PAPA ROACH … We were all in the same area. I lived with the FAR guys for a long time, and I grew up with most of the DEFTONES guys. It’s just one big Sacto family out here. It’s kind of cool, seeing some of these bands break out of this town and do stuff. It’s pretty cool.

Let’s wind back the clock to 2001. What do you remember about that year? How old were you? What was your life like?

Great question. How old was I? Like 26, 27 probably … It was fun. Everything started in ’97. We put out our first full-length record, and then right away Chino and DEFTONES took us out on tour with them for a couple of months in America, and then we went to Europe with them for another month, so we were on the road with them for six months, probably. After that, everything just got crazy. We started getting tours, offers and stuff, because DEFTONES are a really respected band, you know? They kind of told everybody about us and spread the word, so all these bands that looked up to DEFTONES now kind of looked up to us too. So by 2001 we’d already toured with SLIPKNOT and FEAR FACTORY and DEFTONES and stuff, so we were running pretty high at the time. We were just having fun, and we just got picked up by Music For Nations, which is a label in Europe, and them and Revelation Records kind of put out the record together. So it was our first record under them. We had done WHVN, but they just kind of licensed it, but this … they had their hands on Carpe Diem a little bit. We were just excited to record a record … I was living with the bass player at the time, Mike [Martin]. We were just kind of partying, hanging out, writing music. We had a blast – it was good times! [Laughs]

What was the writing process like for Carpe Diem? When did you start writing it? Were you writing a bit of it on the road, or did you wait until you got home?

No, when we got home. We’d just come off a tour with SLIPKNOT. We toured with SLIPKNOT in January 2000 – we did three weeks with them. I came home and we started writing the new record, and I remember being with the SLIPKNOT guys and playing their shows … I got pretty close to Mick [Thompson] at the time. We were just jamming on stuff, and chords, and he was showing me stuff on the Slipknot record that I wanted to learn how to play. So I came home excited to write and record again, and I had taken a lot of those influences from stuff that me and Mick were doing and fooling around with, and I remember just thinking, when I was looking back on some of the SLIPKNOT shows … WHVN and El Diablo were the two albums we had out, so we just had that collection of songs, and watching SLIPKNOT, I was like, “God, we need to add some stuff to the setlist that’s just heavy as hell, and brutal all the way though.” So when I came home, I was like, let’s write a more riff-oriented record, where it’s just a lot of riffs, a lot of headbanging, and keep that WILL HAVEN vibe, but just add some more riffs. So that was my initial thought going into it. I remember the first day we went into the rehearsal room, and this was probably a month after the SLIPKNOT tour, and we were at practice, and I just came up with the main Carpe Diem riff. I practiced screwing around, and we wrote that song that day, and that was the blueprint for the whole thing … A lot of the songs – Dressed in Night Clothes, Alpha Male – are all based around the idea of the Carpe Diem song. It just kind of flowed. The whole writing process was a pain in the ass, but as far as the song structures, and where we knew we were going, Carpe Diem was the blueprint for the whole record.

It was a new thing, for me anyway. El Diablo is definitely more noisy and more NEUROSIS-influenced, and WHVN is just all over the place. We were just having fun with that record. So Carpe Diem was like … I wrote a cool riff, and we added some cool stuff to it, but it was just one of those things that you stumble upon – “Oh, this is cool! We can make a bunch of stuff sound like this!” You want the record to be somewhat cohesive too, so we tried to keep the same vibe going, but add some riffs to it to capture your attention throughout the whole record. With the anniversary coming up, we were going to try and do some Carpe Diem shows … so I had to go and re-learn the whole record again. I hadn’t listened to it in a long time. I was like, “Man, this record is pretty brutal all the way through. This is kind of cool.”

What were some of the challenges of writing it? What songs came easy, and what songs didn’t?

The main thing was that when we started writing Carpe Diem, we had our original drummer Wayne [Morse] in the band, and then halfway through writing he had quit the band and left, so we didn’t really have a drummer, and then I found my friend Dave [Hulse], just a friend of mine that I’d known for a while. He played drums. He’s a really good drummer, but he’d never really been in a band … I just said, “Hey, can you help me write these songs?” He came in and he helped write a few, and then we actually played a show with him but he actually quit right after that. So we didn’t have a drummer for a while. The funny thing is, we were actually in limbo for a while. I’d written a bunch of songs … We went into a studio and recorded Carpe Diem, Dressed in Night Clothes, and maybe one other one, so Dave actually does play on the record. After that, he had quit, so we had three or four songs already recorded, but then he had left, so we had no drummer. [Laughs] So we were going, “Now what do we do?”

And then, all of a sudden, Gloria Cavalera – Max Cavalera’s wife, Max from SEPULTURA and SOULFLY – she was kind of our manager at the time, and she called me up and said, “Hey, SOULFLY is going out for a few weeks, and we need a bunch of guys to open for us.” I’m like, “Uh … OK.” We didn’t have a drummer, so I’m like, “How are we going to make this happen?” So I remember that I got a demo tape from Mitch [Wheeler], who is our drummer now. I called him up and I said, “Can you do this tour with us?” He did, and he ended up becoming our drummer ever since then. [Laughs] So we went through three drummers, and that was the hard thing – trying to get used to a new drummer and what they could add to the band, and how the songs sounded different to how they originally did with Wayne. It was fun, because it added a whole new thing to the record, but it was weird having three different people go through that record process with us. It changed … Mitch added some stuff to that record. Dave was a good drummer too, but Mitch … with Moving to Montana, his drumming on that added so much more to the band. It was kind of like a rebirth for the band. Writing the songs was easy. Just trying to plug in a new drummer was the biggest pain in the ass.

One of my favourite tracks on this album is Finest Our. What was the concept behind that for you?

WILL HAVEN is a heavy band … I love heavy music, but it’s not what I listen to a lot. I have a few heavy bands that I love, but my favourite band is probably PINK FLOYD. I love RADIOHEAD and DEPECHE MODE and stuff like that, so [Finest Our] is all my RADIOHEAD, PINK FLOYD influences coming out of me, and trying to make some sombre [music] … I love NEUROSIS, and I love the quieter stuff that NEUROSIS do. I like the more ambient stuff, so I’ve always wanted to put that into WILL HAVEN’s music. You can hear a little bit on El Diablo and a little bit on WHVN, and in later years I’ve actually added a lot more to it. It’s something that I’ve always loved to do. I love that creepiness and the ambience of it. To me, WILL HAVEN is not about the music – it’s about the emotion. I want to give you a feeling, instead of just trying to have a singalong or trying to rock out. It has to be some kind of emotional feeling. That’s why I love PINK FLOYD and NEUROSIS, because you feel something when you listen to those bands. It’s not music – it’s an experience … Finest Our is just one of those things. I was just kind of adding both worlds – coming in with this really quiet, creepy, ambient thing, and then going into this loud noise … building something. BATS is like that too. It’s just me loving all kinds of music, and trying to put everything into it, and create a band that I want to listen to. [Laughs]

What are some of the things that these songs make you feel?

I don’t know. I was proud of the record once we finished it. I didn’t realise, when I look back on it now, how much I enjoy it. Back then I was just happy to get it done and put something out, but now I look back on it, and I’m like, “Wow, we did some cool stuff on that record.” I don’t know. For me, I want it to be an experience, for our listeners and our fans. For me, it has to be fun to play, because I do get a feeling from when I play it, because I write it, and I only put it out if it makes me feel a certain way. The main thing is that I want to have fun playing it too, you know? I just enjoy playing those songs. There are songs on records that we’ve written that I don’t have a lot of fun playing, but for some reason, I love playing Carpe Diem. Maybe because it’s very simple, and it’s fun to rock out to it. To me, I just love playing those songs … They’re heavy, and they’re fun to play, and they definitely pack a punch … It’s one of those records; you can put any song from that record in a setlist and you know it’s going to be one of the better parts of the setlist.

You guys were quite ahead of your time, because I was listening to Carpe Diem, and I realised that you guys invented the Lars Ulrich St. Anger snare sound two years before he did. [Laughs]

On that record, when we first started WILL HAVEN, we did a demo tape, and then we did a little seven-song demo. We recorded those with our friend Eric Stenman, who actually did one of the first bands I was ever in – me playing drums, and Shaun from the band FAR playing guitar, Grady was singing, and my friend Adam playing bass. It was a total metal/hardcore band. Eric recorded that record, and Eric’s big thing is, he has a good ear for instruments, and he’s always loved that cracking sort of snare sound. If you hear our first demo, for our first band called SOCK, my snare is just cracking hardcore on that thing. It’s louder than the guitars! [Laughs] So he did all our records up to Carpe Diem … He’s always had our snare drums cracking, and the drums sounded good and loud … He worked at Vagrant Records then … They had a warehouse where they would print all of their t-shirts and stuff, and I think we recorded some of those drums in that warehouse. We actually just set up some room mics in there and recorded drums, so it’s a different drum sound, but it was a really live room. It was really loud and echo-y, because it was a warehouse. We actually did some cool stuff on this record that we hadn’t done before. That was the first record we did with ProTools. Everything else was on 2-inch tape. That’s the first one we actually did through a computer, and we did drums in a warehouse. All my guitars, we did in Eric’s apartment bedroom, believe it or not. [Laughs] That record was a whole new thing for us in terms of recording and experimenting.

What was some of the feedback you got from your musical peers for this record?

[Laughs] It’s funny, because El Diablo was definitely the one record that our peers absolutely loved … The day we finished it, I took it over to the DEFTONES practice spot and played it for Chino and Stefan. I had the cassette tape – I had just come from the studio. They were bugging out on it. They were like, “This is amazing.” … Our buddies and other musician friends love that record. We were stoked. The press gave us a little bit of love – Kerrang! gave it five stars and stuff – but the press didn’t really hop on until later, but our friends totally gave us the seal of approval on that record. And then when Carpe Diem came out … the press was giving us more love than our peers. Our peers still enjoy the record, but it seemed like the magazines and the more mainstream stuff was giving us more of the attention. When you’re an underground band, the bands really take you under their wing, but once you reach mainstream media, the other bands are like, “OK, you don’t need our seal of approval – you’re on your own now!” [Laughs] Even when I played Carpe Diem for Chino, I remember sitting in my car and playing it for him, and he was like, “Dude, this is heavy as shit. You guys are getting heavier.” So he was stoked on it, but I think when you’re a new band, people are more amazed by what you can do. We were a band for six or seven years by them, so everybody kind of knew what we were heading towards. I think Carpe Diem was the first time the press was like, “Oh shit, who is this band?”

What was the concept behind the amazing video for Carpe Diem?

Our friend Brad [Oats], who did that video, we’ve known Brad forever. He’s been one of our good friends for a long time. He had done some home videos; he did a lot of cliff jumping videos with his buddies, and he did a few skate videos too. He was kind of an independent film guy, and was making fun videos, so I was like, “Hey man, want to do a video for us?” Brad likes to think outside the box a little bit, so we had tried to come up with a storyline, and it was basically about Grady getting his voice stolen where he can’t sing anymore, and then he has to go on this adventure to get his voice back. That was all we had planned out. We didn’t have a script or anything – we just had this idea. We filmed it at Mike’s house in Sacramento. The day of the shoot, we came up with these different ideas. “Oh, let’s invite this guy over. Let’s do this, let’s do this.” As the day went on, shooting that video, we didn’t have a complete story … We were shooting scene by scene. I called Chino, and said, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “I’m just chilling at home.” … Chino lived a couple of blocks from Mike, and we were like, “Come have some beers and we’ll all hang out.” He wasn’t even supposed to be in the video – he was just going to come and hang out with us. So he comes over on his little scooter, and we were hanging out, and I was like, “Hey, why don’t you be in the video?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know – let’s make a scene up!” So we made a scene up of him driving the car, and then Grady knocking him out and taking the car from him. That was all done on the spot, that night … The thing just came together, and Brad pieced it together, and we put it out. We just thought it was a fun, campy video … And then it blew up, and that’s what kind of set the fire for Carpe Diem … And then we were on the cover of Kerrang! and it just got crazy after that.

WILL HAVEN’s new album is due out in 2022. Stay tuned!

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