Texan band Flyleaf returned to the UK with a sell-out tour, supported by The Crave. WDAC’s Leanne and Olivia caught up with them before their Nottingham date.
Welcome back to the UK! Are you glad to be here?
Jared: Yeah!!
Lacey: Uh huh!
Do you get time to visit the sights of the UK when touring? Is there anywhere you still want to visit here?
Lacey: Usually we don’t get much time, we had a couple of days off when we first got here, though. Sometimes we’ll get stuck in a really cool place but most of the time we just see the backs of the clubs. I’d love to get the time to just look around, visit the castles and stuff like that – touristy stuff.
You’ve done quite a lot of volunteering, Rwanda, Haiti – what have been your best and worst experiences when volunteering?
Jared: I got really sick one time, that was probably the worst.
Lacey: Yeah we have to sleep under these mosquito nets and stuff.
Jared: I guess the best part is getting to see how we’ve helped those people.
Lacey, you have a few tattoos, they seem to mean quite a lot to you – do you have any plans for future tattoos?
Lacey: [laughs] Sure, yeah, I think it’s a dangerous thing starting to get tattoos, they’re addictive! The world’s filled with beautiful things and images. Though with me, I only trust one person to do it and he’s in Michigan somewhere, we don’t get to go there very often.
How do you feel about Flyleaf-related tattoos?
Lacey: [Laughs] Uh… well, sometimes it’s creepy, but other times it’s really awesome, like somebody will pull a lyric out that’s really meaningful to them. Somebody recently got a Memento Mori tattoo, and I think that’s an awesome tattoo to get. That phrase… it’s just such universal thing to remember in your life and apply it back to you, in a good way, hopefully [laughs].
Do you have a favourite track from Memento Mori to play live?
Lacey: I like Chasm, usually like the heavier songs.
Do you think the new album’s a bit more fun to play live; it seems to have a few heavier songs than Flyleaf?
Lacey: They’re both good for their own reasons, but there’s more songs on Memento Mori that are more like my favourite and bring us together in more of a group, you can dance around it.
Is it refreshing to play the newer songs after playing the older songs for so long?
Lacey: We just played our first show here after a short break and it was really cool to get back on stage and play. I think the old songs are just as relevant, especially to a new audience – there seems to be more new faces on this tour than we’ve ever seen, and obviously we did the United States a whole bunch of times, I don’t even know how many. We’ve toured a lot so we see the same faces and it’s good to see the people we remember, but we’ve had a chance to play in front of new people so we still put in the old songs. They feel new because the fans are new, they hear them for the first time. Like when we toured with Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace – it’s good to see how the songs relate to them at this time in their lives. It’s the same with me like the songs would change with what was going on in my life, the meaning of them. That’s what’s cool about poetry – if you sing a song to somebody who’s going through something, that song takes on the meaning of whatever that person’s going through, even to me as I sing it.
You’ve toured with some quite big bands, such as KoRn, Breaking Benjamin – are there any other bands you’d really like to tour with?
Lacey:Oh, U2….
Jared: Yeah U2 that’d be really cool [laughs]
Do you often get gifts from fans and what have been your favourite / worst?
Lacey: We get a lot in Japan, I think that’s just a part of their culture to give gifts, so we get like bookmarks, pencils, just like weird little things, they just couldn’t see you without giving you something. What was the coolest thing we got?
Jared: We got those lanterns.
Lacey: Somebody made like these like lanterns out of metal and it was the Flyleaf flame from the last record, and they had it – you put a light behind it, put like a candle behind it looked like a flame flickering like through it. We have lots and lots of people who draw, they draw like our album cover, they draw our band, they draw their favourite picture of us playing live, and those are all really cool, usually. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they look like Napoleon Dynamite [laughs], but I still love them.
Chloe wanted to know if you still have the flag you gave her a few years ago in Leeds?
Yeah, we have it; we have everything, Chloe’s a really special person to me. Most of the stuff we have from people that we’ve made a connection with, it’s usually in our practice room. We’re building a recording studio at our drummer’s house so all that stuff will go in there.
Have you discovered any new bands recently that you really like? What are you listening to most right now?
Jared: There’s a band called The Paper Tongues, they’re really good.
Lacey: They’re brand new, they just got signed to our record label and they’re putting a record out in the US..
Jared: I think it’s the end of the month?
Lacey: It’s so good, it’s such a different sound that I’ve ever heard. When you start listening to it it’s like, well at first I didn’t like it that much, it’s was interesting, but I wasn’t in love with it but something in the lyrics made me want to listen again, it just struck something in me. So I listened to it back through again and got completely obsessed with it. I wanted to show somebody else, and I was like okay make sure you give this back to me, and then they never gave it back and I was freaking out – I had to hear those songs again, because there’s no recordings of it, it just makes you crazy, I just fell in love with it. Definitely worth listening to, we toured with them a couple of times, we tried to bring them over here actually but we couldn’t get financial support for it. They toured with their wives and kids, and it was really awesome, but expensive.
Did you personally choose The Crave to support you on this tour?
It was more like somebody else decided, we get to hear them and pick between a few options. Somebody suggested them, I guess they know we’re touring and send us their music, and sometimes if their management company is friends with ours, they’ll do them a favour and we’ll do them a favour. We don’t really like doing favours, personally, but at the same time we understand, it’s a really small business once you get down to it. Everybody you meet knows each other, you’ve toured with them or they know their manager, so this was kind of one of those deals. Of course, we wanted to bring Paper Tongues [laughs], but that wasn’t possible. I don’t think The Crave are bad, they’re really talented.
You’re doing meet and greets for all the shows on this tour – was this your idea? Do you feel it’s important to make sure you interact with fans in such a way?
Jared: It’s something we usually do. Even after the show last night we went out, and saw the people who didn’t get the meet and greet. It’s usually at the smaller venues; we can’t really do that back in the States. It’s kinda cool to meet the fans; we haven’t met many over here.