MORGAN Y. EVANS: I think this is your best record yet. The bass on "Death Anxiety" is punishing. You really feel the groove, and also the lyrics of that song. I love the line, “Every night, I fear, is the last with you, so please remember what it meant." I like your past records but I think the attention to detail sonically and thematically this time has resulted in something that will stand the test of time even more.

RYAN WOMBACHER: Yeah. It's definitely the most effort. We always put as much effort as we can into doing the records, but there have always been issues and things that haven't worked our way. Every time we've gone into the studio we've always been in a rush. This record, as opposed to the others, we really planned it perfectly. We had all the time we needed to write without any interruptions, and instead of doing the record in our hometown we went up to Vancouver. We were isolated from everything and had one hundred percent of attention focused on the record. Staying at home, you are in the studio every day and are paying attention, but you do go home and have all your friends and things around, but where we were, that was all we did—in the studio, in the studio, in the studio! Our attention to detail was a little higher.

MYE: One thing I've always liked about Bleeding Through is, and this time around some of the stuff is faster than ever...but, when you have a breakdown in your songs, it doesn't seem forced. Some bands will seem like they throw breakdowns in as mandatory, if they work or not. Yours, I'm thinking of the old song "This Is Love, This Is Murderous" where it seemed real, like the breakdown just happened rather than was made up. This record has many great moments like that in the new songs.

RW: I think there are a lot of bands that do the "We gotta rewrite it so it's got a breakdown thing." Some bands, that's what they are. We decided on this record, "Hey, we just wrote that song in ten minutes and didn't half ass it or have trouble with it. It just turned out awesome but doesn't have a breakdown." We all decided to say "Fuck it. Too bad.” Why force something into it? We have a song or two on there that is fast all the way through. We came from the hardcore scene but the natural progression of us growing up and our style is growing more metal. A few years ago we might say "Oh, it needs a heavy breakdown part," but now we have decided if a song is awesome how it is, don't mess with it.

MYE: Let it have its own life.

RW: There was definitely a song or two where we thought we could make a song heavier, not by adding a heavy part into it, but, we can make it heavier. That's about it.

MYE: How was it working with Devin Townsend versus other producers? He's done so much good shit, production-wise, and still has such a busy, consistently dope musical output. It boggles the mind. He has a reputation as a drill seargent in the studio.

RW: Oh, you hit it right on the head with the drill seargent thing, but the way he works with you, you don't feel like he's slave driving you. It was definitely one of the most comfortable experiences we've ever had in the studio. I like to pride myself on being more of a live musician than a studio, 'cause I'm real fidgety. I've got a lot of A.D.D. where I can't sit down in a room too long without losing it. Devin is kind of the same way but he knows how to make it fun. We knew the songs real well going into the studio so working with him was great. We had a little meeting when we were on tour with H.I.M. and it went to Vancouver and he went to the show. He came and took notes about what we wanted to do and what we were looking for. He was worried about not wanting to intrude too much but he had some ideas. When he came out with ideas it wasn't that he thought it needed more of this part or that, but more of things like "tweak the snare drum" in this spot or instead of double picking a part maybe triple pick. There was never any "get rid of this verse" or "ditch this chorus" stuff, so working with him was almost like Bleeding Through has a seventh member and always has. That's what it felt like.

MYE: Wow. So he didn't scream obscenities like he's done to crowds at Strapping Young Lad shows?

RW: Oh, he definitely did, but that was the fun part, [laughing] and it wasn't yelling at us. We had to sit in a room and he mapped out all the songs on click tracks. We could play the songs perfectly each time through the whole recordings. No matter when we play it live our drummer would have in-ear monitors and the click track would play, and you can play the music video to one of our songs and it will match perfectly because the timing is so perfect. Sitting in the room during the click tracking, which is basically woodpeckers in your skull, over and over again, makes you never wanna hear a click track again. But you get in there when it's studio time for real, and it is all mapped out. He would sit in that room and even he would lose his mind. It was an ongoing joke. We call him the "mad scientist of metal" and that's totally what he is. He's totally metal but has all these ideas going through his head at any given time of any given day. He would sleep in the studio on the couch just in case he would wake up in the middle of the night and mix a part that he had a good idea for.

MYE: [laughing] See, that's the fuckin' way! When you write sometimes, lyrics or poetry or whatever, sometimes I'll kick myself if I'm in bed and I think of something cool but don't wanna get up, and then you forget it the next day and are like," SHIT!"

RW: You have to get up. That is the epitome of musician’s nightmares. No matter what, whether riffs or vocals or drumbeats. It's just like a comedian. You're lying in bed and think of a good joke, you've gotta get up and write it down 'cause you're gonna hate yourself if you wake up in the morning and don't remember. I've done both! I have gotten up and sat up for four hours and also said "Oh, I'll just do it tomorrow". And then I'd forget it.

MYE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think one of the funniest things I ever heard someone say to the crowd at a show was Devin at a Strapping show where someone said his "hair" was ugly and he pointed to his skullet [bald on top/party in the back] and said "I got this head banging! What's your excuse?"

RW: [laughing] That sounds just like him, definitely.

MYE: Speaking of live stuff, I've seen Bleeding Through twice now. I'm from the Poughkeepsie, NY area and was in L.A. and saw Shai Hulud was at the Troubadour with you guys and The Haunted, a few years ago. It was the first time I'd seen Bleeding Through and it was one of the craziest crowd reactions I'd ever seen since the first time I saw a Fear Factory show when they did the Demanufacture album. People were walking on each other’s heads during our set! It was nuts! It's awesome how you guys really include the audience as part of the show, though. I mean, obviously they can't take your instruments, but...

RW: [laughing] Well, that's not necessarily true. If a kid knows a song, I'll let him play! Fuck it, man. It'll be awesome.

MYE: Like if you wanna go get a Latte or something'?

RW: If a kid came up to me and said without a doubt he knew one of our songs our band would be totally cool with letting him play it. We would definitely let someone do it. We love what we do so much. I evaluate my situation of being in a band every year or so. I love what I do for a living. I complain about being on tour sometimes and wanna be home, but a day on tour stuck on the side of the road with four flat tires and a broken axle and busted radiator is better than any day at a desk job. I would lose my mind.

MYE: It's better than settling for a life you don't want.

RW: Exactly. Even the past year there was a while where we were aggravated and had been touring so much but we've found our love for touring again and thank God! We're gonna be touring our asses off on this record! We take our job seriously but we don't take the shows so seriously. We're gonna go up there and be as brutal as we can be but still joke around and have a ton of fun. The way Brandan talks to the crowd is not talking at them, but talking to them. Dozens of times in the middle of a song he'll acknowledge someone over the mic if they are doing something funny or shouting at him. We'll always want everyone to crowd surf or see how many can come up and give us a high five, funny stuff. Get on the stage! Even if it isn't allowed, we want kids to find a way to stagedive. You can have kids go to a show and stand there and not participate. We would feel like monkeys on a stage. Without the kids we're nothing.

MYE: I was at a Murphy's Law show once and they made fun of the crowd and Jimmy said, "We used to dance to bands even if we didn't like them!"

RW: Yeah!

MYE: And if a kid gets up and doesn't know your song you can always "kick him out" of the band again anyway, right?

RW: [laughing] Yeah. We'll give him a hard time. If someone is getting crowd surfed to the stage at a show where there's now barrier and the song is over we make a big stink about it. Brandan will give them a hard time and say, "What are you doing? The song is over! You're supposed to stagedive when the song is going." And we make them stand up there until the next song starts and you give them a count and they gotta run off. Fun stuff. You can't do that at a normal job so you've gotta take advantage of it. I hate it when bands take there jobs so seriously. Come on, man! You play music.

MYE: Feel lucky.

RW: There's a billion people who'd like to be in your shoes. You can still be professional and make a living and be serious about your job while joking around at the same time. It is a luxury not a lot of people have, so we take full advantage of it.

MYE: I definitely agree with that approach, man. The title track of DECLARATION is crazy, man! It's so intense and fast, almost reminiscent of some of Strapping Young Lad's nuttier shit. I was wondering how Tim Lambesis from As I Lay Dying got involved as a guest on that track?

RW: We'd always kind of wanted to have him sing on a record. We've been friends with those guys for years and right when we were doing vocal tracks As I Lay Dying was playing Vancouver down the street. We invited him down at noon and it was as simple as him getting up an hour earlier. It was so simple and easy to do. We almost had him do another song too. John Pettibone from Himsa was supposed to be on it, but the border stopped him and would not let him in. He lives in Seattle and comes across the border so much that they were suspicious of why.

MYE: [laughing] Yeah, Himsa were smuggling drugs the whole time.

RW: The Canadian border ruined a guest vocal appearance. Thanks Canada.

MYE: As for the album title, obviously Declaration means this record embodies what you stand for, but...I was reading a recent Henry Rollins book A Dull Roar, which is excellent. It’s about the reunion tour of the Weight-era Rollins line-up, the most well known one. He talks about how you play with people and hope they will be as focused as you want and it means as much to them but that the times when you kill it feel so good. After years of playing with people there are so many memories and different types of bonds. I was wondering what is it that made you decide on this title or that makes you feel closest to these people as a unit?

RW: I think that the whole title came about as in the state of music right now. I know a lot of bands make that statement. Record sales don't mean anything anymore. People I think have finally gotten that through their heads. People don't buy CDs anymore. Our economy is the worst almost since the Depression. This is the lowest the Stock Market has been since the Depression. It's insane to think. We weren't even alive then. That blows my mind. People don't go out as much. Gas prices are huge. Everything plays a role. You almost don't need a label nowadays because they are mainly just tour support. Record sales aren't gonna do much for you.

MYE: You've gotta get your name out there.

RW: Yeah. So, the name of the record, because of all the stuff going on and how many bands are flooding the scene, especially in hardcore and metal, you have bands on MySpace that don't even have real members yet. They sell records and their first headlining tour they are in a bus and selling out venues at 800 capacity. That didn't happen when I started playing music. With the economy the way it is and the route of the music industry, there's a lot of bands that can't afford touring and have no label backing them. Bands are gonna start to weed out again and the only ones that are gonna stick around are the ones that were doing it before that or who really want it and will put all their hard earned money into it. They work when they are off tour and all their hard earned money they spend when they are on tour. Not for themselves, but for the van and merch. There's gonna be a lot of bands that are weeded out because of this and that's why we named the record Declaration because, as cheesy as it sounds, we are declaring we have always been and done this from the beginning. We went from the genre of kids loving us, and then it being not cool for you to like Bleeding Through and you got made fun of, and then it was cool again, and then it was whatever, and now the record is out and it is cool a bit again. We've been up and down and up and down. We toured on The Truth record for three and a half years and the last year has been "whatever" because the record has been out forever. We weren't in magazines. If you can't survive the low points in being a band, no matter how rich and famous, if you can't survive the down periods there is no point in being in a band.

MYE: Absolutely.

RW: So, this record is our declaration of "We're here. We've been here. We're gonna stay here."

MYE: I think it is great the variety of bands you can play with like Gorilla Biscuits to Marilyn Manson to Bullet For My Valentine.

RW: It blows my mind. The wide and odd variety we can still play with! It's not just that we know someone and get on the bill, but getting accepted by the kids. We've been the odd band out for so long. We are used to it as a band. "Get ready, this will be awesome or a pain in the ass!" We did the Slayer/Manson tour and we were first of three. Slayer fans are known for only liking Slayer and that is it.

MYE: That's an understatement!

RW: The whole tour we got one heckler and one bottle thrown. Even Kerry King said "Wow! I like you guys as a band." He even asked us to play a song we weren't gonna play on the tour. That was rad. He'd even mentioned that he wanted us on the tour but "You know how it goes with Slayer fans." We said "We know what you're gonna say, how nobody likes anyone but Slayer." So many bands get booed. Kerry said it sucks 'cause they wanna bring bands out but it just doesn't work.

MYE: [laughing]

RW: So we were surprised about that. Then we did the H.I.M. tour. We were the opener/direct support. Two bands. Doors would open an hour before we would play and you know, they are mellower rock, and we'd come out with "For Love And Failing" from The Truth record and kids would have no clue what was going on. You'd see it on their faces.

MYE: [laughing]

RW: [laughing] It was really funny. I found it hilarious. After a song or two they realized what they were seeing and the shock wore off, and they realized what they were seeing and thought it was cool. We got a lot of new kids from that tour. We've done AFI tours, and we just did the Bullet For My Valentine tour. We did Ozzfest and Warped Tour, totally different genres, so as a band we are blessed to be able to pull that off. A lot of bands get stuck in a genre and can't do it or are scared. I know some people who might not have taken that H.I.M. tour 'cause they thought they were gonna bomb. We took it and thought "What the fuck are we doing?" and we went out and decided to scare the kids into liking us. It ended up working. It was a great move for us.

MYE: You have good goth hook parts here and there as well.

RW: And we have girl power. We got the keys and some dark sounds.

MYE: Dude, how was it with Marta (keyboardist) directing the strings and classical material for this record?

RW: It was cool. She was really in her element. Not to sound like a typical dude in a band but she is already out of her element surrounded by boys. A lot of clubs we'll play, they will ask if she is someone's girlfriend or wife.

MYE: Girls don't know how to play instruments.

RW: "I need to see a laminate." She is in the band! Let her backstage, dude! She is not with someone; she IS someone in the band. Thank God I don't have to deal with that bullshit! But she sticks with it, and when we were in the studio she had a lot more ideas than on The Truth record. It was cool. She stepped up. Everyone on this record stepped it up. It was rad.

MYE: I really like the recent cover you did of Hum's "Stars". Anytime anyone acknowledges Hum I get psyched. They are the biggest influence of my band Pontius Pilate Sales Pitch. It was unexpected. I got your Misfits thing...

RW: Oh, for sure.

MYE: That's more obvious. but the Hum thing was cool because they had such great timing and guitars. Everything.

RW: Hum is amazing. It's funny. We kind of got some flak for that because the guy who did that tribute CD thought we were gonna do our style of a Hum song and we were like, "You know what, the song is awesome. We love the song." Everyone who does a cover adds something or makes it theirs. We decided as an ode to them to hit it as best we can to sound like theirs. We just went for it.

MYE: Some people think if you do a cover you should do it totally different, which I understand and like that approach, but a band like Hum is maybe a little different because that drum pocket is such an instrumental part of the tune.

RW: Yeah. Whenever I see a band play at a club and do a cover, and they decide to do it just like the band and the singer changes his voice even a little, that's a whole other talent. You can do a cover your own way all day, but to mimic the style and sound is a whole different talent. In a sense, I respect both, but get more wide-eyed when a band can sound close to what they are covering.

MYE: It's funny. Nate Kelley, my drummer, wrote to Hum and said we ripped off [one of their tunes] totally in homage in a song and one of them wrote back and said it was cool. It was the best ever!

RW: [laughing]

MYE: We ripped it bad, and they said it was cool and we were like "Yes!"

RW: That's great.

MYE: For "French Inquisition", "The Loving Memory Of England" and "Germany" tracks I wanted to ask about all the references to European countries.

RW: We were gonna do the whole record about different places but we strayed. We didn't wanna define what the record was gonna be. It still kinda had a theme. Those songs were about touring Europe. Instead of just personal places in life it was more about growing up as a band and certain things you start to feel when you are overseas. They aren't all good or all bad. It is kind of the gray area. ""The Loving Memory of England" was the bass solo song on there that was gonna be instrumental but Brandan ended up adding lyrics. I had just finished the bass tracks on it in two layers and a little bit of keys. I was using an E-Bow on there also and he said, "You know what? This song is super gloomy and reminds me of when we’re in the middle of the UK and it is freezing cold and raining and everyone hasn't been home in two months." A cloudy ass English day. Not necessarily a bad thing. Middle ground.

MYE: Evocative.

RW: That's what "These roads are dark and cold" is about. That's exactly what it is. Walking down the side of the club and everything is wet and has moss on it and cobblestone roads and the sun is never out. Even if you have shoes on you can't walk straight. It's bone cold there sometimes. When Brandan brought it up to us we thought "Totally". That was similar with every song.

MYE: "Orange County Blonde And Blue" and even "Seller's Market" talk about fake people and disproportionate egos.

RW: Definitely.

MYE: Some people serve no purpose but are so self-assured. It is hard to accept stupid people as a part of life or even keep up with politics sometimes because it gets mentally exhausting from the morons out there, but you kind of have to if you wanna stay informed yourself.

RW: Definitely. Those songs talk about it. "Orange County Blonde And Blue" is a direct representation of growing up in Orange County. Orange County is weird because we've got so many weird people that look different. People aren't even fazed by it anymore. A ton of tattoos? Seen that everyday. Ladies get their hair done at salons by a guy covered in tattoos and it doesn't even faze them anymore. My grandparents are from the Midwest and can't believe I have so many tattoos. Growing up in Orange County you would think that 'cause there's so many weird people it wouldn't matter, but there are still those who live in a bubble and can't believe it. Then you've got people who say things and are really fake, and they seem genuine but are a bunch of bullshit. It's a bubble to the rest of the world. If you move here, there's three things I think happen if you come here from somewhere else. You either come and blend in and live in L.A. and you love it, or it eats you alive, or you get there and notice it all and some of the drama you don't normally experience and you turn around and go back home.

MYE: [cracking up laughing] That's what's up!

RW: I know all three of those types! I know them all! Being in a band and growing up without drama and traveling a lot, I notice the fake-nice people. Most people go to L.A. and go to shows and clubs, and when I am home I like to B-Line it and go straight to the forest and go hunting and fishing and motorcycle riding.
MYE: And "Seller's Market", lastly?

RW: That was about the state of our record and what was going on. Shit you were promised and don't get. Fighting for every inch we get as this band.

MYE: People sweet talk and then piss on you. Gotta love it.

RW: Oh, totally. We'll have people praise us and then turn around and talk a bunch of shit. That comes around 360 on when we were talking about being in a band. You play music. Not everyone is gonna like it. When you see my band and yell out "you suck" do you really think I am even gonna listen?

MYE: I think people are stupid when people say things like that to me. [laughing]

RW: [laughing] That's cool. They are the only one who is saying that out of the other 500 people in the room. I really don't care.

MYE: I'm quitting music right now!

RW: And people that make fun of it, it sounds a little pompous, but I do this to piss them off...they say, "Hey, your band sucks," and I'll say, "That's cool, man. You go to your 9-5 and I'll wake up and play video games and get paid to play a show. Have a good life."

MYE: Have fun at White Castle.

RW: [laughing] And then when I get home I'll have the month off and go shopping with my friends. I don't really feel this so much, but it is fun to say. I'll rub it in their face. It's not always like that. There are lots of times in the band where we've had to get jobs. I just love fuckin' with them. I love what I do for a living. Oh, you work at Arby's? How much do they pay? Ohhhh...That's right. It's a quick and easy way to get back at them.

MYE: [laughing] It's not like you are the Pussycat Dolls.

RW: We're not making millions, for sure. We're on Trustkill.