JORDAN MANCINO: We’re in Las Vegas today.

MYE: Uh-oh, a "den of sin".

JM: We’re playing the Hard Rock Café. It should be a pretty good show. The tour started literally two days ago. The first show went really well.

MYE: A lot of your band’s songs deal with themes like the distance between people and ideologies and stuff, but in terms of touring, how do you deal with all the actual distances of touring, all the driving and traveling?

JM: Now it’s a little bit different than it used to be because we travel in a bus, so during the drives we’re usually sleeping.

MYE: (laughing) I’ve heard that’s more relaxing.

JM: (laughing) Yeah, definitely. It works out nice, but we toured many, many years, [in] the beginning stages of this band, in a van.

MYE: You guys put your hours in, for sure.

JM: Yeah, yeah. You slept when you could and that’s about it. You couldn’t really get into any sort of routine or anything like that. We’d switch off driving. Sometimes you’re on tours with bands in busses so when they route a tour they route it for the busses and the drives can sometimes be pretty long. Being in a van when you are following a bus gets pretty brutal.

MYE: I’m friends with Vin Alfieri from the Smash Up, we’ve got a little side project together. He toured with you guys on A Taste Of Chaos and Vin always has spoken really highly of you guys, saying you were such intense performers every night. Vin was always talking about how your singer Tim (Lambesis) had such a massive screaming voice. He also turned me onto some of the Melissa Cross vocal coaching techniques bands like Lamb Of God and Every Time I Die have been following and stuff. What does Tim do to warm up before a show and what do you also do, Jordan, to get yourself ready to express such a big level of personal energy?

JM: I guess it varies a little bit day-to-day. As far as Tim, he does these warm ups. I’m not sure exactly what they are. He went to a vocal coach and they gave him a routine to do.

MYE: Does he hide away from you guys when he does them?

JM: Yeah, usually (laughing). Some of them are pretty funny, but they work really well for him. As far as me, I have a practice pad set up in the dressing room that I warm up on for about an hour every day. I’ll run through the songs and do warm up exercises. I do a lot of stretching and get the blood flowing. Sometimes some push ups help. It’s like not stretching or warming up before you run a mile. It doesn’t work very well if you don’t, so it’s pretty key.

MYE: A lot of sports entertainers, they’ll be out in the field and you have such immense crowd noise all around you, in hardcore music or heavy metal, that equates to people going crazy also. How do you avoid distraction with the level of intensity from the crowd? When you see all this nuts stuff going on, how do you maintain your level of concentration to be able to still play highly technical metal?

JM: I don’t know. I don’t think of the crowd as a distraction. It just helps the energy of the show. We feed off that interaction as a band and I think all live performers do.

MYE: And you’re a good drummer (laughing).

JM: Oh, thank you, thank you. Most cases I can’t really hear the crowd anyway because I wear in-ear monitors. All my monitors are going through my in-ears throughout the set with a click track and everything. I usually can’t hear the crowd that well. I can see them going crazy and whatever.

MYE: Oh, that’s cool. How did it feel to get the Grammy nomination for “Nothng Left”? The metal Grammy category has certainly come far since Metallica didn’t win for “One” off ...And Justice For All like they should have. This year they even have King Diamond nominated, which is like real, purist metal! How did it feel after all your effort to get the nomination?

JM: I don’t think it was really effort to get the nomination. It just happened.

MYE: Oh no, I meant that you’ve worked hard a lot over the years as a band. You deserved a nomination.

JM: Oh, thanks. I was pretty surprised to hear our name come up along with the Grammy Awards. It was something we never set out to do and never really expected. I mean, the Grammys are also one of those things that is not necessarily voted on by the fans as much as industry people.

MYE: And sometimes it is disgusting?

JM: Those are just the people watching us play to people, not necessarily whom we are playing for. It’s good. As a whole I think our families are more excited about it than we are (laughing). It’s something they can associate with and understand a bit more.

MYE: Like, “Oh, they aren’t just crazy metalheads.” (laughing) Well, you know, it kind of fits. I mean, Ricky Martin, The Backstreet Boys, As I Lay Dying (laughing).

JM: Yeah. It’ll be fun to go.

MYE: As you’ve grown bigger and seen people respond more to your music, how have your perceptions changed in regards to what you thought the band was capable of achieving?

JM: It’s a tough question. When we started we never expected things to go this far. It’s been really cool but we’ve always kept the same mentality as when we formed the band. We’ve always tried to write the best songs we could and played the music we loved to play with integrity. We work as hard as we can and try to make the best of all the situations we are in together.

MYE: It seems apparent in your general attitudes and the way you treat your fans and stuff.

JM: Yeah, it’s one of those things with the fans and us, where everybody is in it together, you know? We try to keep that headspace and go from there. As far as the business end, a lot of things have grown but our mentality stays the same.

MYE: Yeah, metal fans are probably the most die-hard fans and they appreciate that. Even the metal musicians, whether you’re a female fronted foreign band like the Bruyah from Spain or an unsigned U.S. band like Cold War Survivor, people struggle hard but they do it out of love and belief, like you guys.

JM: That’s the only way to do it, at least for me personally, and I think a lot of people would agree.

MYE: Word. So, back to the Grammy Awards. I think they should make a new category you guys could win for “Fastest Intro” for your song “Within Destruction”. That song is crazy!

JM: (laughing) Yeah. It’s pretty fast I guess.

MYE: I thought the title track was fast, and then that one comes on and it’s like, “Wow, they didn’t!” It’s pretty up there on the BPMs.

JM: Yeah. We tried to speed up the tempos a bit on this last record.

MYE: I think your footwork has gotten slicker on An Ocean Between Us as well. It’s always been pretty good, and I always liked your tempo choices. An old song off Frail Words Collapse, for example, “Collision”, which had a great tempo for what was going on, was kind of restrained and could have been played faster, but it sits at a dope slightly slower, crushing momentum, this time you wanted things faster?

JM: In certain instances we wanted to. Every song we write we try to find what fits the best. The writing for An Ocean Between Us, the material just sounded better faster. Working with Adam from Killswitch was really cool. We were already friends with him and had toured with Killswitch Engage numerous times, and he’s very talented. This was always something we wanted to do and it was a really good opportunity for us to work with him. It finally worked out for everyone’s schedules.

MYE: You did drums at Big Fish Studio where you’ve worked a lot previously, right?

JM: Yeah. Just drums this time. We were talking to Adam about studios because the biggest thing was we wanted to be home in San Diego. Big Fish came up because we’ve recorded there numerous times and Adam liked the studio and what he heard. He also wanted to make sure I was comfortable while I was tracking. It made sense all around.

MYE: I’ve always thought the band had introspective lyrics. I was reading some CS Lewis recently and also a DISCOVER magazine article on this scientist Francis S. Collins. He was a scientist and then found God in his life. I’ve always thought it interesting how no one knows where the first cell came from. Obviously, cells divide, but no one knows how the first one came into being. That’s a point that stumps scientists. Even an artist like Salvador Dali was kind of an atheist but then later on he found that all religion and science seem to converge at certain points. Dali developed his idea of Nuclear Mysticism and did all these later dope paintings of Christ crucified on these sort of geometric cubes that were meant to represent the building blocks of the Universe. Dali couldn’t separate it from God. I know you are touted as a Christian band and [I’ve] always wanted to ask you something along spiritual lines.

JM: Yeah?

MYE: The Collins article had a great quote from his book The Language Of God that “ DNA Sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of biological data on function, will never fully explain …” you know, things like how people are always searching and how we have a knowledge of moral conduct towards one another. Whether we choose to follow it or not, that is. It seems pretty true that we’re all searching.

JM: Yeah. A lot of people look at the world in different ways, be it how they were brought up or their surroundings. It’s from perceiving different circumstances in life.

MYE: Absolutely. That’s a really good way to say that.

JM: I think that it’s hard for people to deny that there are these certain moral absolutes encoded into our nature in a sense. There’s a Universal Conscience in a sense that everyone can agree, on some level, is wrong or right. Whether they are Christian or whatever they are, I always believe there are some absolutes.

MYE: Some people that are critical of things, they say that people just don’t want to think they are alone in the Universe, so they say there is a God, but I think there is a palpable energy to life that goes deeper than that.

JM: Yeah, I agree. That’s the thing. I think it’s really important whether you’re Christian or not to constantly be learning and to be able to question things and also find answers. Not to just question but to search for the answers as well.

MYE: On that note, I mean, my Grandfather was a minister and I got really into punk but also took religious classes on all types of religions. I was raised a Christian, I try and take the best positive messages I can glean from the Bible, but I do support Gay Rights, for instance. For me, there’s parts of the Bible where, if you studied history, it seems the book was pieced together and so it is hard to know, especially how history shows how politically motivated we are as humans, it is hard to know what to take as literal from the Bible. I try and stay positive in hopes that if I meet God or the energy behind this, or whatever, that it’ll all work out, y’know? (laughing)

JM: Time has told that there are definitely always new things that we are discovering--new developments in history and in science. It’s important to be able to understand real truth and theories. I think it’s very important to always understand and be open to different ideas--well, not so much that way but, finding out new things.

MYE: Keep people communicating.

JM: I think it’s important to also learn how to study the Bible. People are reading it and it isn’t fully beneficial without knowing how to take it. You have to be able to make the most of it. I think a lot of people, including some Christians are like this, a lot of people want a quick fix. They’ll wake up, drop their Bible on the table and it’ll open to a page. They’ll close their eyes and point their finger down at one random verse and they’ll expect that one verse to change their life. It doesn’t work like that. You have to be able to take everything in to make the most out of it and like all things, that takes study and comprehension.

MYE: Right on. What’s next for the band once the touring cycle for An Ocean Between Us is done? Will you take some time off?

JM: We’ll see when we get there. Nowadays the music business is changing so much so we’ll have to see what makes sense at that time. We’re booked up through the end of this summer, and I’m sure we’ll do more stuff into the Fall and into ’09. We might be touring on this record for six months or we might be for five years. I don’t know.

MYE: Alright man, thanks a lot. Very cool talking to you.

JM: Thanks.