AWOLNATION Working With Steve Perry

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AWOLNATION Working With Steve Perry

'I'd like to push myself and get better,' Aaron Bruno says of his new material

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... y-20131219


By Steve Baltin

December 19, 2013

When you have a smash single like AWOLNATION's "Sail," a lot of options become available.

"There are a couple of people I have up my sleeve," frontman Aaron Bruno tells Rolling Stone about who he's working with on the band's next album. "There are a couple of massive surprises that could happen." Though he is initially reluctant to divulge names, he does give an obvious clue: "I can say, 'Don't Stop Believing.'"

He's talking about former Journey frontman Steve Perry, who hasn't appeared on a record since the mid-2000s. "We became friends," he explains. "It feels weird for me to talk about – I feel like I'm bragging about how this legend likes the music I've written. But he asked for my number. He reached out to me."

The follow-up to the band's breakthrough debut, Megalithic Symphony, is taking shape as a much more introspective collection of songs. "The first record was really about more world issues and the discovery of the reality of how stuff works and how we are as humans," he says. "But this one seems to be a little bit more reflective, more about human relationships."

Bruno says he has nine songs done already, including "Kooks Everywhere!!!" and "Hollow Moon." "I got a lot of music in me," he says. "We were touring for three years, so I had a lot of time to spend alone on that bus and think about the way I wanted to make the record and grow, hopefully, into another dimension. I'd like to push myself and get better."

[Kor'n]

Wow! singing too?

[tater1977]

Steve Perry Returning to Studio for Surprising Collaboration?

by Nick DeRiso
December 19, 2013

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/steve-perry-awolnation/

It isn’t the Journey reunion that so many fans are hoping for, but it looks like Steve Perry is going to appear on an upcoming album — collaborating with electronic rock band AWOLNATION, best known for the 2011 Top 20 hit ‘Sail.’

Frontman Aaron Bruno says Perry, who last recorded with Journey in 1996 and hasn’t had a major release of any kind since serving as a guest vocalist with David Pack of Ambrosia in 2005, reached out to him with an inquiry about working together.

“We became friends,” Bruno says. “It feels weird for me to talk about. I feel like I’m bragging about how this legend likes the music I’ve written. But he asked for my number.”

Perry fronted Journey as it moved into pop super-stardom between 1977-98. But hip problems drove him off the road in the late ’90s, and more recently Perry has battled cancer. He had two surgeries over the summer to remove a mole that was diagnosed as melanoma. Journey, meanwhile, been touring and recording with previously unknown singer Arnel Pineda since 2007.

Perry isn’t the only special guest Bruno has secured for the forthcoming AWOLNATION album. “There are a couple of people I have up my sleeve,” he adds. “There are a couple of massive surprises that could happen.”

[tater1977]

AWOLNATION's Aaron Bruno Talks Hanging With Steve Perry and His Own Journey to Success

https://www.yahoo.com/music/awolnations ... 06726.html

Steve Baltin
‎March‎ ‎31‎, ‎2015

After years of being in bands like Under the Influence of Giants and Home Town Hero, AWOLNATION architect Aaron Bruno had his long overdue breakthrough in 2011 when “Sail,” off the band’s Megalithic Symphony, became a smash on alternative radio and crossed over to CHR and Top 40.

The runaway success of the ubiquitous hit has brought about a lot of changes for Bruno and his fellow players in AWOLNATION, as the group recently kicked off the promo run for the band’s second effort, the superb and sonically ambitious Run.

In fact, when Yahoo meets up with Bruno backstage at the studios of Jimmy Kimmel before the band played two songs off the new album, Bruno is having an admittedly hard time transitioning the new material to the promotional shows, like an afternoon appearance at L.A. radio station KROQ the day before.

“The first show was the KROQ thing, which was a weird way to start. It was a fun environment, they have a great thing going on there, then Kimmel was our second show for the new record, which is a bizarre thing to do that early on for me, and new for me,” he says.

Not that he was complaining at all, far from it, as he was very grateful and appreciative for the level of interest. Still, as a guy who grew up going to hardcore gigs, there was something special for him about being able to bring the new music into a nighttime club show.

“We finally got to play an intimate show in Chicago at a place called Cubby Bear, sort of a free radio listener first come first serve, and they turned away 2,500 kids at the door after everybody got in. That felt like the first real AWOL show back and it was incredible,” he recalls. “Just to hear everybody singing the words to almost all the new songs we play when the record hasn’t even been out yet was overwhelming for sure.”

On Run Bruno pushed himself as a writer, opening himself up to be more personal and vulnerable than any of his previous works. And he found the payoff in the Chicago show as fans screamed along to “Windows,” a song he feels could have a similar trajectory as “Sail,” and the album’s lead single, “Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf).”

“Those verses sounded like a hardcore show. People were screaming at the top of their lungs, every single word. The opening line of that song is ‘I’ve been running from it all my lifetime.’ And people sang that like it struck a nerve with them.”

To Bruno it reminded him of seeing bands like Strife at the age of 15. He still recalls how powerful that was for him: “It was like poetry, these bands were speaking for the underdog, they were speaking for all the kids that didn’t fit into the popular cliques in high school in the Nineties. I didn’t have my first sip of alcohol until the age of 22, so when I was 15 going to these hardcore shows, most people were going to keggers in high school. And getting hammered and getting in trouble and getting in trouble is fun sometimes, but I just felt I wanted my mind to have control at that time. Of course that changed as I got older, but just to see this unity of bonding over being straightedge, or bonding over just being in this underground scene that no one else knew about, was probably the most impactful musical moment of my life.”


Fast-forward now more than a decade later, and Strife’s guitarist Todd Turnham is one of Bruno’s closest friends, as is Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford, or “Timmy C,” as Bruno calls him.

That is one of the other strange and wonderful things about mainstream success: the opportunities it affords to meet those you admire. “There definitely have been a couple of legends that reached out to me and appreciated the music I make,” Bruno said with a remarkable humility, almost embarrassment, to be discussing these names, but these are the people who have helped shape this album and helped him grow as an artist.

“As you and I talked before about Steve Perry; he’s just this beautiful human being that is still an amazing, caring musical mind, and to have him in my corner and care is incredible. And he’s great to go to for advice. I’ve become acquaintances with Rivers Cuomo and I love Weezer so much, so that’s really incredible to me as well. I guess to have these people that I looked up to as a kid just a phone number or text away is absolutely incredible, because I can ask them how they felt when they went through some of the trials and tribulations,” he says. “I was able to play this record from front to end for a couple of my heroes, and it was definitely a cool experience, to say the least. I got to finish my record and play it for Rick Rubin. I played the record for Rick way before it was done, and he’s made some of the most impactful records in pop culture. So it’s just incredible to be bumping shoulders with some of music’s most treasured artists in some way or another.”


However, the best part for Bruno, as he learns to deal with the newfound success, is having these people there to guide him. “It’s been even better just to have a friendship and have older brother figures to help mentor me through the ups and downs of record cycles.”

[tater1977]

Interview: AWOLNATION’s Aaron Bruno Talks ‘Run’, Tim Commerford & Steve Perry

http://www.alternativenation.net/awolna ... eve-perry/

by Doug McCausland - Apr 21, 2015

The story of Aaron Bruno and his creation of the industrial outfit AWOLNATION (a one man act in studio, in the lineage of Trent Reznor) is one of the greatest success stories of the past ten years, achieving a massive crossover hit in 2011 with “Sail” off of his debut studio album, Megalithic Symphony.

Bruno certainly took his time in crafting the long awaited follow up, finally releasing Run on St. Patrick’s Day last month. Run refined Bruno’s trademark “lullaby” songwriting sensibility and veered it into a dark new direction, immediately evident on the first track of the album: “I am a human being capable of doing terrible things.”

One month into Run’s lifespan, I had the chance to speak with Bruno, who had just finished recording a performance on Conan. Bruno elaborated on his unlikely assistance from Rage Against the Machine’s Tim Commerford and the pressures of creating a successful sophomore record (out now via Red Bull Records)…

First off, congrats on the great record! I must have listened to it about 30 times by now.

[laughs] Thanks, it’s only at listen number 27 that you understand what the fuck I just did.

This record is so dark compared to Megalithic Symphony. Did you come from any specific place when you were creating this atmospheric record?

My dark heart, I guess. I’m just kidding. [laughs] I think it was a weird experience to have so much success on the first record, coming to the realization that success doesn’t change who you are. It certainly didn’t change who I was. I still have all the same insecurities and issues that I’ve always had. The only thing that’s different is that I don’t have to worry about paying rent next month. I went through a couple of relationship issues.

I think that everybody else has gone poppier, at least in the alternative world. That seemed like a boring place for me to go. After having a record do so well and a song that crossed over into the pop world… it was only natural that I wanted to push the boundaries a little beyond what everyone expected or wanted.

Even the poppier songs on the record have this emotional, dark edge to them…

It was terrifying to make a record that people were actually going to hear, instead of just experimenting… it’s like the “Boy Who Cried Wolf”. You go to the top of the hill and scream at the top of your lungs about how great your music is and nobody hears you… suddenly you go to the top again and there’s tons of people with you, ready to hear what you have to say.

The whole album flows together as a cohesive whole, yet there must have been pressure by the label to make that one real standout song to rival “Sail” on the first record.

Once [the label] heard it, they thought there were four or five potential songs that could have a decent commercial life. You never know whats gonna take and whats not. We had a lot of options. We’re still in the infancy of this record’s lifespan. We’ve already made a hit in “Hollow Moon“.. they chose a harder song first, which I was happy with.

I think they wanted to go with “Woman Woman“, which, to me, could potentially be a big commercial success, but that doesn’t mean its the right first look at this record. It would have been a misrepresentation of the feeling of the album, so I’m really proud and happy we were able to go for something a little more energetic, and darker.

While we are on the subject of that specific song, could you elaborate a bit on Woman, Woman? I couldn’t tell listening to it if its an incredibly uplifting song, or a depressing one: “Last night I fell apart, Broke from a swollen heart…”

[laughs] It’s sort of that moment in life where you throw the towel and say, “That’s it, I’ve found the person, and I’m not gonna fuck this one up.” We’ve all had faulty relationships, some more than others, and me being one of those people, and “Woman Woman” is sort of a celebration of all the pain and misery you went through to get to the right individual.

Another standout track that I believe should be a single is “I Am“. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of that track?

I think at that point in the record, it was time for a good ol’ anthemic moment. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Subconsciously, I wanted a song that was easily digestible to all human beings and not just to weirdos like you and I. I don’t know you, but I assume you are a music fan…

Yeah, I’m a total weirdo.

…who likes music all over the place like me, so I thought it was about time to have sort of a crossover universal moment. When it came up, I remember having the beginning part of the song which was simply a chord progression on my nylon string guitar that I learned on from my dad as a kid. It was really late at night, and I was pretty… in sort of an elevated headspace, if you will? [laughs]

I remember just playing it so quietly and tenderly into my phone, thinking this was sort of a nursery rhyme to go to sleep to, and when I opened it on my phone months and months later, it sounded pretty neat to me. I imported it from my phone, used it in a recording session, and built the whole song around that.

I heard Tim Commerford gave you some input on the record and that song in particular…

Yeah, that song in particular was a big “fuck you!” to Tim. When I showed him the first draft of the record, it had several songs that didn’t even make the record on there. It was even weirder. I loved it, but it was abandoning a lot of the qualities that put me on the map, and one of them was the anthemic nature of some of the songs. We went full circle. I was pleased that he pushed me a lot. He’s a dear friend. He’s a scary dude when you first see him. But the amazing and inspiring things he’s done in his life… I value our friendship very much.

I remember it was reported that you would have a collaboration with Journey frontman Steve Perry on this record that didn’t seem to make the final cut…

The problem with that is I never announced I was doing a collaboration. I was doing an interview with someone and my words were twisted a little bit, I said that we wanted to do something together and we MAY do something together at some point. Again, he’s sort of a mentor/older brother like Tim Commerford. He’s a wonderful singer, he can still do it beautifully. I don’t have any information about when we’ll be able to hear his voice again. When that does happen, if it does happen, it’ll be a beautiful moment.

I’ll try not to twist your words.

I said it as clear as I could!

I’ll do my best anyway. [Breaking news: Aaron Bruno thinks Steve Perry will never sing again] Anyway, will we be seeing any of the scrapped songs from the first draft any time soon?

I hate calling them B-sides, because the record had a story to tell and took a life of its own. I do not believe them lesser songs by any means, they just didn’t make sense in context with the final album. I can’t wait to release them. I don’t know if it will be through an EP that releases between Run and whatever record three is gonna be… I’m not sure, exactly.

You probably have your biggest show ever coming up with the Firefly Music Festival in June, playing with Paul McCartney and The Killers, among many others.

Wow… I guess it is. We’ve played Coachella and played a couple of stages from bands like Radiohead, but yeah, Paul McCartney would be the hugest name that’s been on the flyer that my band has been on for sure. Although at Bonnaroo I played with Robert Plant and that’s pretty amazing.