With their passionate and energetic live performances, the Christian rockers of RED have quickly become a rock and roll touring favorite and garnered a huge fan base. Their records are both riff heavy and beautifully orchestrated with introspective and thoughtful lyrics. I had the chance to touch base with bassist Randy Armstrong as the band prepares for the release of their fifth studio album, “of Beauty and Rage” and subsequent tour. Please join us as Randy fills us in on all the details and everything RED.
KE: Hello Randy! Welcome to backstageaxxess.com. How are you today?
RA: I’m great. Thanks.
KE: Now RED’s fifth studio album is due out later this month, “of Beauty and Rage.” Can you tell us a little about the title and overall theme of the record?
RA: Yeah, the title is a direct reflection of the music on this album. We came up with just recognizing the beauty in the midst of suffering.
KE: It seems to be a perfect descriptor for the music because as you listen everything just ebbs and flows from beautiful piano to attacking guitar riffs.
RA:Yeah, yeah.
KE: Now how did the writing process work for this album. Was it a collaborative effort from the whole band?
RA: Yeah, actually that’s the way we’ve always done it. Everybody’s always had a hand in the writing process and on this one we actually locked down into the studio for once instead of making the record on the fly. We started actually back this time last year up in Maine and then we spent some time writing songs and then went in the studio in Tennessee and started tracking. It took about three months to finish it once we started tracking it. So it’s been a long process and we could not be more happy with the way things turned out.
KE: How do your personal religious beliefs play a role in the writing process?
RA: I think our beliefs, you know, they intertwine themselves in everything we do and say and are. It actually translates into our music and all sorts of things we deal with as individuals and you know in our personal lives, it all seeps into the writing process. For the past year and a half, there’s been a lot of horrible things that have happened, you know, family wise, watching people go through the darkest points and scariest points of their lives, people that we’ve worked close with in the music industry and things like that. We took all of those things, you know, I’d say 30% of things we’ve watched other people go through and 70% of things we’ve been going through personally. It all seeps into the record but we always have that foundation of our beliefs and what we use to deal with when things are going bad and that just seeps into the music.
KE: For this record, you’re back with producer Rob Graves. What was the reason for bringing him back into the mix?
RA: Well, when we decided to leave out Rob last time and go to LA and work with Howard Benson we had a specific goal in mind, a bigger impact in radio and the way radio was going at that point because you know radio changes so quickly but the way radio was going at that point a lot of the bands that were doing well were very stripped down. You know, very watered down lyrics, generic I guess I would say but we wanted to accomplish something in radio that we’d never done before and Howard Benson seemed like a likely choice. He’s had success with a lot of bands. He’s sold over 100 million records in his career. He really understands the formula and so we went and played and worked with him. We always knew that we were eventually going to work with Rob again. I mean he did our first three records and we were afraid that if we made the same record four times in a row that people would say there’s nothing new so it was a conscious decision to come back with Rob of course. One of the things we learned over the last few years was we don’t want to do something that we go to radio and say hey you need this or want this. We want them to say we want that, we need that or just recognize that. Just go and spend your time and energy where you’re wanted instead of where you think you need to be.
KE: There are a lot of video clips on your website for the new album. Would you talk a little about all these clips, the forest and all the red leaves and how that all ties into the story of the album?
RA: We wanted to go with a very sort of provocative rendering with this record. We were really nervous about the art because we had some ideas in mind but we didn’t know how we were going to facilitate them. The cover’s really important. It’s the first thing that everyone sees. Ultimately they start to draw their ideas and attention to what they’ve seen on the album cover. I think we knocked it out of the park with this provocative character on the cover. Everybody asking what this person is or what this thing is. The forest itself, we found a forest in Poland. It’s called Crimson Forest and in the fall all the trees the bark is very dark almost black like and in the fall all the leaves turn red. They don’t turn orange and yellow like you would see in a normal fall scene. All these red leaves fall to the ground and it creates just a blanket of red on the ground with the beautiful black, decrepit looking trees. We just thought it was very provocative and we knew people were going to ask us, no matter what we decided to do, they would ask what we were thinking. We thought about one of the tracks, “Darkest Part,” and it talks about being in the midst of the darkest point of your life and not wanting people to go through that with you because it so bad you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy sort of thing. The trees being as creepy as they were and these images and stuff we thought this could represent the evil that can grow and drop this darkness and sin and blanket you. You struggle to find your way out of that. In the videos we started teasing, you’ll see Anthony covered in these leaves and the leaves representing the darkness that he’s been covered in and he does what he can to escape from it. The whole thing is just centered around how we make things more difficult for ourselves in darker times instead of leaning on the strength that we all have inside of us. The songs themselves, they all tell a story that ties into this beautiful serene maze of forest that you’re in but it’s filled with all this darkness and rage if you would. Our goal is to define the beauty in the midst of that suffering and I think we accomplished what we expected to with people asking us about it.
KE: Right, just powerful images to go along with the music. There’s also a graphic novel that’s tied into the record. Can you tell us about that?
RA: The novel itself is not something we’ve ever done before and we pay attention to what other people are doing and we try to steer away from that of course. It’s not something that we’ve seen other people do in the last decade or so. But to release a graphic novel with the record that kind of ties in all the music videos that we’ve done up to this point in our career. You read a book and you go see the movie and the movie doesn’t quite tell the whole tale. It doesn’t give detailed descriptions and the graphic novel’s going to kind of go deeper into the story a little bit. The video, you know, you hear music not all the dialogue but in the novel you get the dialogue. So we thought about what could be a creative way to tie this all together and the graphic novel is what came to mind. We’re excited to see how it turned out. We’ve only seen some pictures, we wrote the story but we had to hire an illustrator and editor to pull it together.
KE: Is it going to be available as a package deal with the CD?
RA: Yeah, we did a Pledge Music campaign and we had that as part of the packages and they were all sold out. I think we’re going to be doing a run of them to actually sell at the shows and we’ll see how that goes. It could be a thing of when they’re gone they’re gone or we could continue to sell them. It just depends.
KE: So people who didn’t get it on the Pledge Music campaign will still have a chance to get their hands on one of the graphic novels then.
RA: Sure, yep.
KE: The album is fantastic but there’s nothing quite like seeing RED live with all the passion and energy that you put into the live shows. Can you tell us about the tour plans for this album?
RA: Wow, I appreciate you saying that. We always focus on the live show. People spend their hard earned money to spend an hour and a half with us and we want them to feel like they got their money worth of course. You don’t want to go and see a band just stand there and make faces or whatever. We always try to be real dramatic with the shows, with the sets and of course pyro and things like that when we can do those things. We try to treat the live show as sort of a Broadway type atmosphere where they’re going to get the content of the music but they’re also going to get visual content as well. It just adds to the whole element of the cinematic nature of the music.
KE: Might there be a tie in with the whole forest and leaves theme with the stage set?
RA: You never know. You never know.
KE: We’ll have to come out and see the show for ourselves.
RA: It’s kind of funny that you asked about the set because I’m driving to our staging company right now so they can actually show us the set. It’s been finished and we’re on our way to sign off on it right now. My brother’s in the car behind me and we’re headed in that direction right now. (Laughter)
KE: Do we have tour dates lined up yet?
RA: The tour starts on the 19th in Pittsburgh, PA and goes all the way through March 30th. The dates are all up on the website.
KE: Who’s going to be handling the drums for the tour?
RA: The same guy that tracked the record, his name is Dan Johnson.
KE: Now fans of the band know that your brother is also in the band and you guys founded this back in the day but there’s a special twist to it because he’s not only your brother, he’s your twin brother. Not many people have the opportunity to work closely with a family member let alone a twin that’s supposed to be a special bond. What has it been like working and touring with your brother all these years?
RA: There’s nothing like looking across the stage and seeing your brother. I consider all the guys in the band my brothers but Michael and I have known each other for 27 years and I can’t imagine doing this without those guys. We definitely have our fights, we have our bad days, you know we’re brothers. We know a lot of twins don’t get along but Anthony and I we have different personalities at times and you can definitely tell the difference between our personalities but we get over our disagreements quickly and we move on. Everybody seems to get along really well so the energy and the atmosphere off stage is just as important as onstage and I don’t think that anybody else would be able to replace that. If any one of us were gone, I don’t know how RED would survive to be honest.
KE: After being in the band for all these years and having your share of success with RED, tell us what the journey has been like so far?
RA: It’s been absolutely incredible. In hindsight, when we sit and think about this whole thing ten years ago that we would have accomplished what we did, we were just kids from a small town in Pennsylvania that had a dream to move to Nashville and give it a shot. We didn’t want to look back and say we never gave it a shot. We knew what our odds were out here of making it and they were just as slim as anyone else’s odds but God reached down and chose us and we take that seriously. I meet people everyday or see people on tv that would give anything to have a record deal and tour and have this be what they do for a living instead of, you know, sitting in an office or doing something they don’t love to do. So since graduating college I haven’t worked a day in my life because I love what I do and I don’t consider it working. It takes effort and everything to do what we do. We’ve won some awards and we’ve been recognized by the Grammy’s and if it all ended tomorrow I can’t sit back and think that we didn’t accomplish everything we wanted to. We didn’t get into it to win awards or anything like that. Those things are definitely very cool things but we would like to have done what the bands that we loved growing up did for us. That the RED legacy would leave the same things behind, great music and a way for people to connect and a way for people to make a positive change in their lives.
KE: Thank you so much for talking with us today. I love the new record and can’t wait to see RED again live because that’s truly where you shine. Best of luck with everything. We’ll look forward to the album dropping and seeing you guys out on the road.
RA: Oh, thanks so much. That’s awesome. I appreciate it.
We would like to thank Steve Karas from SKH Music for setting up the interview with Randy. For more information on RED inclduing their new disc “of Beauty and Rage,” please go to: Red.
