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ROCKWiRED iNTERViEWS RiSE FOR ORDER LiVE iT AND BREATHE iT You don’t see a lot of dedication in rock n roll these days. Now, all one has to do in the age of reality television is audition before a celebrity panel of judges before millions of viewers while living it up in some swank pad in Hollywood. The evolution of Toronto-based RISE FOR ORDER is a completely different story. The foursome lived and breathed rock n roll by cutting their teeth at the famed REHEARSAL FACTORY in Toronto. News of the band reached the ears of famed producer STEVE THOMPSON (METALLICA, GUNS AND ROSES and KORN) who got the boys into the studio for their forthcoming debut LP. Rock n roll is never a sound career but lead singer and songwriter JOHNNY GOLTZ has found something amidst the bands slick power chords, propulsive drumming and thunderous bass lines. He has found a sense of purpose. "We were very serious about this band and looked at this as our last chance." says GOLTZ "I think that it’s one of the greatest things that I’ve ever done. JORGE, CHAD, TREVOR and I have lost everything. We’ve lost friends and girlfriends but our number one love is this band."JOHNNY GOLTZ OF RiSE FOR ORDER TALKS TO ROCKWiRED ABOUT THEiR FORTHCOMiNG DEBUT LP BREAKiNG iNTO THE STATES AND LiViNG LiFE TO THE FULLEST  iNTERViEWED BY BRiAN LUSH ROCKWIRED spoke with JOHNNY GOLTZ of RISE FOR ORDER over the phone, as he was on the mend from a recent car accident. Here is how it went. How do you guys feel about the finished CD? It’s just like a bullet to the head. That album is just a true, raw recording of us. STEVE THOMPSON is no joke in the industry and he just wanted to bring out the best in us. I feel great about it. For a first rock record, I think this is one of the most real records that you are going to hear. I think that everything you hear nowadays is quantized and tuned and it’s just not the real deal and I’m not shitting on that but I’m saying that this is all really good musicians playing. My drummer wasn’t quantized and cut and edited. We didn’t have the money or the luxury of time to work with STEVE but he really worked with us and brought out our best. We really kicked ass in the time we had to do it. I never expected it to be that difficult but we handled the stress and it made us better. How were you able to snag STEVE for this album without much money? That’s the thing. He took it on as a pet project and he works in Canada quite a bit. DULCE BARBOSA actually gave him a copy of our first EP and thought that it would be really fun project for STEVE. So we had a meeting with her and she pointed out the he was a judge on the CANADIAN MUSIC WEEK and that he was going to be up from Boston that week and she really wanted us to meet with him. STEVE listened to all of our demos and we had started the “”School of Rock at that point which was about five or six months before we started working on the record. We did pre-production work with he and us emailing each other the songs back and forth and talking with him about it over the phone. DULCE BARBOSA really dug our style and STEVE did it for what he could at the time. He makes about six figures a record and we definitely didn’t pay that. It was great and he became a really great friend of the band’s. It was kind of sad when the recording came to an end. Talk about the genesis of the band. We are in our fifth year. When I say that we are as serious as a heart attack, we are. I’ve known TREVOR for like six years and then CHAD. TREVOR is the guitar player and CHAD is he bass player. We came together in this place called THE REHEARSAL FACTORY. It’s three levels of bands jamming. It’s all bands that are trying to make it. It was a place to rehearse and we actually lived there for about four years. The bands that come to the REHEARSAL FACTORY end up doing very well because they are very, very serious. They live it. THREE DAYS GRACE came from REHEARSAL FACTORY and OUR LADY OF PEACE came from there as well. A lot of the Canadian acts that have all broken in the States came from there. They honed their art out of these rehearsal factories. We all started out knowing each other through playing videogames and jamming out on different projects and then all of our projects fell apart and we decided to commit ourselves to this one. We were very serious about this band and looked at this as our last chance. I think that it’s one of the greatest things that I’ve ever done. JORGE, CHAD, TREVOR and I have lost everything. We’ve lost friends and girlfriends. I lost a six year relationship, but our number one love is this band. Talk a little more about your band mates. What do each of them bring to the table moth musically and personality-wise that makes it all work? TREVOR is completely different from JORGE and CHAD. We’re all completely different from each other and it compliments us in a way. If there were two guys in the band like me it wouldn’t work. If there were two guys like TREVOR in the band, it wouldn’t work. TREVOR MACLEOD is an absolute genius. He is an absolute musical genius on guitar. He picked up the guitar at age fourteen or fifteen and he was teaching it within a year and a half so he is a phenom. CHAD MOYLES is one of the most dedicated players ever. He’s been in mostly metal bands and he brings that kind of element to our band. JORGE PEREIRA comes from the hardcore scene and kind of wanted to dumb it down to do something that was going to be a little more commercially viable. He is just a crazy, out there drummer. He’s very hardworking and unorthodox whereas I come from a top-forty background where I like CREED and STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and all of the great grunge bands and so does TREVOR. We all come from different backgrounds but we all bring those different elements to the band. We all compliment each other by being different. It think that is what has enabled us to keep it together for four and a half years. For every year we have been together, we have played one-hundred-twenty shows a year and now we are popular enough to where We’ve got to get paid well to play. It kind of sucks in a way because we love playing as many shows as we can but this way we don’t have to play shit shows anymore. How did music begin for you? I understand that you’ve acted as well but talk about the music. Music began for me in Los Angeles even though I never played or did anything. While in between auditions I remember seeing INCUBUS live when they came back from their world tour and it just really moved me. I’ve played guitar and I’ve sung in the car before with my parents at a really, really young age but after seeing INCUBUS, I just wanted to start playing guitar again and start writing songs. I did that on my off time and never expected to pursue it seriously but it eventually absorbed my life and took over. Don’t get me wrong. I still act. There was this movie that I did called BLINDNESS. I still act but at the drop of a hat, I would give it up to pursue my musical career because that is where my passion lies. How does songwriting happen in this band? It starts out differently every time. A lot of it starts kind of jam-based and then we will let the song evolve on its own. Sometimes, I’ll be singing at home and I’ll call TREVOR up and leave the words and the melody on his answering machine and he’ll save it to his computer. A lot of it is thought out. TREVOR and I write a lot of it but some of it is jam-based. It takes everybody in the band to make it great. It happens organically. What kind of place do you think that you are coming from as a songwriter? Oh God! From which aspect? The last four years? The last four years is good. I think that we all come from really dark, angry spots because of the loss that we never thought was going to occur due to being serious about the band, so there is a lot of angst, darkness and fun at the same time. The first two years of the band, things really kicked off. We were doing so many shows and a lot of parties. We may not have had a lot of fans in the beginning but we always did our homework. The songs don’t come from a happy place but it was happy once we were playing. It was something that took our minds off of the shitty stuff that was going on in our lives. If I died tomorrow, I would know that for the last four years, I have lived the majority of my life. From the CD, what songs stand out for you the most and why? There is the song PARALYZED. I wrote it on guitar and presented it to the band. I had really never turned on a computer for a good portion of my life. The only time I had ever turned on a computer was to network on things like MYSPACE. This whole new environment of texting and chatting on FACEBOOK has allowed people to reach out and get people’s attention but PARALYZED was written about the inability to communicate. At the time my girlfriend was twenty-one years old and all of our fights would happen over text messages. How the fuck can you communicate that way? There is no tone to it and there is no real way to get your point across. Look what terms like ‘lol’ and all of these short-form words are doing to the English language. I can’t spell worth shit but I can communicate. I’m a smart guy but this whole texting thing is absolutely ruining our language. Who knows how far it will go. It’s about the inability to communicate with younger people. It can only go down from there. There is a song called CUT INSIDE and that is the slow song on our CD. I wrote it out one night and it’s about living life to the fullest. You don’t know what going to happen. I just rolled my jeep over twice and I walked away from it and now I’m in good shape. This song is written about a twenty-one year old kid that got in a hockey fight and then he collapsed and wasn’t breathing. He was a beautiful kid. A smart kid and he died of a brain tumor at such a young age. You never know when stuff is going to end. When I say that I’ve lived the majority of my life in the past four years, it’s a true statement. It’s not being over-dramatic and I’m glad. So those two songs stick out for me. Any plans for touring at all? Oh yeah. We had something going where we would be playing TEXAS STADIUM to open for NINE INCH NAILS but TRENT REZNOR got married and NINE INCH NAILS broke up. I was at his last show up here. That would’ve been our first big show in the States but we’re going to start doing more and more shows. I truly believe that the United States – especially the southern United States – will be our biggest market place. Toronto is very skeptical of their music. If you see the scene there, it is not what we are playing but there are some bands that are doing what we are doing and I think it’s cool. What would you like a person to come away with after they’ve heard this CD? I really want people to enjoy the album on the first listen. I want people to hear the hooks and listen to the lyrics but more importantly, I want people to come out and see us live. I want them to feel the adrenaline that we are feeling. When we play, we are a high energy rock band and I want them to feel that intense energy. If they can hear that in the CD, then that would be fantastic. I think every song is going to give them a different emotion. |
