Driven Far Off

Can you please introduce yourself and your role in Society’s Plague?

I’m Joe, I play guitar for Society’s Plague and am one of the founding members.

How did Society’s Plague get started? What is the history of the band?

It’s a pretty long story, on how the band got started. Here is the short version, Me, Matt, Roger and our old bassist got together to make a band in high school. It took us a few years to start getting serious, mostly because we couldn’t find a stable drummer. Before we found a drummer we found Kate to play keyboard, after that we had a few drummers here and there, the longest one lasted about a year.

Then our old bassist quit, and we found Mike to play bass and do some back up vocals for us. Not too long after that we found JD, we had actually asked him to play drums for us years ago, but he was too busy with his band at the time. When JD joined Society’s Plague, it was the first time it  felt like we had THE drummer for SP.

From that point, we started playing a lot more shows, recorded our EP, The Mercy Untold, and eventually all our hard work lead us to a deal with Stand and Deliver Records.

Tell me a little bit about your new album The Human The Canvas that comes out in June.

We recorded The Human, The Canvas with Ben Schigel, and Tony Gammalo at Spider Studios near Cleveland, Ohio. In the middle of recording with Ben and Tony we ended up getting hit head on by a drunk driver, our van was totaled, three of us spent the night in the hospital, and came out with some broken bones. But we pushed through it and the album was only a few days behind schedule.

The album is a great mix of all of our musical influences, we have a base melodic metalcore style but we really try and put all elements of metal into these songs.

We think that anyone that likes any form of  Metal should dig The Human, The Canvas, it has powerful clean choruses, guitar harmonies, lots of keyboards, solos, breakdowns and a lot more.”¨We are very excited about the release of the album,  we have already had a great response to it.

How was it working with Ben Schiegl and Tony Gammalo (Chimaira, Drowning Pool, Misery Signals, It Dies Today) and Alan Douches (Mastadon, Shadows Fall)?

Ben and Tony are great, all the recording sessions were very relaxed, we had a great time.

They helped us pound out some ideas for songs that we probably would’ve never thought of, and got us some great tones out of all of our instruments. We would love to do another album with them.”¨We also had Alan Douches (Nile, Shadows Fall) from West West Side take care of the mastering for The Human, The Canvas, he did a killer job. He really made everything sound great and just took it to the next level for us.

What are your touring plans for the remainder of 2010?

We have a tour already planned out through KY, IL, IA, NE, TX and TN that is starting soon.

We are also have a tour coming up with two other national bands that we cant announce yet, that tour will be going across the entire eastern US. After our East Coast tour we are hoping to jump on another tour package that will lead us to our West Coast fans.

You guys were just added to the Dirt Fest lineup. How do you guys feel about this?

We were very excited about it, we had heard some great things about it and some great bands have played it in the past. Unfortunately Dirt Fest has been cancelled for this year, but hopefully you will get to see Society’s Plague on the 2011 Dirt Fest Lineup.

What would you say are some of your major musical influences?

Overall as a band we are influenced by a ton of different musical styles, anything from old school death metal, melodic deathmetal, metalcore, alternative rock, punk to classical.ӬCollectively some of our biggest band influences are: In Flames, Killswitch Engage, Iron Maiden and Insomnium.

How did you get started playing music?

I got a guitar for Christmas when I was in 6th grade and it all started there for me.ӬFor the most part we all casually played instruments till we all met, then things started to get serious, and we had thoughts about starting the band.

What are some of your goals for Society’s Plague?

We would really like to get over to the West Coast, Europe, and Australia to do some shows and festivals by the end of the year, cause we have some great fans in all those places. We defiantly want to keep putting out great music and playing live shows for a long time.Ӭ

Any last words for our readers?

Keep an eye out for us in upcoming issues of Guitar Edge Magazine, and Drum Magazine, and be sure to watch our Myspace and Facebook pages for new tour dates, and new merch designs, we will be posting them soon. We should also have some contests coming up.