1
Interview with Mike Wengren from Disturbed Sat 09 Apr 2011, 08:52
CrowX
Administrator
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Things were running just a little behind for Disturbed’s press last Thursday, and as I stood in the hall with the label rep and the band’s manager, I overheard some chatter about the interview coming in after me. Apparently, they were going to talk very little about music and focus more on sports. I asked what the deal was and was told that Mike Wengren is an avid hockey fan, and that there was interest in just rapping about the sport on this particular afternoon. It’s kind of cool to know that musicians can roll through Toronto and not JUST have to talk about music.
In my case; however, it WAS all about the music. A dual headliner of Korn and Disturbed on the Music as a Weapon tour saw numerous media and journalists awaiting interviews and photo opportunities with both bands in the press areas at the Air Canada Centre. This would b the second time in under a year that Disturbed had rolled through town on a multi-band line-up, and the promise of hearing some new material from the band’s latest album Asylum was a prospect that had many fans lining up early outside the venue in the chilly spring weather.
As I walked into the green room while the folks before me were wrapping up, Wengren was talking hockey with one of the guys who had just interviewed him, and they exchanged healthy handshakes amidst a flurry of statistics and hockey camaraderie while I got myself set up.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Me: You are a hockey buff, Mike?
Mike: Oh, yeah.
Me: I used to live with a guy who loved the Chicago Black Hawks.
(Mike lifts up his pant leg and shows off a large Chicago logo on the back of his leg.)
Mike: I’m a born and raised Black Hawks fan - been into them my whole life. But I just love hockey – period. And up here in Canada, I love how you guys treat the sport. It’s like a religion.
Me: It’s huge up here.
Mike: Down in the States, the teams have their die-hard fans, but it’s not like up here. It’s not a national sport. I love coming up here and seeing the passion behind the sport.
Me: The aftermarket on sporting events up here is insane, Mike. You almost never pull a hockey ticket out of the (Ticketmaster) machine. It’s all after-market re-sellers and scalpers. And the cost of the hockey tickets is often 2.5 to 3.5 face value, depending on the seats you’re after. And that’s IF you can even find them on the aftermarket.
Mike: That’s insane.
Me: And people just pay it. You know, a concert will sell out and typically the scalps will try for double face value. But hockey is a whole different entity for resellers.
Mike: We were here two nights ago. We had a day off and I came here to see a game against Buffalo. My manager was trying to get me in, and his connections were all dry. He couldn’t swing it. The connections weren’t panning out because it’s such a tight playoff race right now. I just went onto Stubhub and found a cheap nosebleed ticket for about $100. Didn’t matter to me where I was… I just wanted to be in the building, you know?
Me: I’ve bought sports tickets on StubHub. They have it down to a science, really.
Mike: Yeah, for sure. I was happy to just get in and not have to deal with people on the street.
Me: I’m not a big fan of the aftermarket, but with StubHub, they guarantee their seats and you won’t get burned by someone on the street with fake tickets or something.
Mike: Exactly. It’s all about supply and demand. If a game is in high demand, where else are you going to go?
Me: We should do some music stuff…
(laughter)
This year marks fifteen years for you with Disturbed. Did you go into the project thinking it might be a lifer? It must be harder to look ahead on something like that, rather than reflect on it.
Mike: I didn’t honestly know, but it was definitely a goal. We all hoped for some kind of longevity with the band, especially when Danny and I got together… we’ve been playing together now for about twenty years. Part of the reason we got together in the first place was, we saw the drive and the work ethic in each other. We knew that even if we weren’t the best musicians, that we could develop that over time and become something great. Establishing that work ethic with somebody is a tough thing. So we share that common bond, and we love to play together and we like the same kind of music, so we just stuck together and built on that.
Me: I like that you said work ethic. I think a lot of kids jam in garages playing music thinking they can dodge a real job and just gig for the rest of their lives. Once you get into it and do a few cycles of recording, releasing and touring… you learn real quickly that it’s work. It’s a job.
Mike: It really is. It’s an amazing job, but a job nonetheless. If you can pay your bills doing it, that’s an amazing thing. Ultimately it is a job, and as far as becoming a professional at it, it’s called the music ‘business’ for a reason. It’s a business, and it requires being smart and making good business decisions. A lot of guys just want to focus on the music and have management focus on everything else, but that’s not us either. We’re involved in every facet of our band. Every decision, be it music or merchandise or touring, we stay involved in it.
Me: It does seem like Disturbed are pretty hands-on. You can go onto the band’s website and see active feeds from the road, unique material and merchandise for sale, and an esthetic to the overall site that is quite refined. I love seeing that kind of stuff from bands – the interacting with their audience.
Mike: Right, especially when it comes to dealing with our fans, we don’t want to have joe-schmo from the label or management doing postings for us. We try to post our stuff and be involved as much as we can. Ultimately, if it wasn’t for the fans and their support, we wouldn’t be where we are today. So we want to engage them as much as we can.
Me: This is your first time in TO since Uproar, correct?
Mike: I believe so. Yeah.
Me: I don’t think Asylum had been released when Uproar came through town. I think that that tour date in Toronto was just ahead of release day for the newest album.
Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. I think we came here about a month before release.
Me: Disturbed seem to do well on festival bills. Technically, Music as a Weapon is your bill; Disturbed established it and have been on it for five tours running now. I caught you at Mayhem a few years ago in Toronto and, of course, Uproar this past year was a big touring success with Stone Sour and Avenged Sevenfold. You seem really comfortable on festival bills.
Mike: I think we’ve been fortunate to be on festival bills over the years. A few years ago when the economy tanked, we certainly made a conscious effort to get onto bills with other bands. The first things to go in a recession are the luxury items, and it seemed wise to get onto packages that allowed the fans to get more bang for their buck. So this time around on Music as a Weapon, rather than having fans choose between seeing us or seeing Korn, we just decided to team up and do a run of dates together. We joined forces and are giving the fans something extra at a reasonable price on this tour. That’s one end of it. The other end is this; one of our first tours ever back on the first album was Ozzfest. That was just a very big learning experience for us. It’s something we grew very comfortable with and it’s something we enjoy. We love being on a bill with other bands - Ozzfest, Mayhem, Uproar and Music as a Weapon… or any of the big European festivals – doing them is something we love. Not only do we get to get out there and tour and play music for our fans, but we get to see bands that we have toured with before and hang out with them again. We are friends with a lot of these guys in certain capacities – so it’s just us hanging out a lot of the time.
Me: A lot of the festivals I tend to go to are metal festivals. It just seems like metal bands are more prone to doing bills together like you mentioned. I don’t see this in a lot of other genres.
Mike: Back when we were growing up and we were a local band in Chicago, the scene back then was very friendly. It was more of a brotherhood than a competition. We used to play shows with a lot of bands, time after time. We’d flip and flop who would open and close. It didn’t really matter to us back then, and still doesn’t now. We’d kind of help each other out – keeping it more like a brotherhood. I know that in other cites, and even Chicago now, things seem more competitive. We like to be friendly with the bands we are on tour with. We still keep that mentality today.
Me: Do you ever do any side projects, Mike? Do you ever jump onto other bands or jams? I’m thinking Joey from Slipknot here. He’s toured with Ministry, Korn, Zombie…
Mike: Disturbed is definitely my full time job. We’re involved in every aspect of our band. When we’re out on tour and we’re writing or recording or doing this or doing that, or we’re plotting the next move for the band… it takes nearly everything we have. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for other projects. I wouldn’t close the door on that – who knows what the future holds – but we just focus on Disturbed as a band 24/7. When we get a little bit of time, we all have families and we like to spend time with them.
Me: I was going to ask that actually. I assumed that you all had family reasons to NOT tour. I figured you’d all have wives, girlfriends & kids…
Mike: Three out of four of us are married and have kids, and David is now engaged and on that path soon.
Me: Cool. Good for him. How did you get comic artist David Finch doing some work refining your mascot.
Mike: We had the one dimensional face we used on the first record and we kind of got away from it on the second record. On the third record we thought about bringing the face back, but we wanted him to evolve. We started out with Todd McFarlane… he was the first artist to take a stab at it. He was really well known for the Spiderman Venom character, with those big teeth. We thought there was some symmetry there, you know? He did the first version and to try and change it up and continue to keep some sort of evolution happening on the character, we have tried to have a different artist do some work on the character. It went from Todd McFarlane to Raymond Swanland to David Finch. So, who knows who we’ll get involved next? We’ll see where we are next record, but it has been kind of cool to see him evolve.
Me: Are these guys Disturbed fans? And are you guys comic book fans?
Mike: Not necessarily huge comic book fans. We don’t read them every day or anything, but we follow some storylines, we watch the movies, we love the characters and appreciate the artistry behind it all. For us, when it’s time to get the artwork together for the record, the art department at the label will steer the boat there. They will put the feelers out there and let people know what we’re after, and see who’s into giving it a try. It’s really a dream come true to have some of these top name guys pulling stuff off for us.
Me: Well, McFarlane is quite well known, and David Finch is certainly following in the same trajectory as Todd. Kids into the genre love that guy’s artwork. Let’s talk some Asylum. Going into that fifth album, did you feel pressure to top your last four? Did you try to change things up a bit when you were recording the new material?
Mike: It’s always in the back of our minds, topping our previous work, but we try to remain true to what got us here in the first place – just us sitting together in a room, jamming our songs. We always know right away whether it’s a riff or a beat – if it’s cool and it makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up, then we know we’re heading in the right direction. If it’s not great, we don’t spend a lot of time on it. The good riffs and the good beats always rise to the surface, and we try to just focus on that stuff. That’s always been our thing. As long as we don't change that I think we’ll be alright. We try not to think about it too much. If we focused too much on the pressure and trying to top our last record, I think we would over-think it and the music would suffer.
Me: I wouldn’t say that your ‘style’ has changed over five albums – there is a core sound to Disturbed that seems to shine through on every album – but you’ve tried some interesting things album by album. Do you like to challenge yourselves in that sense – to try new things with your band?
Mike: That’s definitely something we think about – whether the fans will dig what we’re trying, we definitely try to write for ourselves first. There is an element of self-gratification to writing. We don’t want to be stale. We do want to evolve as musicians. We don’t want to just record a carbon copy of the last album. We always try to change it up somehow. We do have a formula that seems to work for us, and we like to get together and jam that formula out. Our sounds are somewhat unique. My drumming sounds like my drumming. Danny’s guitaring is quite distinct and so on. When we all come together it’s going to sound like signature Disturbed. It’s really a matter of us trying what we feel like at the moment. On Sickness we kind of kept things more rhythmic. On Believe, David wanted to expand into some melodies. We kind of mixed those two things together on 10000 Fists. We try small things here and there, but we don’t stray too far from the path. We are pretty happy with how things have gone so far.
Me: Disturbed has appreciated some primo moments in movie soundtracks over the years – “This Moment” on Transformers, “The Sickness” at the end of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake – are you all a part of these film deals?
Mike: We always get emails or phone calls about this sort of thing. We don’t broker those deals or anything. (laughs) Our management and someone from the publishing company usually handle all of that action, especially if it’s a Warner Brothers’ soundtrack or movie; that always makes things a bit easier. So we get notified about this stuff, and if it’s something we think is cool, we usually go for it. We do get offers for stuff that we don’t think is a good fit and we turn them down. We’ve been pretty lucky so far with what we have been offered.
Me: Disturbed has covered two versions of Faith No More's ‘Midlife Crisis’ – “Land of Confusion” by Genesis, “Living After Midnight” by Priest, and your latest is the U2 cover of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. That’s an eclectic assortment of material for a band in your genre. Do you all weigh in when you cover a song?
Mike: Absolutely. It’s just something that’s fun to do. It’s like a tension release, really. We spend months at a time focusing on creating new material. Once we’re comfortable with the bulk of the material and we know that we almost have a record ready, then we will lay back a bit and have some fun, and that’s what those covers are. We get to see what we can do with somebody else’s song. It’s usually a band that we have a lot of respect for and have been heavily influenced by, like Faith No More or Judas Priest, or it’s a band that we feel has had a great hit from the past and we can try and do a 180 on the song and put our own spin on – and not get crucified for it.
Things were running just a little behind for Disturbed’s press last Thursday, and as I stood in the hall with the label rep and the band’s manager, I overheard some chatter about the interview coming in after me. Apparently, they were going to talk very little about music and focus more on sports. I asked what the deal was and was told that Mike Wengren is an avid hockey fan, and that there was interest in just rapping about the sport on this particular afternoon. It’s kind of cool to know that musicians can roll through Toronto and not JUST have to talk about music.
In my case; however, it WAS all about the music. A dual headliner of Korn and Disturbed on the Music as a Weapon tour saw numerous media and journalists awaiting interviews and photo opportunities with both bands in the press areas at the Air Canada Centre. This would b the second time in under a year that Disturbed had rolled through town on a multi-band line-up, and the promise of hearing some new material from the band’s latest album Asylum was a prospect that had many fans lining up early outside the venue in the chilly spring weather.
As I walked into the green room while the folks before me were wrapping up, Wengren was talking hockey with one of the guys who had just interviewed him, and they exchanged healthy handshakes amidst a flurry of statistics and hockey camaraderie while I got myself set up.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Me: You are a hockey buff, Mike?
Mike: Oh, yeah.
Me: I used to live with a guy who loved the Chicago Black Hawks.
(Mike lifts up his pant leg and shows off a large Chicago logo on the back of his leg.)
Mike: I’m a born and raised Black Hawks fan - been into them my whole life. But I just love hockey – period. And up here in Canada, I love how you guys treat the sport. It’s like a religion.
Me: It’s huge up here.
Mike: Down in the States, the teams have their die-hard fans, but it’s not like up here. It’s not a national sport. I love coming up here and seeing the passion behind the sport.
Me: The aftermarket on sporting events up here is insane, Mike. You almost never pull a hockey ticket out of the (Ticketmaster) machine. It’s all after-market re-sellers and scalpers. And the cost of the hockey tickets is often 2.5 to 3.5 face value, depending on the seats you’re after. And that’s IF you can even find them on the aftermarket.
Mike: That’s insane.
Me: And people just pay it. You know, a concert will sell out and typically the scalps will try for double face value. But hockey is a whole different entity for resellers.
Mike: We were here two nights ago. We had a day off and I came here to see a game against Buffalo. My manager was trying to get me in, and his connections were all dry. He couldn’t swing it. The connections weren’t panning out because it’s such a tight playoff race right now. I just went onto Stubhub and found a cheap nosebleed ticket for about $100. Didn’t matter to me where I was… I just wanted to be in the building, you know?
Me: I’ve bought sports tickets on StubHub. They have it down to a science, really.
Mike: Yeah, for sure. I was happy to just get in and not have to deal with people on the street.
Me: I’m not a big fan of the aftermarket, but with StubHub, they guarantee their seats and you won’t get burned by someone on the street with fake tickets or something.
Mike: Exactly. It’s all about supply and demand. If a game is in high demand, where else are you going to go?
Me: We should do some music stuff…
(laughter)
This year marks fifteen years for you with Disturbed. Did you go into the project thinking it might be a lifer? It must be harder to look ahead on something like that, rather than reflect on it.
Mike: I didn’t honestly know, but it was definitely a goal. We all hoped for some kind of longevity with the band, especially when Danny and I got together… we’ve been playing together now for about twenty years. Part of the reason we got together in the first place was, we saw the drive and the work ethic in each other. We knew that even if we weren’t the best musicians, that we could develop that over time and become something great. Establishing that work ethic with somebody is a tough thing. So we share that common bond, and we love to play together and we like the same kind of music, so we just stuck together and built on that.
Me: I like that you said work ethic. I think a lot of kids jam in garages playing music thinking they can dodge a real job and just gig for the rest of their lives. Once you get into it and do a few cycles of recording, releasing and touring… you learn real quickly that it’s work. It’s a job.
Mike: It really is. It’s an amazing job, but a job nonetheless. If you can pay your bills doing it, that’s an amazing thing. Ultimately it is a job, and as far as becoming a professional at it, it’s called the music ‘business’ for a reason. It’s a business, and it requires being smart and making good business decisions. A lot of guys just want to focus on the music and have management focus on everything else, but that’s not us either. We’re involved in every facet of our band. Every decision, be it music or merchandise or touring, we stay involved in it.
Me: It does seem like Disturbed are pretty hands-on. You can go onto the band’s website and see active feeds from the road, unique material and merchandise for sale, and an esthetic to the overall site that is quite refined. I love seeing that kind of stuff from bands – the interacting with their audience.
Mike: Right, especially when it comes to dealing with our fans, we don’t want to have joe-schmo from the label or management doing postings for us. We try to post our stuff and be involved as much as we can. Ultimately, if it wasn’t for the fans and their support, we wouldn’t be where we are today. So we want to engage them as much as we can.
Me: This is your first time in TO since Uproar, correct?
Mike: I believe so. Yeah.
Me: I don’t think Asylum had been released when Uproar came through town. I think that that tour date in Toronto was just ahead of release day for the newest album.
Mike: Yeah, that’s correct. I think we came here about a month before release.
Me: Disturbed seem to do well on festival bills. Technically, Music as a Weapon is your bill; Disturbed established it and have been on it for five tours running now. I caught you at Mayhem a few years ago in Toronto and, of course, Uproar this past year was a big touring success with Stone Sour and Avenged Sevenfold. You seem really comfortable on festival bills.
Mike: I think we’ve been fortunate to be on festival bills over the years. A few years ago when the economy tanked, we certainly made a conscious effort to get onto bills with other bands. The first things to go in a recession are the luxury items, and it seemed wise to get onto packages that allowed the fans to get more bang for their buck. So this time around on Music as a Weapon, rather than having fans choose between seeing us or seeing Korn, we just decided to team up and do a run of dates together. We joined forces and are giving the fans something extra at a reasonable price on this tour. That’s one end of it. The other end is this; one of our first tours ever back on the first album was Ozzfest. That was just a very big learning experience for us. It’s something we grew very comfortable with and it’s something we enjoy. We love being on a bill with other bands - Ozzfest, Mayhem, Uproar and Music as a Weapon… or any of the big European festivals – doing them is something we love. Not only do we get to get out there and tour and play music for our fans, but we get to see bands that we have toured with before and hang out with them again. We are friends with a lot of these guys in certain capacities – so it’s just us hanging out a lot of the time.
Me: A lot of the festivals I tend to go to are metal festivals. It just seems like metal bands are more prone to doing bills together like you mentioned. I don’t see this in a lot of other genres.
Mike: Back when we were growing up and we were a local band in Chicago, the scene back then was very friendly. It was more of a brotherhood than a competition. We used to play shows with a lot of bands, time after time. We’d flip and flop who would open and close. It didn’t really matter to us back then, and still doesn’t now. We’d kind of help each other out – keeping it more like a brotherhood. I know that in other cites, and even Chicago now, things seem more competitive. We like to be friendly with the bands we are on tour with. We still keep that mentality today.
Me: Do you ever do any side projects, Mike? Do you ever jump onto other bands or jams? I’m thinking Joey from Slipknot here. He’s toured with Ministry, Korn, Zombie…
Mike: Disturbed is definitely my full time job. We’re involved in every aspect of our band. When we’re out on tour and we’re writing or recording or doing this or doing that, or we’re plotting the next move for the band… it takes nearly everything we have. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for other projects. I wouldn’t close the door on that – who knows what the future holds – but we just focus on Disturbed as a band 24/7. When we get a little bit of time, we all have families and we like to spend time with them.
Me: I was going to ask that actually. I assumed that you all had family reasons to NOT tour. I figured you’d all have wives, girlfriends & kids…
Mike: Three out of four of us are married and have kids, and David is now engaged and on that path soon.
Me: Cool. Good for him. How did you get comic artist David Finch doing some work refining your mascot.
Mike: We had the one dimensional face we used on the first record and we kind of got away from it on the second record. On the third record we thought about bringing the face back, but we wanted him to evolve. We started out with Todd McFarlane… he was the first artist to take a stab at it. He was really well known for the Spiderman Venom character, with those big teeth. We thought there was some symmetry there, you know? He did the first version and to try and change it up and continue to keep some sort of evolution happening on the character, we have tried to have a different artist do some work on the character. It went from Todd McFarlane to Raymond Swanland to David Finch. So, who knows who we’ll get involved next? We’ll see where we are next record, but it has been kind of cool to see him evolve.
Me: Are these guys Disturbed fans? And are you guys comic book fans?
Mike: Not necessarily huge comic book fans. We don’t read them every day or anything, but we follow some storylines, we watch the movies, we love the characters and appreciate the artistry behind it all. For us, when it’s time to get the artwork together for the record, the art department at the label will steer the boat there. They will put the feelers out there and let people know what we’re after, and see who’s into giving it a try. It’s really a dream come true to have some of these top name guys pulling stuff off for us.
Me: Well, McFarlane is quite well known, and David Finch is certainly following in the same trajectory as Todd. Kids into the genre love that guy’s artwork. Let’s talk some Asylum. Going into that fifth album, did you feel pressure to top your last four? Did you try to change things up a bit when you were recording the new material?
Mike: It’s always in the back of our minds, topping our previous work, but we try to remain true to what got us here in the first place – just us sitting together in a room, jamming our songs. We always know right away whether it’s a riff or a beat – if it’s cool and it makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up, then we know we’re heading in the right direction. If it’s not great, we don’t spend a lot of time on it. The good riffs and the good beats always rise to the surface, and we try to just focus on that stuff. That’s always been our thing. As long as we don't change that I think we’ll be alright. We try not to think about it too much. If we focused too much on the pressure and trying to top our last record, I think we would over-think it and the music would suffer.
Me: I wouldn’t say that your ‘style’ has changed over five albums – there is a core sound to Disturbed that seems to shine through on every album – but you’ve tried some interesting things album by album. Do you like to challenge yourselves in that sense – to try new things with your band?
Mike: That’s definitely something we think about – whether the fans will dig what we’re trying, we definitely try to write for ourselves first. There is an element of self-gratification to writing. We don’t want to be stale. We do want to evolve as musicians. We don’t want to just record a carbon copy of the last album. We always try to change it up somehow. We do have a formula that seems to work for us, and we like to get together and jam that formula out. Our sounds are somewhat unique. My drumming sounds like my drumming. Danny’s guitaring is quite distinct and so on. When we all come together it’s going to sound like signature Disturbed. It’s really a matter of us trying what we feel like at the moment. On Sickness we kind of kept things more rhythmic. On Believe, David wanted to expand into some melodies. We kind of mixed those two things together on 10000 Fists. We try small things here and there, but we don’t stray too far from the path. We are pretty happy with how things have gone so far.
Me: Disturbed has appreciated some primo moments in movie soundtracks over the years – “This Moment” on Transformers, “The Sickness” at the end of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake – are you all a part of these film deals?
Mike: We always get emails or phone calls about this sort of thing. We don’t broker those deals or anything. (laughs) Our management and someone from the publishing company usually handle all of that action, especially if it’s a Warner Brothers’ soundtrack or movie; that always makes things a bit easier. So we get notified about this stuff, and if it’s something we think is cool, we usually go for it. We do get offers for stuff that we don’t think is a good fit and we turn them down. We’ve been pretty lucky so far with what we have been offered.
Me: Disturbed has covered two versions of Faith No More's ‘Midlife Crisis’ – “Land of Confusion” by Genesis, “Living After Midnight” by Priest, and your latest is the U2 cover of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. That’s an eclectic assortment of material for a band in your genre. Do you all weigh in when you cover a song?
Mike: Absolutely. It’s just something that’s fun to do. It’s like a tension release, really. We spend months at a time focusing on creating new material. Once we’re comfortable with the bulk of the material and we know that we almost have a record ready, then we will lay back a bit and have some fun, and that’s what those covers are. We get to see what we can do with somebody else’s song. It’s usually a band that we have a lot of respect for and have been heavily influenced by, like Faith No More or Judas Priest, or it’s a band that we feel has had a great hit from the past and we can try and do a 180 on the song and put our own spin on – and not get crucified for it.
