A new interview with Daryl Palumbo of Glassjaw has been posted on Rock Sound, please read it below when you get the chance.

Want the real history of Glassjaw? Warts and all? Then sit back and make yourself comfortable as Daryl Palumbo dissects the history of hardcore’s most maligned…

RS: Did people read too much into Glassjaw in the early days?

Daryl Palumbo: Yeah. I didn’t give a fuck, I didn’t make the records to be offensive but people took offence and then I felt bad. I never thought I was sexist, I was just real upset about things that had happened. I guess I did say a lot that was relatively demeaning and given the number of impressionable young people that bought the record then yeah maybe I should not have said all that stuff but I was mad. And things are different when you are18, 19 or 20. It is what it is. I look back at it as a time in my life. I don’t know. A lot of it was rude, and that was the point at the time.

RS: Guess you did not know how impressionable the audience was?

DP: No I did not know they were impressionable at the time as I was young enough to still be impressionable too. When you are 18,19 you are impressionable. You give me the power to stand on a podium at that age, I’m not going to say all the right shit. You give me the stage then I will say some wrong things. I was young. How the fuck was I supposed to know there were kids even younger than me out there taking it in. People come up to me and talk about those records and say they got them when they were teenagers and say something derogatory in reference to women or a woman they knew right there on the spot. I did not say those things to have those conversations with people more impressionable than myself so they could be mean.

RS: People tracked down ex girlfriends to interview them about you. Is that the kind of thing that made you want to give up GJ?

DP: In a way. You make it sound too profound, it was not profound at all. I don’t explain my lyrics so I am not trying to be profound that way. People thought I was taking a stand, doing this or that. I was not. I was mad at my ex girlfriend. And as a young dude I just kept having bad experiences with women. Being straight edge and being 18 that was the problem in my life. I was sick and I had problems dating girls. I was not a drug addict, I was not 40 and I was not dying of cancer I just had some health problems and a couple of women that rubbed me the wrong way. People made that so profound. If I was 30 years old when we made those Glassjaw records then I would probably end up playing that type of music for the rest of my career. Being the age that we were it was just so different and weird that people had to make a lot out of it, for kids so young to be doing that against the grain at that time was a supposed big deal. It wasn’t. We were just a post-hardcore band.

RS: How do you think people will react to the new record?

DP: I just imagine that people will be harsh critics. I only care what Beck our guitarist thinks of the record and I know he only cares what I think of the record so I don’t give a fuck what one other human on this planet thinks of it. We know what we want the record to sound like. The four of us are going to sit in a room and do it, I am not paying a million dollars for some fucking figurehead producer to sit in a room and not do a damn thing. It is just going to be the record that we have in our head. People are waiting to put it under the magnifying glass but I could not care less.

RS: Are you talking about Ross?

DP: That was not a reference to Ross, that is a reference to any producer you pay to not do anything. I did not make a reference to Ross I am just not going to pay anyone to get in the way, fuck with my emotions, turn up late, try to tell me what to play and all that. I will not listen to some forty-year-old fucking producer who knows nothing about the type of music I want to make. I don’t care what any producer would think about our band, I don’t trust their judgement. Unless I meet someone from today until we make the record that blows my mind and makes me and Beck reconsider then no one goes in the studio with us. It is not early for me to know but it is too early to convey in an interview, its almost pointless. As of right now, the melodic shit is way more melodic and progressed and the heavy stuff is that much heavier. It is forty years heavier at least. Brutal. The melodic and ambient are that much more of an experience.

RS: People are excited and nervous. Like it really matters…

DP: I know it matters.

RS: Are you worried you wont be able to channel the energy anymore?

DP: No. it doesn’t go away. It goes away for people like Elvis Costello, not for people like me. I am way angrier at this point. I am more rabid now that I ever was, its just that on the first record there was a missing synapse where I could not articulate it so well, all my bullets went at once. Just believe me on this.

RS: Do you have a latent discontent?

DP: I am just a brat. That is my character. My type of person is constantly complaining, mad at something, unnerved by something else, it is just who I am. I am still happy but the discontent at something is constantly there. And that does not get easier as you get older, the fire just burns harder.

RS: Does regret get in there?

DP: The list gets longer but I do not regret anything. You do not get older and watch your life get simpler, you get older and watch it get more fucking complicated. I am by far not a rich man who made a lot of money with his music, I did not make it and then have to remember how to be mad to go on tour, it is always right there. I woke up pretty annoyed.

RS: Does talk of your illness piss you off too?

DP: Friends don’t bring it up every day but I guess people like you tend to think otherwise as people always ask how I am feeling. If I was not then we would not be even talking to you. Press over dramatise things, that is what they do and in this country a drama is loved. American press is fucking disgusting too but UK press is sensational. It sensationalised my illness and it is flattering but ridiculous at the same time.

RS: Funny how you became a villain when the edge was dropped too?

DP: It was ridiculous that it even reached the press that I was not straight edge any more and then for people to attribute my sickness to that. Are you kidding me? I am not trying to waste anyone’s money, if I book a tour I am not drinking Jagermeister for 15 days and nights before in the hopes I will be vomiting blood on the day of the first show. I don’t do that. I don’t even drink. I did think about it, I was allegedly on a moral high horse when I was straight edge. I wasn’t. I never gave a fuck I just happened to be straight edge. And the press gave that to me so people thought it was such a shame that I was so righteous yet so sick but then it gets in the press that I am no longer edge and people think fuck him if he is out raging like a rock star and cancelling shows all the time. No, it was not even close to the truth.

RS: The disease was the consistent thing.

DP: Exactly, I was sick when I was and wasn’t straight edge, it was the thing that was consistent the whole time. I don’t think anything brings it about besides not sleeping and not eating.

RS: Are you financially well off?

DP: Dude people saw our videos and thought it was a billion dollar video and that we had made it. Are you crazy? It could not be any further from the truth. And now it’s the same, I am not a millionaire from making music. People always saw stuff and thought the machine was working for them. No it wasn’t. It never was. There were no ads for our records, there was no major promotion, no one gave a fuck about my band. When Glassjaw was a full time touring band we were not a huge thing. People did not understand that. We had people taking advantage of us the whole time. Because we were young people were ruining us all the time. In many ways and I feel like the whole time we were not happy as we were not seeing the results we had worked for years to get, we spent years eating, sleeping, shitting Glassjaw and all we got was ripped off.

RS: Would it be different now?

DP: You open up any magazine now, especially a magazine like Alternative Press, and there are a thousand bands that Glassjaw could tour with if we were a young band. Back then there was no one we could tour with, we used to be asked who to tour with and we would not know, bands like Quicksand had broken up so we guessed at bands like Filter or the Foo Fighters. There were no post hardcore bands. Now there are a million. We were unhappy about almost everything at the time, we saw bands that had been about for six months headlining for 5,000 people a night and we did not want to headline those shows, we just wanted to get by. We could not even do that. We did not want to be rich and famous, we just wanted to get by. And we could not.

RS: We never saw it over in England, you guys headlined over here from almost the first tour.

DP: We were always bigger in the UK than we were back home. We did not tell anyone over here that it was not like this at all usually, we would just crack up. We were just a hardcore band. Two hundred people would come see us at the most back home and we got fed up with it. We played a show in Chico with American Nightmare, fifty people turned up. Imagine the crowd that show would get now. I could not work out what we were doing wrong, I used to question whether we should have signed a record deal at all and done it all ourselves to see if that would have worked out better. People who weren’t signed to majors were doing great and we were not, we were fighting on the road all the time as we were together all the fucking time, we were a bunch of brats from Long Island having a tough time. But people made it into a legend. Biggest shows we played were when we played the primetime slots on Warped in New York, New Jersey. I remember every show we played. I remember how many people were at them. I know how many records we sold and every week I would keep track. I remember it all. I tell you, it has been made myth and way bigger now than it ever was back then. It is great to know that we toured a few months ago in the US and they were the biggest shows we had ever done. It is great to know that. In every way it was the biggest and it is hysterical but at the same time anything from the lyrics to the image was made into something bigger than it ever was. We were five dudes from Long Island who wanted to play post hardcore. It was nothing more. We wanted to play progressive hardcore.

RS: Will it be different now?

DP: We felt totally alone but now it will be easy, everything is fun now. We are making it that way. All the lessons learned are being taken onboard. There is no reason to fight, to disagree and to be confused and to worry about a label. For that reason I don’t give a fuck what people think about Glassjaw. I am just putting on tape what we as musicians need to hear.

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