Famed poet John Donne once said that no man is an island unto himself. He probably would have made an exception to that had he lived long enough to go on tour with Madina Lake.
They set out to promote their second major label album Attics to Eden in January when they played in Australia, hopped over to Japan, swung back around to the UK and France, returned to Japan, hit up Germany, and then headed back to the United States to play a two-week headliner and Warped Tour all summer until they fly back to the UK in August.
“Every morning I wake up and it takes me probably four minutes to realize where I am and where the bathroom is and where the front door to the hotel is,” said bassist/backing vocalist Matthew Leone. “It’s very confusing.”
When taken into consideration that he travels the world with his twin brother and vocalist Nathan, guitarist Mateo Camargo, drummer Dan Torelli and everyone else who makes sure the band gets from show to show in one piece, perhaps Leone wouldn’t be quantifiable as an island after all.
“Every city we play, we’ve got five to 10 friends that we’ve collected along the way that we’ve met at shows and wound us hanging out or crashing on their floors,” he said, “so it give you some semblance of a normal life when you see familiar faces every night, and in this world that’s a difficult thing to accomplish, so we’ve been lucky.”
In every city, there are fans that need to be entertained or won over, and the rocky start Madina Lake had on the tour circuit made them appreciative of the ones they have.
“I think our label had a little bit of an identity crisis with us. On the first album cycle, we were really doing the Warped Tour crowd, that sort of scene stuff, and we’re really not a part of scene,” he said. “So it took a while for people to warm up to us, but now we definitely have the core of fans that are really amazing… Although we’re not pulling in a thousand fans every night, the ones that are there have really connected to something. It’s been working – slow – but we’re still working our asses off.”
When it comes to how to work their asses off, the guys of Madina Lake have had the chance to perform with bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Audition, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park.
“It’s really cool to see them because, when you spend so much time together in this unique environment, you make pretty close relationships with these other bands. And you go your own way and you don’t see them for a while, but then a festival happens like Warped Tour or Bamboozle and even Soundwave in Australia, and everybody reconvenes,” Leone said. “The guys in Dillinger Escape Plan are incredible. We’re like the odd couple because we’re like no similarities music wise, but I think we do sort of share a philosophy on life. We shared a bunk with them when we did Download Festival in the UK last year, and we connected with them right away.”
Of all the things they’ve learned, Leone said that humility has been the most important thing he’s taken away from his relationships with bands like My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park, with whom Madina Lake toured on Project Revolution in 2007.
“These bands that have acquired this level of success, it was refreshing to learn that they have a good head on their shoulders and that they stay true to who they are,” he said. “They didn’t start buying into their own hype or start believing in the praise that everybody puts upon them, and that’s a valuable lesson for any band to learn. We’re fortunate enough to have a lot of success in the UK and sell out a 2,000 or 3,000 capacity room, and then we come back to Florida and play in Tampa to 47 people, so we’ve managed to stay level and connected.”
For their time on the road, Madina Lake today is wiser than the four musicians who wrote From Them, Through Us, To You in 2007.
“On the first record, when we had a quick rise in the UK, suddenly we realized how many people were judging us on superficial characteristics like haircuts…” Leone said. “That changed things for us. We got a little defensive about the fact that we got categorized into this sort of emo/pop punk thing…”
The frustration the band experience caused a shift in gears when they went into their sophomore album.
“We just sort of toned everything down so we just steered the focus on just the music and hopefully be judged by that,” Leone said. “We’re all really thrilled with the [new] record, but in retrospect, I think that some of the sounds were a counterpoint to what we experienced touring in that sort of scene for two and a half years where everything seemed a little watered down and a little homogenized.”
The group ventured into new territory when working on Attics to Eden, paying greater attention to their creative impulses.
“Everybody seemed to be doing the same thing and looking the same way and acting the same way, so when we got into the studio, we saw it as an opportunity to not really worry about any of those parameters,” Leone said. “If we wanted to use a trumpet in a song, we did that, and if we wanted to explore crazy guitar tones or weird effects or anything, we had the courage to do that. It’s yet to be determined how effective that will be in the broader scope of our audience, but it feels really good to us at the end of the day as artists. That’s the only way you can make it honest. “
Producer David Bendeth deserves some credit for aiding Madina Lake’s growth. Himself a musician, Bendeth’s tough love approach in the studio has helped craft the sound of albums for Paramore, Killswitch Engage and In Flames.
“We battled every day. He would tell us that we sucked. He was like a drill sergeant; he really lit a fire under our asses, which nobody had done at that point, so it was what we need and wanted, but still hard to go through,” Leone said. “We would almost get into fights – real fights – and we’d be laughing five minutes later. So it was an arduous task, but he was really effective in helping us discover who we were, what was at our musical roots.”
“I think he has a degree in psychology, and he used that against us, too,” he continued. “He really observed our social dysfunctions as a band and he helped bring a lot of things to the surface, and we’ve grown in that we’ve learned more about each other and we’ve learned more about the music we want to make and we became more self aware.”
One proud moment for Leone on the new record is the song “Criminals,” which he said is currently his favorite track.
“It’s because of the statement that it makes about what culture can do to you, the effect that it can have, the trap that it can set for people to just fall into and the consequence is what happens to people when they snap, when they finally realize that they’re trapped in somebody else’s dream,” he said. “The music, I think, coincides with that emotional sentiment very well.”
As Madina Lake matures, one thing that remains a part of their music is the conceptual story behind it that is seen in the art work, the layer of folklore within the album of Madina Lake as a “1950s lost America” that is a reflection of the flaws of society at large.
“On the album art, Adalia is the woman character with the aviator glasses, which signifies that she’s on a journey,” Leone said. “She’s bringing consciousness down to the robot, which represents humanity. “
The story began with “The Auspice,” which is published on the bands fan site, and will continue with “Scorched Earth.”
“The music and the lyrics are the most important things, and those will never be compromised or affected by the story, but we realized when the four of us started getting together that what drew us to music in the beginning was the imaginary world that it created,” Leone said. “You know, when you go to a show and the house lights go down, nothing in the outside world matters, and we really appreciated that about music, so when we were discussing our dream musical scenario we thought, ‘Why not expand upon that idea?’ So we would literally create this imaginary world, if that even makes sense.”
Leone himself reads authors like Daniel Quinn, best known for Ishmael, and Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer. Despite the effort put into the creation of the story, Leone and his band mates aren’t about to get their feelings hurt if some fans don’t dig saga of the “real” Madina Lake.
“If somebody likes the song they hear on the radio and they want that to be their experience with our band, that’s cool, but we also wanted to provide something if the listener wanted to scratch the surface [and] have this whole world underneath that they can sort of use their own imagination with and we can sort of convey these thoughts that we have about religion and philosophy and social decay,” he said. “I know it sounds pretentious; we never intended it be that way, which is why we don’t really use that as the marketing angle, we just kind of have it existing for people who are interested in it.”
With their breakneck touring schedule in full swing and a literary piece in the works, it’s hard to believe that the members of Madina Lake have time to catch their breath right now, let alone look to the future. For the time being, the Illinois natives have got an album that they’re proud of and sense of self that will lead to bigger and better things the next time around.
“Our only intentions when we made the record were to create songs and music and lyrics that completely moved us from head to toe with every beat and every note, and I think we defiantly managed to do that,” Leone said. “We sort of look at our musical context from a broader scope. How is the record going to stand up in five or ten years? Is it going to be what Limp Bizkit was to nu metal or is going to be what The Flaming Lips were to the late 90s indie rock explosion? We’re more interested in making music that is timeless and just kicks ass without any other judgment parameters around it.”
