INTERVIEW: XY

XY

Interview

'I think our music can reach a large range of people'

Playing home and abroad, making their debut in Los Angeles at famous "Whisky A Go-Go" along with such big names as Guns N' Roses, Rage Against the Machine, three members - William (vocals), J-L (guitars) and Joey (bass) - of the quartet form French Riviera, XY, talks about their history, the future of the band, covering songs and Avenged Sevenfold.

P.S.: Somebody, get these guys a label contract!

CAN YOU RECAP ON HOW THE BAND GOT TOGETHER?

William: In the early days of the band, I was playing with Manu (drums) and two other guys just to have fun in the garage, covering Iron Maiden and Metallica songs. I was 16 years old. After two years we started making concerts around the town and in 2005 we met J-L, who joined us and brought his ideas of compositions.

Joey: In 2011, I was called by the second guitarist (who is my father’s friend) for a bass audition. I had seen them play before at a showcase for the release of their first album Another Me. I really liked their music and fortunately the band chose me to play with them!

HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE NAME XY?

J-L: We were searching for something short and easy to remember. My best friend suggested the idea of XY and we liked it! But to be honest, with all the “Pokemon X-Y”, “Kyle X-Y”, etc. we were pretty hard to find on the internet with those two letters only. Which is pretty boring…


HOW DID YOU START PLAYING MUSIC? WHAT ARE YOUR INFLUENCES? 

Manu, Joey, William & J-L

William: I started playing guitar and singing very young because of my father. He is a pretty good player and singer, and he showed me how to play when I was around 5. Now the student seem sot have surpassed his teacher (laughs).

More seriously, I’m still learning some techniques of my singing and improving my voice day by day. I am really impressed by how M. Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold sings. I like his voice so much and I work to reach the tone and the notes he gets.

Another guy, who gives me shivers, is Jared Leto form 30 Seconds to Mars. I like the way he interprets his songs and the feeling he has on his voice - very interesting.

J-L: At the age of 5 my parents made me start music with piano and solfeggio. 10 years after, I stopped it to start the electric guitar on my own (I’ve never been attracted to acoustic guitar). As I was living in Gabon (Aftrica) at the time, I didn’t find many people to play with but when I came back to France, I started my first bands.

My favourite guitarists are Joe Satriani, John Petrucci (Dream Theater) and Synyster Gates (Avenged Sevenfold).

Joey: I started playing the bass at the age of 13. My dad is a drummer, so I tried to play drums when I was younger (10 years old) but when I tried out the bass, I knew it was for me!

My favourite bassists are Victor Wooten and Marcus Miller (for Jazz), Johnny Christ from Avenged Sevenfold (for Rock)

WHAT MUSICIANS, BANDS INFLUENCED YOUR STYLE?

William: A lot of bands inspire us. But our influences evolves. I don’t listen to Iron Maiden anymore but it was my favourite band 10 years ago!

I can say that, for now, the bands who inspired us the most for our forthcoming album are 30 Seconds to Mars, Dream Theater, Linkin Park, Bring Me The Horizon and Avenged Sevenfold, even if our music is not really similar to theirs.

J-L: Just like William said, our main influence is Avenged Sevenfold but our songs are not really taking the same direction that they took. Some riffs and the way William sings for example, are clearly influenced by them but more generally speaking, in the writing process we’re including electronic things in our songs, samples, loops, etc., which is the opposite of A7X’s direction. That’s just how we feel it.

30 Seconds to Mars is a new influence in our music. I was not really a fan of them before seeing the live. Jared’s melodies and Shannon’s drum parts really hooked us during the show.

At Cédac De Cimiez venue, French Riviera

YOU’VE BEEN A BAND SINCE THE END OF 2006. HOW DO YOU FEEL YOU’VE EVOLVED OVER THE YEARS?

William: When we started the band, our first album was very heavily influenced by Linkin Park. We composed it in a studio without playing it live before its release. That was a mistake. Even if the album is pleasant to listen to, with a lot of ambiances, etc., we had less fun to play it live than we thought.

On Flying we wanted to bring something more powerful and live than the first one. That was a pretty big deal to compose more all together rather than J-L and I in the studio in front of a computer because a lot of ideas come up form all of us and we needed to be focused on the good ones. But that was a great experience.

Now we are about to release our third album and this one, according to us, has the perfect amount of power, originality and modernity we wanted to. I think we found our personality and our sound and we are very excited to release it.

This one will be more metal that the first two and we added some new sounds that make it unique and personal. We can’t wait to play it live to all our fans.

J-L: To be honest, I’m considering this upcoming album like it’s gonna be the first one. The first one I’m really proud of. Another Me was cool but it is our debut album so… As for Flying, at the time it was about to be released, we hesitated to cancel it because at the end of the recording/mixing process, we were really bored of most of its songs. On this third one, we spent so much time working on it, changing things when we didn’t like them anymore, improving them, finding the right sound for the moment. This is really what XY’s music is about.

XY HAS GROWN BIG ON YOUTUBE WITH VARIOUS COVERS, AVENGED SEVENFOLD IN PARTICULAR. HOW DO YOU FIND THE PROCESS OF COVERING SONG — HARD OR EASY? HAVE YOU HAD ANY FEARS THAT THE FANS OF A7X MIGHT BRING HARD JUDGEMENT?

J-L: Covering a song exactly as it’s written is not so hard. Of course, you must be pretty used to work by ear! Remixing is longer, like we did for our Linkin Park, Lady Gaga and David Guetta stuff for example. I really enjoy changing a dance song into something rock/metal. It’s funny to see that when you replace a keyboard with a guitar and a sampler with some real music, it suddenly becomes a cool rock tune, like it could have been written this way.

Joey: If you work hard, everything is possible; some songs were harder than others. We learnt the song separately, we recorded it and then we shot the video. And for the moment, fans seem to like what we did!

William: Well, as I told you before, Avenged Sevenfold is a band that we really like and that we wanted to cover. We didn’t expect anything in the very begging of the covering process on YouTube. One day they came up their new album Nightmare and there was a song So Far Away that we wanted to cover, to share to the world our compassion for the loss of The Rev. We saw that a lot of people left positive comments on our video and the views were growing everyday, so we decided to release another one and so on…

We now have nine A7X covers on YouTube that brought us approximately three million views and the fans always want more. We have been very surprised about the number of guys who stopped us in the queue to have a picture with us because of our YouTube covers, when we went to Paris to see A7X live. And we were even more surprised when M.Shadows talked about us in stage in front of 7000 fans, saying that he bought our CD on iTunes and telling to everyone to check us out!

J-L: Yeah, and that was even more amazing, when we met them backstage after the show. They were so cool with us… Also, I’d like to add that there’s a wicked point about covers — you can be considered as a “cover band” only. Some fans are only interested in those covers and don’t show interest in our own songs. It’s totally normal, they can like our A7X versions and not our originals… But sometimes it’s frustrating, like when you upload a new original song and the first comment is “plz cover… form Avenged Sevenfold”! (laughs)

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE ANOTHER ME AND FLYING ALBUMS? 

William: I think J-L can talk more in details about the lyrics because he wrote all of them. Those albums went out pretty fast compared to the third one in which we take the time to bring each song to what we think is perfection. We wrote 27 songs/drafts but we’ve only kept 10 of them, just to tell you how exigent we are for this one.

J-L: Yeah, like we said, Another Me was out first album and had more electric sounds that Flying but this one is more live, its songs were more interesting to play in a concert, less “ambient”. There is also more “punkish” influence in Flying, I can’t really say why.

But those two albums were drafts, compared to the third one. We tried influences, we tried things, got frustrated by our previous choices. Now we know what we like, we know what we write: some more metal things (there are even screams) with some huge dubstep/ drum n’ bass synths. What is funny, most bands go from metal to rock to fit people, we chose to go the other way…

About the lyrics, in both there are some fiction themes and some which are more personal. It’s up to you to find which ones are “real”.

Also, I would like to officially give my apologies for the song Flying and its childish lyrics but we only had one song without lyrics when we had the opportunity to shoot this awesome music video, so it was pretty hard to find something really interesting to write… (laughs)


WAS IT HARD TO GET YOUR BAND ‘OUT THERE’ — BOOKING GIGS, BUILDING UP THE FAN BASE?

Joey: Luckily, we have a magical tool called “the Internet”!

William: Yeah, the covers on YouTube help us a lot about that. People look for their favourite band videos, find our covers, enjoy our band and become fans.

We are still looking for a bigger label for our new record, which can help us finding gigs and get more exposure. That’s pretty hard nowadays…

WHAT 2014 HOLDS FOR XY?

J-L: Our main goal is to be able to travel the world to play in front of people, willing to hear our music! We’re really focusing on touring on touring for 2014; We should be going back in the US around May and we will certainly play in nearer countries also (in Europe).

Joey: We know the release of the third album will help us a lot in that way (we’re recording in those days).

ANY MEMORABLE, WEIRD MOMENTS FROM THE GIGS?

William: I will always remember our first gig in L.A., when I saw the name XY written on the "Whisky A Go-Go" sign. That was pretty intense. All that effort form creating music and playing it at the other side of the world was rewarded.

The weird moment was when one of our ex-bassist started to fight with me on stage because I turned off his amp (he was too drunk to play!).

Joey: Our first gig in Los Angeles, it was a dream for us to play in the USA and we did it! Shooting Rebirth music video there was also amazing.

The weird moment, I think, was our gig in Stockholm (Sweden). It was our first time abroad, we didn’t know what to expect but it was a nice experience, right? (laughs)

J-L: In December 2013 we played in Switzerland. We started playing Duality by Slipknot and we were doing it sooo hard/loud that a part of the air conditioner above me fell on my head! It didn’t stop me form playing, fortunately, it wasn’t big!

IN SHORT, DESCRIBE YOUR BAND FOR THOSE, WHO HAND’T HEARD YOU YET.

William: I think our music can reach a large range of people, form who only listen to metal to others, who just enjoy listening to rock music. Again, I’m very excited about the forthcoming album because there is something new on it, something that you’ve never heard before. The right amount of metal, the right amount of rock, a big mix of our inspirations that makes this record unique and more personal than the other two. For those who don’t know us yet, stay tuned, it should be released around March/April and you can already check out Rebirth and Crush You music videos on YouTube. Hope to see you guys on our gigs and all around the world!

J-L: The third album will be something you’ve never heard before and you’ve always wanted to hear.

Joel: Welcome to the XY family!


Official XY website

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Albums on: iTunes