Faber Drive

Here is a transcript of the interview I did with two members of Faber Drive, Hinsley and Krikit, on April 6th, 2007 at the Cabaret Juste Pour Rire on St-Laurent Street in Montreal.

CONFRONT: Hi welcome back to Montreal.

HINSLEY and KRIKIT: Thank You.

CONFRONT: So let me explain to you who we are.  CONFRONT is an online music magazine.  Our motto is Dare, Defy, Provoke, so Dare to Listen, Defy Stereotypes and Provoke Change. Basically we want to be a magazine ahead of the mainstream; we want to make sure that we let our readers know that there are many types and styles of music out there and that it’s cool to know about it. Talking about mainstream, what would be your definition of mainstream today?

HINSLEY:  I think mainstream has changed.  It seems to me that the internet has been such a great avenue for music.  Mainstream isn’t mainstream anymore.  You have these bands that have these huge underground followings.  So the mainstream does not feel so mainstream anymore, because now you’re getting these sort of abstract bands that now show up and play in places and it’s all because of the people.  People have so much more to say now.

KRIKIT: Yes, it definitely has much more to do with what kids want these days, [rather] than what the record labels want to push on them.  They can say this is cool; you have to listen to this.

CONFRONT: They can now decide what they want to listen to.

KRIKIT: Exactly.

CONFRONT: Okay, before I keep going I wanted to let you know that the next couple of questions are CONFRONT Magazine question that we ask to all of our interviewees.

KRIKIT and HINSLEY: Cool.

CONFRONT: Nice, ok here we go.  What is the first and last CD you bought? Well technically it doesn’t have to be a CD is can be a cassette or even a record.

HINSLEY: Mine was Nirvana `Unplugged at MTV` I believe that was in grade 3, so that was my first one and the last one I just purchased recently was the new Hinder CD.

CONFRONT: Oh nice and you?

KRIKIT: My first album was `Clumsy` by Our Lady Peace, I think that was like grade 4, like 1995 that was the first time I purchased an album.  The most recent would have been ehhh…

CONFRONT: Can be something you bought on iTunes.

KRIKIT: 30 Seconds To Mars `Beautiful Lie`.

CONFRONT: Yeah great album, they were here (in Montreal) last week if I remember correctly.

Hinsley: Oh cool.

CONFRONT: Your first and last concert attended as a fan?

(Krikit and Hinsley start laughing).

HINSLEY: I believe my first concert, that I remember was Garbage, when I was very young in Vancouver, and the last one I went to was with you guys…

KRIKIT: Three Days Grace.

HINSLEY: Exactly Three Days Grace, very great concert, those guys sound amazing.

CONFRONT: For sure, there are a lot of bands like that, you listen to them on the CD and they sound good but you see them live and then it’s WOW.

KRIKIT: Exactly.

HINSLEY: You don’t get the whole package deal.

CONFRONT: Exactly and Krikit your first concert?

KRIKIT: My first one was a guy named Carmen, who does like Christian music.  I was about 5 years old and that’s about the only thing my parents would let me listen to, so they took me to this concert. I just remember, he played at BC Place in Vancouver, and the whole freaking thing was sold out.  We were in the nose bleeds, up at the top, on the balcony and I just thought it was so cool that you can have one guy that can sing and play music and have thousands and thousands of people coming to see him.

CONFRONT: I understand that feeling; I’ve always been a big fan of live music too. Ok we have in the magazine a section called Daily Urges, obviously this section changes everyday and in that section each one of us at the magazine propose a new artist, or an artist we love very much and we feel is worth listening to.  What would be your daily urges? Are there artists you feel like they’re not known enough or an artist that would be considered old school and you guys feel like people should know about?

Silence….

CONFRONT: You guys are being very quiet.

KRIKIT: You’re actually making us think for once…

Everyone burst out laughing.

HINSLEY: You know, for me what I can think of off the top of my head, is stuff that I pull out and I listen and people are always wondering why, I listen to that or why I still listen to that …

CONFRONT: Okay.

HINSLEY:  Like The Cure, Robert Smith.

CONFRONT: For sure.

HINSLEY: It’s kind of like an 80’s thing, but that’s kind of my guilty pleasure, I’ve always loved this music.  I find some of my friends saying, who’s this? Who’s this? You know…

CONFRONT: It’s The Cure.

HINSLEY: Exactly.

KRIKIT: For me it’s one that I just kind of started to appreciate a lot more on this tour, because Faber, our lead singer, it’s one of his favourite band, it’s called Anberlin.  They’re starting to get some recognition; they’re actually on tour right now.  They’re going the other way while we’re going this way, across the country. And yeah, he listens to that CD all the time, and it just kind of hit me last week or so, just how: ‘Ok I listen to this’.  It’s a very very good CD.

CONFRONT:  It’s the kind of music that it’s not the first listen that makes you believe in it but if you keep listening to it, it just happens… I love this stuff.

KRIKIT: That’s probably the best kind of music.  A lot of CDs that I find I loved right away; you don’t listen to them as long.

CONFRONT: Exactly.

KRIKIT: But when it takes a little while to get into something, I feel like there is more meaning to it. It means more when it takes more time to sink in.

CONFRONT: Yeah a lot more background meaning too.

KRIKIT: Yeah.

CONFRONT: Talking about guilty pleasure, Hinsley you mentioned The Cure, apart from this band what would be one of your guilty pleasures musically? Like what would be the music you don’t want anybody to know you like?

KRIKIT: That would be Justin Timberlake.

HINSLEY: That’s exactly what I was going to say.

We all burst out laughing.

CONFRONT: It’s a very well produced album, very groovy.

KRIKIT: Yeah, I know and I’ve never felt that way about his music before.

HINSLEY: His record came out and it just blew me away.

CONFRONT: How do you guys feel you’ve evolved as musicians and as a band since your song won the contest on 99.3 The Fox’s battle of the band?

HINSLEY: We’ve evolved a lot.  Like going on tour and going through all those events together, that made us grow.  We’ve developed a pretty strong brotherhood.  Not only that but being in the studio for eight months straight, recording with some of the best names on the West side of the country, we just learned tons and tons from these guys. Also from being on stage, you learn so much, like if something goes wrong you just keep going.  Our confidence level is higher now.  3 years on stage is great experience and working with all these amazing musicians; I mean we still have a lot to learn but it’s been great.

KRIKIT: I mean just on stage, we’ve evolved so much, there are some videos of us on YouTube of when we won the contest and I mean we were pretty much just standing there you know.  Now we walk around, go crazy, have fun.  We’re much more comfortable.

CONFRONT: OK now the first album ‘7 Second Surgery’, talk to me about it, how do you guys feel about it, how hard was it, was it a hard road to do it or was it something that just came easily?

KRIKIT: I feel like it’s been a long road.  Some songs on that album were written three years ago when we won that contest, then we had to wait because Nickleback were recording in the studio we were scheduled to record in.  Then we were in studio for eight months.  We also worked hard with our producer too; he would not let us settle for something when he knew we could do better.

CONFRONT: Which is great!

HINSLEY: Exactly! We’re very proud of it!!!

CONFRONT: Ok, now let’s talk about touring.  Last year you guys toured with Hedley, you opened for Nickleback. Do you feel these bands have influenced you in any way? Or do you prefer being yourself or do you feel you’ve learned from them?

HINSLEY: First I think being yourself is very important but I think as bands, when you go on the road everybody learns from everybody.

CONFRONT: There is no competition.

HINSLEY: Exactly and we get along so well with the Hedley boys and the MXPX too, I think you learn little things from them and they learn little things from us at the same time.

CONFRONT: There is no like: ‘I’m bigger than you because you’re the opening act and we’re the main act’.

HINSLEY: No not at all, we were there as a request from Jacob.

CONFRONT: That’s very cool.

KRIKIT: One cool thing is that as of now we never had to deal with a band we were not friends with.

CONFRONT: Nice.

KRIKIT: Like Hedley we’ve been doing shows with them for a couple of years now so, we’ve become good friends with them, we’ve been trying to get them with a Hedley style prank war that we had when we toured with them, they’re scared of us now…You might not want to know about that…

CONFRONT: Hahaha, no I want to know about that, and I’m sure our readers will want to know about it too, go for it.

KRIKIT: OK well it all started on the first Hedley tour when we went to the Faber dressing room, because we were only Faber then…

CONFRONT: Right.

KRIKIT: There is a sign on the door saying “Gayber”… so we open the door of our dressing room and there is gay porn, plastered all over the walls, naked men.

HINSLEY: Nasty.
KRIKIT: So we ripped it all off the walls and the venue filed a complaint to our manager about the fact that there was all this paint ripped off the walls.

CONFRONT: Oh no.

KRIKIT: So when Hedley heard about that they said: ‘Ok we’re going to pay for it’.  But we decided we had to get them back anyway, so it was some more lewd things that you probably would not want to publish.

CONFRONT: Hahahaha.

KRIKIT: But once the guy from Musique Plus actually came up and toured with both bands for a little bit.  So when he was out, Jake took a boob cake – it was a huge cake – and put it all over their truck and the tour manager poured animal fat over all the rest of the truck, so we took our ketchup and mustard and wrote Hedley is gay all over their truck.  What else is there up to the finale?

HINSLEY: WOW it’s been a while man…

KRIKIT: Ok the big finale anyway… They thought they would get us really good and well after we finished our set, right before they went on they captured Faber, took his shirt off and duck taped him to a dolly…

CONFRONT: Oh my God.

KRIKIT: And they spray painted Hedley across his chest. Finally our final come back came.

CONFRONT: Ok.

KRIKIT: In this time of the year on the road between Regina to Winnipeg there is a lot of road kill: racoons, skunks, owls, all kind of stuff.  We took up a few of them and put them in a plastic bin.  So when we finished playing one night, we went in Hedley’s dressing room and took all the food off their buffet table, put down some garbage bags and put down all the dead animals on the table and obviously they had been in that plastic container for a couple of days now so they obviously did not smell very good.  So when Hedley finally came down, the guys from the bands puked all over the place and after that, we went on another tour with them not a single fight, and everything was ok.

CONFRONT: Yeah, I think you guys are fine now.

KRIKIT: I think that’s why Mariana’s Trench don’t do anything.

CONFRONT: Oh maybe hahaha.  Ok now I do have a fan question, Elisa from Ottawa knows Faber Drive has something to do with your lead singer Faber, but why did you guys decide on Faber Drive?

HINSLEY: Well yeah it started out as Faber, mostly because he was the main writer at the time.  Now, everybody kind of takes part in the writing process.  So when it came time to change the name because of legal issues, we … I guess the story is Red was driving with Faber and Faber thinks driving is a waste of time so he is the type of guy who would be driving his car playing his guitar, see what I mean?

CONFRONT: Of course.

HINSLEY: So Red was driving with him and Faber burnt a red light one day and Red screamed at him “Faber Drive”, and it stuck right; because the intensive driving Faber does is the same type of intensity we want to bring to our lives and on stage; so it just clicked. We still had Faber in there, important because we had already started having a fan base across Canada so we just thought it was perfect.

CONFRONT: You guys have a MySpace page. We’re an online of magazine, we have a MySpace page too, we’re probably friends of yours by now…What is your relationship with the whole internet connection to your fans? All the comments, messages, blogs; is it fun or is it too much?

KRIKIT: I think that to connect to your fans MySpace is the best thing that’s ever happened to bands.  It’s a special day to day relationship with them, you know.  There is multimedia, there are videos, there is music, there are pictures, everything a fan would want to know about the band is there, and it’s not like a website.   It’s easy, anybody can create their MySpace page, you know; it doesn’t cost anything.  But I mean on the road it can get very overwhelming.

CONFRONT: Because you can’t go everyday.

KRIKIT: Exactly and if you do go online it’s only for an hour or two, so it’s very overwhelming but as long as you stay on top of it daily, I think it’s very exciting and it’s a lot of fun because you actually get to know your fans and it breaks down the barrier between the fan and the artist.

CONFRONT: Ok now last but not least, this is another CONFRONT Magazine question.  As an individual or as a band, let’s say Faber Drive in 10 years, what would your legacy be?

HINSLEY: Well we definitely want to have a positive impact, you know what I mean?  We don’t want to be playing music for playing music.  We have goals of playing internationally for causes, it’s very important to us.  We want to give back that would be our legacy.  We want to say something.

CONFRONT: Krikit you agree with that?

KRIKIT: Of course.

CONFRONT: Great. Well that was it guys, thank you so much, this was a lot of fun.

KRIKIT and HINSLEY: Well no thank you, it was a lot of fun and hopefully we’ll see you later at the show tonight.

CONFRONT: Most likely.

Official Website:  www.faberdrive.com
Official MySpace: www.myspace.com/faberdrive

Editor’s note: We would like to thank Vanessa for the use of all the photography featured in this article.