Has it been 5 years?

Has it been five years already?  Seems like just yesterday I was waiting impatiently for our first issue to go live on August 31st, 2006 and here we are, 60 issues and two redesigns later, getting ready to bring you Backstreet Boy, Nick Carter, as our October cover story.  What a dream come true.

Everything we have accomplished over the years has been nothing short of wonderous to me.  I have always been such a fan.  A fan of music certainly but also a fan of performers; and I live my fanatism openly though demeurely.

I have never been the type of person to harrass celebrities for a picture and though I have spent my fair share of time freezing my buns off in below freezing weather just to catch a glimpse of someone, I have never «Stormed the Gates » as it were, to get overly close.  As I got older however, I started to have less and less patience for these activities and one day decided that sleeping outside for days to get front row tickets to a concert didn’t interest me anymore.  I felt saddened by this sudden lose of interest in something that I had ben so passionate about… as though it meant I was now a boring adult…

CONFRONT Magazine has been a natural progression from those teenage days of whistfully dreaming of meeting celebrities and being content to basque in their aura, as they performed on a stage ten feet away from me.  It has become my adult way of being who i am at heart; a dreamer, a fanatique… a reporter.

Celebrities still facinate me and rubbing shoulders with stars is still intoxicating but I found as I got older that needed more.

As some of you may already know, CONFRONT Magazine was born from a rather simple desir.  I wanted to meet Jared Leto.  I had been a fan of his dating back to my teenage years and he represented something I had never encoutered.  He was at once a beautiful and shinning hollymood movie star to stare and marvel at, while at the same time being a more accessible recording artist in a band that hadn’t yet to rocket to the top of the charts.

That juxtaposition was incredible to me.  He represented something that fascinated me: A « normal » celebrity.  The fact that the music his band, 30 Seconds to Mars, put out truely spoke to me was all the more reason why I wanted to meet him.  How though?

An “in passing” comment made by my friend Christine, who later became my business partner for CONFRONT’s first two years of operations, seeded an idea in my head that quickly took root.  Why not start a little music blog and see if we can get an interview.

Who could have predicted the outcome.  Roughly three months after that little idea was planted we were launching a full fledged online magazine with 30 Seconds to Mars on it’s cover and Simple Plan and it’s first straight up interview.

In honor of these wonderful five years, I would like to share with you some of my favorite interviews to date.  I hope you enjoy re-reading them as much as we enjoyed working on them.

Thank you for reading us all these years and I hope you continue to visit us as we continue to bring you the latest in music.

All the best,

Angel Karmazenuk

Editor-in-chief

2006 – 30 Seconds to Mars – interviewed by Angel Karmazenuk

excerpt: (…) By the time Matt and a still half asleep Tomo joined us, Shannon was headed to the venue and I had thankfully managed to regain my composure. Following quick introductions, the ordering of a late lunch and some casual banter, during which Matt and Tomo exchanged playful polemics to determine who got to tell who what to do and at what time – Tomo concluding that it was “an almost natural predicament” – we got down to business. (…)

2007 – Mutemath – interviewed by Stéphanie Chicoine

excerpt: (…) Well Mute Math initially started as a side project just with the drummer and myself.  I was playing in another band at the time and I was getting these demo CD’s with some instrumental tracks from Darren and I was impressed so I invited him down to New Orleans to set up and record some songs and things kind of clicked.  I thought it would be a great side project; we weren’t sure of what was going to happen. (…)

2007 – Strata – interviewed by Sophie Ferrandino

excerpt: (…) I think that there’s definitely, as far as like following and obeying laws, people are definitely afraid of authority still and maybe that’s good but, as far as moral consequences, I think you’re right. I think that people definitely lack those and they’re being desensitized every day. Look at pop culture right now. I went to the movies and I had all this time to kill and I was like: “I’m just going to go to a movie by myself”. I walk up and I look to see what’s playing and everything is torture. They’re all movies based on people torturing each other, it’s a really weird social fad I guess… (…)

2008 – Megadeth – interviewed by Judith Lalonde

excerpt: (…) To be frank with you I’m still working on my metal side. I love rock and roll and I was around when Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Beatles were around and to me this is a spinoff of the stuff that I love and I’m enjoying it very much. I learned more about the metal bands by playing covers with other bands. This is an addition to my musical career. (…)

2008 – Chiodos – interviewed by Gemma Pietrollino

excerpt: (…) Like any fan, I of course have my favourite band member. That’s not the say that I dislike or don’t care about the others, but my interests are more directed toward front man, Craig Owens and guitarist, Jason Hale. Not for any particular reason other than they are the two I am most familiar with. That’s why I was happy to learn that my interview was with drummer, Derrick Frost, so that I might learn something new. We settled into a comfortable, out of the way, spot and after our hellos and how-are-yous, we began our conversation. (…)

2009- All American Rejects – interviewed by Melissa Payette

excerpt: (…) We kind of went against the label’s advice to release ‘I Wanna’ which is the first song on the record. You know we felt that although we did get to expand on ourselves sonically, just with actually using real loops and instrumentation on a song like ‘I Wanna’ it’s kind of a road we’ve already traveled. We want to expand our fan base with this new song ‘The Wind Blows’. So we’ll see what happens!

2009 – Our Lady Peace – interviewed by M. Payette & J. Schukov

excerpt: (…) We’re musicians at heart who want to get better. By being a musician you pick the people you want to play with and we all got lucky in the sense that we found musicians that were good to work with creatively. We made a record that way and we just made record after record and this is number seven!(…)

2010 – Barenaked Ladies – interviewed by Melissa Payette

excerpt: (…) Aside from the psychological elements of men in our 40’s getting ready to sleep on a tour bus for the next 4 month… and trying to anticipate the aching back and all the other diva-like complaints that come with being a man in his 40’s not in his own bed, we’ve been rehearsing the songs and preparing riffs and ideas for exciting moments on the stage. Essentially putting our heads together and coming up with one heck of a show!

2010 – Marie-Mai – interviewed by Christine Jutras

excerpt: (…) It’s a challenge. Because the market over the United States and over Canada is very different. It’s night and day. It’s really important to meet the right people. People who believe in you, people who want to go in the same direction as you so that they don’t want to change you. That will definitely be a challenge but you know what, I loved conquering Quebec one people at a time and I’m sure I’ll enjoy doing that in Canada or the United States one people at a time too. (…)

2011 – Simple Plan – interviewed by Lili-Anh Le Minh

excerpt: (…) As we moved onto the inevitable subject of their album, I asked about how their sound has evolved throughout the years. After all, it had been almost 10 years since the release of their debut album. From what I understood of recent interviews, it was described as a mash-up of the best Simple Plan elements. Here’s how Sebastien put it: “It’s everything that Simple Plan is good at so we wanted to definitely bring back all the fun and kind of young-ness of the first record and the energy and the live feel of the second record. And then clearly some of the deeper stuff like the song Astronaut which is maybe reminiscent of the third one. But I don’t think this record could’ve been anything but our 4th record, you know? It’s definitely an evolution, a step forward: Simple Plan 2011, as we like to call it.” (…)