ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 22 JULY 2011
Melbourne sextet Dream On, Dreamer has already had a busy 2011 and it doesn’t look like slowing down soon, either. With their album completed and a Victorian tour just wrapped, the group will now be gearing up for their national jaunt with Avenged Sevenfold, announced a day after this interview was recorded. Follow that up with the album’s release, a national tour of their own and shows overseas, and Dream On, Dreamer won’t be doing a lot of resting on their laurels.
“The bands we toured with, we all got along really, really well. Every show went well and we all had a lot of fun,” says vocalist Marcel Gadacz of the recent Push all ages tour.
In August, the band will be out covering much more ground on the Heartbound tour in support of the album of the same name, due out August 5. Heartbound was laid down in Florida earlier in the year with producer Cameron Mizell over seven weeks, and Gadacz is extremely pleased with the result.
“It was very professional and we were really pushing to get the best sound for the album. We couldn’t wish for any other people… any other producer to be working with. It was just great and we were all friends by the end,” he says. “The whole recording process [went] really well. The pre-production was in Melbourne, and got prepared for a couple of months. The production was booked probably half a year before and we knew our little deadline when we had to have all our songs written and all our pre-production done. We can’t be happier with how it turned out.”
Recording in Orlando made Dream On, Dreamer concentrate on the task at hand, because it meant they couldn’t just scurry on home at the end of the day. Being away from home is no stranger to Marcel, who came to Melbourne as an exchange student from Germany, joined the band and has been here ever since. For him, it was definitely a constructive experience.
“ We were Orlando, Florida, so it was kind of like an extended summer coming from Melbourne. It was a positive, happy time,” he explains. “We didn’t see any pressure and we didn’t see any stress. In the studio we had a good time doing what we love doing anyway. You can’t go home at the end of the day, but I think that makes that whole feel… that you’re away from home and you’re there for a reason. You’re not there to stuff around. You gotta do it properly because you only have a limited time booked in the studio.”
The task was that much easier due to the time the band had spent on pre-production in Melbourne. All the songs and preparation had already been done, so all that was left was to record and Mizell work a little of his magic as well. While he acknowledges that the producer has a positive creative role to play, Gadacz says that Dream On, Dreamer prefer to have their material down before heading to the recording studio.
“There’s some bands that actually go into the studio and write the songs with a producer,” he says, “which we’re not really a fan of because it feels like an album that we didn’t do: the producer wrote the album, not us. The way we’ve done it is the way we’ll probably do it in the future, because we’re prepared, but the producer has a few ideas that develop the sound as well. Things you don’t even think of when you write the song.”
As for how the album’s songs compare to their previous EP, Gadacz describes the new material as a more mature sound with a more original take.
“What changed was that we worked on being mature with our sound, more outstanding and more unique,” he says. “It’s just a progression of our old stuff, but it’s still like what we sounded like on our last album. Without sounding cocky, I think we always had a bit of a unique sound. With this album we’ve clarified it a bit more and not doing what everyone else is doing. Of course there’s influences. We don’t really try to sound like any other band. That’s the first thing. If anything sounds like we’ve heard it before, we’re not going to go with it. It’s coming from us, not anyone else.”
Now that Heartbound is in the can, they’ll finally be able to add some new songs to their live set, something the singer is fired up for.
“It’s gonna be great,” he enthuses. “Especially because… you play the songs every day on the tour. I’m not saying they’re getting boring, but it’s just the same thing. And now we’ve got ten new songs to play, and we’ve only ever played two of them so far. So for the next headlining tour will just be awesome, because it will be a fresh new sound. Everything’s going to be really exciting because we haven’t played these songs before and it’s going to be exciting to see the crowd reaction. Definitely something to look forward to.”
Something else to look forward to is an impending European tour with Memphis May Fire and The Colour Morale, directly after their Australian run.
“Thirty shows, which will be very exciting,” Marcel says.
Twenty hours later, Dream On, Dreamer was announced as the main support to tour Australia with Avenged Sevenfold, which I’m sure he would have also been quite excited about. With Heartbound about to lob and such prestigous shows to back it up, Dream On, Dreamer aren’t just dreaming anymore.