DS Exclusive: Crusades premiere new song and video, plus interview with singer Dave Williams

[rug]

Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:00 PM (PST) by Carson Winter

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For me, Crusades has always been a band driven by concepts and from what I’ve heard, this is probably the most personal you’ve gotten with one. On Perhaps You Deliver… there was the real life story of Giordano Bruno to buffer the intimacy of the songwriting– not to say, that album was impersonal, but the concept was not nearly as visceral, immediate, and relatable as the loss of a loved one or grief. Do you find it necessary to write within a concept or does it just happen naturally? I’d love to hear about your songwriting process, because Crusades has always impressed me with their incredibly cohesive albums.

Dave: I’d say that This is a Sickness and Sickness will End is undoubtedly the most personal Crusades record thus far, at least in that it is entirely personal. The Sun is Down and The Night is Riding In was also very personal at times – it was the first time I tried to write about a lot of the things in my life to that point that contributed to the often anxious and angry (shout out!) person I am now (which, I’ll add, I’ve gotten considerably better at managing in the past few years). But I also interspersed the deeply personal stuff with some vehemently anti-christian rhetoric and situations which, now that I’ve had plenty of time and distance to reflect on that album, likely served both to maintain some degree of comfortable detachment and to make the whole thing a bit more sensational and appealing.

I definitely took a different approach with Perhaps You Deliver, almost completely avoiding any personal ties to the lyrics and instead using Bruno’s life as a focus for what I thought had become Crusades’ raison d’etre: spouting even more pointed diatribes against the catholic church and christianity as a whole. But, and this is not only the first time I’m writing this but maybe even the first time I’ve boiled my thoughts down on the subject, it was ultimately unsatisfying. Certainly live, with the Perhaps You Deliver songs (aside from a couple that have some deep, personal parallels), I’ve found it difficult to stay completely connected and in the moment, which I attribute to singing about someone else as opposed to my own experience. And if it’s obvious to me that my performance isn’t coming from a sincere, feeling place, I assume it’s obvious to the people we’re playing for as well.

This is a Sickness… and the two years leading up to it changed how I feel about a lot of things, including the potential scope of this band. Being so immersed in illness and loss and grief for so long, I couldn’t help but write about it. From the day we learned the diagnosis up until the funeral and for some time after, it was essentially all-consuming. I dwelled on how my wife was feeling watching her mother die, how my young daughter was feeling watching her parents and family grieve, how my father-in-law felt as his whole life and future ground to a halt, how I felt as a husband and father to women who have the very real potential for this sickness hardwired into them, about how temporary all of this is. I couldn’t possibly have written about anything else. And I think to find some kind of comfort, I looked to lyricists and poets who’ve been driven to create after feeling something similar. And I found that so many people, for so long, have shared these same harrowing experiences and made something so incredible and cathartic and relatable out of them – I really wanted to do try and do the same thing. The idea that something we did as a band could in some way be a comfort the way those writers were to me, suddenly that seemed a lot more important than just still being pissed off about idiot christians.

Anti-Christian rhetoric is another key part of Crusades identity. For better or worse, satanist pop punk has sort of become the log-line of your band. Is Satanism as integral to your music as us music journalists make it out to be?

Dave: Ah, my favourite sub-sub-subgenre, ‘Satanic Pop Punk’. As I mentioned, we certainly played up the Satanist element on the first EP and LP, and I think that it fostered a decent amount of curiosity in our band when it was new, but I should clarify that none of us consider ourselves true Satanists. There are absolutely tenets of the Laveyan and Satanic Temple philosophies that I agree with, and Crusades certainly embraces atheist/antitheist thought, but I can safely say that none of our personal philosophies are entirely congruent with any established order. And while I dismiss the ‘Satanic Pop Punk’ label because I’d prefer not to be lumped in with any post-Misfits horrorpunk/psychobilly/cartoon camp nonsense, I’m more concerned that, at this point, it’ll either draw initial interest from people who won’t dig what they hear or serve to keep away folks who might really dig our stuff. But I suppose that’s the risk of intentional, significant evolution away from one’s early output. It all seems to find the right sets of ears eventually.

http://dyingscene.com/news/crusades-premiere-new-song-and-video-plus-interview-with-singer-dave-williams/