Colour Revolt

Colour Revolt’s line-up looks different than the last time you saw them. And Sean Kirkpatrick, one of two original members (along with Jesse Coppenbarger), is still a bit disoriented from the changes. Minus a guitarist, bassist and drummer — and entire line-up for some acts — Colour Revolt moves on with a new freedom to create and some confusion mixed in.

Still the core elements are in place, so longtime Colour Revolt fans should not fret. Kirkpatrick insists some of the builds are still there and that both remaining members were the source of the band’s material anyway. Perhaps they’ll find less is more as they move on, but in the interim, they’re still trying to make sense of what happened.

SSv: The direction for The Cradle… when did that first begin to take shape?

Sean Kirkpatrick: I think it sort of became more evident as certain people were leaving the band and stuff like that. It was almost a direct response to people moving on with their lives and stuff like that. A lot of these songs grew out of that drama. I think there were some song ideas there in the beginning, but the direction we were taking wasn’t fully formed until some of these directions started happening within the band.

SSv: Can you take us behind that drama?

Sean: Well, I think the glamorous rock star life fizzled out for some of the members. They realized that we weren’t going to be an overnight success. I don’t want to talk about them in a negative light, but I think they realized they were in it for the long haul more than they expected. So out of that, people realized, ‘Hey, maybe I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. Maybe I want to go to graduate school. I want to bet on a more sure thing than the musician’s life.’

So in that, it separated the guys who were really in it to see things through than those who were just having fun and enjoying it at the time. So in that, we lost a guitarist, a bass player and eventually a drummer. Our drummer was in it until he got heartbroken by these other friends who had left the band. He helped us out with some demos for this record and stuff like that, but eventually it got too much for him, I guess, and he said he couldn’t handle it — even though he’s still playing music with other people.

But he couldn’t play with us, I guess. He recently heard the record and says it’s the best he’s heard in a long time, so it’s really funny how things work out like that.

SSv: It sounds like you’re still confused by all that’s transpired.

Sean: I am, sort of. I will admit that. I don’t exactly know or can’t go into their minds and know what they expected of the last record and what they expected out of touring, but it seems that they were very disenchanted by it. They couldn’t stand looking out of the windows of a 15-passenger van. The reason I don’t think it’s a personal issue is because it didn’t seem there were any real complaints between any of us. If anybody ever into an argument, it was just stress. I don’t think it was some personal angst against anybody. I just think people were having some serious quarter-life crisis going on and so they wanted a sure thing.

That’s all I can think of it as. Jess and I were really surprised, but we decided to just keep going. We decided this is what we’d rather be doing even if we don’t know if the next record will be a success or anything like that. I think that’s what really finalized it and made us keep moving forward with this.

SSv: So what does this do for those who stay?

Sean: It confirmed that we wanted to really go through with this. I will admit that at one point, Jess and I wondered, ‘Should we really do this?’ We’d never thought of the band as just us two driving it along, but we realized in the end that we were the ones who were actually driving it along and there was no reason to really quit, considering how far we were into the music world and how many we could find to help us out with this record.

We started sending this record out to other people and they said this was some of the best stuff we’ve heard in a while and that they wanted to be a part of this. We realized that maybe we still had a little something. Maybe we hadn’t hit a dead end as far as songwriting goes. If it’s anything like what these others are saying, it could be an actual record people would want to listen to. So we realized that maybe we could write songs by ourselves and be successful at it.

So in that, it helped us confirm what we thought we were, which is musicians. [Laughs]

SSv: That’s really interesting to see how people respond so differently to this same crucible. Does this produce something healthy in you?

Sean: It really helps our interactions when things go wrong. It seems a lot of the negative aspects came out. We almost broke up and now we’re starting back up again, so we already quit in that respect. That was the worst thing we could have done. So you think, ‘Well, we already quit the band. But now we’ve started up again. So we’ve done the worst thing that can happen to a band and yet we’re still going on.’ So now we can keep going. Things just don’t seem as dramatic as they used to be since we’ve gone through the gauntlet, I guess.

SSv: How does the new line-up affect the songwriting?

Sean: I think we felt a lot more freedom about what we are going to do. For the last record, we were trying to support this persona that we thought we were projecting, this character of our band that said, ‘Colour Revolt doesn’t do this with a melody. They do this. They always stay in minor key. They’ll always have a build-up dynamic on songs.’ We still have that build-up dynamic in some songs, but after things happened with the band, we think, ‘Who cares? Let’s write it the way we think it should be written and not how people will expect.’

On the last record, we were trying to please everybody else, but not really ourselves. We thought we had to keep up with this characteristic of the band. I think ultimately that screwed us on the last record. We weren’t writing honest songs. [Laughs] That sounds weird to say, but on our first full-length, we had all of this anxiety that we had to sustain this role that we didn’t really have. The world wasn’t watching out and trying to see what happened with Colour Revolt. I think we just thought that way.

So when we went through that and realized our perspective was ridiculous, we just started writing songs that we wanted to write. I think this record is a complete proper representation of what we should have written the first time.

SSv: So there’s a new sense of freedom, too?

Sean: Definitely. Now, it’s like, ‘Who cares? Just write the songs the way you want.’ Nobody expected anything from us and a lot of people thought that we quit. I think it was this freedom to do whatever we wanted to do, which is a great feeling.