Converge: The Kurt Ballou Interview

I sat down with Kurt Ballou, guitar mastermind of Converge and recording guru of Godcity Studio, before their show Oct. 10 in Denver. It was a cold snowy day and the band got in late, so I was stoked that Kurt took the time to give an interview. He had a lot to say. We got to talking about high school bands, solar powered cars and of course, the new Converge album and touring with Dethklok. 

SLUG: How was the show last night?
Ballou: The show last night was actually really good. I’ve been going to Salt Lake since I was 12 and it was my first time ever actually getting to go to the lake itself, so that was kinda neat. I tried to ride my bike on the Salt Flats but that didn’t work so well. It was sort of like quicksand. It was easy going straight and smooth, but as soon as you tried to turn or put force into cranking, all of a sudden it would suck you into the sand.  [As for] the show for us. We’re a band used to doing our own thing. Doing a support tour like this is not common for us. It’s an interesting experience. It’s a challenge playing to someone else’s audience, it forces us to try to play better and it keeps us in check. All of the shows, especially Salt Lake, have been surprisingly good for us. I was expecting a less warm reception from the audience. I was expecting mostly people who’d know about Dethklok through Adult Swim and don’t necessarily know anything about a hardcore band like us, or might not know much about underground music. Despite ticket prices being a lot higher than what a Converge show usually is, it’s actually been a lot of people who clearly know our material at the shows. They’ve made for pretty good shows. You know, they’re not like normal Converge shows because there’s a barricade and we feel pretty separated from the audience. 

SLUG: How is that for you guys? Whenever I’ve seen you play it’s always in the kind of venue where there’s not a huge line between the audience and you guys.
Ballou: Yeah, that’s what we prefer. As we’re getting older, our physical recovery is slower, there’s a little bit of personal space that we require. We grew up going to shows where there was really no clear delineation between the band and the audience, during the actual time of the show and also in terms of the community. Like, I go to a show on Friday and watch Timmy’s band play and I’m in the crowd and I’m singing along with his band and then on Saturday, Timmy’s in the crowd watching my band. That’s kind of the way it was. There was sort of a communal sense between audience and the bands playing. As we age, we get a little bit removed from that, but it’s definitely the kind of feeling that we like at our shows and it’s something that we kind of thrive on. In that, also I think that we sound better at those shows where there’s a visual energy to kind of lead your ear to hearing things sonically. A band like Converge, we’re really fast and really dense and we’re moderately sloppy live, so like at a big room like where we played yesterday, the Saltair, a big room like that doesn’t really lend itself to fast music. So, you couple that with being on a big stage and being really separated from the audience, it puts more emphasis on the sound of the performance and less on the visual excitement. But, when you’re in a smaller environment, the sound is less important and the visual excitement is more important, I think. I think we’re better suited to that because we’re not like a super professional band, we don’t have our stage show down, we don’t have like a lighting guy that’s got a bunch of stuff in sync with what we’re doing. That’s cool, Dethklok does that and it works really well for them, it’s not really what we do, so we’re definitely out of our element here. Like I said, we enjoy the challenge. 

SLUG: In terms of it being a different audience, how do you expand that punk rock ethos? What do you hope people take away, other than just getting a chance to experience your music? 
Ballou: Well, I think about it a lot in terms of the younger people, because everyone needs stepping-stone music. In my generation there was rap and then there was bands like Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth, Pixies, that started to get big. My generation was the first generation that ever had Headbangers Ball. We had the Bay Area thrash stuff that would sometimes come on. Headbangers Ball was like our stepping stone towards punk rock. We also had skateboarding, so we had Thrasher covering the punk rock stuff. So those were sort of like our stepping stones into hardcore. And then the generation after us had like Nirvana and Mudhoney and Pearl Jam and stuff like that, and then subsequent generations have this stepping-stone music. So a band like Dethklok and Mastodon, where they’re awesome in their own right, but they’re pretty inaccessible sonically and I’m actually surprised that that kind of band is as popular as it is. But those bands are pretty easily, in terms of acquiring the music, it’s easily accessible, I’m not saying it’s sonically easily accessible, I’m saying that it’s there for people that are looking for something. It’s not something that you have to dig hard to find. Whereas the hardcore stuff I got into as a kid was something you have to dig hard to find. You need this kind of stepping-stone music to inch you into this underground stuff. It inches you in by training your ear to hear more non-traditional sounds and tones and harmonic structure, and also through the network of bands that know each other and respect each other and are friends and put each other on their thanks lists and so forth and so on. You can find your way into underground music through that. So, obviously, Mastodon are a much bigger band than us, but we’ve been friends with them since they started that band. So a kid who’s 14 or 15 and knows about Mastodon, they come to a Mastodon show and maybe they see Converge and maybe they see something there that appeals to them. They look up Converge on the internet, then they see these other bands that Converge’s toured with and they know Converge is on Epitaph, and Jake from Converge runs Deathwish Records, so let me look into that, and then they see all the other bands. All of a sudden, a couple years go by and they’re fully into this underground scene. I kind of think about these big tours as a way of promoting where we’re from and bringing hopefully some people that truly have that spirit in them back to the roots of our music. It’s not so much about us trying to grow, or us trying to get more popular. It’s more trying to bring an audience to us rather than us go to the audience.  

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