Interview: Pallbearer
It’s always worth sticking around because life's full of wonderful things. It can be terrible, it can be frustrating, and depressing, and soul destroying, but it can also be really beautiful with good times.
Pallbearer have just released their latest album, the beautiful and powerful Mind Burns Alive and it sees the Arkansas doom metal masters reaching even higher heights with this new music. Gavin Brown caught up with Pallbearer lead vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell to hear all about Mind Burns Alive and the return of Pallbearer. As well as upcoming live shows (the band having just announced an unmissable UK tour with Baroness and Graveyard), playing on varied bills and memorable tales from the road for the band.
E&D: Your new album Mind Burns Alive has just come out. Does this mark a new chapter for Pallbearer?
Brett: Yeah! New album, new songs to tour on. I think it marks a new chapter in the sense that we are all in the same city again, and this is the first album that we’ve made since that change, the last time we all lived in the same city was the Foundations Of Burden era.
E&D: How has change that affected your music since your last album?
Brett: Well, all the music for this album was written before that change, but it was recorded after Joe had moved back, and we were back in the same city again. So we’ve yet to see on a songwriting basis. I’ve been writing, but we haven’t really dug into what our next album will be, so that’s yet to be seen.
E&D: How was the experience of creating and recording the album in your own studio, now you’re all in the same city again?
Brett: It was cool. We recorded the drums pretty close to all the rhythm guitars at Fellowship Hall Sound, which is the studio that we recorded Heartless and the Fear And Fury EP and some of our other stuff. They have a huge, awesome sounding drum room but everything else we did in our own studio. It was great, because we weren’t on the clock. In a normal studio setting, time is literally money and every second costs money, it puts a certain pressure on you that maybe isn’t necessarily the best situation for getting the best performance out of you. A little bit of pressure is good, but when you’re struggling with a tape or something, and you’re just like, fuck, we’ve only got two hours left. I’m killing time and there is so much to do! In our own studio, we can take as much time as we want, so that was very nice, especially for the way that we work.
E&D: Did having that time allow you to expand more on the songs?
Brett: Absolutely. I recorded vocals at my house, doing them in a room by myself allows me to meticulously go over every element. It’s not just four or five other people sitting bored in the control room while I do take 27! So it free frees me up to try different vocal approaches for sections, like the tonality of the voice or how quiet or strongly I want to approach each section. It’s a lot of freedom, which I like. I like to experiment.
E&D: What topics do you do explore on Mind Burns Alive, and is the album title, a commentary on mental health?
Brett: Yes, it is. The title feels like a headline, Mind Burns Alive, but it is appropriate for the subject matter, which is by and large, about various mental illnesses of sorts, I guess, reactions to trauma, and just the way that life can kind of push you up mentally. That’s essentially all the songs are about in some capacity. We decided together that the name works for the whole record pretty well.
E&D: Despite the heaviness and sometimes bleak nature of the album, did you intend for it to be a hopeful album ultimately?
Brett: No, I mean, it’s not supposed to be, There isn’t really an intent behind it in that way. It’s sort of a reflection of the way things are. It’s certainly not meant to be defeatist, or filled with this kind of absolutism. I think that despite the darkness of the subject matter, there is a way out, but you have to fight for it, you have to want it. That’s a sweeping generalisation, but I do think that if you’re struggling with mental illness, it’s always worth fighting to try to find the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Speaking for myself, I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety and there have been some points where I’m very, very low, I just can’t get out of bed, but I find a reason to do it and just keep going. It’s always worth sticking around because life’s full of wonderful things. It can be terrible, it can be frustrating, and depressing, and soul destroying, but it can also be really beautiful with good times, you know but you’ll miss out on those good times if you succumb to your problems.
E&D: Did making the album feel like a cleansing experience for the band?
Brett: Sure, yeah. The songs that I wrote personally are very much directed towards elements of my life that I didn’t have a way of addressing through other avenues. It was stuff that I needed to make for myself, and for some people involved.
E&D: Who have been the biggest influences on this album?
Brett: Well, I’d say we were still often drawing from the same influences that we have always drawn from, but different ones rise to the top. At this point, we’re kind of pulling from our own playbook but we’re trying to expand those sounds or focus on different elements of those sounds. I don’t think there was any overt intent for this album to have the more extended quiet sections, but that was just where the music brought us. It felt very natural writing these songs, it just felt like the right thing to do.
E&D: How have your recent live shows gone and have you been testing the new material out live?
Brett: I think we’ve played all but two of the songs live at some point since like 2023. We’ve played ‘Endless Place’ a lot, and the final song ‘With Disease’. We were playing ‘Signals’ quite a bit. They’re great. I mean for an untested song or a song that the audience hasn’t heard, the response has been seemingly pretty good. For an audience to connect with a song they’ve never heard before, it’s a a positive side for us.
E&D: How excited are you to be to be hitting the road in the US after the album drops?
Brett: The lineups really good REZN and The Keening are both really, really cool bands. We started writing these songs in like 2019 so I’m very ready to finally get to play them. I really like the songs, even after all this time, and focusing on them for so long. I’m just happy that they are done. They exist. They’re recorded. I’ve held the LP in my hand, I know it’s been printed. So to finally be on the other side of this five year long creation. It’s nice to finally get to the final stage, which is performing the songs live. So yeah, I’m very excited.
E&D: Wit starting creating these songs so long ago, have you had any thoughts about any new material?
Brett: Oh, yeah, I’m constantly writing. I don’t know where it’s gonna go yet. I think I have ideas of, loosely, what I’d like to do artistically. I’ve been writing quite a bit of different stuff. Some of it fits in with that overall kind of goal, and some of it doesn’t. So often, I am kind of a slave to whatever comes out comes out naturally, kind of guided by instinct but we’re still deep in this material in one way or another because doing interviews talking about it and prepping for tour, we won’t really get to dig in to new stuff probably until at least this fall or possibly next year. I think everything that we do is a reaction to the last thing that we did, and some of it is what we’re interested in doing comes from playing those songs live. Once we decide what we like, what what’s exciting about playing the elements of the new stuff, we’ll find what we want to do and what will be exciting next time. It will be easier to answer next year!
E&D: Going back to the tour. You’ll be playing with Rwake, REZN, Inter Arma and The Keening at various times on the tour. Are you fans of all those bands and are they perfect touring partners with Pallbearer?
Brett: Yeah, I love of all the bands and Inter Arma are very old friends of ours. We’ve been friends with those guys about 15 years, so we’ve toured together before and played lots of shows together, we crash at each other’s houses and stuff. They’re really really good friends and also just a staggeringly awesome band. Their new record is insane, it’s fucking wild! That’s very exciting. We toured with them and Gatecreeper years ago. The fact that we had Gatecreeper opening up tells you how long ago it was! That was a blast. Those guys are hilarious, and I’m very much looking forward to it. We have not toured with The Keening or REZN but we’re friends with at least a couple of people in The Keening, and we’ve met the REZN guys. They’re cool, so I’m excited to see all those bands every night.
E&D: Pallbearer have toured with everyone from Baroness and High On Fire to Yob and Enslaved. Who have you loved touring with the most in the past?
Brett: Really, Inter Arma was one of them because they’re very good friends of ours and have been for a very long time. Yob is another one. They’re also very close friends, and we did our very first European tour with them in 2014. Yob is an influence on the sound of us and Mike is a brilliant songwriter and just a wonderful guy and Aaron is like a brother and Dave French is also very cool. I haven’t known him as long, he’s a newer addition to the band. He’s really cool, too. We toured with them last year too. Most touring experiences are enjoyable. If you do for a living all the time, you understand what the roads like and most people are pretty chill. It’s always a treat to see bands that you like. We toured with Obituary several years ago, which was a pretty odd pairing you might think, and that was fun, especially because we intentionally played our heaviest stuff, we laid the fucking hammer down! It was fun to watch the Obituary fans with their arms crossed and the front row staring us down like, who are these fucking losers? Then watching them uncross their arms and start bobbing their heads by the end of the set, when you can win over the death metal diehards, that gives a great sense of accomplishment.
E&D: Do you enjoy playing varied bills with different heavy bands and different crowds? You mentioned Obituary there and you toured with At The Gates, Converge and Vallenfyre on the Decibel tour in 2015.
Brett: Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s a challenge and I like a challenge. I think our music is diverse enough that we can adapt to the circumstances. Like, if we’re playing with Obituary or At The Gates, we can choose to lean into our heavy stuff or we could sat, “Let’s really challenge their audience and play some softer stuff”, but you’ve got to be wise enough to know your audience. I think, it’s a lot of winning people over and I think that because our music is diverse enough that we can do that no matter who we’re playing with. I think it’s more interesting to see a variety of bands on a bill than it is to just to hear the same stuff over and over.
E&D: Will you be heading over to the UK in Europe at all this year?
Brett: Yes. We will be over there this fall.
E&D: What live performances by Pallbearer have stood out over the years for you?
Brett: When we played Hellfest. Through a series of bad circumstances, I got separated from everyone on the way to the train station and couldn’t get any help from the staff at the train station to get to the train that I needed. I’m from Arkansas, we don’t have public transportation here, so I’ve no experience with trains. I also have no experience with speaking French because I don’t speak it. So I had no way to really know how to get to the train to go to the city where I was supposed to be picked up. None of us had phones in Europe at the time, we learned that lesson for sure! Now I always make sure I have a Euro plan when I go over there! I came very, very, very close to not making that show, but what happened is Joe was able to figure out a way to get in touch with me, he had already been at the right place, so he came and got me and we took a separate train from the other two guys. A three hour train ride and we showed up twenty minutes before we’re supposed to go on stage. It was the biggest show we played at that point, and I was drenched with sweat, and just absolutely filled with the most intense stress and anxiety and rage at my inability to get there but we showed twenty minutes before the show started. By that point, I was incapable of feeling nervous because I just got through the worst fucking ordeal. So when we got on stage, we just destroyed it. We did a killer killer set, because I really needed to let out some frustration. If that hadn’t happened, I probably would have been nervous because it was such a big crowd, but I felt like I was completely in command of them. That was a memorable one. Another memorable one was when we played Roadburn for the second time. I had a chipped tooth my whole life, since I was a kid because my friend kicked a rock and hit me in the tooth. The dentists had put stuff on my tooth to hold it together, but there was a crack and the night before the show at Roadburn, I’d been singing karaoke with some of my friends in Berlin and clinking a beer top on my teeth and I felt a piece of something come out like enamel. So once again twenty minutes before going on stage at Roadburn, I was brushing my teeth and went to spit the water out and basically, the whole front part of my tooth had fallen off. I was like, Guys, it’s a real problem here, I looked like Lloyd from Dumb And Dumber and everyone was fucking just dying laughing at me! I had to go on stage with a huge lisp and I sounded like Sylvester The Cat! It was ridiculous! I’ve never felt more Arkansas in my life. The tooth fell apart right before I went on stage and I had to do the show before I could get it repaired.
