Dave Sittig, bass player for Impending Doom, sat down with me to discuss their upcoming album release. While discussing the release and any upcoming shows, the conversation turned to the struggle of balancing a passionate music career and family life. He was light-hearted and honest about everything, but it gave a great look into the struggles of a musician, and gave me an even bigger appreciation for musicians who have to balance everything in order to put out their art for fans and expression.
Their upcoming album relates to the modern day chaos our country has been witnessing. Asking those same questions asked in their music, I’m looking forward to their release. Be on the lookout for their new album, and any tour dates and read below for a look into a musician’s life.
Side Stage Magazine: I saw that you guys are releasing your sixth album in just shy of a month.
Dave Sittig: Yup! It’s coming up.
That’s exciting! What was the whole process of making it? How long did it take to write it?
It kind of took a little while. It took a few years from us writing it to recording it to having it all done. Mainly because we took some time off the road to be with our families and kind of slow down the crazy Impending Doom train that’s been going nonstop for the last ten years. We kinda took our time with this one. It definitely took the better half of two or three years to get it going.
I don’t blame you guys for slowing down. I know what it’s like to be going too fast, so that’s good you took the time and I’m sure it’s going to show in the quality of the album.
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s just as important as getting out there and playing. When we wanted to take a step back, we were just beat from doing it for so many years and going nonstop that it’s just better for the band to get a little refresher I think.I think it worked out in our favor.
Oh yeah, definitely. There’s that metaphor that “You can’t fill up anyone else’s cup if yours is empty.” So I’m glad to hear you guys took a refresher and you’re feeling reenergized.
I like that metaphor. I hadn’t heard that.
Oh, I use it all the time!
I was listening to your last album, and I have to say that “The Great Divide” is my favorite song. I love how it ends with the piano for two minutes, and I love when metal music fuses other genres.
Yeah. That’s one of my favorite songs off that album too. It’s just a little different, and I’m more attracted to the different, unique song on the record. So, I’m glad to hear that.
Is this new album gonna be different from your past albums, or is it gonna be your own style?
It’s our own style. It doesn’t take a big left turn on the singing or gotten soft or anything like that. It sounds like Impending Doom and we’re a bit heavier and more pissed off sounding each time around. I think that’s what we’re trying to achieve.
That’s great for head-banging and moshing!
Yup!
Does the album have an overall theme?
Not really, but I feel like that the majority of the lyrics are influenced by what’s going on in the world today, like all these horrible things that you’re seeing every day in the news. All the crazy things that make you just take a step back and ask “is this really the world we live in nowadays? It’s insane. “ So I feel like a lot of our stuff goes off of that.
Sounds like a lot of people are going to relate to it.
Yeah, definitely.
I was talking to another musician the other day and we were just talking about how music is that one universal language and sometimes it’s the only language you can express what you’re feeling, and that’s why metal is so popular. Sometimes that anger you’re feeling, it’s the only way you’re able to express it, through that music.
Yeah, absolutely!
So, I saw that you guys just finished a short tour, and there’s no new dates. Are you guys going on tour after your album releases?
We have some shows booked right now, but we’re mainly doing exclusive shows from now on. We’ll fly out on a Friday, play on a Saturday, and come home on a Sunday. We’re playing all over, but the days of hopping on a bus and being on the road for 40 days straight, those days are long gone. I don’t think you can pay us enough to do that again. We kind of want to focus more on individual shows and making those shows bigger and better. It’s also a better thing for the fans, too. If we’re coming to your town once a year, or once every few years, everyone’s gonna go to that one show. It’s not like in the past when it’s like “Eh, I’ll catch Impending Doom when they come back to Texas, or come back here.” That’s how it used to be. We’d be there, and then back a couple months later. We’re gonna book a bunch of shows. Right now I think we have Anaheim, CA show next month, in like three weeks. After that we have a New York dates, a Pennsylvania date, a couple Texas dates. There’s some things in the works that we’re trying to get out there.
Wow! All over the States. Do you think you guys would go to Europe or Australia?
I would hope so. We’ve gotten plenty of offers to go to those places. It’s all about the logistics and making it work with all of our schedules and everything like that. Leaving the country is a little bit harder. It’s impossible to fly out on a Friday, play in another country on Saturday and fly home. I’m sure it’s something that, at the right time, we’ll do. We love playing Europe, we love Australia! We’d all love to go back, it’s all about making it happen.
I hope it happens!
Where are you from?
I’m actually in North Carolina, so I’ll be looking out to see if you guys come through here. I always see that European tours are really big and they don’t always get their favorite bands going through there.
Yeah. Europe always throw the big festivals that Americans never really get. I don’t know why it’s really popular over there. Like Download Fest, the massive ones with everyones with bands like our size to playing with Metallica and Iron Maiden and everybody playing over. I don’t know why they don’t do it out here.
There are a few, like we did Rockville and Fort Rock. It seems like they cluster them in one month. I was amazed, like Trivium and Ozzy and Five Finger Death Punch. It was pretty cool, but all these bands seem to have albums coming out around festival time, so it’s a nice promotion time for all these bands.
Yeah, but how many people were at that festival, if you had to guess?
The one I was at [Fort Rock] had 30,000.
That’s a lot of people, but the ones in Europe are 60, 80 [thousand], sometimes double or triple the amount of people. 30,000 is a lot of people, but Europe is just way more people. I don’t know why they draw so many people over there. Those metal festivals are enormous out in Europe.
I think with that many people, I would just maybe stay home and watch it from TV.
Oh yeah. I wouldn’t even go to one with 20,000 people! I’ve gone to a few arena stadium shows out here, and it’s a nightmare, trying to leave. I just regret it when I’m walking out, I’m just like “I should’ve stayed home.”
It’s better for me. I go and photograph and interview, so it’s better for me to hide behind my camera and when it’s too much for me, I can go back stage, but leaving was ridiculous. It took me two hours one night.
Yeah, I don’t mind playing them! Like you said, if you’re working them, you can go back stage. The more the merrier, I love the big festivals, but if you’re attending them as a fan, it’s god-awful.
Yeah, you don’t have to worry about heat stroke.
So is having families a big part of why you’re not touring anymore?
Yeah. Pretty much everybody is married, a couple guys aren’t married, but everyone is pretty much having babies or getting married and have their own companies or careers that they’re all doing. It’s not like the band isn’t as important or second to everyone else’s career, but–it’s weird. It’s everybody’s passion, but what I think a lot of people don’t understand is in music, in general, but especially in metal, there’s a giant gap of being a band our size, to a band like the size of Metallica. There’s a middle ground, there’s not a lot of bands out there that are “chilling” and making a living. I mean there are some bands that are, but not as many as you’d think. So, nowadays, it’s like unless you’re headlining and playing arenas and selling out huge arenas, you’re not really making what the average person working a career in California makes. Plus we all have our own career jobs and own our own businesses, and that’s why we do the fly out on the weekend thing. Our name is established and we can play shows anywhere and make decent money doing it, and obviously it’s not about the money, but at some point it has to be if you’re going to expect a band to be out on tour, away from their families. I mena, how do you pay for your mortgage, or how do you pay for your children and their school, and all things like that. So we’re just trying to blend, cause we always want to do that band-we always want to write music, and we always want to play shows, it’s just a little unrealistic to have a family and become parents and do that thing. We’re trying to blend the two worlds.
Oh yeah, I totally get that. I always wondered, I mean the touring life just seems so exhausting to me, it almost seems like in the music industry you can’t really have a family. You’re away from them all the time. The more musicians I talk to, it’s hard. I understand trying to find that balance for you guys. I can see that you’re passionate about it and that’s why you’re trying to juggle it, but like you said, you still have to pay the bills, so it’s totally understandable.
Yeah, and if we were all young and we didn’t want to get married and buy houses and have kids, we would all be dirty dudes in a van right now traveling somewhere and be loving it. When we’re all on stage, all of us still to this day, we’ll say that there is really no better feeling. It’s our passion, you don’t get that feeling anywhere else. We never want to not do it. I think fans will be surprised to know which of the bigger bands make big money, which make less money, and which make just enough to get by and not have anything after. I think not a lot of people on the outside see that. I’ve talked to people before that ask me “How many cars do you have and how many houses do you have?” and this and that. I have one car and one house, that’s all it’s ever gonna be. I think people sometimes, if they like your band, they think you’re bigger than you are. Or they see your videos on MTV and they think you’re filthy rich.
Especially today in the digital age. It’s a blessing and a curse. Now you can make your stuff more accessible to other people, but now so can everybody else, so you’re just fighting with everybody else to get those views and get paid.
Yup. It’s a lot easier to get known, but it’s not easier to get paid.
Like with YouTube and Vimeo, I don’t see how the industry is surviving. How are people getting paid with all this free access?
I have no idea! I’ve always understood that with YouTube, once you get over a million views, YouTube starts paying you, obviously it’s very small like a third of a penny per view after a million, or something like that. We’ve absolutely never seen a dime from YouTube and we have plenty of videos that have over a million views. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true or somebody’s getting that money somewhere and it’s not us.
It’s getting lost somewhere in the pipeline.
Yeah, that pipeline is like a maze, I tell you.
There’s a clog somewhere, better get some drain-o.
Yeah. Exactly.
Well, that’s all the questions I had for you. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. I’m excited for your new album and I’ll be looking out for it and any news or dates on your guys’ page.
Thank you for the interview, I appreciate it. June 22nd is when our album comes out, check it out!
Thank you, you have a great night!
