Andre chatted to Three Days Grace guitarist Barry before the band’s show at Rock City on Tuesday night.
This is your second date in the tour, are you excited?
Yeah! It’s gonna be a long one!
We beat Van Halen, yeah! It’s really cool cause I grew up with Van Halen.
What does the new album ‘Outsider’ mean to you?
The way the world is right now, everybody is in their own place, not talking to each other. It’s kind of celebrating our differences as opposed to going against each other. So it’s okay to be different, you shouldn’t fall into the trap of “I say this so you should say it too, you know?” It’s cool to have your own opinion on something and agree to disagree sometimes. To me that’s what the record’s about.
About the album artwork, what does it represent?
It was a collaboration of some things, we knew while we were finishing up the record, that’s when all that stuff comes to mind ‘cause you think about the art and we were really thinking about those colours, the red black and white, they’re such great contrasting colours. So we had that in mind, and it’s funny because we started experimenting right away and we had a red cover with a black rhino on it, it really had no significance. But thinking of ‘Outsider’, our buddy in the label came up with the arrow idea, one obviously discoloured from the others, showing direction to somewhere else.
In the music video for “The Mountain” you’re playing inside an octagon, are you guys big UFC fans?
Yeah, I grew up watching it I think it’s awesome!
How come there’s no hockey in it, you being Canadian and all?
That actually came up, it was one of the first sports but we thought because we are Canadian it might be too obvious to do, doing a hockey thing. So we did consciously think about that. But we thought it was cool, skaters, basketball, a little bit of everything, right?
‘Outsider’ has old-school Three Days Grace vibes, if I’m not wrong you produced it with the same person who produced the first one, did you?
Yeah, we kind of did something really different we’ve never done before, we had two other producers, Gavin Brown, who did the first record with us, and he also did the last record ‘Human’. And Howard Benson, who did ‘One X’ and ‘Life Starts Now’. So this time around, we kind of had a blend of both, Gavin working with us on all the writing and getting the arrangements right and finished up everything with Howard, he’s great with vocals and we think that’s important that’s why Adam wanted to do vocals with Howard. So it’s cool to have both of their perspective, from two producers you really like.
It’s almost a year since the late rapper Lil Peep passed away. Going back to your previous record ‘Human’, how do you feel about his song “Witchblades” which samples your song “The Real You”?
It was interesting! I never met him, we just heard that song and thought it was neat, to do something totally different over a piece of our thing. I feel sad that the guy’s not here anymore.
Any new bands you’re into?
I really like Ghost lately! I grew up on classic rock of the 70’s, I was a big Scorpions fan and a lot of times they remind me of Scorpions or other bands like King Diamond at times, maybe Merciful Fate, stuff that I grew up on, I think they’re really cool. Also Highly Suspect, Neil was playing me some of their stuff and it was really cool, it has a 90’s sound to it.
It’s October already, what are your go-to Halloween movies?
I’m not a big thriller fan, my wife is though. I do love Halloween and the time of the year, the whole scariness thing. We’ll probably dress up for it!
What are you gonna be?
I don’t know, we’ve had some ideas but we’ll figure it out.
‘Outsider’ is out now.
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