Pistols At Dawn are a hard rock band from Atlanta, GA who just released their debut record Ascension on Megaforce Records. Founding member and drummer Adam Jaffe recently took some time to talk about the band’s rise and the new record.
Please press the PLAY icon below for my conversation with Adam Jaffe of Pistols At Dawn –
On the lineup of Pistols At Dawn – So Devin White’s are lead rhythm guitarist. He and I founded the band back in 2015. He writes the majority of the songs, and he’s my brother from another mother. We have Cris Hodges, we have Sean Hinden who’s our bassist. Cris Hodges is our front man, he’s from California, he’s one of the best front man on the planet these days. We also have Will James, who’s our shredder, he is 21 years old, and he is Eddie Van Halen reincarnated. :40
On if the new lineup and record feels like a rebirth of the band – Yes. Actually, what took place was when we were created in 2015, we had our initial line up, we had another singer named Chris Pearson, he’s a very talented writer and talented singer. We had used him just to sing on our material, and one of our guitars passed away. We’ve had several rebirths, so I guess you could say. We rebirthed just prior to the pandemic, we decided to take it as far as we could go, and then obviously through the pandemic and out of the pandemic into Ascension. Coming into where we are now with Cris Hodges and all the line-up that we have now, it’s truly special. My guitarist Devin said to me recently, he’s like, “Adam, we’re home”. It’s really like when we’re all together, there’s just something truly special going on in the room that you can’t put your finger on, but you just know it’s there, and you just don’t want it to end. Every time we end rehearsals and everybody goes back home, it’s truly like something’s being taken out of us. 1:34
On the musical influences of the band members – We all are heavily influenced, Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Muse, Foo Fighters. They definitely all come out in our music and even progressive, Tool, for example, heavy influence, and you can hear it in “Under The Surface”. It definitely comes out and then for some reason, we just have our own twist on things. It’s like all of our influences come out and then our twist on it kinda takes over, so you kinda get the best of both worlds, like you’ve heard it before but you still know that it’s Pistols At Dawn. Devin and I are the guardians of that, and we make sure it sounds like Pistols At Dawn. His guitar and my drums really kinda give the backbone for that, and then when you add someone like a Cris Hodges to Pistols At Dawn, the guy has a voice of the gods, he is one of the nicest, most genuine, wonderful guys you could ever ask to be a member of a band with. He’s just a true consummate professional, he’s been a session singer and a pro lead singer for years now, and he just got it and he takes it seriously, and he takes pride in it, and he just loves being in front of people. He did bring his own influences to the table, whether that be Alice In Chains, or interestingly, if you ask him about his influence is growing up, he’ll tell you Michael Jackson and all sorts of other interesting influences. He was kind of in this very closed-off environment when he was little, he had very unique influences is very much, very different from what ours were, but then he got into the heavier stuff in Texas with Pantera and everything, and we just all click. It’s like one of those perfect dates where you just know things are gonna last and you’re probably gonna get married, or are you gonna get laid, one or the other. 3:16
On how involved the band is in their video concepts – We’re 100% involved in putting the concept together, we conceptualize them from the beginning to the end. Obviously, we use an incredible film maker, his name is Michael Muller with M3. He takes our visual and brings it to life. But we have an incredible creative director, her name is Ali, Ali Jaffe, interestingly, and she is brilliant with just helping, again, taking our ideas and bringing them to life and helping us bring the songs to life. I guess what I would say to you is this, is that we’re an old school hard rock band. What that means to us is that if you’re gonna be a rocker, you gotta plug and play, we don’t use a ton of track, we don’t use any tracks, we don’t use any tracks, we plug in and we play. We can play everything that we do. Not to say it’s bad to have tracks, every band uses tracks at one point or another, I’m just saying that we pride ourselves on that, we also pride ourselves on making music videos, we wanna be old school, we wanna be old school, we want people to see our music come to life. As you said, you watched “Under The Surface” and you got that Fight Club feel and the Joe Versus The Volcano feel and the Office Space feel, and it’s kind of like, “This is super cool, how are they doing this during the pandemic?” The answer is, we’re just finding a Goddamn way. Because when the pandemic hit, we put our heads together when we decided that we weren’t gonna let up, we out on eight videos during the beginning of the pandemic, and we put out another three with this album. We want it to be the full Hard Rock experience, and that’s what’s so important to us about the music that we make. 6:45
On being a young band and trying to get their music heard through streaming- It’s given us the entire ability to hold off to form the right team, and we’ve only added members as they were the right members for Pistols At Dawn. Every band wants every song when they’re all gonna be a single, right? Well, we believe we have at least five strong singles on the eight-track album and no fluff whatsoever. There’s not one song on the album, we believe is that song where you’re just like, “Oh, they just threw it in there, they just needed more songs on the album”. We don’t write 50 songs, we wrote 8 songs for this album, that’s it. We perfected them over and over and over. We wanted eight songs, 30 minutes, we didn’t want anybody getting bored, we didn’t want anybody just going to the next song or the next song, like all of us do. In this day and age, you have to learn how to market yourself intelligently, or you will not be able to do it at the professional level. You have to be able to wait it out until you have the right team or you won’t do it professionally. I tell people, that it takes a team to make this thing happen, and it takes a lot of hard work and effort. Someone accused me recently, they’re like, “Oh, you just hired your team and they just take care of it all for you”, and I think to myself, during the hardest parts of the pandemic, I messaged a million different people on Facebook, a million. We took it upon ourselves to literally engage with every single human being on earth that engaged with us during the worst part of the pandemic, and I’m just like, “You’re crazy”. Just to get our record deal, our production deal or anything that we’re doing, our manager, it’s all hard to work and you have to put your head down and you have to market like crazy, but smartly, and that’s the hardest part, I think of the industry these days. There are a lot of unintelligent ways to market yourself and that you have to kinda figure out exactly how to do it, and now we have this really unique team all over the world, and we can push “Go” now, and it’s really cool to see where we come out with. It took us a long time to do it, we had to touch and go touch and go, touch and go, Ascension comes out, press “Go”, boom, we know how to do it. Then we added for Ascension, we’re currently doing a big national radio campaign in the United States and with “The Truth”, and we added some of the top radio marketers in the country, and we’re just blessed that we’re in this position, to be honest with you. 9:40
On putting their record together – You bring up a very valid point with the amount of tracks and just to kind of the order of tracks, it’s interesting if you had asked or mastering engineer the great Maor Appelbaum,, who’s done Faith No More and a bunch of huge bands, he’s incredible, by the way. He had an idea for what order our tracks should be in to give the full hard rock experience. We went back to him at the very end and we were like, “We need to re-master it, we want the hits, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, we need to keep people’s interest”, and that’s really what the internet is all about these days, and what radio companies want these days, and what radio people want these days, it hit it, hit single, single, single, single single. We think we give you a great experience, but we definitely put them in a specific order based on the tracks themselves. As far as the pandemic and the break, the reality is this, we put our heads together and decided we are gonna make the best out of the pandemic. So it really provided some ample time to get together and knock this album out. Knock out our first EP, knock out the album, and now that everybody’s coming out of the pandemic a lot more, it’s so much better coming out with the music intact. I think a lot of bands did that, and the ones that did, including us, we’re rearing to go. 13:00
On touring in addition to the opening slot with Alter Bridge and Mammoth WVH – Everything is under discussion right now works. Well, the last member of our team, we’ve held out for just the right one is a booking agent. So, for example, we were contacted and connected with the Alter Bridge people, their management, and we had the good fortune of getting the offer to play with them based on the people we work with and our ability, and that along with all of our radio play we’re getting right now all over the US is definitely getting us a bunch of attention. Now we’re talking to some of the top tour marketers in the country, and so our goal is to sign with one of the best in the country very soon, we very well may do that next week, we have some very good opportunities abound. The answer to your question is “Hell, yes”, we’re gonna tour, hopefully very shortly, if not the very beginning of the year. I can tell you that our goal for ’23 is to basically start and we’re not gonna stop. We’re going everywhere, and then we’re coming back, and then we’re coming back again, and we’re coming back again, and then we’re going everywhere again. This band is all about playing, and we’re ready, the set’s ready, we’ve been rehearsing like crazy. If you look at our Facebook, we rehearse non-stop, we’re ready for the tour right now, we’re ready, so it’s just a question of ink to paper. We’ve got March lined up, we’ve got something else lined up in February right now, it’s gonna come out soon, and you know what, it’s time to go hit your neck of the woods, we need to go all the way up the east coast, all the way through the Midwest, we need to hit Canada, go to Europe, South America, we’re going. 14:43
On if the current lineup of the band has ever played live – Excellent question. Our past line-up, we played a bunch of benefit shows at the end of ’21 as we were completing the album and getting it mixed and everything. But the very new line-up, no, we’ve saved this, we’ve been working on this, we perfected our line up, everybody, there is no weak link, everybody is the shit at what they do. I’m not trying to toot our horn, I’m just trying to say we are very confident in what we do. If our first show with this line-up is in front of 10,000 people were ready to go. 16:39
On upcoming plans – So it’s interesting, we wrote Ascension a year ago, so it’s just coming out now, and so to us, we wrote this a century to go, and we’re just now getting to reap the benefits of it. The way we look at it is this, we’ve got no less than three radio singles on Ascension, hopefully, five, if we’re lucky, and we intend to put them all out to major radio in the United States, at least three of them. While we’re doing that, I would say that I can tell you that one of the fun things we do in our rehearsals is we always write new music. So we’re not intending to put out a new album any time soon, of course, we just put this out, but I can tell you that three new tracks are already 90% there, and so we’re playing the new tracks because it’s fun. I guess our goal is gonna be the tour Ascension like crazy, put out as many singles as possible, milk it for everything we can just to tour as much as possible worldwide. In our tours, you’re gonna start seeing us trying out the new songs and seeing how people react to them, and if they react the way, think they will, based on how we’re writing them now, then I think you’ll see either singles or a new album much sooner than later. 17:52
