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Interviews: Thrice

Rock Sound talks sport and second careers with Thrice drummer Riley Breckenridge...

Strange fact, Thrice drummer Riley Breckenridge nearly made it in the world of baseball. ''I had professional scouts coming out to some of my college games,'' he admits. Now he and his brother are the rhythm section of Thrice and despite the polar opposite world which they now inhabit there are some bizarre similarities, especially when it comes to scouts (and we are not talking the cub kind). ''The sports scouts are a little more hands off,'' remembers Breckenridge. ''You know that they are watching you and that they are taking notes on all aspects of your game. They dissect you, from your physical makeup to your game to what they think your mental make up is but they do not really talk to you and interact with you they just profile from afar. It is scary and I did not deal with it well, if I found out there were scouts at the game I would get so nervous and not perform well which is probably one of the reasons why I did not make it.

From Riley's experience, the music industry scouting equivalent, the A&R man, is far less subtle in his methods. ''The A&R watches you and builds that profile from far away but then comes up to you and showers you in compliments, most of which are not true," admits the drummer with a laugh. ''They put on this schmooze thing that scouts do not, they just watch and report back to their higher-ups, the A&R guy just wants to tell you that your band is amazing, buy you drinks then arrange to take you out to dinner.''

For this and many other reasons Thrice are not such a great fit in that world and thus they find themselves releasing a two disc, four part concept record on semi-independent label Vagrant. However, the band are not surprised to find themselves where they are right now. ''I think we went into this project knowing we would probably be where we are now,'' comments Breckenridge. ''It was something we really wanted to do and I don't think we were really comfortable on Island anymore. I am grateful for all the opportunities we had there and for some of the people there, especially our A&R guy (Rob Stevenson) who is actually one of the few guys who is not all about the schmooze. I can talk to him about life and whatever whereas most other people we met just wanted to talk business and numbers. I miss Rob but I do not miss that world. I am also glad that we were able to experience it because I think you cannot really understand it until you are fully into it. People that hold onto indie cred have no idea, people that have been there understand there are shades to it. I do not think any of us wanted to be the next huge rock band, we want to make the records we want to make and tour hard and hopefully have a base of people that enjoy what we do so that we do not have to worry about singles and videos and radio play.''

For a second it seemed like Thrice were going to become the next huge rock band alongside Thursday who were both pushed hard by their record label in the hopes that they would become the next radio friendly unit shifters. ''There was definitely an effort to make our bands the next grunge or whatever we were supposed to become,'' remembers the drummer. ''It just did not work. I don't know why it did not work but I know it was never a goal of ours to be enormous, we just wanted to keep doing our thing and see what happened rather than try and make things happen. We just wanted to be ourselves and I think that us doing that is not a very marketable thing. We did not want to do stuff to get headlines or develop onstage personas to try and push the music. After being in the major label world and being presented with certain possibilities you can definitely see when a band decides to go with it, where they reason that despite not feeling great about something they want their band to be fucking huge so they go along with something for the eventual payoff of more record sales or rock stardom.''

Andrew Kelham