An interview with Eric Weyer of Codeseven

Updated: 12/26/04

After their critically acclaimed CD entitled The Rescue, one was left in wonder as to what Codeseven would do next. Now signed to Equal Vision, the band’s latest effort is the ominously titled Dancing Echoes/Dead Sounds. Once again filled with complex tapestries that will surely stun their fans, Codeseven remain an compelling entity. We recently spoke with guitarist Eric Weyer prior to their hitting the road with A Static Lullaby and Hopesfall.

I understand you just finished a video shoot. What song was it for and how did it go?
The song All The Best Dreams, the second track, after the opening. Everything was amazing.

Is there a concept behind the video?
A little girl who’s apparently deaf and her parents who are arguing all the time. It starts off where she’s sitting at a table eating a bowl of cereal and her parents are fighting and screaming at each other and she looks at the cereal box and gets in this dream world. She takes off with this bunny rabbit who takes her into this dreamland. Then we come in and the video just goes along with the song. Things resolve in the end with her and her parents. It’s kind of weird; you just have to see it.

How do you think the new album compares to The Rescue?
I think it’s along the same lines but just a little bit more electronic, like the drum samples, more synth stuff… I don’t feel we strayed too far away from where The Rescue was done except for the new record which has way better production. We spent more time on it, it sounds better. Whatever comes out of us is what we like to do. We don’t specifically try to sit down and write something in a certain style.

It’s not as dramatic as The Rescue and the previous album Division of Labor.
Every album we do is going to be different. We’re always going to be adding something new just to keep it interesting. What good is playing music if you can’t experiment? Recycling the same stuff over and over on their albums. They’ll put out three albums that sound alike. What’s the point? [If only more rock bands felt that way! – Highwire Daze Bret] You keep a certain type of fan, but at the same time you sort of lose something. It think that’s very important when you’re a songwriter, to keep things interesting. That’s what we’re all about.

Dancing Echoes/Dead Sounds, what does that title mean to you?
I didn’t come up with the title. I’ll be honest with you, that was Jeff’s deal right there. When I heard it, it reminds me of us as a band, how we’ve all wondered in the past if anyone gets this, our music. It’s like the audience hears an echo but they don’t get it. It’s hard to digest. The dead sounds part is that what we’re doing isn’t the popular thing. Like ‘is it dead?’ Is it just something that people aren’t going to get? That’s what I thought when I heard it. We were all just sitting around in the van one day while driving and coming up with names, just spitting out things left and right and that’s just the one we decided on.

Does this album also deal with extraterrestrials and UFO’s?
Most of this album is about politics, love, sex, pretty much normal stuff. Not as much about extraterrestrials and UFO’s as the last record. When Jeff describes this record he says it’s about bugs, sex and politics. Jeff is a pretty insane person, so God only knows what goes on in his head when he writes lyrics.

All the bands were so different from each other on the Equal Vision Tour. How was that tour for you?
The first half, the first two to three weeks was good because we were in our territory. We were the ones dominating the shows, as far as drawing fans. But the second part, when Fear Before the March of Flames jumped on, the kids that came out the see them weren’t really accepting of us. It was a younger fan base that started showing up, 14-15 year old kids that wanted just to hear hardcore and metal and we went completely over their heads. They didn’t get a damn thing we did. The second part was definitely rough. Overall, the bands were awesome, we got along with everybody and we had a great time hanging out. But that kind of tour is not the kind of tour we need to be on. We need to be with bands that are closer to our own music. Just so we can fit in. Because we stick out like a sore thumb with bands that are heavy. We’re trying to get away from that, trying to find bands that are more like our style. But then again, what is our style?

What band would you like to tour with?
We had put in for the Muse tour. We didn’t get it unfortunately. But I think Muse would be a good band. I don’t keep up as much as the other guys do with who’s new. I think we fit well with Jade Tree bands. I’m really looking forward to…once Dredg’s new album comes out…doing a tour with them. Hopefully we can get something going. Surprisingly we do really well with Coheed. I was speaking to Josh from Coheed a few months back and we’re going to try to do something in the near future. We thought the kids were going to hate us when we went out with Coheed about a year ago, but we ended up selling about $1500-$2000 a night in merchandise. People were eating us up. Nobody really matches what we do. We’ll soon enough find our audience. We won’t have to support other bands, just do our own thing. We need to create a huge enough fan base that just comes to see us. Tool is a good example. They don’t sound like anyone else and they have some really loyal fans that come out to see them. Hopefully we can get something going to where we have our own crowd.

What is the weirdest experience you’ve had on the road?
The worst would be hitting black ice at 4 o’clock in the morning in Milwaukee and flipping our trailer and almost flipping our van. I was dead asleep when this happened and it was pretty scary. I thought we were all going to die. I was in the back of the van and God knows what we were doing driving. We were talking about pulling over and getting a hotel room because it was too dangerous to drive, but our tour manager at the time wanted us to get to the place. It was -8 degrees, snow and ice everywhere…that was scary. I think that was the worst experience I’ve ever had. Near death is never good. A weird one is probably just driving at night and seeing a huge ball of light in the trees right in front of me go off the highway. I’m not as much of a UFO fanatic as Jeff and James are. I have to see it to believe it. That was really weird. I woke everybody up, it just freaked me out. It was 2am in the morning and a ball of fire, ridiculously big, on a highway in Texas. That’s probably the weirdest thing.

Do you think that people have really been abducted by aliens?
I do, I think a lot of people say they have or maybe live in this fantasy world or just make themselves believe, but I do think it goes on. A lot of people don’t believe it. I do think that stuff goes on. The government hides a lot of it too.

After covering Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer for your first album A Sense of Coalition in 1998, what did you think about The Atari’s version?
I get a lot of phone calls from people who asked us if we were on the radio or if we already did that song. It’s cool they did, there’s no hard feelings. When we played it people always requested it and I never wanted to get big off of a cover song. Those guys got the pleasure of it. They gained a lot more fans because of a cover song. Better them then us. Hopesfall asked them about it and The Ataris weren’t even aware that we had covered the song already. We were on Howard Stern about a year back when The Ataris’ version came out and he played both versions and critiqued them and overall he liked our version better, which is kind of cool. I think our version blows because we did it the first day we went into the studio. We just threw it together. It came out pretty good, I guess, for 1997.

I love your cover of the song actually!
I guess I’m just being too hard on myself. I listen to it now and think it sounds so outdated.

You guys were actually on Howard Stern’s show?
We didn’t go [to the studio]. It was on his radio show. It happened twice. Right when our version came out somebody had brought it on. One of the producers was a big fan of us. They played it, and Howard said he liked it except for the screaming and then when the Ataris’ version came out he brought our version back on and they played both songs back to back. Then he took a vote of the people in the studio of who liked what version better. I know that Howard’s favorite was definitely ours. I’ve got calls about that too, like 6:30am in the morning people in New York are like “yo, I just heard you on the Howard Stern show!”

If Codeseven did a heavy metal cover, what song would you do?
I love so much old metal. It would be hard to pinpoint one band. I think Meshuggah is my favorite heavy band. Slaughtered from Pantera off of Far Beyond Driven is one of my favorite songs. It’s just bad-ass. I listen to that song and it has so much energy and so much drive to it that it makes me wish I had written that song. Then there’s another one, Surprise! You’re Dead! from Faith No More. That’s the one really heavy thing they did. We did cover that but way back when we 15. Nobody really knows about that, it was just something that we played around town.

Codeseven has three brothers in the band. Do they all get along?
The brothers get along. When John and James get drunk sometimes they fight and it gets pretty funny. We just sit back and laugh at them. The things they call each other, it’s just so stupid. As a band we fight, I’m not going to lie. It’s like a marriage. We’ve been together for so many years and we fight but we all know that we love music so we can have differences and at the end of the day we know what we’re here to do.

Would you like to be able to play some of the older songs live?
I’ve been wanting to play songs off of Division of Labor. I listened to that album about a month ago and I think the album was really well written. It was ahead of its time. With our new music those old songs don’t go along. A lot of people want to hear the old songs and who knows, one day we probably will throw in a few old songs here and there for special occasions. Especially Sod Within the Hill, that’s one of my favorite songs, and Steady State. Those are two songs I’d love to pull out, of everything we’ve done. People want to hear Incommunicado off of A Sense of Coalition. People bug us about that.

What do you say to people who are unhappy about you no longer being a hardcore band?
If you like hardcore and you’re not open to other kinds of music then what I have to say to them is sorry. Every band goes through some kind of change. Ours was a complete flip around. It doesn’t affect as many people as I thought it was going to affect. A lot of our fans stayed with us. We only gained more fans so I don’t think it was a bad thing, the change.

Which Simpson sister is better, Ashlee or Jessica?
Oh boy….mmm…both of them together, that’s what I want. I think they’re both hot, they’re both dope and they’d both get it. You can’t pick. They’re music, I could care less about. These pop stars, they all suck. They’re all puppets. I give most of them no respect because the majority of the time they don’t write anything. Everything’s been written for them and they’re just told what to do. Anyone who’s in music for that reason or does something like that I have no respect for.

What’s next for Codeseven?
We leave Friday to head out to L.A. to tour with A Static Lullaby, Hopesfall and Hawthorne Heights. That will be at the Troubadour this Sunday. We’re good friends with Hopesfall and A Static Lullaby so we’re really looking forward to it. It’s going to be a good tour. It’s going to be for five weeks, then we’ll be off for the rest of the year.

Do you have any messages for your fans in Southern California?
Just come out to our shows. L.A.’s been good to us and we appreciate everything. I’d like to give a shout out to Woven. They’re one of my favorite bands and they are from Los Angeles. They were on Interscope. Those guys are doing some new material that is awesome. We stayed with them and I hope the world is ready for them because they are kick-ass. Every time I hear more of their music I feel less of a person because I can’t even touch them.

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