Ignite Interview with bassist Brett Rasmussen. Interview January 20, 2016.
– What’s new in the world of Ignite?
We are on tour right now in Europe with H2O, Terror, Wisdom In Chains and a bunch of other cool bands. The album came out last week and we are excited to be out playing new songs on the road.
– How was it recording your album A War Against You?
We basically had the same team of people work on this album as we did the last album, so when we got in the studio there was definitely a sense a familiarity and a comfort level that we were used to. We started working with Cameron Webb in 1999 and he is a very important part of Ignite and I don’t think that we would ever do an album without Cameron as the producer. We worked with Cameron on “A Place Called Home”, “Our Darkest Days”, “Our Darkest Days Live DVD” and now “ A War Against You”.
– How do you build a song up from nothing to become something?
The song writing process is something that is quite difficult to explain properly. There is no formula that works every time for every song. Some songs are written in 15 minutes top to bottom while other songs sometime agonizingly take years to write. We have band where everyone contributes to the songwriting process, we all write. For this album, we started working on songs back in 2007-08, but the bulk of the songs were written over the past two and a half years. We ended up with about 30-40 songs, some completely written, some half written that we picked apart to create new songs.
– What is the strangest inspiration you’ve ever had for a song?
Zoli saw a traveling circus in Europe when we were on tour in 1998 and they had a bunch of animals in bad condition in cages. He tried to get the city in Germany to shut down the whole thing but he couldn’t get them to do anything that day. So he penned the lyrics for our song “Hands On Stance” later that day reflecting on that frustrating situation.
– Vinyl is making a comeback. Do you have a personal preference? Is your band producing on vinyl?
Of course, we did a bunch of different colors of vinyl for the album and single release. See attached photo.
– Do you have any tours coming up in the near future?
We are working on booking the next two years as we speak.
– What would be some of your main musical influences today?
We have so many different influences in this band from metal to punk to rock to singer/songwriter…etc. Basically all 5 guys are listening to so many different types of music it would be difficult to give an accurate list.
– What would we be surprised to find in your music collection at home?
Madonna…lots of Madonna