Imperial: Interview with Dale Dupree and Josh Adelman
Would you say that record labels in general do a lot for bands in your position?
Josh: Anybody that’s going to read this; anybody that knows anything about us knows that we’ve stood firm in this belief: Record labels don’t owe you shit. You get out there and bust your ass, and you provide them with a product and you have that working relationship where they want to do something for you, then you’re in the position that we’re in. All these people that strive to be on labels and think that they are going to get some awesome fucking deal and think that they are going to sign to Victory Records and Tony [Brummell] is going to suck them off and put them on Warped Tour are going to be surprised; it doesn’t happen that way. I think that even before I was in the band, when they were doing all the grunt work for where Imperial is now, they had the working relationship with [Pluto] that enables them—us to be in the position now where [Dale] is running a business, and has a family, I am in school, we have a Rollins [College] grad, we have a studio drummer. We have all this shit—Imperial has gotten to the point where we are all adults now and we can write the records that we want to write and we know that we have Pluto, to be as awesome as they are to us, to enable us to do it how we want to do it andwhen we want to do it—we went to them saying, “We have this EP idea before we put out the full-length album and we think that it would be a proper interlude to bring the existing fanbase forward and get us out into a new market and kind of expand what we want to do, like he said, it’s going to be drastically different, you’re not going to hear the new record and be like “fuck! It sounds just like Killswitch Engage!” At a lot of labels, they wouldn’t allow that to happen. A lot of labels will be like: “An EP?
No, your contract states this, you need to do this, you need to have cookie-cutter promotion, you need to fucking tour in a van for 18 months, you need to do this, this, this.” [With Pluto], it’s not that way. The music industry has completely changed. Every one is changing with the times. It is much more about the artistic direction and us being able to spend 3 months figuring out what we want to do to move forward artistically, not even just with the sound, we have been doing that for a year, kind of fine tuning that then realizing that the EP is the best solution for us.
It seems like you’ve come a long way while keeping up with your personal lives. With all that’s going on, how does Imperial find the time to progress?
Josh: Instead of being in a van for 8 or 10 months out of a year, playing 300 shows in front of 2—300 kids, we’re in the position now where we can take two weeks, and go to Europe and play in front of thousands of kids a night. That’s what we want to do, and that enables us to travel, do things that we haven’t done yet and not have to fit the cookie-cutter role because we are putting everything in this band. We have no illusion that we are going to become millionaires; I mean get the fuck out of here; we are Imperial; we are going to write the music that we want to write, we are going to rock out for the kids who like the music and if we sell records, awesome; if we sell merch, awesome, but it’s about connecting with them. We are musicians, we are friends, we are all adults, we are going to do it how we want to do it, when we are going to do it and like I said, we have a relationship with the label because people put in the time and the effort to nurture that relationship to the point where it is now that we can do that.
Dale: And to balance with what Josh said, with touring plans. A lot of people ask us “when are you going on tour/what are your touring plans?” and for us it’s not about the tour, it’s about the kids that are at the shows watching us. Imperial, one of the things that we harped on was making relationships with people. I can name a dozen kids right now in different states that I would consider my friends, I would have invited them to my wedding had I known them earlier, that is how this band has become what it is and stayed what it is: we have very loyal fans, they’re not just fans, they’re family to us. Now we don’t just go out for the music, for the money, we do it for the kids 100% and if we’re doing anything the kids don’t like, we fucking stop.
What are we to expect from the new album?
Dale: We are going to do an EP before the full length. Both albums are going to be centered on a ‘villains’ theme. We are going to throw the word villain out on a lot of the artwork and the look of Imperial is going to be a little more evil this time around. The EP will probably coincide with the villains theme, but the full length is where the real meat is going to be. Basically we are going to cut 4 songs that are going to kind of tickle their fancy and have a little intro/outro thing for it and expose people to what we’re about to do.
The idea of a “villainous” album sounds really sick, what brought that about?
Dale: The villain piece, the real reason for us to write such a dark album was because our last album, even if you go through the cover art, you’ll find a man that’s basically travelling through a city full of drugs and corruption and whatever else you could run into in your daily life. It was based on my experience in life and it was very positive. At the end of the track we had our “In Ashes I Leave” song, which is basically dying and finding peace. We kind of had a start to finish concept so we just said, for this new album we have to make it a little bit darker, especially with the symphonic sound and it’s got to push a few more buttons. People can listen to albums and be inspired by them but if we write something that’s conceptually along the lines of reading a book or watching an awesome movie, your favorite movie, then we can turn more heads and find more listeners. We are jumping to the dark side, or so to speak.
Josh: For this record, it is a darker thing we are going for. It’s the constant. Dale approached us with this thing about having a concept record and it was something that we could all latch to. Musically, we clicked. We just click as people and we might have different views on all sorts of isssues but friendship stands the test of time and we can put other stuff aside to put out the record that we want to put out.
Imagine a Lord of the Rings fucking your face with metal. That’s what we are going for. It’s a huge soundscape, a movie scoundscape set to metal and gauntlets and codpieces.