By Jeremy Vane-Tempest
Jeremy DePoyster, guitarist and clean singer of The Devil Wears Prada, answers the phone sounding slightly out of breath. “Our bass player, Andy (Trick), his cat got out”, he says. “I caught her though!” After comparing notes on our experiences with restraining cantankerous felines, we got on to the topic of the band’s new effort, the Space EP. It’s their first release since their lead guitarist Chris Rubey left on mutually agreeable terms. Losing a lead guitarist isn’t the best situation, especially when he’s one of your main songwriters, but Jeremy’s cool with it.
“Zombie was 90% Chris’ idea and he also took the lead on 8:18, but there are other songs where it was a very collaborative process”, explains Jeremy. “If you have to lose a guitar player to discover whether you can still write music, and Space EP is what you wind up with, then I consider myself lucky”, he laughed. “We’re really pumped on it. It could have been disastrous, but luckily, it wasn’t. We’ve planned another concept EP for a while, and we knew it would be a space EP for at least year prior to Chris leaving. When he left, it wasn’t like ‘oh god, maybe we should just rush out an EP’, it was more ‘oh, well, we got this ‘Space EP’ boiling away, we may as well use this as an excuse to do it.’”
While Chris didn’t leave the band because of money, the fact is that the financial burden on musicians is strenuous at best. “If you want to make money, you’re in the wrong industry,” Jeremy agrees. “It’s like acting, there’s such a limited life span. You’re like an athlete, you’re gonna get old and used up and people will either care or they won’t and it’s not up to you. If you have aspirations of money or fame, or even buying a house, god forbid, never start a band. It’s the worst idea in the world. I think kids get really confused now, like, ‘why aren’t we getting big, like Parkway Drive? We want to be big’ and I’m sitting there going ‘you don’t know what big is’. They think they’ll sell a hundred thousand records and make a million dollars. They’ll sell a hundred thousand records and they won’t see a nickel.”
“Not every band can be A Day To Remember”, he continues. “People think it’s gonna happen overnight, but you need to work your ass off for years, and it’ll still probably never happen. We can talk about how important hard work is, and it absolutely is, but we got incredibly lucky almost every step of the way. We had no idea what we were doing when we started. We all basically sat down at a blackjack table and got dealt the ace and jack of spades in almost every hand for eleven straight years.”
To finish, I ask if he has any regrets over his career. Is there a moment that makes you think ‘god, what were we thinking?’ “Every night when we play Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over”, Jeremy laughs. “While we’re very proud of our old material, in terms of their place in our band’s journey, I can’t listen to anything off Plagues or Dear Love: a Beautiful Discord. There’s only a couple of songs that people wanna hear us play off them. They weren’t a total bust – there are a few songs that get a good rise out of the audience – but I genuinely think that most of our discography could be erased from history and it really wouldn’t matter that much.”
Space EP is out on now via Rise/ADA/Warner Music Australia.
