When He Is Legend hit Pittsburgh on their tour with super group The Damned Things, I had the pleasure to sit down and have a chat with the He Is Legend front man about their new music and serial killers among other things. Had a great time talking with him, and if you get the chance you should definitely catch them at a show and pick up their new album when it drops next month. 

JJ Ulizio: How far into the tour are you guys?
Schuylar Croom: This is day 3, we had a headlining show last night in New Jersey, but this is the 3^rd date. We did Lancaster, Brooklyn, and now here. 

JJ: So you’re mixing in headlining dates with the tour?
SC: Yeah, we’re trying to supplement our income. We are the first of three on this tour. We get paid a little less but were in front of way more people and with a killer lineup. So were stoked. 

JJ: How’s the response to the tour been so far?
SC: Really cool man. Obviously it’s an interesting dichotomy for me because there are three singers with long hair and beards and we kind of look similar. It’s just funny to me to just look at it from afar. The kids have been loving it, I feel like there’s a similar fan base for all three bands, and just being around legends like Scott, and even Joe and Andy. Like fall out boy, they’re just an amazing band. Everybody is super sweet and super nice, funny, you know funny is key. 

JJ: Fall Out Boy was always one of those bands that kind of made me realize how my tastes have changed since I’ve gotten older. I never really used to care for them but in recent years I kind of started digging what they’ve got going on.
SC: Sometimes there’s that stigma around bands that get highly successful, I grew up on pop music, and I love pop music. A band like fall out Boy that can kind of corner their market, but they’re all fans of metal and it shows. It shows in their attitude and who they take on tour. It’s cool, it’s really cool. They’re all also the sweetest dudes, it’s a refreshing thing to see. We’ve toured with assholes before. It’s easy for someone with such relevance to be jaded and not give a shit about an opening band. Me and Keith (Buckley of The Damned Things). It’s a good fit, it’s cool, and we are real excited to be out here with them. 

JJ: Have you noticed a difference in some of these bands between when you tour with them as opposed to when you see them on one of these festivals that every city seems to have nowadays?
SC: Not really, I think when you develop a friendship with a band, like at a festival you’re kind of overwhelmed at how many of your homies are around. We’ve been lucky enough to play some of these big guys lately and it can definitely be overwhelming. Sometimes you can be hanging out over at catering and then the guys from Mastodon or Tool come walking by. It’s definitely a far out thing but I try not to get to star struck over too many people. Ozzy Osbourne was one of those ones when I saw him I kind of froze. Keith and I were on tour in 2010 and we were in a bus wreck together. It was around Christmas time and we’re all sentimental and kind of gushy dudes. We were all decorating the bus with Christmas decorations and watching Christmas movies.  I think it’s cool, like when you make those connections you will seek that person out or like the other side of the coin, if your acquaintances with a person but you still love the dudes so you’ll hang out and party a little bit and then move on to the next stop. 

JJ: Like a summer camp a little bit?
SC: Yeah it is. It is fun. But that’s really like the only perk to playing those things, because nobody likes playing in the heat, and nobody likes lugging their gear around through the mud or playing at 2 in the afternoon, there’s a place for it…
JJ: That was going to be my next question. Do you prefer the festivals over touring?
SC: Club tours are always going to be, I think where most bands shine, and they can be more of themselves. Playing at night is always more exciting than playing in the day. Some festivals got that vibe and you can feel that daytime energy. But that can be different for some bands. Out music is dark and it beckons for darkness in a way. We would always want to play in a smoky club. It’s a little easier on us. 
JJ: Everybody likes the CBGBs vibe?
SC: Yeah man, we were lucky to play in one of the last shows there. Pantera had played there like a day or two before, which was another crazy thing. The CBGBs vibe seems to be going the way of the dinosaur, you still have some of these punk clubs that are legendary that really dial it in and have that grime you want like the Ottobar in Baltimore, or we play St. Vitus in Brooklyn cause it’s got a dirty heavy metal goth kind of vibe, those places are few and far between anymore. But when you find one you try to make it kind of your landing base when you come into an area. 

JJ: So I recently read that you guys have an album coming out soon, how would you describe what the recording process was like and how the music on that album is compared to some of your previous works?
SC: The recording process was not unlike past works. This being Jesse’s first record with us, we kind of have a rule of everyone feeling as comfortable as possible when you’re recording. We did the guitars at Warrior Sound in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is where we recorded the last 4 or 5 records. Jesse went with his friend Matt Goldman who’s done a lot of stuff; I believe he recorded a few of the earlier Underoath albums. We did the drums in Atlanta, and then came back to North Carolina for all the instrumentation. Then I did all my vocals with Mitch, our former guitar player who produces now. We just did that in his house. I just flew out to him and did my best to kind of try and get into a different head space. Flying out to LA and writing the album, since I wrote the album it’s loosely based on a fictional serial killer, more like a high concept…
JJ: Is it more like a concept album?
SC: It is lyrically for sure. I would talk to the guys about where I was going with it. I became really obsessed with this Golden State Killer case and how Patton Oswalts late wife had written, and how she had been trying to track this guy down for ages and she wrote a book about it called I’ll be gone in the Dark which I like used some of her writings to homage lyrics out of. This guy had a 40 year run, killed maybe 12 people, I’m not sure of the numbers right now. So I’m reading the book, and right when I finished reading the book, they catch the guy. So I’m writing lyrics at the same time, and I go out to LA where most of this stuff was happening back in the 70s. So I kind of took on this creepy persona, I was trying to evoke an emotive response to make lyric writing easier. A lot of the stuff I had before I left and before they caught this guy I just immediately ditched. I was so caught up and so inspired by this story, and Michelle McNamara’s story. Her book came out posthumously. It’s a very weird and wild recording process this time. I think we got some gold. It has a little piece of every album in it. It has some smooth poppy, I am Hollywood shit in it, and it also has some of the heaviest stuff we did like with Suck out the Poison. It’sdefinitely the most conducive we’ve been since It Hates You, since we took a break and came back to do that. 

JJ: Have you always been fascinated with serial killers or was there just something about that case that caught your attention?
SC: My father was a cop; he was head of homicide in Carolina Beach. He was the Chief of Police in Tabor City, and since he retired has been a private investigator, still going strong, My grandmother through my father’s work was very into forensics, and had a dark sense of humor and would just tell me stories and we would read crime books together. It was awesome. She actually turned me on to a lot of that. So instead of watching cartoons I was watching horror movies, and forensic files and cold case files. I was also a private investigator for 2 years when I was 19 & 20. So that all helped me develop a fascination with those things, crime is something that I just dig and have a fascination with. It’s hard to say how you enjoy it. There’s a seedy underbelly to a lot of things, and I think I got fascinated with it and with crime because of my dad and know my dad was like a crime fighter. In my own way though, I love horror and I love stories like that. If it’s not something supernatural, then it’s the inherent evil of man and those things just fascinate me. There are some cold cases that I’m still following on web sleuths just to assist and try to like read and study. There’s one certain case in Delphi, Indiana that happened maybe two years ago but these two young girls were killed and they still haven’t figured anything out about it. They have footage from their snapchat, and they think they may have gotten footage of the killers. There’s also a theory that they actually got 45 minutes of the actual murders that she got on her phone because she kept it recording. So there’s a lot of weird seedy police tampering, and it’s kind of a classic case of true crime from all angles because you got killer, but you also want to know if the cops are fucking shady. So things like that fascinate me, so if I’m not writing lyrics for a project I’m trying to flesh out screenplays or stories that I have had for ages to try and get them into some format. After the last two videos we filmed we’re trying to start a production company to try and make some films. It’s just another step down the path. I’m excited man, I feel like this album has opened up a lot of doors already and it’s not even out yet. 

JJ: What do you expect to happen when the album comes out?
SC: I really don’t know because we kind of kept this album under wraps for so long, that when we dropped the single around Halloween people thought we were just releasing a single. Meanwhile the album was actually done. Sometimes it takes a while to put out an album on a label. If we were releasing it ourselves like on bandcamp or something, we could have recorded it that day, finished it, and put it out that night. It’s not always like that though. Now here we are almost a year later since we’ve been finished. Which is about par for the course with a lot of labels, some of the things I can’t speak about but it’s going to be an interesting release. We are going to go more where we think our fan base is through the horror community. We have a stoner, sludge, rock mentality that I think we do rock and we breach heavy metal really well and we do post hardcore well, but in no way would be consider ourselves a hardcore band. I like heavy metal as a generalized term, just like I like rock and roll as a generalized term. I think a lot of cool things are going to happen. I mean obviously we got a late start because we tried to keep this a secret. Fans have been so stoked over the two new songs and were going to release a couple more before it actually comes out, and just see what shakes loose. That kind of always how you have to do it. 

JJ: Sounds like you’re pretty excited about it
SC: Yeah, we are all really excited about it man, it seems like a new begining. Like I can’t even tell you the last time we openeda tour. I think when we played with Gwar we were like second of four, so that was like. I don’t mind playing early and getting of stage and being able to hang with everyone. I live for that, I love to be able to talk to bands and listen and just be present. I think this run is going to be different. It just has a different energy.
JJ: Do you have anything lined up after The Damned Things tour?

SC: Oddly enough, No. We have somethings “in the pipe” as they say, but nothing announce-able yet. We’re kind of just hoping that this tour opens some doors for us. We have kind ofbeen like a black sheep of this genre, because of how our history has been, being on a Christian record label but not being a Christian band, and when we did the crowdfunding thing in the past, it brought us closer to our fans but further from the mainstream. Now with the label, it takes longer and has more moving pieces, but it’s ultimately better for this project. Even now before the album was done, the artwork was done by myself and a guy named Matt Ryan Tobin who does a lot of horror illustrations and poster art. He just did a bad ass Batman and Catwoman from Batman Returns. He has done the Hellraiser waxworks, he’s done IT. I am a huge fan of his work, and it just so happens that he is also a He Is Legend fan. So we worked this out and we worked really closely together, using some of my more crude drawings and some Polaroid’s to add some of the things we were working on. It really fits the theme and vibe. Everything is coming together, one of the guys from Periphery mixed the thing, and we have been utilizing our friends where we can and sticking with where we know that things work. 

JJ: Do you ever think you will go back to the crowdfunding thing in the future?
SC: I don’t think we will crowd fund again. I think the best way I can see doing this in the future in a way that we can start seeing some revenue from would be to be putting out our own records, and perhaps maybe through our own record label. That’s an idea, but that’s in the background. Right now though we have a two year record cycle coming up, but we have some more material written and were prepared to just churn it out. 

JJ: It helps when you like who you are working with. 
SC: Yeah, man it does. I’ve been really blessed to have guys like Jesse, and you know me Matt and Adam have been doing this since we were 17 or 18. We still get along, we are still best friends. Which is hard for a lot of people to say. Jesse is the fastest friend I have ever made; Andrew is such a good homey for helping us out now. Touring with us and playing guitar. It’sjust nice to have a team that works. 

JJ: That’s all I got for ya, anything you want to say before we dip out?
SC: If you got some spare cash and you want to help us out, Please preorder the record. Preorders really help us out with our first week sales and as you know that’s really the only number that matters. You can go to our Instagram which is heislegendnc and I think that might be our twitter as well as our website. We have some really cool preorder bundles right now with some stuff we will never have on the road. Even if it’s just the digital download, that always helps too. It will be out for sale in store and online on June 28^th. Pick it up! Thank You.

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JJ Ulizio

JJ has been a contributing writer and huge asset to Empire and Empire Extreme since the very begining. He is always digging for new bands and has a true heart and desire to see the bands grow and succeed.

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