RockRevolt Magazine recently conducted an interview with A PERFECT CIRCLE guitarist Billy Howerdel. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below. RockRevolt Magazine: What do you feel have been some of the greatest joys and successes you've experienced within A PERFECT CIRCLE? Howerdel: I mean, right off the bat, right out of the chute, I think that just starting out like we did was just incredible. That time I can still remember that feeling of putting out this record, opening for NINE INCH NAILS and having the record come out and being the biggest debut release in history. Also, having David Fincher just finish our first video. The first record going platinum. It was all those things, and the feeling from those is just eally hard to reproduce and recreate. I think it would be hard-pressed to reproduce that time again. RockRevolt Magazine: How does it feel to you playing in front of a ton of A PERFECT CIRCLE fans? What does it feel like being in the zone? Howerdel: Grateful. I would say during the show I'm not thinking about much I mean, things do come in and out but you are in somewhat of a zone. I certainly get in that place where you have to have a concentration of sort in what you are doing especially like on "Stone And Echo". That was, for lack of a better word, kind of an auto-pilot kind of thing; you know what you're playing, your muscle memory is intact and you're now able to experience and give more nuance and more emotion into the performance. So there's not a lot of thinking. Back to the 2010 tour, when we had to learn the material we hadn't played for years, that certainly took more concentration. Relearning those 40-some-odd songs that we did live over those three nights was definitely a different thing. I think there was more struggle in that performance, for me at least, just because it just came together, right before the first show while I was still practicing in the dressing room trying to remember the songs we'd never played live (like all of the "eMOTIVe" songs) we had to reconfigure and retool for a live setting. They weren't going to work as the record was recorded, and it just wasn't doing itself justice in a live sense. So we kind of ripped them apart and reworked them. And that was the really exciting part. Basically, over the past few years have been like the "eMOTIVe" tour. It's been the reworking of these songs that are totally different than the release. That's a really cool thing to be able to go in and get really creative with something that was already a known. We were doing a cover in the first place, and then we're doing kind of a cover of the cover. RockRevolt Magazine: You've released "By And Down", which has been gaining much momentum. I've heard it played several times on Sirius XM Octane. Tell us about this song, where did it come from lyrically and musically? Howerdel: The music was just me playing around with my three-year old at the time. He was playing piano, banging around on the keyboard, and I was just trying to play a melody to help have him follow along with, (use one finger instead of pounding with your fist), and the melody of "By And Down" just came out of that. I hit record on my phone, recorded the beginnings of that, the chord structure, kicked my three-year old out of the room, probably put him in front of the Wiggles or something like that on TV, and got to work on the song. Read the entire interview at RockRevolt Magazine.
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