Interview: The Century

 

 

 

 

Jasmine Garcia. Anaheim. June 19, 2015

After 8 years of writing music and touring the world, vocalist Joel Kanitz, guitarist Sean Silverman, and drummer Ryan Gose of  This Century have decided to split. To celebrate the past 8 years, the band recorded their newest album Soul Sucker where they finished off their time as This Century. USD Radio met up with vocalist Joel Kanitz and talked about their newest album and what is coming next for the members. 

 

Question: Why did you pick these specific cities for these last shows- to finish This Century?

Joel Kanitz: Well, Anaheim makes sense just because we’ve done a lot of shows here – I don’t know how many, probably 40 or 50 at this point, it feels like. So Chain Reaction we for sure wanted to do because Chain Reaction was the first place we ever played that was out-of-state. So it’s always been special to us. Our Anaheim family has been supporting us since day one, so it was important for us to come here. As San Francisco goes, we just wanted to go for Northern California, and it just made sense to make it a San Fran show. So we went to Bottom of the Hill, and we thought it was a pretty good show to go back and visit them so our north Cali friends could have a show.

 

Q: When recording Soul Sucker, did you know this would be the last This Century album?

JK: Yeah, we did. It was somewhere within the beginning or middle part of it. We all kind of came to an agreement that we were all going to move on to the next chapter. So at that point, it kind of just became “Let’s give it everything we have, and let’s just make a really great record.” You know, or what we feel is a really great record, and have a good time. Hopefully fans enjoy that and they see that. I hope they dig it.

 

Q: And what song would you say is your favorite off that album?

JK: You know, it changes. I really like “Heaven.”

 

Q: What are each of you doing after This Century?

JK: We’re all going to be doing music in some way, shape or form. Ryan has a project called Stop Dead and he’s going to be doing that from time to time. I don’t know if it’s going to be a consistent thing, but he’ll be doing that. Sean is heavily involved in music production and song-writing, but he was also just on tour with The Technicolors, helping them out. So it looks like he’ll be switching between the two. I’m going to be working on my own music, I guess you could call it “solo” music. So I’ll be doing that because it’s just who I am at this point. I can’t just stop, that’d just be weird. And we have such an incredible fan base, our TC family, I wanna keep doing it, sorta in a way, for them so it doesn’t feel like we just completely disappeared off the face of the earth. I just really enjoy it, and I think I have more to say, and more to give.

 

Q: How different would you say Soul Sucker is from your previous releases?

JK: We wrote it in a very short amount of time. We wrote it in two weeks. So that alone kind of separates it from other releases. The process was a lot longer. Recording took a year and a half unintentionally. But I would say it’s fairly dark in its subject matter on some songs, I think. This one deals with the inner conflict and how that is just part of the human experience. I think it’s different in that way, at least the way I see it . That’s how it seems to separate itself from the others, in that regard.

 

Q: How did you go about choosing the setlist for these last shows? It couldn’t have been easy…

JK: Well, literally all we did was choose all the songs that were most popular with the fans. We looked at our Spotify or iTunes – what’s the most played? What’s the most bought? What has the most plays on YouTube? Those are the ones we’ll play.

 

Q: If you could have added one more song to the setlist for tonight, what song would it be and why?

JK: I like “Skeletons” a lot. It’s a favorite of mine. And it just didn’t make it on the setlist, we didn’t have room for it.

 

Q: Thinking over all of the This Century music you’ve created, can you pick one specific song you’d call your favorite This Century song?

JK: That’s really hard. But like I said before, I like “Skeletons” a lot. Right now, I like “Heaven” a bit more I think  because of the lyrical content. Myself, I’m a person of faith. And you could ask the other guys, it means something different for each one of us. Because the cool thing is, when we’re writing, we write lyrics together so each of us take away something different. But for me, it’s about being real and being transparent about the fact that if you’re a religious person, or a follower of Christ in my case, not everything is going to be easy. And it’s kind of okay to be open about that – to be angry or confused or doubt or question – that’s all a normal, you know, a healthy human reaction to things. And maybe it’s not something you’d hear in the contemporary Christian world necessarily. You don’t hear about that stuff. And I’m still very much a Christian, but I think it’s a good thing to be transparent about that side of things too. So it’s about dealing with the struggles and really realizing “I’m fine.” after everything.

 

Q: That’s really great! Can your fans expect any reunions in the future, a couple years down the road?

JK: That’s hard to say.  But it could very well happen. I like that kind of stuff, you know, doing that kind of stuff for the fans. I could see maybe not necessarily a reunion tour, but maybe we get together and record a few songs or something like that – just as a nice thing. Or maybe even songs that we had before. Yeah, I think that’d be cool – just some stuff here and there.

 

Q: And as “This Century” what are your departing words?

JK: Thank you. It’s two words that we say a lot, but it doesn’t lose its meaning for us. We really mean it from the bottom of our hearts. Our fans are amazing, they’ve just completely changed my life – changed all of our lives. I think we’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to change at least some of their lives and that’s been a really cool thing. I mean, they’re like family to me. Literally, you go out on the road and you spend half a year with them, and then you go home and spend half a year with your family. So it really does feel like a family. Just it’s a huge thank you to them for all the support over the years. And check out the new album, I hope they like it. And I’m going to be doing music so the plan is to keep rolling and keep going with it. I think our fans will be excited about the new stuff that we’re doing individually.