The Devil Wears Prada | Walking Dead Chaos
Written By: Jeremy Seick

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Mike, thank you for talking with us! You guys have been at this for a while now, and you have obviously aged and grown since Dear Love, what have the years taught you that you hoped to do differently on this EP?

Mike Hranica: Everything with the EP felt really natural to the band in general. It felt really natural to me especially. When we did the EP it wasn’t like reinventing or creating something new for me as I wrote parts. It was already there. It was just a different way. I focused on the songs. I felt like everything on the EP we already had in us but it was just something we didn’t do; it was something we wanted to do now obviously.

So along those same lines was there any particular element you purposefully kept, or went back to, from previous releases?

MH: Everything about it was a lot like our releases because we are still the same band. It just kind of flowed I guess. When we came up with all the songs it was very central toward hitting harder. This time it was just what we focused on and it just kind of came naturally.

Let me say that this EP is sick. We have had Zombie cinema and literature and now we have music. And reading through the lyrics you really paint a very vivid picture of what this sort of take-over would look like. What inspired you guys to do this Zombie EP? And what are some Zombie pieces that you pulled from?

MH: It was just an idea to have some fun and come up with a zombie song. It was something fun and something to enjoy doing. We just kind of went with it. As far as inspiration, for me writing the lyrics it was pretty primarily the Romero zombies, the slow clumsy zombies, the fever and gray skin. I wanted the zombies throughout the EP to be pretty stereotypical. I read a lot while writing the EP to try and come up with ideas and be as creative as possible with everything. I think that there’s a lot of zombies you can come up with and I encountered that as I read. Some zombies are totally different than others but I really wanted to keep it very ordinary and original.

Is there any meaning that we as listeners are supposed to take from it or is it just for kicks?

MH: I don’t know if you would say there’s specific meaning to it. It’s not really meant to send a message. It’s something that was different than our full length and it’s not meant to be taken as seriously which makes it kind of fun for us and the fans. We wanted to give people something that isn’t overwhelming. We do love to come up with full lengths and we love talking about the message we have and putting that throughout the music. But the EP is just meant to be more music, well it’s kind of hard to explain, it’s always music. The EP is meant to be heavy, I kind of describe it as dumb because it’s not the same intelligence that I would put into a full length but it’s meant for the fans to enjoy and to have some new Prada to listen to.

The pre-orders come with a comic book; can you tell us more about that?

MH: We actually got some of them today for the first time to see them. Its sweet, it’s a full fledged comic book, full size with nice glossy pages. It just goes through the story of us killing zombies with us having an ultimate mission which you don’t find out until the end of the book. I think its fourteen pages. It’s full fledged. No one really gets it because we didn’t describe it much but it’s not a joke or just something to make money. It was kind of like the perfect idea to make a pre-order package for fans. We’re really stoked for how it’s looking to be.

What are your plans for a full-length album in the near future?

MH: We’re working on talking to producers right now but we’re shooting for January/February which is tentative. We have some other tour offers that are kind of interfering with that but we’re shooting for early next year to be in the studio.

I want to switch gears a bit… Talk to me for a second about fame. We all know that it has it pluses and minuses. For you what would you say is that best part of being in TDWP? And what would you say is the biggest misconception?

MH: My favorite part of playing in the band is definitely playing shows and coming up with new music. Before I joined the band I was already writing lyrics and what not, well I guess they were just poetry because I didn’t have songs to put it to so when I got the offer to join the band it seemed to work out perfectly because it was something I was already accustomed to doing. I still love finishing a song and sitting back and enjoying what you came up with.

When you come up with a new song and play it for the first time it’s always nerve-racking but I always loved playing shows. The more I have toured the last couple years the more I enjoy being at home. But I love being up on stage and playing the songs you came up with and saying what you have to say, putting the visual expressing behind what you came up with. I’ve always thought of our band as more of a live band than a recorded band.

As far as misconceptions, I guess anything heroic or famous. I hate to think of us that way, like our band having famous members or something, that sounds like total BS to me, I don’t like that. I’m not trying to sell myself by being in a band, I’m not trying to be popular myself, I’m trying to work for the band and make the band stand out. I’m not trying to be famous or any sort of hero or perfect or anybody’s idol, I’m trying to talk about what the band talks about and make the music that we make.

I think a lot of people kind of get mixed up. You see other bands and other guys trying to make themselves gods and trying to push their own name rather than their band’s name. They’re trying to make themselves these…I don’t even know. I hate that, I bands that do that. I know people see that in our band but it’s something that I hate to look at and I’d hate for our band to be like that.

You guys started this thing at a young age, and it kind of took off quickly, is there anything you would rather do with your life, or something you hope to transition into in the future?

MH: For me, before I joined the band I was in high school, I was just planning on going to college and doing English literature, whether it was journalism or trying to write just anything-that was something I’ve always loved. Even now that I’ve been doing this for a few years, someday I’ll move on, I know I won’t be able to play shows forever. I’ll always be writing but I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else but playing in a band at this point in my life. Especially in the last couple months I’ve really been disciplining myself into writing more than just band lyrics so that’s something I’d like to concentrate on.

I have seen you guys being ragged on in the past for the type of music that you play. And I feel that really styles and genres are all very relative. What does your music and the style that you play mean to you? And what DID you hope to do with TDWP when you guys started?

MH: What it means to me is the message. We’ve always talked about God and the lyrics have always been about God. If you were to call our band successful, which I’d be reluctant to, any sort of success we’ve had as far as playing shows and selling CDs is because of God and God wanting to work through us. That’s what the band needs to be and I know I get far from it sometimes and my mind wanders off to other things. I think about trying to do more for me than for God but that’s just one of my million imperfections and that’s one of the misconceptions we talked about earlier. If the band one day was saying they don’t want to talk about God anymore, that would change everything and I doubt I’d want to do it anymore.

When the band first started it was really just to play shows. You always see these band now days that come up with a nice MySpace before they even have songs, it’s stupid. For us and everyone else before the Internet was so popular, you made music to show people and because you wanted to play shows. We were all going to the same shows, the same local bands but we were never like well we want to get signed to Rise and played Warped. We never expected any of that to happen. We just wanted to play the shows on the weekends that we were going to. I didn’t know how a record deal or touring worked, we never would have wished for it or expected it and we just wanted to play shows. That’s what we wanted when we first got rolling.

I know a few Cinephiles that were pretty stoked when they heard you were doing a Zombie EP, so this question is for all of them out there. What is your favorite Zombie movie and why?

MH: I get this question a lot but we don’t have one. If it were anything current I guess it’d be Dawn of the Dead and Zombieland for me. When we named it the Zombie EP, I was reading a lot and not really watching movies. I’m not really a zombie movie buff and I feel funny to say Zombieland because it’s so new and popular and not an old classic.

It was all the books I was reading and trying to get my mind in the state of zombies and see what other authors did to give it a creative twist to an already creative scene.

Well the Final product is incredible! Be sure to pick up the new TDWP Zombie EP available now in stores and online everywhere!