A band deciding not to tour is like an Olympic runner deciding not to condition. Its a bit of an oxy-moron really; working so hard on something such as an album, sacrificing time and money to complete your artistic vision, releasing it to your fans, then not touring the countryside in order to reach more ears with your product. For Portland Oregon’s A Hope for Home, the road less traveled is simply steering clear of the road itself, and with good cause. Last summer I received a text from guitarist Matt Ellis. AHFH was on tour with Facedown label mates In the Midst of Lions. “The tour is going okay. The kids just don’t know what to do”. Since being welcomed to the Facedown family in late 2009 after their Strike First release The Everlasting Man, A Hope for Home’s musical direction took quite the left turn. Realis was the band’s first release officially on the Facedown Records. It was a stark contrast from anything else you’d hear from the label and while Realis revealed a more introspective ambient band, Facedown was left with the challenge of finding bands to tour alongside the new sound. The scene is fickle and at times completely unwilling to step outside the box with a band. Drastic measures must be taken. Matt Ellis spoke with us recently to talk about his band’s recent career decisions and to dissect their newest experiment In Abstraction.

You guys never cease to amaze fans with your ever evolving sound. No one will ever say that AHFH made the same record twice. Are you guys just addicted to change or what?

Matt Ellis: (Laughs) I would love to say that every musical step we have taken has been planned and organized from the get-go, but that is just not true. The reality is that we usually just make everything up as we go and write from the tips of our fingers as opposed to accessing something that we have been planning for months, if that makes any sense. I think what happens is that we just forget the context of our past records until we are almost done- say, mixing it or something- wherein we find ourselves on the couch, listening back to mixes, thinking, “holy crap…how are we ever going to sell this?”

I don’t think anyone saw your last album Realis coming. Its certainly not typical Facedown. How has the label nurtured your band as its something completely different than the rest of the roster?

ME: Thanks man! This one is going to be even worse (laughs). We are really in a bizarre place. Jason, who owns Facedown, is far less our boss or A&R guy as he is just one of my good friends. He came out on tour with us and My Epic last summer, and we basically just goofed around all the time, rode jet-skis down in Florida, and geeked out on Ebay buying out of print ISIS and Cult of Luna vinyl. So when it comes down to business stuff, it’s more of a, “Hey, lets just put out some music, and do something crazy like put a film with it, because it would be fun.” We obviously aren’t one of his best selling bands, but we feel incredibly blessed and lucky to be in the position where we are, especially now that we aren’t touring, where we can pretty much just put music out without a big commitment. It’s not lost on us, though, that the fit is really weird musically.

When this change began to occur, what did you see in touring life that maybe discouraged you from it? And how have you seen your fanbase change?

ME: I don’t think there was a specific day where a noted change occurred, but there were certainly big milestones along the way toward becoming who we are now. I’ve always felt like I wanted to be “This kind of a band” or “That kind of a band,” and I think it took a conscious decision to stop touring full-time for us to just put our hats in the ring and write exactly what we wanted without worrying about crap like what kind of tour we could get on, or how many records we would push the first week or whatever. That said, it’s definitely been a gradual process, as I’ve mentioned previously. I think you can hear a clear and delineated path from Here, The End to In Abstraction, but it was never a conscious decision to be crazy different with each new record or anything. The reality is we are all completely divorced from the scene, we hardly listen to heavy music, and it just so happens we are in a band somehow related to bands that honestly have nothing to do with us. And that’s where all the weirdness comes from, I think. As far as our fanbase goes, its hard to tell. Most people I talk to through our social networking sites seem like awesome people who get what we are doing. Its inevitable that we get the weekly “OMG play mroe breakdownz like Iniquity!” but we have no right to be mad, because even though we hate playing that song, it means someone was impacted by something we created in a positive manner, and I can honestly tell you that that is the ONLY thing that has ever mattered to us on an external note, beyond writing music that satisfies us as musicians.

You’ve made a decision that you won’t be touring much, or at all, anymore. How did this decision come about and why wouldn’t a band tour?

ME: I can remember and vividly replay the day we made this decision in my head. We were on tour with So Long Forgotten and My Epic playing somewhere in Virginia, and a few of us had been talking about it for a little bit in the previous week. We “A Hope For Home’s In Abstraction is their most mature and creative release yet.  It feels like they finally got to a place where they are writing the music that they want to write and I couldn’t be happier about that!  It’s my goal to have a roster of bands that are passionate about their art and A Hope For Home definitely portray that with In Abstraction.”

-Facedown Records Owner Jason Dunn got done playing and all went our separate ways to change or whatever, and I called my parents to tell them that I was thinking about going back to school. I was wandering around on the phone in some empty parking lot kicking rocks when I saw Nathan and Lance over in the distance talking about the exact same thing between themselves. The thing is that we had pretty much been on the road for two years, with different kinds of bands, different kinds of tours, and we saw there were two options: One, we could tour with other Facedown metal bands and be the weird band that everyone waited through so they could mosh to In The Midst of Lions or two, we could tour with other Christian Indie bands and play youth groups because our booking agency didn’t know what else to do with us.

We aren’t a traditional Facedown metal/hardcore band, or a worship band (try quoting Nietzsche to nine year olds) – so we were stuck somewhere in the middle. And maybe we have changed since The Everlasting Man, but the reality is that what we were doing with Realis (and what we are doing now) doesn’t fit into that world- so we had to figure out something else. And what we decided was that we needed to pretty much go back to square one and redefine who we were as a band. Any touring we could possibly do at this point would just be a money drain. And I don’t mean worthless, but when some of us are married, engaged, and in school, we can’t really live in a van anymore- and we were making absolutely no money. We really want to get back on the road someday, but our goal now is to find a true home for us where we aren’t the weird boring band. And if it takes being a tiny local band again and finding some great friends to play shows with, thats what it takes.

Later that night, we convened in the attic of Jeremiah’s (My Epic) now wife’s house with the bands on the tour, rating our favorite films and making our arguments for why The Village and Woody Allen were important artifacts in American art history- and I saw a tiny glimmer of light beaming out from the eyes of my band mates, excited about art again after being crushed under the reality of economic decisions grounding us, suggesting that maybe there was a different way we could approach the future of our band, a different path we could take to keep creating this art that meant and still means so much to us.

What is the label’s and some of your peers’ reactions to this? Is music now just a part time thing in your lives?

ME: Oh man. That’s a bizarre question. I would say that no, music is not a part time thing, but we are all doing crazy crap right now- Nathan is in school for English and working retail, I’m working and double majoring in Film and English, Tanner is working at Starbucks and writing music for about eighteen thousand different projects, Dan is finishing up his engineering degree and working at a machine shop, Eric is working at a huge camera shop, and Lance is working at Apple and finishing his linguistics degree…so its inevitable that life keeps going on.

I’m not sure who our peers are at this point, but the one thing that has always been true since the days before Here, The End is that we have always written music solely for ourselves- and that is something we hold really dear. I’ve heard a thousand different bands say it, but its really true- the day you start writing music to please anyone other than yourself, is the day your music becomes dishonest. I would much rather hold a record in my hand that I am one hundred percent happy with than fling soundscans out left and right for something I don’t even want to listen to.

So In Abstraction is just beautiful. How do you feel you’ve grown as musicians and writers since your first release on Strike First The Everlasting Man, or even since Realis?

ME: Thank you so much. As I’ve mentioned, I think that by far the most important step we took was to tear ourselves out of the Touring Band thing and just write music we like to listen to, which has always been a slow and gradually changing process.The earliest genesis of A Hope For Home was Kyle Cooke and I aimlessly driving around in my ’94 Ford Ranger listening to Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon and Thrice’s The Illusion of Safety, deciding what parts of both bands we should rip off in our goofy high school band- but honestly, we aren’t that far behind that now, five and a half years after his death, listening to the same bands writing different records and saying different things, realizing we are a band writing different records and saying different things.

The least I can say is that everything we write is utterly immediate to us at the time. The next record we put out will honestly be 100% different than In Abstraction, solely because I will be 25 and listening to different bands than I am now, and the same goes for everyone else. For me, those are the most important things between The Everlasting Man, Realis, and In Abstraction: the difference between 20, 22, and 24.

The scene that you guys found yourself so deeply ingrained in, yet maybe you don’t feel truly a part of, seems to be slowing down. Some say it’s completely on its deathbed. What are your thoughts on this?

ME: I think it needs to die- and furthermore I think all “movements” in art need to die and be replaced by something new every couple years- or else it becomes nothing more than a factory churning out clones of clones of clones.

I don’t really care what happens at the end of the day, because we just want to play the music we like to play, and will keep playing it until we can play no longer. We will never be the next big thing or a part of whatever the next big thing is- so more power to them. Except for dubstep, that stuff is awful.

AHFH is very literary and I know you don’t do anything without mass amounts of back story. So what is In Abstraction as a whole?

ME: For the first time in A Hope For Home’s history, we didn’t write a concept record. Our goal this time around was to write a record with interconnected ideas and themes that bled together thematically and lyrically as opposed to conceptually. Nathan and I got together about halfway through the writing process to talk about ideas, and we realized we were totally unorganized and unable to find middle ground. In our conversations, though, we realized that pretty much every record in the history of the band has been introspection- analyzing the forces within ourselves that define who we are and the decisions we make. We really wanted to try and look outward this time, which is, I think, something we never do enough as people.

You know, everyone has an opinion now. Everyone has a voice and an outlet, our world is becoming way more connected than it has ever been. And I think there is a strong tendency for some people to be afraid of people who might be different than them, whether it be people of a different religion, region, ideology, or whatever. Its really easy to resort to traditional stratified lines and lump “others” into boxes that are far, far away from the comfortable boxes we place ourselves in. If In Abstraction has one central idea or theme, it would be one addressing that- and perhaps trying to remember that we are all one human race, we are utterly and completely responsible to be our brother’s keeper, and those of us who are even called into a place of love are often the first to build up walls between themselves and others.

What made you want to include a full documentary along with the album? What does it add to the overall experience of the record?

ME: It was a couple different things, really. First- we wanted to do something different than Realis, or at least, not just “another” record. I’ve always been really fascinated by bands that tie in a visual aesthetic (beyond a fancy backdrop and matching speaker cabinet grilles) and definitely wanted to experiment with it, especially since our songs are getting longer and less driven by vocals. The original plan was to film a complete narrative that would run alongside the running time of the album, but we ran into a huge time crunch and had to improvise.“I think it needs to die- and furthermore I think all “movements” in art need to die and be replaced by something new every couple years- or else it becomes nothing more than a factory churning out clones of clones of clones.” So we decided to basically tell our story and the story of the record with the time we had.

For one song in particular, you talk about how as you grow older, your core group of friends who had previously sort of had similar mindsets, start to drift apart and follow different paths. You also touch on the idea of speaking to your younger self. What have you seen in your own life as a big deviation from the path you thought you’d continue on?

ME: It’s really an all encompassing thing, touching so many different parts of my life. I definitely always thought I wanted to be in a band more than anything else, didn’t care about paying rent or school, being home, or a job. Just, you know, being young, eff the world, and rock and roll. I also felt like we had this super crucial mission to go out and fix everybody else- that the band was some sort of chosen and important mission that superseded something dumb like working a part time job- we were on a much more important path than that, and everyone that does that is somehow failing themselves.

It’s weird because suddenly you find yourself older and caring about different things, wanting different things. My younger self would probably think I sold out or gave up or something like that, but I wish I could go back and ask myself why I thought being in a cool band made me any better than the guy making my sandwich at Subway. What does he think about the world? Who does he impact and talk to every day? What has he gone through that I could never understand, and what perspectives does he have that would far outweigh my own? I know it sounds so basic and dumb, but I see it in myself back then and still see it all the time.

How has faith played a part in the path of A Hope for Home?

ME: We have always wanted to have this project be a way for us to express ourselves, and nothing more. There certainly were times in the past where, as I mentioned, I let this awful sense of entitlement get to my head, but at the end of the day, we’ve always just wanted to write music we like to listen to, and a have a chance to express ourselves the way we want.

I could go on about this for days, but it really comes down to a few things. If you read any of the lyrics to Here, The End or The Everlasting Man and don’t get what we were saying, then, well, I don’t know what else to tell you. We wrote The Everlasting Man before signing with Facedown and being plunged head first into this huge Christian music industry, and it definitely changed us. We went from being this band that was a part of the diverse Northwest scene one thing to this band that was, willingly or unwillingly, a part of the Christian scene saying the same thing. Today, I’m pretty sure there are more Christian bands than non Christian bands- thousands upon thousands. I started to ask myself why on earth we even needed to bother being that kind of a band if there were so many others, obviously doing it better than we were, reaching more people. We want to express ourselves, but also, if we are not striving to say something that would warrant writing a record and touring, we shouldn’t even bother- because we wouldn’t even be trying to make art, we would just be salesmen. And that is what disgusts me the most about the Christian music scene- settling with a lackluster and mediocre product or a rehashed message because you are in doing it for the “right reason”- and giving a halfhearted attempt at expression to who you claim to love the most. We aren’t interested in that at all. We just want to express ourselves and what is happening in our lives without consequence or pretense, with the sole purpose of creating art (or at least trying to).

The Northwest is known for it’s indie music scene mainly, a lot of coffee, and hippies. Do you think living in that environment has shaped your evolution at all? What do you love about the scene in your hometown?

ME: There are certainly few experiences like driving down the Gorge, westbound on 84 after a few months in the Midwest and South. I don’t think I could ever stomach living anywhere else, to be honest. We don’t really have a huge scene here, which I’m reminded of every time I go to Southern California. But I think there is a healthy amount of isolation up here that allowed us to just, well, kind of be us, and not get too deep into a “scene” that has stupid rules and style cops and preordained models for bands to follow. Then again, we were just talking the other day about how almost mutually, our favorite artists across different mediums have all come from Sweden. So maybe there is ground left for us to tread!

Thank you for speaking with us. Anything else you’d like to add?

ME: Thanks for putting up with us over the years, still supporting us even though we don’t have touring plans, downloading, buying, and talking about our music. Also, we will never play “Iniquity” again, so stop asking.
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