Editor’s Note: 2017 was an incredible year for rock music. We saw the return of rock music to the forefront. If I were a historian, I would say it’s in four-fold, it was the year of the big bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Guns ‘N’ Roses from a tour package standpoint. It was also the year of gritty, dirty classic rock such as Greta Van Fleet, Queens Of The Stone Age, and Royal Blood heading to the forefront. It was also bands such as In This Moment, Avenged Sevenfold, and Trivium taking that next step, and lastly, Ded came out of nowhere to stun the masses with their live energy and stealing the show opening up for the likes of Korn and Stone Sour. As raucous and determined as Ded is on the live stage, they are as equally as chill of people that you could talk to you. They immediately treated Madness To Creation as if we were a part of the Ded family. It was a lot of fun hanging out in their trailer on a cold winter’s night in Iowa. Check out Ded on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dedofficial
Madness To Creation: What’s your favorite kind of beer?
Joe(vocalist): When I like drinking a lot and getting drunk, Coors Light! They like Bud Light, but we all like IPA’s. I like Spotted Cow beer out of Wisconsin, that beer is super good too!
M.T.C.: Are you guys crashing in this trailer tonight?
Joe: No! We just like to kick it in here and get the space heaters going.
David(guitarist): In this trailer, we can make the beds and put it over the other seats, so we can seat more people. It’s also nice for us to get our t-shirts so we don’t have to go all over to get our bins.
M.T.C.: We’ve kind of talked about doomsday prepping, let’s say the nuclear war between the United States and North Korea happens, how does Ded prepare?
Matt(drummer): Walk right into it and die! It’s all over after that!
Joe: We’re just going to keep playing shows. We’ll just chill in here, we got our space heater!
David: We’ll get some chicks in here!
Joe: So ladies out there, whoever wants to carry on the species!
Kyle: And Ded won’t be dead! We’ll be the only ones alive!
M.T.C.: How has the tour with Pop Evil been going?
Joe: It’s been great!
David: All the shows have been incredible, we heard this show is sold-out tonight too!
Joe: They’ve all been either sold-out or right next to sold-out. It’s been really cool, the Pop Evil guys are awesome, the Lionize guys are really cool, we just met them, and we’ve known the Pop Evil guys for awhile, it’s quite a diverse kind of package, the Lionize guys are more “jammy” kind of rock, we’re heavy, and the Pop Evil guys are more straightforward kind of rock. Lionize kind of reminds me of My Morning Jacket a bit. They’re big Bad Brains fans since they’re from the D.C. area.
M.T.C.: What’s your favorite Bad Brains song?
Joe: I don’t know much Bad Brains stuff honestly. I’m aware of them and I try to be knowledgeable of where bands are from and their impact on the music scene, but I haven’t really dived into their catalog. I’ve listened to their music though.
M.T.C.: You guys went out with Korn and Stone Sour, how was that?
David: It was amazing!
Matt: It was a dream come true!
Joe: Just great shows every night! They were just f****** great live!
Matt: They would always come kick it with us too, Corey Taylor would tell us cool stories in the trailer, he hung out in here too.
Joe: It was cool also to have Yelawolf and Skillet on there, again a cool diverse package, Yelawolf was sick!
Matt: Ray and Fieldy from Korn came out and did that Travis Barker song with them, that was really cool!
Joe: It was just really, everybody hanging out with everybody kind of thing!
M.T.C.: Out of curiosity, did anybody joke with Corey Taylor, on “what would Corey Taylor think of this”, it’s on the Loudwire comments all of the time!
David: That’s funny, but nobody did.
Joe: No, but he does like to run around and flip you off though!
M.T.C.: We’ll just kind of go around and ask, what is your favorite Korn song and/or album?
Joe: We’ve been really jamming the new Korn album. Their best written song is probably “Freak On A Leash” honestly, it’s just a f****** great song!
Matt: I love the vibe in “Life Is Peachy”, that’s when they were the craziest. My favorite song of theirs is “Black Is The Soul” off of their new album. Right now, but it’ll change tomorrow.
David: Favorite CD is “Life Is Peachy” but I love “Dead Bodies Everywhere” off of “Follow The Leader”.
Kyle(bass): My favorite album is also “Life Is Peachy”, but “Issues” is also pretty incredible, I don’t know about favorite song, they’re all pretty f****** awesome!
Joe: “Here To Stay” was so good live too! Just watching them play live, it makes you like certain songs more than others, just because it shredded live so much, it was awesome!
M.T.C.: Is Korn pretty cool to chill with?
David: The best!
Joe: Absolutely, just awesome energy, we get there and they were like, “yeah, we know your song”. That was when our song “Anti-Everything” was out.
Matt: Class act!
M.T.C.: I bet that about floored you all!
Joe: With me, in my room on one wall I had nothing but Korn stuff! For me, that was a really crazy thing.
M.T.C.: 2017 was an amazing year for Ded, being a part of the Loudwire Music Awards and the Alternative Press music awards, what were those experiences like? Also, how do you guys feel about awards shows in general?
Matt: Meeting all of the artists there, that was the best part!
David: The people that you meet there, that was so vast, that was probably the coolest part, everybody was just all in one place from so many different genres.
Joe: We definitely drank a lot! It was great for us, you get to meet so many bands that you know, and it was really cool for us, a lot of them knew who we were. It was really cool to have so many people who we have been listening to for so long, and be cognitive of it. Like Chris Jericho stops and says hi to us now. We got to say hi to Rob Halford, it was crazy.
M.T.C.: Tell us about the song “Remember The Enemy”, the video directed by Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit fame and it almost felt like a throwback to the days of bands like Flaw.
David: We certainly draw our influences from the nu-metal era.
Joe: We worked with Fred Durst for two of our music videos. This time around was really cool because we already knew him, it was better because it got the awkward “how do we hang out with you” thing out of the way. He was just really easy to work with, it was like hanging out with a buddy honestly. We did the video in an old abandoned zoo in L.A., the same place in Anchorman where they shot the scene where they fall in the bear pit. It’s old and condemned, I was just in the cages swinging around and stuff, it almost looks like they do Satanic rituals in the cages, and just looks like they do all kinds of weird shit up there, it was creepy and an awesome place to shoot a video.
M.T.C.: Take us into the Ded writing process.
David: We try to riff it first, and there’s a lot of SportsCenter. I just have the TV on mute and it’s on ESPN when I’m writing and I just riff a bunch of different ideas out, and we’ll sort through all of the things that I just jammed, it’s the selection process I guess.
Matt: To some people, it looks chaotic, but it’s very systematic for us!
M.T.C.: Let’s say you’re playing tonight and Donald Trump is out in the crowd moshing, how do you react?
David: I give him a high-five! I throw him a guitar pick.
Kyle: In that moment, he wouldn’t be Donald Trump to me, he would be a fan.
Joe: I would tell everybody that Donald Trump is at a metal show right now.
Kyle: He would probably go up a couple percentage points in the polls.
Joe: I wonder what kind of music he listens to actually.
Kyle: He probably doesn’t listen to music, he probably listens to silence. He probably puts on tracks of silence.
Joe: He probably listens to himself talk.
Matt: The soft screams of victims somewhere.
Kyle: He only listens to old speeches that he gave.
Joe: He also listens to money counting machines.
Matt: He listens to his tax papers being burnt in a fire.
Kyle: He listens to old excerpts of The Apprentice. He probably sits into his room and puts on the Vengaboys.
M.T.C: Malcolm Young of AC/DC recently passed, did AC/DC’s music have an impact on your music, tell us about that if they didn’t then tell us about AC/DC.
Matt: One of the biggest bands in the world.
Kyle: Riffs for days! Riff City!
Joe: One of the best guitarists of all time.
David: His guitar tones were the best in terms of fundamentally getting other guitar tones, he made it sound very powerful and very clean, and it still sounds modern to this day.
Joe: They took basic to another level, where you can be just f****** heavy and just kill it.
Kyle: He would be on the Mount Rushmore of riffers, him, Dimebag Darrell, Jimmy Page, he’s got some riffs.
Joe: I would say that there’s no direct influence on our band per say, but obviously you grow up listening to that, it manifests in you, it’s part of your experience in being alive. It influenced a lot of other bands that we listen to, but dude AC/DC is amazing.
David: I own a Gibson SG because of the song “Back In Black”, he inspired the movie “School Of Rock”, or his brother did, I don’t know! *laughs*
Matt: I’m just hoping that Malcolm had a good life, it seemed like he had a pretty kick ass life.
Kyle: I don’t think that people will ever stop saying his name, he will be remembered.
M.T.C.: Let’s put a supergroup of members of today’s bands, who is in that group?
Joe: A supergroup of today’s bands, a singer, drummer, two guitar players, and a bass player?
Matt: The keyboard player from Toto, an all keyboard band!
David: I would put Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park in any band in there. I would put Benji and Joel in there as the two other singers.
Matt: I would put Mario of Gojira on the drums in there.
Kyle: I would put Michael Starr of Steel Panther on vocals in there.
David: Zakk Wylde on bass. John Paul Jones on bass instead.
M.T.C.: What’s on your I-Pod, Mega Boombox, etc.
Matt: Vengaboys and “Winds of Change” by Scorpions.
Joe: “Africa” by Toto too, just those three songs!
Matt: It was our tour manager’s birthday the other day, so we’ve been listening to happy birthday songs the whole day!
David: I was finding on Spotify “Happy Birthday David” and other songs like “F*** You David” . For the record, it was our tour manager’s birthday, not my birthday.
M.T.C.: Let’s talk about the “Mis-An-Thrope” album, why should people pick it up if they haven’t done so?
Matt: It’s our favorite thing that we have ever done.
Kyle: People will like it.
David: All of the energy that we do live, we capture it on CD, it’s supposed to be an overwhelming feeling, turn it up, play it louder, when it’s loud enough, turn it up a little bit more.
Joe: If you are feeling it, then show it to somebody else, and hopefully they’ll feel the same way, that’s the beauty of music.
M.T.C.: “Anti-Everything” is the other main single on the album. Take us into that song.
Kyle: When I think about that song, I think about the image of you on John’s f****** swingset, like a little kid’s swingset, and writing the lyrics to “Anti-Everything” and just yelling “f*** this”, while your knees are up here.
Joe: We were at John Feldman’s in L.A. and he has a couple of kids and he has a playground on his giant-ass property that he has there. We all put the music down, and just made it this cool hip-hop vibe, more hip-hop than we have really done. We didn’t have as much hip-hop influence directly until we went with John, it was originally more metal, there was a phrase that I jotted down in my phone, we had the music there, we had written some vocals that just weren’t right for Ded, we were still feeling out how to write together because John is very much in the pop world a lot of times, we were a breath of fresh air for him to do a heavy band again, it was newer, so we were trying to figure out how to write together, but that phrase came up, we had written something previously and it didn’t feel too correct to us so I just went out and jumped on that phrase and wrote a lot of it, we all went back in and sculptured it, in that process, we were just throwing out ideas. It’s hard to remember how everything came together. He is crazy in his vocals, that’s his strong point is that he’s crazy in producing vocals. The song is about individuality, it’s not really supposed to be taken literally, like you can’t be anti-everything, about how I don’t want to be lumped into any sort of group, I want to be my own group, I want to be a culmination of what everything that makes sense to me.
David: It definitely got cooler and cooler as we went along. John is sick!
“Anti-Everything” by Ded
M.T.C.: You guys will be out with In This Moment, P.O.D. and New Year’s Day. What else is in store for Ded in 2018?
David: Shiprocked! We have some other things in the works, fans should stay tuned when we announce it! Definitely looking forward to meeting In This Moment.
Matt: We’re also looking forward to hanging with P.O.D. again, we learn from other bands live, we pick up on certain things, and I’m looking forward to watching them and picking up on how they do everything.
M.T.C.: Based on what Matt said, what is one thing that Ded has learned this year?
Joe: For me, I watch and learn what other frontmen do, watch the way that they control the crowd, there’s always thoughts of merch, thoughts of stage setup.
Matt: Even when we load in, we always look at what we can do to make it better, there’s so many things that seem unimportant but they can make a big difference.
David: We got to see Korn 22 times in a row, and that was the shit, every other band, Stone Sour, Skillet. Even our merch display, we’ll run to the store to make it better, we study what other bands are doing right. It’s not like there’s one key to success in this business, that it’s all a process to make it as smooth and enjoyable for everybody while you’re being picky in what you need and stuff like that.
Joe: Being in a band is a lot like the fire department, you don’t learn from your mistakes until you make those mistakes. You just change your stuff as you go.
Kyle: It is the little things, it is the finer details, you hear Korn, and you go “how do you do that heavier”, and you hear Gojira and you’re like, “how do I melt faces like that”.
Joe: At those festivals, there are so many styles of bands that you watch. You’ll watch Theory Of A Deadman, then you’ll watch Gojira, then you’ll watch Mastodon, then you’ll watch Of Mice And Men, and then Sleeping With Sirens. Everyone has their own vibe, it felt like we did every festival this year. You get to watch so many different styles and you think, “that could work for us”.
M.T.C.: Anything else you would like to add, message to the fans, etc.
Matt: Thanks for picking up the album, we appreciate it!
David: Come to a show if we’re in your area.
Joe: All of our social media is @dedofficial . We always try to reply to everybody’s shit.
David: Hang out after the show, we always try to meet everybody after the show.
And there you have it! Honestly, this was one of my most favorite interviews we’ve done. I’d love to get them on a video interview because the passion of their craft just radiates off of them and how chill they were as well. In 2018, Ded will be providing support for In This Moment. P.O.D. and New Year’s Day are also special guests on the tour. Check out tour dates below!
Tuesday, January 16th- North Charleston Performing Arts Center in North Charleston, South Carolina
Wednesday, January 17th- Miller Theater in Augusta, Georgia
Friday, January 19th- Jannus Live! in St. Petersburg, Florida
Saturday, January 20th- Florida Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida
Sunday, January 21st- Shiprocked! in Port Canaveral, Florida
(w/Stone Sour, Seether, In This Moment, Black Label Society, P.O.D., Nothing More, Starset, Beartooth, Red Sun Rising, Otherwise, Shaman’s Harvest, Like A Storm, Adelitas Way, Stereo Satellite, Aranda, Badflower, He Is Legend, Palisades, The Letter Black, Doll Skin, Kaleido)
Friday, January 26th- Revolution in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Saturday, January 27th- 93X RoxStock at Dixie’s Roadhouse in Cape Coral, Florida
Sunday, January 28th- Hard Rock Live in Orlando, Florida
Tuesday, January 30th- Music Farm in Columbia, South Carolina
Wednesday, January 31st- The Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina
Friday, February 2nd- Express Live! in Columbus, Ohio
Saturday, February 3rd- The Louisville Palace Theater in Louisville, Kentucky
Tuesday, February 6th- Victory Theatre in Evansville, Indiana
Wednesday, February 7th- The Fillmore in Detroit, Michigan
Friday, February 9th- House Of Blues in Cleveland, Ohio
Saturday, February 10th- Rapids Theatre in Niagara Falls, New York
Monday, February 12th- London Music Hall in London, United Kingdom
Saturday, February 17th- Harrah’s Casino at Voodoo Lounge in Kansas City, Missouri
Sunday, February 18th- Palace Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota
For tickets and further information for any of the shows listed above, click here!
