Editor’s Note: I really believe that Messer is going to make some waves in 2018 and beyond, hearing about their chance encounters that you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t subscribe to The Secret or The Law of Attraction, this has led them with the golden opportunity to open for Metallica and to open the “Unstoppable Screams” Tour featuring Red with Lacey Sturm and Righteous Vendetta. The bass player Maddox Messer has an amazing conversation with their vicious dog in tow. Fans can pick up their album on April 20th(although if you come out to “Unstoppable Screams”, they will have copies available to you) and fans can also check out Messer at the following locations:
Madness To Creation: Tell us who you are and what you do in the band.
Maddox: I’m Maddox and I play bass in Messer, and we’re from Dallas, Texas, and we’re trying to bring our new brand of modern rock to the world.
Madness To Creation: What do you consider to be a new brand when you say that?
Maddox: I think what we’re trying to do, our goal is to create some new modern classics, songs that are reminiscent of the 90’s and 80’s when we felt those were our heavily influenced years of music and rock, and what we wanna do is just maintain some of that stuff that we liked that felt good, that sounded good from those decades of great rock, but have it be modern for some electronic elements and things of that nature, which is why we say our songs are familiar, yet addictive, that’s kind of our little tagline.
Madness To Creation: What do you consider to be addictive music, was there a band that you were addicted to growing up?
Maddox: Tons, anything that had a great hook, I’m a sucker for a great hook, I like songs that I can singalong to the first time you hear it, before you get to the chorus, you already know what the words are going to be, like your Bon Jovis and Def Leppards, that time period when I was growing up, also our metal influences being from the Dallas/Fort Worth area growing up, Pantera, Drowning Pool, all of those influences, and a little bit of harder edge from that.
Madness To Creation: What is the music scene like in Dallas/Fort Worth?
Maddox: The music scene in Dallas/Fort Worth area is incredible, we have music, there’s a lot of great bands that are really thriving right now, not just our band, but bands like Big Story, who are doing great things that have been out with Nothing More, just finished a big tour with those guys, our friends in Adakain, there’s a really strong rock scene in Dallas, something that has really been bubbling under the surface the last couple of years that we feel are going to bring a lot of attention to.
Madness To Creation: Give us two local bands from Dallas that we should check out.
Maddox: Definitely Big Story and if you’re into metalcore, my good friends in The Leader The Legend, they’re an upcoming metalcore band that’s doing some great things.
Madness To Creation: You guys have a new record coming out on April 20th, what can fans expect from that album?
Maddox: Well, for one, they can expect to be able to put it in their CD player or record player because we are releasing it on vinyl simultaneously, both on 140 gram and 180 gram special edition that we have in our music campaign, that being said, the 4/20-4/21 release on Record Store Day was important to us because the experience of getting that CD, ripping that cellophane off, opening it up and looking at all of the artwork, putting it in and listening to it from start to finish, we will have the lyrics printed in there so you can follow right along with all the liner notes, it really tells the journey that is the story of our lives in this record, which took us six years toiling away to craft this to what we feel is our masterpiece so far. It’ll be an emotional day because we’ve had a few milestones that we crossed in the making of this album, getting the single out, and releasing it digitally, and every one of them has been an emotional rollercoaster. It’s for those fans back home that have been sticking by us and supporting us in the making of this album, who are asking the questions on “where did you guys go” for all of these years when we went away to create this in the studio to coming back. We have a great light show for our headlining shows, it’s for all of our families and friends, for all of those that have supported us, having them to be able to finally hold it in their hands, I think it will be extremely emotional for us and we are excited about that.
Madness To Creation: Cliche question, what do your fans mean to you?
Maddox: Our fans are everything, no one does this for the money anymore, if you’re trying to get into the music business for the money, well the old adage is, “if you want to make a million dollars in the music industry, start with two million”, but we do this for the fans, that’s what drives us and motivates us. We have some wonderful fans, not just in Dallas but we’re making new fans every single day and the things that people are messaging us are is gratifying and that’s why we do this, that’s why I come on this particular tour driving 13,000 miles to spend seven total hours of time on stage for 30 cities and however many dates. I always use that “tip of the iceberg”, you see this top but you don’t know what’s going on, and you don’t know what it took to make all of that happen, that’s why the merch is so important, so we can sustain ourselves.
Madness To Creation: What goes into creating a Messer song, does somebody come in with a riff or?
Maddox: It starts with some riffs and we have a co-writer and a producer who co-produced the album, love the guy to death, it started with anything with pitching riff ideas into the riff tank, and from there we start seeing if there are any particular vocal melodies that come out, when we decided to craft our sound, we didn’t plug in some amps and go with some standard tuning, we are using some proprietary standard tuning that we are using in order to do more sonically, we wrote and arranged everything symphonically so that it’s definitely the sum of the parts that make it happen, and then on the live show, there are little features on this guitar pokes out, or that guitar pokes out or where the bass will poke out, but it’s a very very clear stereo image, those are the types of details that we paid attention to on this album, we wanted the listener to put the headphones on and it be reminiscent of a Pink Floyd album like “The Wall” where you’re hearing psycho acoustics coming from all over the place, we put a lot of detail into that.
Madness To Creation: What is the single “Make This Life” talking about and where can people request it?
Maddox: Of course, you can find that song on a number of radio stations across the country, Spotify, Pandora, all of those things, I-Tunes, Google Play, and our music campaign, pretty much anything at Messer band(see links above), and find that song, download it, buy it, steal it, whatever you gotta do. That being said, that song is about giving the listener a voice, it was during a time during the early Presidential Election where that song lyrics were being written for that, and we were just all sick of it all, and there’s that underlying lyric in the pre-chorus where it goes, “I’ve been sick of it, I’ve been sick of it, I’ve been sick of it, I’ve been sick of it all”, and that was kind of our mantra, we were tired of this side, we were tired of that side, it’s time for our side, and it’s time to hear our voice. That was really more of an attack on mass media and not meant to be a protest against this person or that person, but we’re calling everybody out on this, and it’s time to hear our voice and know that we won’t back down, and in the music video, we’re breaking those TVs, which were a lot harder to find these days, those old tube TVs have been thrown away for years, it took us awhile to find them, I wish I had more, but it was a lot of fun breaking those TVs because I have never done that, but it’s very rock and roll breaking them with a bat. That music video is telling the story of us playing some of those characters where we were the news, Dereak was playing the newsanchor, I was the guy on the street, our sound guy was the producer and we made him the antagonist, where he’s saying “stick to the script”, and we’re like, “I’m tired of reading the script, I’m tired of you telling me what to tell the people, and you take this job and shove it” kind of attitude, that’s where he hooks up with Donnie, who is the weather guy down with me where I’m covering a protest, and you know what, let’s go back and tear this station down, and that ended up being the music video.
Madness To Creation: In order to “Make This Life” what changes or personal growth do you think you need to make?
Maddox: I’m always trying to stay humble and this is a very humbling industry to be in, and I think what is the most important is to make your own life, change is within here, finding that inner peace within yourself, I think that is the most important part of making this life worth fighting for.
Madness To Creation: What do you do to find that inner peace?
Maddox: I do a lot of meditation, I do a lot of binaural beats, there’s a lot of great stuff on YouTube that I have found, sometimes when I get into my bunk I’ll put on my headphones and I’ll find something to realign my positive energy my Chakra, I try to block out negative energy at all costs, that’s why we have the salt lamp over there, we’re constantly saging, but we don’t have anyone with negative energy come on this bus, we try to be very protective of that. I worked as a hairdresser for years, and when you’re working with women, they like to unload all of their problems on you, and that would weigh on me, I’m a sensitive person, I’m a Pisces, I’m an artist, and I would carry all of that home with me, I’ve learned to keep a positive energy and keep that negative energy out, it just bounces off on me.
Madness To Creation: Do you subscribe to The Law of Attraction?
Maddox: Totally, and this is based off of The Secret, this whole thing conceptually after being exposed to The Secret, and Laws of Attraction definitely plays into that, this whole band has come together through a series of serendipitous events that often remind me and let me know that I’m on the right path, moreso than anything else I have ever done in my entire life.
Madness To Creation: Do you think that’s what led you to open up for all of these bands such as Metallica and Scott Stapp of Creed?
Maddox: Yes! I will tell you when we went on tour with Black Label Society, we didn’t even have a van or anything to go in, and we had nowhere to go, I told the guys that, “we need to get a van and something is going to happen, I don’t know what it’s going be but something is going to happen”, and we’re getting a Sprinter van and building all of these bunks and doing it ourselves, and this was in a very DIY moment of the music industry, and sure enough about a month into fixing up this old Sprinter van, the phone rang and they asked if we wanted to go on tour from Nova Scotia to Vancouver with Black Label Society and we said we wanted to, and we had the van to do it, it was one of those “if you build it, they will come kind of moments. There’s been even more of those, we didn’t know that we would have a tour to go on when this album came out, and we wanted to go on tour with some really good bands that would be complimentary to what we believed in and the universe provided it.
Madness To Creation: Is there any thing else you would like to add in regards to the band or the album coming out?
Maddox: Just remind everybody about the Pledge Music campaign, and we have all of these exclusive items and packages on there that are you going be a one of a kind exclusive to the Pledge Music campaign, and download it, buy it, even if you bought it buy it again, keep buying music, keep supporting all bands.
Madness To Creation: So cool to talk with somebody about Law of Attraction as well!
Maddox: I’ll tell you a crazy story real quick. When we were making the video for “Make This Life”, I have to tell you the backstory. Originally, that was not going to be our single, our single was going to be the first song that we played tonight called “Everything Beautiful”, and we had all of the things that you would need in order to get the single done such as videos, artwork, and all of that stuff. At the very last minute, our management team came in and said, “let’s go with Make This Life” first and we will go with “Everything Beautiful” as the follow-up, so what we had to do was shift gears and make a lyric video, a music video and all of this artwork in 14 days. We shot that music video, edited it, and released it back in seven days from start to finish, and I wrote that script for the storyline for the video, in the making of this video, there’s a boy in the artwork cover of “Make This Life”, and there’s a green bottle with a gas mask, he’s got the bottle, striped shirt and gas mask, that homeless guy was playing that character, but he didn’t have that bottle, I didn’t think about having that bottle with the homeless person.
We had a rain delay while I was filming the back alley and filming that scene, during that rain delay, I’m standing and taking cover, I look across at the parking lot, 100 yards, and I see this green wine bottle sitting there and tipped over, I’m going to run over there and get that wine bottle and put it in this thing, so I get over there and I’m thinking “just a normal wine bottle right”, and I go over there, I pick it up and I immediately realize it had a cork in there and it said, “message in a bottle”, and it said “yes, now”, and what I’m about to read to you is going to get even crazier, I didn’t open the bottle initially, I open the scene with the bottle, that week we had just been certified on Shazam and we’re getting all of these Shazams and management didn’t know we were actually going to chart by getting Shazamed a whole bunch, and I kept saying, I can’t believe we’re getting Shazamed, I’ve never used that, we kept saying the word “Shazam” for like a week, so I open this up and the first thing it says is, “yes, now, Shazam, the universal mindflow has led you to the exact moment in time and space, yes it is happening now, the cosmic, kismet trigger effect, that is procreating the inner awakening of your Shazam inner samurai, which is catapulting your nitro burning, fuel injecting hootenanny, howling wolf love dance, into making your wildest dreams manifest into reality into a fantastic accelerating rate, yes now”, and this is what it was, a little handdrawn note, and I’ve Googled and Googled and I’ve done an image search and I can’t find any information on this at all. But it just lets me know that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and becoming stronger and stronger at manipulating this universe into creating and manifesting what is to be about a number one hit album. I’m a Law of Attractionist all the way to the top.
Madness To Creation: That is a wonderful story and I am truly humbled that you shared that story with me.
And there you have it! Check out Messer providing support on the “Unstoppable Screams” tour featuring Red, Lacey Sturm, and Righteous Vendetta! Check out tour dates below!
Tuesday, March 20th- Ace of Spades in Sacramento, California
Thursday, March 22nd- The Fillmore in San Francisco, California
Sunday, March 25th- The Regent in Los Angeles, California
Friday, March 30th- Marquee Theatre in Tempe, Arizona
Saturday, March 31st- Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Saturday, April 7th- Canton Hall in Dallas, Texas
Tuesday, April 10th- Tower Theatre in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Friday, April 13th- New Daisy Theatre in Memphis, Tennessee
Sunday, April 15th- The Masquerade in Atlanta, Georgia
For tickets and further information for the “Unstoppable Screams Tour” click here!
Check out other Messer tour dates!
Wednesday, April 18th- Jack’s Bar in San Antonio, Texas (w/Shallow Side)
Friday, April 20th- Trees in Dallas, Texas (w/Secret Of Boris, The Leader The Legend)
Sunday, April 22nd- Southport Music Hall in New Orleans, Louisiana (w/Shallow Side)
Sunday, April 29th- The Haven Lounge in Orlando, Florida(w/Shallow Side)
Wednesday, May 2nd- The Masquerade in Atlanta, Georgia(w/Shallow Side)
Saturday, May 12th- GroundZero in Spartansburg, South Carolina(w/Shallow Side, Anonymous Concept, Broken Testimony & SD)
For tickets and further information for any of the shows listed above, click here!
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