3YH is a hard rock band that hails from the Quad Cities (IL, IA) and consists of five members: Jose Urquiza (vocals), Tony Reeves (guitar), Neil Kuhlman (guitar/vocals), Dex Digga (bass) and Chris Cushman (drums). Though the band has been around for 12 years, there were moments that they were unsure if they’d keep going, but I for one, am glad they did. The band member changes in the past may’ve caused some initial struggle, but with more motivation that ever, they overcame their loss and have dug deeper within themselves as musicians to put out one hell of an album with their newest release “The Cracks”. They are currently rocking solid with the music from this second full length album to date. With great inspirations such as Sevendust and Chevelle, could a band really go wrong? Judge for yourself. This album kicks ass in every direction. Don’t just stop there though, they have another album, “Ascension” and two EPs out there that will blow you away. They may just become a household name. Give em’ your ear, listen hard and listen loud. They are well deserving of your attention; of recognition. They show you how it’s done when you pour your heart into it. With nothing to lose, they fucking kill it! While out running errands and preparing to head to the studio for some acoustic work, Jose lent me some time so I could get to know a little about him and 3 Years Hollow. The small things matter when you’re getting to know someone like the fact that we both love a key change in a song. He loves the big build up to a dramatic key change at the end of songs. I personally love a key change anywhere, and it can be what makes me love a song even if I really don’t relate to the lyrics at all. Structure? What is that? As we joked about it, structure is authority and Jose doesn’t like authority, but when it comes right down to it…some structure is perfectly fine, like the structure the band received during the progression of their newest release.
An Interview with Jose Urquiza of 3 Years Hollow
By Leslie Elder Rogers
Metal Exiles: The Uproar festival just wrapped up. How did that go for you guys?
Jose: It was amazing honestly. We’re very new to touring. I say very new just as a band, we’ve just started touring nationally about a year and half ago. We’ve been on some really small tours. Things were going good for us and all of a sudden we got offered Uproar. That’s like an eye-opener for a new band, to go out on a tour with all these really big bands that have their stuff together. You really get to see a festival like this kind of be built from 8 a.m. every day. It was awesome. We played for so many people. For a new band like us to get in front of that kind of crowd, it was awesome every day so it definitely changed us. That short little, 3 weeks period changed us as people and as a band.
Metal Exiles: What were some of the better moments of the festival for 3 Years Hollow?
Jose: For me personally, I think what I miss a lot being in a band, is that I don’t get to go see a lot of other shows, bands that I like, that I grew up listening to, because I’m always playing. I think getting to see bands like Skillet play for the first time live; they pretty much blew me away. Then talking to them and hearing their story and the long grind over so many years, it puts things into perspective. I think the coolest thing that we experience was after got done on the festival stage, we would go over to our merch tent and we would just stand there and sign and meet people and take pictures. Sometimes we’d be in line for an hour and a half, almost two hours, just talking to people. I think that was a new thing for some of the fans to experience because not a lot of bands on the festival did that. It was cool seeing their excitement and getting to know them face to face.
Metal Exiles: The Cracks has been out for half a year now. What are your feelings on the album now that it has had time to set in?
Jose: This album is very interesting because we started working on it about 2011. So, it’s been about 3 years in the making. We put out our own little EP that had some of the songs on it and we shopped it around to get some support and started touring. Then Imagen Records came along and we were able to go back in the studio and write and record 8 more songs and the release a full record. So, we’ve been around this music for a long time. A lot of our die-hard fans are really familiar with it but like you said, we’re just now starting to get our music out to the people, to the masses. It’s cool that it’s fresh to so many people but we’ve also been playing these songs for a long time too. It keeps it exciting for us when it starts to get a little redundant.
Metal Exiles: Where do you see the growth in the band from The Ascension to the new album?
Jose: Oh wow! I guess I’d like to think our band has an interesting story just because when we did Ascension, none of us had ever been in a real recording studio before. None of us had ever self-produced anything but we knew that recording time was expensive. We knew that we really wanted to get music into the peoples’ hands so, for Ascension we really just bartered with the owner and said “Hey can we give you a bunch of this equipment if you let us come in and use your studio anytime we want”? Thankfully, he changed our lives at that point by saying yes. Ascension was just throwing things at the wall basically, just learning as we went, totally self-produced with no outside direction. That’s what really started the growth of our band back in 2008. So jump forward to The Cracks, it’s the first time we’ve really had an outside producer come in, somebody that comes in and kind of slaps your wrist when you want to get a little carried away. It was really cool and I think this has a lot more of who we are now, being able to go into a studio and just focus on the music and not worrying about how we’re gonna record it or how we’re gonna get it together and release it. I think there’s a lot of growth. I really look forward to the next record when we can go into the studio and build a record from scratch instead of having previous songs and previous ideas that we had. I’m just looking forward to going in with the band now and building something from the ground up. Since we can self-produce our stuff now and we have a studio after all of that, we put an acoustic EP on our own last year with some songs and we’re hoping to do the same thing again with some songs off of The Cracks. That’s what we’re kind of working on now.
Metal Exiles: Where did the title come from and what motivated the album art for The Cracks?
Jose: The title was basically picked from the song “The Cracks”. That song had a lot of personal meaning for me. I was going through a really tough time in life and some things came into my life and made me see things differently. We started thinking about the title “The Cracks” and how many different things that could mean, over so much time with things falling through the cracks. We didn’t want to be one of those bands that fell through the cracks. We also thought about it in the case of the cover art, everybody in this band is a little broken at times. We all have our flaws. We’ve been working with this band now for about 12 years so we’re constantly feeling the strain. It was about being cracked and broken, or cracked a bit but never broken; basically about putting yourself back together and fighting on.
Metal Exiles: Clint Lowery (from Sevendust) did an amazing job on production. How did you guys nail him to do your record?
Jose: You know, that is an interesting story. Sevendust has been my lifelong favorite band. It’s the craziest thing. They’re the first band that I’d heard that was a heavy band. They really got me into wanting to do this. We were touring and playing a couple of shows and we met Clint’s brother, Corey Lowery, who was playing in Eye Empire. We played with Eye Empire a couple of times and Corey really liked what he heard. We would always ask him for advice and we would always show up the next time having taken his advice trying to get better. He saw that and really thought that we would benefit from working with his brother so he came up to me and said I should give Clint a call. He said he thought we should do some co-writing. Of course, I was like “yeah right” because for a while there we learned that everybody says these things but very few actually come through with what they say. Two weeks later, we got a phone call from Clint talking about coming up to do some co-writes. We had such a fun time writing some songs together that when we signed our deal, we decided to have him come on and produce the whole thing.
Metal Exiles: What did you learn from him in the studio and how did he affect the outcome of the record?
Jose: The thing that’s cool about Clint, and what’s different about Clint, unfortunately I can’t speak from a lot of experience because I don’t have it, but Clint’s been in a band for 20 years and he’s been a songwriter in a band, so when he stepped into our little circle, he was producer but he also kind of jumped in as a 6th member of the band during our entire recording process. Clint always had his guitar. He was always sitting next to me. When we’re writing vocal lines to these new guitar parts we’d just get up to the microphone and say the first stuff that comes to our mind in some kind of melody. It can come out not making any sense whatsoever but me and him found that we wrote our songs kind of in the same way and that really made the process smooth. So I guess I learned that the way we’ve been doing things is on the right path. To have somebody come in that has had so much success just doing the same thing you do, makes you feel like you’re doing something right.
Metal Exiles: The songs sound intensely personal. What motivated some of the songs like Run Away, Hungry and even Devil’s Slave?
Jose: I tend to write about things that I’ve experienced either first hand or by watching through somebody else’s eyes I guess. As clitche’ as it is, writing about pain comes easy to me just within the life that I have, my childhood and everything. A lot of the times when I get into this mode where I’m being creative, a lot of the things just come from nowhere; I don’t even plan for them to. The song ‘Run Away”, in particular was actually written about a friend of ours, a guitar player that played in our band for quite a while. Things started getting serious and busy and unfortunately we had to separate paths at that time. During that time, we were at a crossroads. Were we gonna be able to continue without him? That song was about looking around and realizing that after so long, we’re the only ones left standing. In our area, in our home town, we’ve been a band for so long. We’ve fought for so long and we’re still here standing. Everybody else has basically run away so that’s something to be proud of. “Devil’s Slave” is one of my favorites actually. A little background on that song is that it’s one of the last three songs we wrote for the record. We went down to St. Louis to where Clint lives and went to a studio there. Clint had these guitar ideas and he showed me and I thought, yeah, let’s do something with this. We’d never had somebody else come in the band and present an ideas for songs but since Clint was producing and already so close we took his idea and made a full song out it that became “The Devil’s Slave”. Me and Clint we sitting down writing the lyrics and the chorus is what really stood out to us. We were basically talking about how the devil is always at work, there’s always darkness and he’s always pulling you in these weird directions and you’re not really sure of. Sometimes it’s pulling you and you don’t even know. It’s really just talking about it always being there and you gotta fight it. That song definitely has Clint all over it and he helped a lot. We sat there the whole time, me and him, writing the guitar parts and the vocal lines, so that’s kind of a Clint collaboration I think.
Metal Exiles: I almost always ask this question so I won’t stop now, is there one song that stands out as your particular favorite on the new record and why?
Jose: Well, I really love the song “Fallen”. Actually, “Fallen” and “Taken by All” I would say are my two favorite songs on the record just because I think those are the epitome of what I enjoy about our music; the heaviness that both of those songs have, the really melodic vocals, the harmonies and the cool guitar parts. “Fallen”, I think is a favorite of all the guys in the band so that’s kind of our choice. The funny thing is that I think ‘The Devil’s Slave” would win every time, but I’m so weird and if there’s one little thing in a song that I wish I would’ve done differently, it eats away at me and then I can’t even say that song is my favorite song anymore. It’s so strange.
Metal Exiles: What is it about the Midwest that consistently churns out some of the best melodic rock bands?
Jose: (as he laughs deeply) You’re right. You’re absolutely right. All my favorites are from this general area. I don’t know. I really can’t say. I know, personally for me, there was never anything to do because I’m in the middle of nowhere with miles of corn fields and my friend was always my music so I just put everything I could into that. Otherwise, I don’t know. I really don’t. Music was always so important to me and it became my therapy and I never knew how to quit.
Metal Exiles: That being said, how did 3 Years Hollow break out of a big glut of bands to get noticed and make national tours?
Jose: It was a combination of things. Really, I have to go back to the fact that we’ve been doing this for so long. Tony and I started the band 12 years ago but this group of guys didn’t get together until the Ascension album. We didn’t really play out of our area a lot. We just practiced and we just slowly built up a little circle regionally until finally we had some opportunities to play some national tours coming through the area. Slowly and surely the shows just got bigger. What really made it happen though, as good as I like to think we did at our jobs, was getting a serious manager on board; somebody that could keep us together and keep us focused to do the things we were good at. We would not be here if it wasn’t for some of the managers we’ve had along the way. I am the worst when it comes to organization and focus. I like to do my music, but I have to give props to the guys that actually make it possible to do this.
Metal Exiles: Now that Uproar is over, where do you guys go now?
Jose: Yeah, we just released a new single that’s going out to radio all across the country and we’re gonna put out a video here in the next week or so. Then, in October we’re gonna be going out on tour with Nonpoint, Gemini Syndrome, and Islander. That is our next big tour so we’re basically just home getting ready and starting to rehearse for that. I think a lot of fans are really excited for that group of bands to tour together.
Metal Exiles: It’s going to be a great line-up. Since I haven’t had a chance to look at your full tour schedule yet, will you be coming through my area here in Georgia? We have some popular venues in the Atlanta area with Gwinnett Center and The Masquerade and I’d love the chance to see you guys live, maybe even meet for an in-person interview.
Jose: I wanna say that we’re coming through Georgia. I’m almost positive we’re coming through Georgia in early November. I hope you will find us and introduce yourself if we come through your way.
Band website: http://www.threeyearshollow.com/
Follow them on Facebook @: https://www.facebook.com/3yearshollow
Follow them on twitter @: https://twitter.com/3yearshollow
Buy the album @ https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-cracks/id791710936
An Interview with Jose Urquiza of 3 Years Hollow
By Leslie Elder Rogers
Metal Exiles: The Uproar festival just wrapped up. How did that go for you guys?
Jose: It was amazing honestly. We’re very new to touring. I say very new just as a band, we’ve just started touring nationally about a year and half ago. We’ve been on some really small tours. Things were going good for us and all of a sudden we got offered Uproar. That’s like an eye-opener for a new band, to go out on a tour with all these really big bands that have their stuff together. You really get to see a festival like this kind of be built from 8 a.m. every day. It was awesome. We played for so many people. For a new band like us to get in front of that kind of crowd, it was awesome every day so it definitely changed us. That short little, 3 weeks period changed us as people and as a band.
Metal Exiles: What were some of the better moments of the festival for 3 Years Hollow?
Jose: For me personally, I think what I miss a lot being in a band, is that I don’t get to go see a lot of other shows, bands that I like, that I grew up listening to, because I’m always playing. I think getting to see bands like Skillet play for the first time live; they pretty much blew me away. Then talking to them and hearing their story and the long grind over so many years, it puts things into perspective. I think the coolest thing that we experience was after got done on the festival stage, we would go over to our merch tent and we would just stand there and sign and meet people and take pictures. Sometimes we’d be in line for an hour and a half, almost two hours, just talking to people. I think that was a new thing for some of the fans to experience because not a lot of bands on the festival did that. It was cool seeing their excitement and getting to know them face to face.
Metal Exiles: The Cracks has been out for half a year now. What are your feelings on the album now that it has had time to set in?
Jose: This album is very interesting because we started working on it about 2011. So, it’s been about 3 years in the making. We put out our own little EP that had some of the songs on it and we shopped it around to get some support and started touring. Then Imagen Records came along and we were able to go back in the studio and write and record 8 more songs and the release a full record. So, we’ve been around this music for a long time. A lot of our die-hard fans are really familiar with it but like you said, we’re just now starting to get our music out to the people, to the masses. It’s cool that it’s fresh to so many people but we’ve also been playing these songs for a long time too. It keeps it exciting for us when it starts to get a little redundant.
Metal Exiles: Where do you see the growth in the band from The Ascension to the new album?
Jose: Oh wow! I guess I’d like to think our band has an interesting story just because when we did Ascension, none of us had ever been in a real recording studio before. None of us had ever self-produced anything but we knew that recording time was expensive. We knew that we really wanted to get music into the peoples’ hands so, for Ascension we really just bartered with the owner and said “Hey can we give you a bunch of this equipment if you let us come in and use your studio anytime we want”? Thankfully, he changed our lives at that point by saying yes. Ascension was just throwing things at the wall basically, just learning as we went, totally self-produced with no outside direction. That’s what really started the growth of our band back in 2008. So jump forward to The Cracks, it’s the first time we’ve really had an outside producer come in, somebody that comes in and kind of slaps your wrist when you want to get a little carried away. It was really cool and I think this has a lot more of who we are now, being able to go into a studio and just focus on the music and not worrying about how we’re gonna record it or how we’re gonna get it together and release it. I think there’s a lot of growth. I really look forward to the next record when we can go into the studio and build a record from scratch instead of having previous songs and previous ideas that we had. I’m just looking forward to going in with the band now and building something from the ground up. Since we can self-produce our stuff now and we have a studio after all of that, we put an acoustic EP on our own last year with some songs and we’re hoping to do the same thing again with some songs off of The Cracks. That’s what we’re kind of working on now.
Metal Exiles: Where did the title come from and what motivated the album art for The Cracks?
Jose: The title was basically picked from the song “The Cracks”. That song had a lot of personal meaning for me. I was going through a really tough time in life and some things came into my life and made me see things differently. We started thinking about the title “The Cracks” and how many different things that could mean, over so much time with things falling through the cracks. We didn’t want to be one of those bands that fell through the cracks. We also thought about it in the case of the cover art, everybody in this band is a little broken at times. We all have our flaws. We’ve been working with this band now for about 12 years so we’re constantly feeling the strain. It was about being cracked and broken, or cracked a bit but never broken; basically about putting yourself back together and fighting on.
Metal Exiles: Clint Lowery (from Sevendust) did an amazing job on production. How did you guys nail him to do your record?
Jose: You know, that is an interesting story. Sevendust has been my lifelong favorite band. It’s the craziest thing. They’re the first band that I’d heard that was a heavy band. They really got me into wanting to do this. We were touring and playing a couple of shows and we met Clint’s brother, Corey Lowery, who was playing in Eye Empire. We played with Eye Empire a couple of times and Corey really liked what he heard. We would always ask him for advice and we would always show up the next time having taken his advice trying to get better. He saw that and really thought that we would benefit from working with his brother so he came up to me and said I should give Clint a call. He said he thought we should do some co-writing. Of course, I was like “yeah right” because for a while there we learned that everybody says these things but very few actually come through with what they say. Two weeks later, we got a phone call from Clint talking about coming up to do some co-writes. We had such a fun time writing some songs together that when we signed our deal, we decided to have him come on and produce the whole thing.
Metal Exiles: What did you learn from him in the studio and how did he affect the outcome of the record?
Jose: The thing that’s cool about Clint, and what’s different about Clint, unfortunately I can’t speak from a lot of experience because I don’t have it, but Clint’s been in a band for 20 years and he’s been a songwriter in a band, so when he stepped into our little circle, he was producer but he also kind of jumped in as a 6th member of the band during our entire recording process. Clint always had his guitar. He was always sitting next to me. When we’re writing vocal lines to these new guitar parts we’d just get up to the microphone and say the first stuff that comes to our mind in some kind of melody. It can come out not making any sense whatsoever but me and him found that we wrote our songs kind of in the same way and that really made the process smooth. So I guess I learned that the way we’ve been doing things is on the right path. To have somebody come in that has had so much success just doing the same thing you do, makes you feel like you’re doing something right.
Metal Exiles: The songs sound intensely personal. What motivated some of the songs like Run Away, Hungry and even Devil’s Slave?
Jose: I tend to write about things that I’ve experienced either first hand or by watching through somebody else’s eyes I guess. As clitche’ as it is, writing about pain comes easy to me just within the life that I have, my childhood and everything. A lot of the times when I get into this mode where I’m being creative, a lot of the things just come from nowhere; I don’t even plan for them to. The song ‘Run Away”, in particular was actually written about a friend of ours, a guitar player that played in our band for quite a while. Things started getting serious and busy and unfortunately we had to separate paths at that time. During that time, we were at a crossroads. Were we gonna be able to continue without him? That song was about looking around and realizing that after so long, we’re the only ones left standing. In our area, in our home town, we’ve been a band for so long. We’ve fought for so long and we’re still here standing. Everybody else has basically run away so that’s something to be proud of. “Devil’s Slave” is one of my favorites actually. A little background on that song is that it’s one of the last three songs we wrote for the record. We went down to St. Louis to where Clint lives and went to a studio there. Clint had these guitar ideas and he showed me and I thought, yeah, let’s do something with this. We’d never had somebody else come in the band and present an ideas for songs but since Clint was producing and already so close we took his idea and made a full song out it that became “The Devil’s Slave”. Me and Clint we sitting down writing the lyrics and the chorus is what really stood out to us. We were basically talking about how the devil is always at work, there’s always darkness and he’s always pulling you in these weird directions and you’re not really sure of. Sometimes it’s pulling you and you don’t even know. It’s really just talking about it always being there and you gotta fight it. That song definitely has Clint all over it and he helped a lot. We sat there the whole time, me and him, writing the guitar parts and the vocal lines, so that’s kind of a Clint collaboration I think.
Metal Exiles: I almost always ask this question so I won’t stop now, is there one song that stands out as your particular favorite on the new record and why?
Jose: Well, I really love the song “Fallen”. Actually, “Fallen” and “Taken by All” I would say are my two favorite songs on the record just because I think those are the epitome of what I enjoy about our music; the heaviness that both of those songs have, the really melodic vocals, the harmonies and the cool guitar parts. “Fallen”, I think is a favorite of all the guys in the band so that’s kind of our choice. The funny thing is that I think ‘The Devil’s Slave” would win every time, but I’m so weird and if there’s one little thing in a song that I wish I would’ve done differently, it eats away at me and then I can’t even say that song is my favorite song anymore. It’s so strange.
Metal Exiles: What is it about the Midwest that consistently churns out some of the best melodic rock bands?
Jose: (as he laughs deeply) You’re right. You’re absolutely right. All my favorites are from this general area. I don’t know. I really can’t say. I know, personally for me, there was never anything to do because I’m in the middle of nowhere with miles of corn fields and my friend was always my music so I just put everything I could into that. Otherwise, I don’t know. I really don’t. Music was always so important to me and it became my therapy and I never knew how to quit.
Metal Exiles: That being said, how did 3 Years Hollow break out of a big glut of bands to get noticed and make national tours?
Jose: It was a combination of things. Really, I have to go back to the fact that we’ve been doing this for so long. Tony and I started the band 12 years ago but this group of guys didn’t get together until the Ascension album. We didn’t really play out of our area a lot. We just practiced and we just slowly built up a little circle regionally until finally we had some opportunities to play some national tours coming through the area. Slowly and surely the shows just got bigger. What really made it happen though, as good as I like to think we did at our jobs, was getting a serious manager on board; somebody that could keep us together and keep us focused to do the things we were good at. We would not be here if it wasn’t for some of the managers we’ve had along the way. I am the worst when it comes to organization and focus. I like to do my music, but I have to give props to the guys that actually make it possible to do this.
Metal Exiles: Now that Uproar is over, where do you guys go now?
Jose: Yeah, we just released a new single that’s going out to radio all across the country and we’re gonna put out a video here in the next week or so. Then, in October we’re gonna be going out on tour with Nonpoint, Gemini Syndrome, and Islander. That is our next big tour so we’re basically just home getting ready and starting to rehearse for that. I think a lot of fans are really excited for that group of bands to tour together.
Metal Exiles: It’s going to be a great line-up. Since I haven’t had a chance to look at your full tour schedule yet, will you be coming through my area here in Georgia? We have some popular venues in the Atlanta area with Gwinnett Center and The Masquerade and I’d love the chance to see you guys live, maybe even meet for an in-person interview.
Jose: I wanna say that we’re coming through Georgia. I’m almost positive we’re coming through Georgia in early November. I hope you will find us and introduce yourself if we come through your way.
Band website: http://www.threeyearshollow.com/
Follow them on Facebook @: https://www.facebook.com/3yearshollow
Follow them on twitter @: https://twitter.com/3yearshollow
Buy the album @ https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-cracks/id791710936