Though the name of this band may not be on the tongue of every rock music lover or promoter YET, it is clear that Adage is making a name for themselves in a big way and they are gaining recognition quickly. Though they’re an up and coming band that just found its completion with the addition of last of the band members last year, the newness is not compromising their ability to impress the industry already. The band is eager to be the band that the fans want to hear and want to see and they are willing to put in the blood, sweat and tears to prove it. They are well deserving of the praises that they are already receiving from those who’ve had the opportunity to give them a listen. Do not misjudge the power of the enthusiasm of this band. It is evident that they are here to stay and will continue to get bigger and better.
An interview with Justin Doyle
By Leslie Elder Rogers
Metal Exiles: First of all, give your fans some history on Adage. How did you guys form and where did the name adage come from?
Justin: We first got together just last year actually, the summer of 2013. A couple of the guys were already playing together and trying to start something up and I had recently moved to the area so I went online and found what bands were posting “we need a guitar player”, “we need a singer” ads. I came into the band not actually wanting to be the singer and just wanted to be the guitar player. We spent a couple of months trying to find a singer and it just didn’t work out so, at the end of that I said, I’ll go ahead and do it. Shortly after that we were trying to think of what to call ourselves. Adage is a group that gets together to do something together. It’s like a proverb so basically we looked at ourselves and thought “well, we’re all just a bunch of strange kids getting together trying to write some music so that sounds pretty cool and it’s easy to write. Maybe it’ll catch on…maybe. That’s how we got started.
Metal Exiles: Not coming as the singer shocks me because when I listen to your voice, I thought that you were 100% designed to be the singer.
Justin: It was just one of those things. I had travelled with a previous band before and had done both the vocals and guitar. It had gotten to be a little too much for me in that group. Coming over with these guys, I was like, “let’s try to find somebody”, but that’s a lot of responsibility to take on. We gave it a shot and couldn’t find anyone that really took the attention off of “By Myself” because’ that was recorded previously. I’d had that to show my guitar playing skills and had my vocals obviously on that too so the guys were all like “no, you’re gonna sing”, so I said ok.
Metal Exiles: When you say you had recorded it (By Myself) coming in, was it a song of yours before you joined the band or just something you all pre-recorded that helped them determine that they wanted you to become the singer?
Justin: It’s a song of mine before I had joined the band. It was written between projects and I kind of came in letting them know that I’d written a song and had it recorded professionally by Clint and Corey Lowery. Clint being from Sevendust and his brother, Corey, recorded that song so I got a lot of help as far as making it sound good, making it sound professional. By the time I got it finished I was ready to start looking for a group to do that song.
Metal Exiles: What inspired the musical direction for Adage?
Justin: I love big, heavy, massive guitars. The other guitar player, Luke, we got together with the same mindset to make these guitars sound massive. In music that’s heavy and has clean vocals on it, that’s really something that’s missing a lot of today. I don’t a whole lot of screaming vocally. I much rather would like to sing than scream, so we got together and I had all these riffs, and he had all these riffs, and we thought it would be cool to put all these riffs together and I’d just sing on top of it instead of screaming all the way through. So far that’s going pretty well. I mean, I’m not scared to throw a scream in there every once in a while but I won’t let it run the show.
Metal Exiles: Defined is an amazing collection of songs. First of all, why an EP and not a full length for your debut?
Justin: Actually, we recorded the EP completely on our own. We had no label help or anything like that. It was just something that we wanted to do as a group of musicians getting together. When we were approached by Pavement, they said there were two options we could do. We could pull aside and do an entire full length album or we could just release the EP because its good quality and we could start out with that. So basically it was kind of just what we had to start with so when Pavement said they’d go ahead and put the EP out there and see how it does. It was a good way for us to sit back and see how this sound was going to be taken. Right now we are actually recording practices and writing a whole full length to come out probably next summer, so we’re already working on the rest of the additional tracks that we’re going to create for the next album. This one was just to get us started and get us out there and see how it goes. It’s actually doing a lot better than we thought it was going to.
Metal Exiles: Do you write the songs as a band and all contribute together to the lyrics or is one person basically responsible for the lyrics before you put it to music?
Justin: For the EP, I had almost all of those songs basically ready to go so when we got together to record the EP “Defined”, all of the songs were songs I had previously written and brought into the group and we just put a little finishing touch on them. Right now we are writing as a full group but its’ strange how I write particularly lyrics and stuff. I won’t touch the lyrics of it until the song is completely done as a band and I’ll jam on it at the house or in the car to kind of get an idea of what the song sounds like and then immediately start writing something down for it and try to span off from there. Right now it’s turning into a collective process really more than just for myself, but as far as lyrics and melodies, that’s going to be my contributing role.
Metal Exiles: What motivated the title of the album, Defined?
Justin: It’s actually kind of funny, wherever we play, whenever anyone sees the word “Adage”, they always say “What does that mean”, so it’s kind of a joke that we ended up naming it “Defined” because everyone was asking us so we were always basically defining what the word meant. At one point, we sat down and said “You know what, let’s make it Defined”, cause that’s what we’re doing anyway. So we came up with that as kind of a little side funny thing to go ahead and name the EP “Defined”.
Metal Exiles: The tracks seem quite personal, especially “Best Of”, “Growing Colder”, and “By Myself” which is my favorite. Where did you go mentally for this? Was it from personal experiences? Where did the emotions derive from?
Justin: I’ve just always connected with really personal songs. To me, if you’re singing about things that happened to you it’s a lot easier for someone that may be going through the same things to easily connect to. To me, that’s what I want to do music for, is more of the connection than anything else. A lot of songs have pulled me out of rough spots and there have been a lot of times where I’ve written a song and said I really hope that it throws an idea out there to somebody that might be going through the same stuff I was. “By Myself” is the most personal song I’ve written. It was about my son being born and he had all sorts of medical problems when he was born. He stayed in the NICU for his first seven months of life so I wrote the song kind of from his perspective, from his point of view during that time process. If I could’ve imagined how he could’ve put some thought together as far as how he might’ve been feeling, then that’s how I wrote the song as. So you get a lot of answers as far as “why am I here”, “why can’t I just go home” kind of deal? I wrote it from how I felt his perspective would be so I love that song too.
Metal Exiles: On your Unsigned.com page you have a song called “Push You Away”. I know that you came into the band a little later so this may not pertain to you but why was this spectacular track left off of the EP?
Justin: I had a few recordings before ever really starting with Adage and that one was included with ‘By Myself”, along with a previously recorded version of “Anymore” that I had too. We did the Defined album in a weekend in Atlanta on our own budget so when we went down there we had to pick and choose which songs we wanted to do; which songs we thought would fit well together on an album. We had enough songs to do a full length, we just didn’t have the money to do it. We had to go through thirteen or fourteen different songs and decide which five we wanted to choose. “Push You Away” was one of the top ones we wanted to do but with some of the other songs that we had we just kind of went through the process a little bit and decided it was something we could hold onto and maybe do a little bit later on. We wanted to see how the songs we chose would do and we ended up choosing “Anymore” with one vote above “Push You Away”, so it almost made it on the EP but not quite. It’ll be done later, redone, and it’ll be sounding a lot better than the previous recording hopefully.
Metal Exiles: You guys are using some amazing looking Splawn Amps. How did you hook up with this company and what do they do for your sound?
Justin: Well, its’ funny. The same way we got in contact with Pavement Entertainment is how. People think this doesn’t work, but it actually does. I got onto Facebook, and we’d just had our EP done, and got it mastered by Sing Mastering in Atlanta and had it sounding really, really nice. I sent out mass e-mails to every company that we either liked or used and any record label that might want to listen to our stuff. I probably sent out a good two or three thousand e-mails as just a mass e-mail saying this is who we are, this is our music and if you like our music then do this, that and the other. Pavement was about the fourth or fifth record label that responded to us, so we were super stoked, like “oh my gosh” because we were getting some response and people were actually listening to our stuff. Shortly after talking with Pavement, we signed the deal with them, then we tried to contact everybody again and we got a much better response once the label was behind us. We called Splawn and everything and they said yes, they’d like to endorse us as and endorsed artist. Their whole operation is in North Carolina near us so we just hopped in the car and drove down to Splawn and had some fully customized amps built with every last detail put into them. That was like a dream come true for us. We were like kids in a candy store. It was amazing. So far, that’s one of the coolest things that’s happened. We’ve also picked up a lot of other endorsements that we’ll be shooting out there real soon so it’s just a good time for us right now.
Metal Exiles: So you did your initial recordings in Atlanta, which is close to my stomping ground here in Macon. How did that come about?
Justin: That’s actually where I grew up, about ten minutes south of Macon in Warner Robins. I went to Houston County High School and played one of my first shows ever in Macon. That’s my stomping ground too. I was in a big Macon band called “Hybrid L”. One reason we moved to Atlanta and created Atlanta as a hub was because of the market. We kind of started there. I was with them for about four years, from 2002-2006. That was the last band I was in before joining “Adage”.
Metal Exiles: The Crow is part of many pieces of your art work. What does this symbolize for Adage?
Justin: For me particularly, yeah, the crow is kind of a symbol of some people that’ve been lost in my family. I view this as kind of my way of saying thank you to the people I’ve lost along the way. A lot of the songs are written about particular situations that have happened between family and loved ones so when it came down to the album artwork, the only thing I kept thinking was “let’s throw this crow in here, that’s cool, I like it”. It just kind of stuck so now we just kind of use it for everything.
Metal Exiles: With the EP dropping and the support of Pavement, what do you see happening for Adage in the near future?
Justin: Right now we’re in talks with Pavement about what kind of tours we are going to set up. We’re still kind of in a test mode to see how it’s doing. So far we’ve passed the first test which is radio, some of the radio stations that we’ve been on, some of the internet radio stations that we’ve been on and what not. So far it’s generating a lot of buzz and now Pavement is upping the ante a little bit on advertising and PR to get us pushed a little bit harder so we’re not really sure yet. We’re still kind of new to this whole record label and getting on the radio and doing interviews and stuff but we do see some big stuff happening. We’re going to release a professional video for the track “Hold On”. We’re getting all of our fans involved, everyone locally that’s involved with us, we’re getting them in the video as well with lots of live shots, lots of just us at a show hanging out with fans and their reactions to the music. It’s really neat. So far we’ve taken about four or five hundred hours of videos from the last shows that we’ve had, so hopefully that’ll be released right about the time that our album is released and we’ll put that up for free on you tube so everybody can watch it so they can get an idea of what everybody looks like and what the live shows are like. Other than that, we’re in Revolver Magazine right now, and are going to be in it again with a full page spread advertisement for our band. Right now we have a lot in the mix but we don’t know the outcome of everything yet so it’s just depending on what the fans want us to do and how many fans want us to do it. Hopefully we’re building a nice little fan base to help decisions to be made for us pretty easy and we are gonna go where we’re wanted and go as often and as quickly as we can.
Metal Exiles: If and when touring does begin, are there any bands you’d like to see Adage touring with?
Justin: The other guys have their opinions but since I’m the one talking to you, I’ll let you know mine. The band ‘Red”, I absolutely love those guys. Their sound is pretty much where we want to be. If ‘Breaking Benjamin” was still together, that’d be my favorite tour of all times to be able to rock out with those two bands.
As I concluded the interview I did remind Justin that I’ll be looking out for concert and tour dates near my area as I am certain that this band is headed for success. He did let me know that they are going to try to hit the Georgia area pretty hard and that they would definitely be down this way in Atlanta or maybe shooting somewhere like Valdosta so I need to be looking out for them. I very much intend to do so.
Listen @: http://www.reverbnation.com/adageband
Twitter: Adage@Adage_Band
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adageband1
EP release date: August 19, 2014
An interview with Justin Doyle
By Leslie Elder Rogers
Metal Exiles: First of all, give your fans some history on Adage. How did you guys form and where did the name adage come from?
Justin: We first got together just last year actually, the summer of 2013. A couple of the guys were already playing together and trying to start something up and I had recently moved to the area so I went online and found what bands were posting “we need a guitar player”, “we need a singer” ads. I came into the band not actually wanting to be the singer and just wanted to be the guitar player. We spent a couple of months trying to find a singer and it just didn’t work out so, at the end of that I said, I’ll go ahead and do it. Shortly after that we were trying to think of what to call ourselves. Adage is a group that gets together to do something together. It’s like a proverb so basically we looked at ourselves and thought “well, we’re all just a bunch of strange kids getting together trying to write some music so that sounds pretty cool and it’s easy to write. Maybe it’ll catch on…maybe. That’s how we got started.
Metal Exiles: Not coming as the singer shocks me because when I listen to your voice, I thought that you were 100% designed to be the singer.
Justin: It was just one of those things. I had travelled with a previous band before and had done both the vocals and guitar. It had gotten to be a little too much for me in that group. Coming over with these guys, I was like, “let’s try to find somebody”, but that’s a lot of responsibility to take on. We gave it a shot and couldn’t find anyone that really took the attention off of “By Myself” because’ that was recorded previously. I’d had that to show my guitar playing skills and had my vocals obviously on that too so the guys were all like “no, you’re gonna sing”, so I said ok.
Metal Exiles: When you say you had recorded it (By Myself) coming in, was it a song of yours before you joined the band or just something you all pre-recorded that helped them determine that they wanted you to become the singer?
Justin: It’s a song of mine before I had joined the band. It was written between projects and I kind of came in letting them know that I’d written a song and had it recorded professionally by Clint and Corey Lowery. Clint being from Sevendust and his brother, Corey, recorded that song so I got a lot of help as far as making it sound good, making it sound professional. By the time I got it finished I was ready to start looking for a group to do that song.
Metal Exiles: What inspired the musical direction for Adage?
Justin: I love big, heavy, massive guitars. The other guitar player, Luke, we got together with the same mindset to make these guitars sound massive. In music that’s heavy and has clean vocals on it, that’s really something that’s missing a lot of today. I don’t a whole lot of screaming vocally. I much rather would like to sing than scream, so we got together and I had all these riffs, and he had all these riffs, and we thought it would be cool to put all these riffs together and I’d just sing on top of it instead of screaming all the way through. So far that’s going pretty well. I mean, I’m not scared to throw a scream in there every once in a while but I won’t let it run the show.
Metal Exiles: Defined is an amazing collection of songs. First of all, why an EP and not a full length for your debut?
Justin: Actually, we recorded the EP completely on our own. We had no label help or anything like that. It was just something that we wanted to do as a group of musicians getting together. When we were approached by Pavement, they said there were two options we could do. We could pull aside and do an entire full length album or we could just release the EP because its good quality and we could start out with that. So basically it was kind of just what we had to start with so when Pavement said they’d go ahead and put the EP out there and see how it does. It was a good way for us to sit back and see how this sound was going to be taken. Right now we are actually recording practices and writing a whole full length to come out probably next summer, so we’re already working on the rest of the additional tracks that we’re going to create for the next album. This one was just to get us started and get us out there and see how it goes. It’s actually doing a lot better than we thought it was going to.
Metal Exiles: Do you write the songs as a band and all contribute together to the lyrics or is one person basically responsible for the lyrics before you put it to music?
Justin: For the EP, I had almost all of those songs basically ready to go so when we got together to record the EP “Defined”, all of the songs were songs I had previously written and brought into the group and we just put a little finishing touch on them. Right now we are writing as a full group but its’ strange how I write particularly lyrics and stuff. I won’t touch the lyrics of it until the song is completely done as a band and I’ll jam on it at the house or in the car to kind of get an idea of what the song sounds like and then immediately start writing something down for it and try to span off from there. Right now it’s turning into a collective process really more than just for myself, but as far as lyrics and melodies, that’s going to be my contributing role.
Metal Exiles: What motivated the title of the album, Defined?
Justin: It’s actually kind of funny, wherever we play, whenever anyone sees the word “Adage”, they always say “What does that mean”, so it’s kind of a joke that we ended up naming it “Defined” because everyone was asking us so we were always basically defining what the word meant. At one point, we sat down and said “You know what, let’s make it Defined”, cause that’s what we’re doing anyway. So we came up with that as kind of a little side funny thing to go ahead and name the EP “Defined”.
Metal Exiles: The tracks seem quite personal, especially “Best Of”, “Growing Colder”, and “By Myself” which is my favorite. Where did you go mentally for this? Was it from personal experiences? Where did the emotions derive from?
Justin: I’ve just always connected with really personal songs. To me, if you’re singing about things that happened to you it’s a lot easier for someone that may be going through the same things to easily connect to. To me, that’s what I want to do music for, is more of the connection than anything else. A lot of songs have pulled me out of rough spots and there have been a lot of times where I’ve written a song and said I really hope that it throws an idea out there to somebody that might be going through the same stuff I was. “By Myself” is the most personal song I’ve written. It was about my son being born and he had all sorts of medical problems when he was born. He stayed in the NICU for his first seven months of life so I wrote the song kind of from his perspective, from his point of view during that time process. If I could’ve imagined how he could’ve put some thought together as far as how he might’ve been feeling, then that’s how I wrote the song as. So you get a lot of answers as far as “why am I here”, “why can’t I just go home” kind of deal? I wrote it from how I felt his perspective would be so I love that song too.
Metal Exiles: On your Unsigned.com page you have a song called “Push You Away”. I know that you came into the band a little later so this may not pertain to you but why was this spectacular track left off of the EP?
Justin: I had a few recordings before ever really starting with Adage and that one was included with ‘By Myself”, along with a previously recorded version of “Anymore” that I had too. We did the Defined album in a weekend in Atlanta on our own budget so when we went down there we had to pick and choose which songs we wanted to do; which songs we thought would fit well together on an album. We had enough songs to do a full length, we just didn’t have the money to do it. We had to go through thirteen or fourteen different songs and decide which five we wanted to choose. “Push You Away” was one of the top ones we wanted to do but with some of the other songs that we had we just kind of went through the process a little bit and decided it was something we could hold onto and maybe do a little bit later on. We wanted to see how the songs we chose would do and we ended up choosing “Anymore” with one vote above “Push You Away”, so it almost made it on the EP but not quite. It’ll be done later, redone, and it’ll be sounding a lot better than the previous recording hopefully.
Metal Exiles: You guys are using some amazing looking Splawn Amps. How did you hook up with this company and what do they do for your sound?
Justin: Well, its’ funny. The same way we got in contact with Pavement Entertainment is how. People think this doesn’t work, but it actually does. I got onto Facebook, and we’d just had our EP done, and got it mastered by Sing Mastering in Atlanta and had it sounding really, really nice. I sent out mass e-mails to every company that we either liked or used and any record label that might want to listen to our stuff. I probably sent out a good two or three thousand e-mails as just a mass e-mail saying this is who we are, this is our music and if you like our music then do this, that and the other. Pavement was about the fourth or fifth record label that responded to us, so we were super stoked, like “oh my gosh” because we were getting some response and people were actually listening to our stuff. Shortly after talking with Pavement, we signed the deal with them, then we tried to contact everybody again and we got a much better response once the label was behind us. We called Splawn and everything and they said yes, they’d like to endorse us as and endorsed artist. Their whole operation is in North Carolina near us so we just hopped in the car and drove down to Splawn and had some fully customized amps built with every last detail put into them. That was like a dream come true for us. We were like kids in a candy store. It was amazing. So far, that’s one of the coolest things that’s happened. We’ve also picked up a lot of other endorsements that we’ll be shooting out there real soon so it’s just a good time for us right now.
Metal Exiles: So you did your initial recordings in Atlanta, which is close to my stomping ground here in Macon. How did that come about?
Justin: That’s actually where I grew up, about ten minutes south of Macon in Warner Robins. I went to Houston County High School and played one of my first shows ever in Macon. That’s my stomping ground too. I was in a big Macon band called “Hybrid L”. One reason we moved to Atlanta and created Atlanta as a hub was because of the market. We kind of started there. I was with them for about four years, from 2002-2006. That was the last band I was in before joining “Adage”.
Metal Exiles: The Crow is part of many pieces of your art work. What does this symbolize for Adage?
Justin: For me particularly, yeah, the crow is kind of a symbol of some people that’ve been lost in my family. I view this as kind of my way of saying thank you to the people I’ve lost along the way. A lot of the songs are written about particular situations that have happened between family and loved ones so when it came down to the album artwork, the only thing I kept thinking was “let’s throw this crow in here, that’s cool, I like it”. It just kind of stuck so now we just kind of use it for everything.
Metal Exiles: With the EP dropping and the support of Pavement, what do you see happening for Adage in the near future?
Justin: Right now we’re in talks with Pavement about what kind of tours we are going to set up. We’re still kind of in a test mode to see how it’s doing. So far we’ve passed the first test which is radio, some of the radio stations that we’ve been on, some of the internet radio stations that we’ve been on and what not. So far it’s generating a lot of buzz and now Pavement is upping the ante a little bit on advertising and PR to get us pushed a little bit harder so we’re not really sure yet. We’re still kind of new to this whole record label and getting on the radio and doing interviews and stuff but we do see some big stuff happening. We’re going to release a professional video for the track “Hold On”. We’re getting all of our fans involved, everyone locally that’s involved with us, we’re getting them in the video as well with lots of live shots, lots of just us at a show hanging out with fans and their reactions to the music. It’s really neat. So far we’ve taken about four or five hundred hours of videos from the last shows that we’ve had, so hopefully that’ll be released right about the time that our album is released and we’ll put that up for free on you tube so everybody can watch it so they can get an idea of what everybody looks like and what the live shows are like. Other than that, we’re in Revolver Magazine right now, and are going to be in it again with a full page spread advertisement for our band. Right now we have a lot in the mix but we don’t know the outcome of everything yet so it’s just depending on what the fans want us to do and how many fans want us to do it. Hopefully we’re building a nice little fan base to help decisions to be made for us pretty easy and we are gonna go where we’re wanted and go as often and as quickly as we can.
Metal Exiles: If and when touring does begin, are there any bands you’d like to see Adage touring with?
Justin: The other guys have their opinions but since I’m the one talking to you, I’ll let you know mine. The band ‘Red”, I absolutely love those guys. Their sound is pretty much where we want to be. If ‘Breaking Benjamin” was still together, that’d be my favorite tour of all times to be able to rock out with those two bands.
As I concluded the interview I did remind Justin that I’ll be looking out for concert and tour dates near my area as I am certain that this band is headed for success. He did let me know that they are going to try to hit the Georgia area pretty hard and that they would definitely be down this way in Atlanta or maybe shooting somewhere like Valdosta so I need to be looking out for them. I very much intend to do so.
Listen @: http://www.reverbnation.com/adageband
Twitter: Adage@Adage_Band
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adageband1
EP release date: August 19, 2014
