BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME: Why They Hated OZZFEST

Pete Richards of ChartAttack.com recently conducted an interview with bassist Dan Briggs of North Carolina's BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME. An excerpt from the chat follows.

ChartAttack: You must be proud of how well "Colors" has sold.

Dan Briggs: Yeah, it did really well. We're really excited about it, glad that people kind of adapted to the whole Wall album and you know, musically it's kind of conceptual and has a lot going on. People were really taken to it both on the road and on the record, so it's good.

ChartAttack: It debuted at #57 on the Billboard 200.

Dan Briggs: It's cool. It's cool. Victory [Records] did a good push for it before it came out and I guess they got what they expected. I don't know. It doesn't really matter to us. It's cool and whatever, but we're proud of the record, so we don't really care how it sold. We knew it was the best thing we had done and it's nice that other people think that as well.

ChartAttack: It's amazing that this kind of extreme music is doing so well now at a mainstream level.

Dan Briggs: Well, that was kind of the point on "Colors". We really wanted to distance ourselves from the bands that we were being associated with because the Ozzfest tour was, like, 15 bands that we got clumped in with that we didn't sound anything like or share anything in common with. That kind of fueled us to push ourselves and write the record that we really wanted to write.

ChartAttack: I would think being a band that sounds a bit different from all the other bands on Ozzfest could kind of help you stand out.

Dan Briggs: Yes and no. I mean, it just wasn't for us. We hated the experience. It was awful. It was terrible. The last song on "Colors", "Whitewall", is all about the Ozzfest experience and just how lame it was.

ChartAttack: Why?

Dan Briggs: It's just like a talent show. It's not for us. It's not for a band that writes long songs that are really involved and take time to sit down and understand. You know, you can't play a 20-minute set and play three songs and expect that people are going to walk away really grasping something.

ChartAttack: It seems Ozzfest is broken into two categories: The headlining bands that draw large crowds and the lesser-known bands there to showcase themselves to those people.

Dan Briggs: Yeah, it was nice to get it over with.

ChartAttack: Really, so this is the scoop: "BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME hated Ozzfest."

Dan Briggs: Oh yeah. It's old news anyway. We've been talking about it since before "Colors" came out. It pretty much fueled the "Colors" writing experience, et cetera.

Read the entire article at ChartAttack.com.