Abir Hossain of The Morning Of : Q&A

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/themorningofinterview.jpg" alt=" " />In the middle of a nationwide tour, The Morning Of’s bassist/lyricist Abir Hossain took a second to talk to QRO....

  In the conversation, he discussed the tour, touring in their van (including it once blowing up…), how The Morning Of works, the scene (or lack thereof) in their hometown of Newburgh, New York, Bamboozle, and more…

QRO: Please state your name, your band’s name, and your part in the band.

Abir Hossain: My name is Abir Hossain, I am in The Morning Of, and I play bass and write most of the lyrics.

QRO:  Who else writes lyrics?

AH: Justin [Wiley, vocals] wrote lyrics to two of the songs on the album.

QRO:  When you write lyrics, are they based on real life?

AH: They’re always based on real life.

QRO: How did you all meet?

AH: Chris [Petrosino, guitars/piano], Rob [McCurdy, guitars], and myself began playing when we were in junior high school.  We met in jazz band and we all wanted to start a band, so there it began.  We had a bunch of different line-ups, different singers, drummers, and such.  Then last summer we got Jessica [Malloy, vocals], Justin, and Jimmi [Kane, drums] and completed the entire band!

QRO:  Was the current lineup the lineup for Welcome Change. Goodbye Gravity?

AH: No, not at all. There were three other people on Welcome Change. Goodbye Gravity.  But the reason we were able to remain The Morning Of is because Chris and Rob write most of the music, and I write most of the lyrics, so we always wrote the songs.  It was just a matter of us finding the right pieces of the puzzle to perform our songs!

QRO: Do Chris and Rob still write most of the music?

AH: Yes!  We all collaborate when it comes to the arrangement of the songs, but Chris and Rob write most of the music and I write most of the lyrics, that’s how we work I guess!

QRO:  How did you come up with the name ‘The Morning Of’?

AH: The name ‘The Morning Of’ means that people are too concerned with the future or the past.  ‘The Morning Of’ means that we are concerned with what’s going on right now.

QRO: Speaking of what’s going on right now, you’re on nationwide tour, right?

AH: Yes we are, this tour went all the way out to the southern Midwest, West Coast, north Midwest, and now we are on the East Coast leg.  It’s a forty-six-day tour I believe.  We’re about to hit day thirty tomorrow.

QRO: Are you touring with other bands?  What’s been the best part of the tour thus far?

AH: We are touring with other bands; currently we’re on tour with Farewell, Jet Lag Gemini, and Kenotia.  Zolof The Rock and Roll Destroyer (QRO photos) was on the tour, they dropped off when Farewell joined.  The best part of touring thus far, I thought was getting to see all these awesome places on the west coast that we had never been to before.

This was our first time touring the West Coast.  We got to go to Hollywood, Portland, and Seattle.  Those were my personal favorites.  But then last night we played another East Coast date, and we had an amazing crowd singing along and I remembered how amazing it is to play a town where people actually know your songs!  Every part of touring is amazing, besides overnight drives and not getting to shower and sleeping in the van gets kinda hard, ha-ha.

QRO: How many people do you have in your van?

AH: There’s seven-to-six of us and our tour manager.  We were thinking of bringing a merch girl on this tour, I can’t imagine how hard it’d be to sleep in our van with 8 people, ha-ha.

QRO: Do you sleep sitting up?  It already sounds like a tight fit.

AH: Haha, well we have a huge fifteen-passenger van, and we have two of the benches taken out.  So there’s spots for six people to sleep comfortably.  And then someone sleeps in the passenger seat.

QRO: How do you pass time while traveling?

AH: Well we have a TV in the van with an N64, and a Wii.  So we play that a lot.  We all listen to our iPods a lot, and three of us, including myself, go to school online, so college takes up a lot of our free time.

QRO: On this tour, overall, have the crowds been receptive?

AH: Yes!  Somehow this tour has gone really well for us!  We couldn’t ask for better crowds (okay okay, don’t hate me, but a sold out tour would be toootally sick).  But this tour has been awesome.

QRO: On this tour are you playing more bars, or bigger venues, a mix, etc?

AH: It’s been a very odd mix of venues, some venues have been amazing, others have been awful.  But we always say we can play the worst venue in the world, but if the people there are nice and some kids are singing along we are having a fun time.

QRO:  You are playing Bamboozle next month, how do you feel about that?

AH: Oh man, I can’t even tell you how excited we all are to play Bamboozle!  We’re playing Saturday May 3rd, the same day as Jimmy Eat World, Saves the Day and Snoop Dogg!  We are soo pumped!

QRO: What’s your favorite song to play live?

AH: I think on any given night it changes to whatever song the crowd is feeling the most, or singing the most.

QRO: If you could tour with any band ever, who would it be?

AH: If I could tour with any band ever it would definitely be The Beatles, hands down.

QRO: Does the band do any cover songs?

AH: Ha-ha, we know some funny covers but we only bust them out for bar shows.  You’ll have to come to one to find out though!  They’re a secret.

QRO: What’s the music scene like in your home town/home area?

AH: Ah, our hometown personally doesn’t have much of a scene at all.  When we do hometown shows, we put them on ourselves.  They’re actually a lot of fun!  Our home area is slightly better, there are some awesome bands from the area like Just Surrender, and other huge contemporaries like Coheed and Cambria and Matchbook Romance that have come from our area. 

There’s not much of a semblance of a scene anymore, but we always promise ourselves if we’re ever home for longer than a week, we want to try to help build a scene.

QRO:  Do you have any thoughts on the lack of scene?

AH: There could be a lot of things, bands like Just Surrender, Us and the other bigger bands from area are always on tour.  Kids in our area don’t really put on shows for themselves, and no one really comes out to shows just for fun like they do in some other scenes.  I don’t think too hard about it as long as they come hang out with us when we’re in town!

QRO:  When you play in your hometown area are the shows in basements, bars, venues, VFW halls?

AH: We used to rent out our towns VFW hall, but they sold it, so now we have our shows in this restaurant called ‘It’s All Good’.  It’s actually an awesome place; it’s pretty much an awesome venue.  We had our CD release show there, and it was an amazing night.

QRO: Recently you put out an album, The World As We Know It, and a digital EP, The Digital EP.  What is The Digital EP?  What’s on it?  Who did the remixes?

AH: The Digital EP is two songs from our album that were made into dance mixes by our friend Alex Goot, and one song from our old EP that we did an acoustic version of.

QRO: Did you approach Alex with the idea or did he do it on his own?

AH: He did “Let Your Spirit Soar” for fun, and our label and us thought it’d be a fun thing to do and put out as a fun little things before our album came out!

QRO:  You’re on Tragic Hero Records. How did you get involved with them?

AH: We went on our first tour ever with the band Alesana, and they were on Tragic Hero at the time.  We ended up becoming great friends with the owner Tommy, and decided that we wanted to be on a label that really, really care about us as people and who we trusted with our music.

QRO:  What’s the weirdest thing that has happened to you/the band on tour?

AH: Oh I can’t even begin to tell you, our van blew up once about a year ago!  That doesn’t happen to many people and we hit black ice once and almost died.  We cheat death on a weekly basis, ha-ha.

QRO:  Everyone was okay?

AH: Yeah we got out scratch free both times!  Someone’s watching out for us!

QRO:  Wow, definitely.

QRO: What’s it like having a girl in the band?

AH: Having Jess in the band is no different than having anyone else in the band, she’s just one of the guys to us.

QRO:  How do you feel about being compared to Paramore?

AH: Uh, I don’t know, we all think they’re an amazing band!  And even more amazing live!  But we definitely think, aside from Jessica and Hayley being of the same gender, our similarities end there.

QRO: If you weren’t in a band right now, what would you be doing?

AH: If I wasn’t in a band right now I’d probably physically going to school for Pre-Law, instead of online.

QRO: Is law school a fall back, or do you hope to do both?

AH: I hope to finish school one day, but to play music for as long as I possibly can!

QRO: What have you been listening to lately?

AH: We listen to so much different music!  I can’t even begin… if you listen to it, we probably do too!

QRO:  Do you have any advice for bands who are just starting out?

AH: Just work as hard as you possibly can, and don’t ever, ever give up!  Chris, Rob and I were god awful when we first started playing, but we never put our instruments down, and we never stopped writing songs.

QRO: Why should someone who has never heard/seen your band before give it a shot?

AH:

You should take a listen to our album because I promise you there’s one song on the album that you’ll definitely love because we have so many different styles on the album!

QRO: What is next for The Morning Of?

AH: Hopefully some more awesome tours!  And hopefully more albums in the next year!

QRO: Are there concrete plans for another tour in the near future?

AH: Yes!  After Bamboozle we’ll be going on tour with A Cursive Memory and The Medic Droid!  Then in June I think we have an awesome tour coming up as well!

QRO: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

AH: I’d like to thank youuu Gaelen for doing this interview and putting up with our ridiculous schedule!  And to anyone who is reading this, and supports our band, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart!

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