First things first, though, the band actually has to relearn a whole heap of songs they haven’t played in a very long time. “It’s actually going really well,” McCall says. “We have plans for the shows but we need to jam and learn songs again initially. We’re playing a pretty strong retrospective tour so we’re literally learning songs we haven’t played in eight years – that’s what is the most interesting part. There are only about three songs that we’ve ever written that never made it to a live set. There are gonna be songs that people haven’t heard just because they weren’t around when we were playing them, but other than that there’s nothing completely un-done before.”
McCall is honest about the growth the band has undergone in their time together – and never has that been as obvious to him as it is now. “Generally bands get big off a few songs and then they put out albums and nothing lives up to those first songs,” he says. “For us the old songs created a lot of passion but the band has grown and grown and the newer the song the better it is. It’s really good for us to go back and do this but at the same time we don’t know if people actually wanna hear this music or if there’ll be an awkward hour of songs with people tuning out.”
So has there been a slight cringe at some of Parkway’s older catalogue? “There’s more than a slight cringe,” he laughs. “Some of the stuff I’m so stoked on and I really enjoy, and then there are other songs where we’re like, ‘What the fuck were we on when we wrote this piece of shit?’ There’s a few songs that we’ve played and after three minutes it’s like, ‘What, another riff? Nothing’s repeated and there’s been 30 riffs in this song.’ We literally wrote songs starting with a riff and then the next part was another riff and another riff and once a riff was done we never went back to it. We listen to it now and it’s the most boring thing on the planet. The songs that are fantastic are a hell of a lot shorter.”
The reason for the obtuse playing was less about arrogance and more about ignorance. “It wasn’t really an ego thing – I think it was just that we had no idea how to write music,” McCall says. “It’s really only been recently that we’ve gone through that change. Literally the last album, or even in writing newer stuff, we’ve finally realised that certain instruments have to fulfill certain roles at certain times. You can’t just be this free-flowing, creative spirit all the time or you just have everyone smashing noise at once. The biggest learning curve for us has been to learn when to restrain yourself, and it’s only been recently that we’ve really learned that.”
After ten years, does Parkway Drive have a future? “We hope so. We still love making music and we’re talking about writing a new album really soon. Having said that, you never know when we’re all gonna just crack the shits with each other and bail – but it seems to be going really well for now.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
