part III of the warped tour series brings us to cove reber of saosin fame. i’m sure a lot our readers out there don’t really listen to this band for whatever reason it may be, but i’ve always enjoyed them. they put on a great live show (which, for the record, i missed due to the fact that i was interviewing thrice at the time).

not to mention, cove is easily one of the most pleasant and positive guys i’ve ever interviewed to date. after we finished the interview spot, he mentioned the fact that he loves interviews, and that fact was apparent throughout the 15 minutes aj and i hung out with him.

hit the jump for the interview, where cove speaks on the new album, wanting to tour for the military, and the ladies of the warped tour.

-grizzly

weworemasks.com: For the record, what’s your name and position in Saosin?

Cove Reber, Saosin: My name is Cove Reber and I sing for the band.

WWM: How’s Warped going so far?

CR: It’s going good man. It’s been a lot of fun, these Texas dates. We’ve obviously played today and yesterday in Texas. I dunno, something about Texas dude: you’ve got a lot of goons out in Texas. I was walking around yesterday and was just thinking “whoa, there are a lot of creatures.”

WWM: Where were ya’ll at yesterday?

CR: We were in San Antonio, and tomorrow’s Dallas. We’re gonna go to a [Texas] Ranger’s game tomorrow night, and we’re gonna go to Six Flags as well during the day. But yeah, there’s a lot of creatures out here, as well as pretty women. And it’s weird because they’re either really hideous or really cute. And I’m fortunate enough to be dating a girl right now, so I’m just like [shrugs] right now. They are 90% hideous girls, so it’s alright, so there’s not just tons of babes running around.

But Warped Tour’s cool, man. It’s obviously really hot. I feel like I’ve already lost like, 10 pounds on this tour. I was huge when I started this tour, I felt like such a fatty, but now I’m eating one meal a day and it’s not even that big of a meal and I drink 4 gallons of water every day.

WWM: …and the sweating?

CR: Freaking sweat dude! I sweat so much! I’m surprised I don’t smell like a big onion from all the Mexican food that I eat back at home. But yeah man, it’s dope. I love warped tour.

WWM: Whose sets have you enjoyed watching?

CR: You know I’ve only really caught a couple bands’ sets but I caught Chiodos the other day, it was their first day, and my buddy’s playing drums for them. My buddy kills it, he’s so good. He’s prefect, flawless.

WWM: Yeah, their drummer just left, huh?

CR: Yeah, but my buddy’s now playing drums and he’s insane. So yeah, caught Chiodos’ set and they did really well. Stoked to have them on the tour. Craig has completely 180’d as a person and you can definitely tell that he’s making an effort to kind of get to know everybody a little bit more. He did kind of carry a bit of a bad rep about him when we were on tour with him last, and it sucked cause I give everybody a free shot, but once you’re being “that guy,” I don’t wanna be a part of it. But he’s definitely come around and I’m really looking forward to hanging out with him, getting to know him a little bit better. He came up to me last night and chilled with me for a little bit. Obviously saw Underoath. 3OH!3 did really well, and has been doing really well. But the highlights of the tour for me have been innerpartysystem and P.O.S. I try and catch their sets every single day if I can. They’re so good at what they do, it’s incredible.

But there are also a lot of really cute frontwomen. Like LIGHTS is on this tour, obviously she’s just like cute as can be.

WWM: And Tat?

CR: Oh man, Tat. Intimidating. So intimidating!

WWM: Must be the accent.

CR: Yeah, but really awesome. VersaEmerge has this really cute girl on tour. All the guys on this tour have been completely drooling for all three of these girls and there’s even more. It’s crazy. They’re all really good singers and I’m so stoked to be on this tour to be honest.

WWM: Your new album [In Search of Solid Ground] is coming our September 9th. Is that the final date?

CR: September 8th, actually. I’ve been screwing it up and saying the 9th cause 9/9/09 just sounds cooler, but it’s 9/8/09. we’re really excited about the record. It’s really good and everybody at our label is super stoked about it, which I don’t really care if they’re stoked on it or not. But the people I really look up to seem to like it a lot. Obviously my family loves the record, all my friends back at home who were worried about this record are saying that it came out really good.

Everybody’s just really stoked on it. I’m really proud of it. It’s a little bit deeper than the last record on the inside, like an m&m – you know what it is once you see it, but you don’t know what’s on the inside half the time. It could be peanut butter, an almond, a peanut, whatever…you have to really crack the shell of the record and dive into it with the lyrics to really understand what the whole meaning of the record is because it’s really deep; at least for me it is.

WWM: How was it working with Butch Walker?

CR: Sick man, sick. He did five songs for us and all the songs came out really really good. He’s a really organic producer, whereas a lot of people are like “hurry up, play your guitar” or “hurry up lets do the drums, we can just edit it all,” and he really left a lot of it live and that’s something we’ve never really been able to do because we’ve been so focused on making everything perfect that the five songs butch did were really live and organic and that really translated into what we did post-working with him on a couple songs we produced ourselves. We left a lot of it really live and organic and really cool. Like my vocals aren’t keyboard tuned you know? It’s not perfectly flawless. There are some parts where you can hear the back of my throat irritating and freaking out but it’s cool man. I’m really stoked on this record. It’s so good

WWM: There are three different producers right?

CR: Yeah, John Feldman [Goldfinger] is one, he did three tracks – two made the record. This guy called Lucas Banker, he’s part of Matt Squire’s team. Matt Squire kind of executive produced the track. And there’s another guy who came and helped us out – we kinda got into this rut like halfway through the record. We really don’t work well together in a room, honestly it’s the most difficult thing in the world. If I’m working solo with Chris I do great, if I work solo with Beau I do great, but you get the three of us and our heads in a room it sucks. Somehow we manage to just hate each other so we just jumped around.

We called up our friend Jeremy who’s in this band called Savio, from Atlanta, and we’re like “Jeremy, come fly out here,” and he produces records and engineers and stuff. He works in the same building as Matt Goldman, who did the Underoath record, so he’s good homies with him, that’s kind of his mentor. So he flew out here and he’s really really good at vocals, so he just took all of my ideas and made them 100 times better, whether it was a harmony or something, and he just kind of pushed me to be able to think a little but more, and I feel without him a lot of the songs, even songs that were produced by Feldman or Squire were made better because those songs had already gone through work with so many people.

WWM: How do you expect to keep a consistent sound given the three different producers? I mean John Feldman and Butch Walker alone…

CR: Have completely different sounds of producing, you’re totally right. A lot of people ask us that saying “Hows it gonna sound?” And Saosin is Saosin, whether were produced by Howard Benson, Butch Walker, Matt Squire, or John Feldman. It’s gonna come out sounding like us, and we’re not gonna do anything that that we feel is selling ourselves. We pushed ourselves on this record to write different tunes that show progression show what we can do and what were capable of, and I feel on the last record we stuck with what had been done prior with Anthony, and we kind of have to follow that up, obviously and stick with that. This record I feel that we’ve shown growth and…I’m sorry what was the original question?

WWM: [Laughs] Keeping a consistent sound…

CR: Yeah yeah, Beau mixed the record, our guitar player mixed the record, so that was also a big help with the record’s sound, as far as what comes across to the listener as a whole. We want kids to sit down and read at the lyrics while they listen so the consistency wasn’t that big of a deal but it was a big pain in the butt to mix because of all these different [sounds]. We were pulling stuff from eight months ago trying to finalize the record, but it’s really cool. It came out awesome and sounds great.

WWM: What can we expect from Saosin as far as touring goes?

CR: A lot of touring, like a lot of touring. Were looking to do a full headlining tour in the fall. Were looking to go to Japan, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Europe. But were also looking to be able to play Dubai, they have a big desert festival out there called Desert Rock. We’d love to play that. Really want to go to South Africa and we wanna make it up to Thailand. And we really wanna do something for the military. Like a military base…what do they call those tours?

WWM: USO?

CR: Yeah USO. We wanna do tours like that. They have those in the south of Japan and bases down there, one in Korea. We would love to do something like that where we could travel, see some cool stuff, hang out with good people who are serving our country. We just figure the more places we hit up to open up a new market whether it be for us or another band that goes on after us, the better off everybody’s gonna be.

Like right now in the states, kids are super spoiled when it comes to shows, so most bands are try to get out of the US strictly to open up a new market, see a new crowd, new faces. Just to see what its like to play Japan. For us, in Japan the first time, we were losing our minds, it was awesome. We’re just looking to do a bunch of new stuff, meet as many people as possible and just hang out. We wanna continue to make music for as long as we possibly can.

WWM: Very nice, man. Anything else you wanna add?

CR: Thanks to everybody. Album’s out September 8th. Stay tuned, we’re gonna be doing cool stuff for the tour and every tour following. It’s gonna be dope.

saosin on myspace.

-grizzly