We Are The Fallen: interview with Carly Smithson

We Are The Fallen is a band unto its own, insists Carly Smithson, and that’s not changed by the fact that she was not too long ago a favored American Idol contestant nor the fact that three of her bandmates were at one time members of the popular band Evanescence (including co-founder Ben Moody). And she’s right, of course. A year after announcing their new band, and getting pelted with questions from the media about their past the whole time, We Are The Fallen have finally released their debut album Tear The World Down. And on opening day of their tour with Saving Abel, Carly explains to me that being in a band is what she’s always wanted – and why she would never have wanted to name the band after herself, even despite the name recognition she gained from a year of television exposure.

“It was a very sweet day when we all met,” she says of joining forces with Moody and the gang. “They were working on the same project across town, they didn’t have their singer, I was working on the same project across town, didn’t have my band. And we met and it was just perfect timing, perfect everything. I mean there’s five people in a band, I would never want to call it Carly.”

While some in the press initially tried to peg the band as being some kind of put-together entity, it turns out to be one of those stories you couldn’t make up if you tried: “My friend lived with Ben, and I happened to be in his house, and his girlfriend saw me, told her mom, and her mom watched Idol, and hounded Ben to contact me. Even though I was in his house a lot, he wasn’t there, he was always in the studio.” Finally Ben reached out, and after an initial all-night discussion about common goals, they decided to push forward as a fivesome, including fellow former Evanescence members Rocky Gray and John LeCompt, along with Marty O’Brien who had also previously collaborated with Moody.

Once the two camps came together, they pooled the material that they had each been working on and co-wrote a surprising number of new songs as well. “Bury Me Alive, which was the first single, was actually something that I was working on,” says Carly. “Paradigm, which is on the record, originally was a track that they had been working on. Through Hell was on their project. St. John, I had been working on, on my project. There were just many different things that we had all been writing for so long. When we originally came together, our original idea was only to do two songs as our first recording and writing together, and we ended up doing fifteen.”

Why so many newly written songs, when they already had so much existing material to work with? “When we got together we had all these ideas for personal projects that we’d been working on for so long, and they just all gelled together so perfectly. This record took not a lot of time, and the whole writing experience was really amazing. I don’t know, you have to be in the room and there to experience it. It was really magical the way it all happened. It was like us five had really known each other forever.”

But nonetheless, the comparisons to Evanescence persist, at least inside the beltway. “You’re the first interview that I haven’t had the first five questions be exactly the same,” Carly tells me of the fact that the press just won’t stop asking about the parallels. She’s quick to add, however, that “our fans have never said any of those things. And even when we didn’t even have a song, we were just an idea of a band, they were supporting us one hundred percent.”

Asked if her year on American Idol, which sees contestants poked and prodded in every fashion, helped prepare her for the inevitable media sideshow surrounding the launch of her band, Carly says she’s learned not to care about outside opinions, quoting a piece of advice from her friend and fellow Idol alum Brooke White: “opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. You just can’t get rid of that.” Although Carly adds that Brooke “might have said it in a more PG fashion.”

As if to emphasize that We Are The Fallen is not about any of their past accomplishments or any existing name or face recognition, the band members decided that none of them would appear on the album cover, but would be depicted by children instead. “The track on our record with we all mostly love is Tear The World Down. It’s the most bells and whistles, it’s the finale to the record, it’s the boldest song that we have on the record. So we decided to name the album Tear The World Down. I was going through different images online, just different photography and stuff like that, and we all decided we’ll go away for a couple of days and we’ll all come together and reconvene with our different ideas for the album cover now that we have the name, and see what we come up with.

“I went away and I was looking at different things, and I saw this picture of this child that looked kind of like a mixture between the kids from The Shining, the kid from Orphan or The Omen, that kind of like creepy kid, but still very angelic and just innocent, with this background of a ruin, and it just looked so eerie, the contrast between this child and this destruction, demolished buildings behind her. So I contacted the band and said I think it would be a cool idea to do the band, but as six years olds, all these creepy eerie looking children. So we found children for every band member and we did a full photo shoot with all these five kids, and they were creepy as hell looking, but it just didn’t look as eerie and as isolated and as alone as with one child. So we decided to just go with the little girl. But it’s not me, it’s a child that we found in LA, and she was just amazing. She looked just like me as a child. It was weird.

“Little Ben was really funny as well. He kept pulling down his pants and all sorts. It was an amazing day to have five children and have us five all dressed up. It was very weird, cause we had a whole photo shoot day with the children and stuff. But it was really cool. They needed like a little school teacher and a school setup and everything, cause I guess the laws and stuff. It was cool, we came in and they were all sitting down doing their first lesson of the day while we were getting hair and makeup. It was funny. But yeah, she was amazing, and that’s kind of the idea. The idea is that child woke up in the middle of the night and destroyed the city behind her, and that’s Tear The World Down.”

Finally, there’s the matter of being the female lead singer of an otherwise all male rock band, which Carly says was her goal all along. “I always wanted to be part of a band. I hate being on stage. I feel so isolated being alone. I love having. And before Idol, I actually had a band that I would play with every week. Going from that to being alone on a stage was really quite frightening, and just uncomfortable and I really didn’t like it. I’ve basically grown up around boys. I was always one of the tomboys, and I guess having a tattoo shop, and building cars when I lived in Atlanta, I’ve always been around greasy metalheads, so these guys are probably the cleanest of the clean that I’ve ever been around. There’s eleven guys on our bus, and they’re pretty much just like my friends back home, but they make music instead of cars and tattoos. And it’s cool, my husband gets along really well with them cause we’re all tattooed and all into the same stuff. So it was honestly just a perfect match when we all met.”

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About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.