From the moment that Miss May I first broke onto the Ohio metalcore scene back in 2007, it was clear that they were something special. Their self-released early EPs introducing a brutally melodic take on the ever-expanding genre, they were swiftly snapped up by Rise Records. Heading into the studio with producer Joey Sturgis to record their debut full-length on their new label home – they knew they had to make their mark.
Furious, playful, and boasting the then-five-piece’s technical proficiency in every defiant note, ‘Apologies Are For The Weak’ became a staple of the scene. Ripping into crowds on the Warped Tour stages, and leading Miss May I to share line-ups with their heroes, its ten songs catapulted the band into their hearts of countless heavy music fans across the world. Fifteen years on from their breakthrough release, Miss May I are celebrating a little differently.
Unveiling an anniversary edition of their iconic album, they’ve shared a brand-new re-recording of ‘Apologies Are For The Weak’, featuring cameos on every single song. Teaming up with August Burns Red , Fit For A King , The Word Alive , and more, to celebrate the collection’s release Rock Sound sat down with the band’s Levi Benton to find out more..
. ROCK SOUND: It’s a bold venture to re-record your debut album with ten different cameos..
. Where did that idea come from? LEVI: “The label thought I was crazy when I presented the idea! I’ve seen so many reissues over the years, and I’ve always said that if we were going to do that, we had to spice it up. If you look back across our albums, we don’t have a lot of guest vocalists on them, and it’s a card we’ve never really pulled.
Some of the guests are younger people who were fans of the band back then, and there are also people on the record who we went on tour with at the time. We brought some people out of retirement to do this, and a lot of them are our best friends. It was a crazy idea, and the label thought that having ten extra lead singers on a record was a nightmare.
We were sure we could do it though, so I fired out a text to all these friends. Two days later, everybody had said yes.” RS: How did you go about choosing which song would be best suited to each guest? LEVI: “The first one was Garrett [Russell] from Silent Planet .
Miss May I haven’t toured with them yet, but Ryan [Neff, bass] was on tour with As I Lay Dying who were playing shows with them. Garrett heard from Ryan that we were doing this project, and he called dibs on ‘A Dance With Aera Cura’. After that, I listened through the album, and I thought of parts that were like other bands.
For example, when you listen to ‘Tides’, it has this bounciness to it that fits August Burns Red’s Jake Luhrs perfectly. I got all the guests to say yes first, and then I mapped them out.” RS: It feels like a celebration of the community this scene has fostered.
How integral has that spirit been to Miss May I’s journey? LEVI: “ That’s what it’s all about, touring with friends. There’s the politics and finances that come into it over time, but really, it’s just friends hanging out and doing what they love to do. On this project, not one person asked for a single dollar or any rights to the songs.
I thought that was cool, because in the past when we’ve tried to do things with different people outside of our circle, those are the conversations that stop the forward motion. People usually just want to know how much they’re getting paid or whether they’ll own the song, but everyone I hit up was like, ‘Cool, whatever you need. I’ll do it my bedroom and send it back to you’.
There are some names on this record that are easily bigger than Miss May I, and they didn’t have to text me back, but they were more than happy to help.” RS: Songs like ‘Forgive And Forget’ have become setlist staples over the years, but what was it like to revisit some of the tracks you haven’t played in over a decade? LEVI: “Our whole career has been awesome, but creating the original album was the best time of our lives. All the memories came back, especially when we were tracking it.
It unlocked this whole part of my brain that I didn’t know was still there, and I felt like a kid again. The cool thing about this album is that it was recorded before we knew anything about music. There’s no structure, and nothing on the album makes sense, but that’s the charm of it.
Our later albums are structured because we became more commercial, but this one was just total freedom. It felt so nice to revisit that, but it required a whole lot of stamina. The album is so fast, and we’re old now.
.. It kicked our ass!” RS: Was it interesting to revisit some of the lyrics too, given that you were only a teenager when you wrote them? LEVI: “I remembered the ideas behind why I wrote these songs, and that brought back a lot of my influences.
I was really into bands like As Blood Runs Black and All Shall Perish , and in that scene it almost wasn’t about the subject of the song, it was about the most insane thing you could say. We were cracking up doing some of the vocals because I was singing my old lyrics and thinking, ‘Why would you say that?’ A lot of it sounds evil, and that was the whole idea at the time. The lyrics brought back some memories too, because I was in high school.
A lot of it is about getting out of your hometown, but written in an evil, metal way. They’re songs about school and relationships, but they’re just wrapped darkness and evil.” RS: When you were re-recording, were there parts of songs you were tempted to change or shift, or were you focused on staying true to the originals? LEVI: “Usually when we record music, we have three tracks, the vocal track, the instrumental track, and the click to keep time.
For this, there was a fourth track, which was the reference track. We listened to the reference of the original track, and some stuff was dated, or we knew we could do it better now. When those parts came up, we would track it.
Everyone in the room would feel when those moments were needed, and there were points where it felt right to do a modern spin on who we are now. It’s cool, because that makes it a timeless album. With having a bunch of friends on the record too, we told them to add whatever they wanted.
A lot of them added weird stuff, and that rules. It’s a celebration.” RS: Was there a pressure that came with re-visiting an album that so many fans see as a classic of the genre? LEVI: “All of us knew that it was either going to end up sounding stupid, or everyone was going to hear it and lose their minds.
We did the recording in shifts, because our lives are so different now. We weren’t all in the studio at the same time, so everyone was texting back and forth. I was the last one in the studio, and I remember doing the first vocal track.
I looked at everybody and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be sick’. People often say, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, but having the songs recorded with new technology makes them sound so much more beefed up. Everything just meshed, and from then I knew it was a great idea.
” RS: Were there any challenges vocally, given how your style and approach has changed over the last fifteen years? LEVI: “There are a lot of long and high screams on the record which were so hard back in the day but are much easier to hit now. Back then, we would open the door to the vocal room, I would drink water and take some breaths, then I would run across the whole building towards the mic and give it everything I had. We were pushing so hard just to make something crazy.
After all these years of touring, I was able to do those screams without going to such lengths. Revisiting the songs also opened this box of stuff that I’d abandoned though. It made me feel like a kid again, because there were no managers or labels telling us what to do.
I was able to remember what that feels like. I haven’t done high screams in five or six albums, and the whole album is highs. That’s awesome, and it was so much more fun.
It was a challenge to bring some of those vocal ranges back, but they also came naturally after all the touring we’ve done. It was humbling to remember how much it hurt and sucked when I was 17 and first doing it in the studio.” RS: Your line-up has changed since we last had new Miss May I music.
What role did freshly recruited guitarist Elisha Mullins play in the album’s creation? LEVI: “He engineered it, recorded it, and played on it. He’s cut from the same cloth as us, as he’s from the Midwest area. He’s the same age as us, and he was playing 100 miles west from us back then, but he was doing the same thing we were doing.
He was almost in a parallel universe, so in a sense he’s always been a part of this band. He has the same influences and the same experiences, so we didn’t skip a beat. He knew our world, but we didn’t know his world, so now he’s bringing his world into ours.
We thought we loved black metal until we met Elisha, and he’s bringing in so many riffs and a whole host of music we’ve never heard. He wants this as much as we all do.” RS: In terms of the visuals, you’ve been having fun with the nostalgic elements of this record.
Where did the idea to create a MySpace-inspired site come from? LEVI: “I have always been a developer behind the scenes throughout our whole career. When the pandemic happened, I took it a little more seriously because we weren’t playing shows. I made an agency and did it for other bands, which was a lot of fun.
Me and my team always joked about creating a new MySpace, and this ended up being a guinea pig. We were working on a new database language, and this seemed like a great place to test it. We had to stop ourselves from getting carried away, but we thought it was a cool way to tease the album.
We’ve been doing this for so long that it’s important for everything to feel spicy or exciting. We want to do it our way, and I think that’s part of the reason why fans are so excited. There’s a goofiness to it, and we’re just having fun with it.
” RS: You’ve also recently signed to Solid State Records, joining their roster alongside the likes of The Devil Wears Prada and Fit For A King. What role have they played in making this project what it is? LEVI: “They are the first people to ever give us free rein, and it’s insane. They fully trust us.
I was hanging out with Fit For A King recently at a festival, and they’ve been on the label for twelve years. They don’t know anything else, and I was telling them how much of it has been pulling teeth for us. They’ve never had that experience, but now we get to do things differently too.
There are so many cool things down the road that we’re doing just because it’s what we want to do. It all falls into place, it’s a universe thing. You go around this whole loop just to come back to your first album, and a new label.
It’s back to where we started, in an amplified way. It feels great.” RS: Musically this band has evolved a lot since ‘Apologies Are For The Weak’.
What is it like to reflect on your debut record and the earliest days of the band knowing how much you’ve grown now? LEVI: “We were originally going to do this idea with ‘Monument’, back when we had the old lineup, but it didn’t really mesh. The people that didn’t want to do ‘Monument’ are the people that aren’t in the band anymore. When we got together to do this album though, we realised that we could make it fun.
It rejuvenated us, and fun was mandatory. If it was going to be too serious, we didn’t want to do it at all. That’s why ‘Monument’ didn’t happen.
It was too serious. We decided to take away all the corporate stuff and just have fun with it, and that was the best decision. It felt like when we did it the first time, back when we were just playing music and showing off with friends.
It’s that feeling of a bunch of guys hanging out in a garage and jamming together.” RS: When you were first writing and recording these songs over fifteen years ago, did you ever imagine you’d still be celebrating them a decade and a half later? LEVI: “No, it is crazy. When we did the ‘Monument’ anniversary tour five years ago, we started meeting fans who told us that their parents raised them on our band.
These kids would be around twelve years old, and we’ve been playing shows for their whole lifetimes. Throughout our whole career though, we’ve known that our first album was our special album. Every time we released an album, it would do what it needed to do to keep us going, but we always knew that ‘Apologies Are For The Weak’ was the special one.
When we meet people, they’ll either have the lion tattoo, or they’ll have an ‘Apologies Are For The Weak’ sleeve. We knew that if we were going to celebrate anything from the band’s history, it would be this. I remember having it on a burnt CD after coming out of the studio.
When we went back to high school, I remember going in my friend’s cars and putting it on. Everyone would lose their minds, and since then people have been excited for our albums, but nothing has been like that. There was something special about that album.
”.
