Beautifully Broken

Supposed to Be

Ashley

"So like most New Jersey bands we started out on Eyeball Records. Back then they'd pretty much put out any shit you gave them. The album was bad and we all knew it was bad, but we wanted it out there. It had no direction, none of the songs went together. I think the first review of it wrote us off as another whiny band from New Jersey and told people not to waste their money. Funny thing is, everyone wanted another whiny band from New Jersey. We were happily riding the wave created by bands like Thursday. Within a week of the album coming out we were on tour. I think that's when we really started to want to be serious."

When Tom Griffin, the first ever interviewer to really stand behind us, called up and said he wanted to do a tell all interview to promote the new album I knew I had to do it. If anyone was going to understand the direction our band is going it would be him. There would be no stupid questions. He would let us all tell the story. We'd get to explain how we started out on the dirty streets of New Jersey and fought our way up. Everyone else agreed, excited to get to finally take back the headlines and squash some of the worst rumors. We took our day off to sit in a hotel room and finally clear the air. If Claim of the Broken is going to plow on, we need to do this.

"Do you guys still play songs from that record or do you prefer to just kind of sweep it under the rug?"

The guys let me take the lead on the questions, piping up here and there to tell a funny story or add in their own opinions. Despite it being a group effort, the band knows this album is for me. The story of how we started is largely based around Matt and I. Ryan and Andrew allow us to tell the story how we need to. Matt refers to me, insisting the band would have never gotten off the ground if I hadn't pushed. None of us really had any goals, nowhere to be and no one to answer to. Making music gave us a direction, a purpose. Even with the shitty first album I just had a feeling. I kind of drug the others along with me because I couldn't play all the parts. Plus doing things with your friends is way more fun than going it alone.

"The thing about our first album, I'm Just Here for the Free Booze, is that, at the time it was exactly what I needed. My brothers and I fell on some pretty hard times. We were living out of a van, sleeping on people's couches. Ron, my younger brother, and I were really into pills at the time. That whole album was written on the back of napkins or on the walls of our car. It was how I was coping with the addiction and the homelessness. I'll still play the bigger songs, the one's that people seemed to like or I thought were good. Songs like A Thousand Sunsets or Down the Drain, songs that the kids seem to still want to hear and enjoy."

Tom nods, scribbling down a few notes and whispering little messages to himself in the recorder, "Now you said you and your brother were into pills, when did the heroine start?"

"That started on our second tour. We had to come home during the winter because we had no money. We all got jobs to try and raise enough to go back out for the summer. Eyeball was great because they'd put out anything you wanted and send you on tour whenever, but because of that they didn't have a lot of money to throw at the bands they had signed. We had to pay for everything while on tour. I got a job at this sketchy adult bookstore. The guy I worked with was heavy into the stuff and when he noticed I was downing like half a bottle of Xanax a day, he just suggested it. I was seventeen, eighteen, maybe, I figured if it would get me high like the pills I'd try it. I got hooked really fast, from day one. I think Ron was on it months before that, but I don't really know."

Matt gives my shoulders a squeeze. Talking about the addiction doesn't bother me; it's part of who I am. The part that gets difficult is talking about Ronnie. He's an integral part of the band getting started and was ripped away from it way too soon.

"Right there with Ron and Ashley's addiction, I was very quickly falling into alcoholism," Matt jumps in; his struggle with alcohol plays an equally important role in our early downfall. "Mostly it started because beer was what we could afford, it was what everyone had at their house. Beer and fucking cold cans of Chef Boyardee. It then became a way to cope with everything. One little thing would go wrong in my day, like someone would look at me funny, and I'd need to get wasted. I was going through anything with an alcohol content like it was water."