The legendary progressive metal band Between the Buried and Me is currently out on the road in North America for The Colors Experience Tour, which is a celebration of two separate albums from the band’s catalog: Colors (2007), and Colors II (2021). This tour sees the band performing two nights in each city, playing all of Colors on the first night, and Colors II on the second night. Their Toronto stop brought them to The Opera House on March 18th and 20th for two nights of heavy, technical metal music, with guitar solos, blast beats, and time signature changes galore. We had a quick chat with the bassist Dan Briggs before the show in Toronto.

Julien: Hey, what’s up everyone, I’m Julien from Metal Wani, and today I’m sitting here in Toronto’s beautiful Opera House with none other than Dan Briggs from the legendary Between the Buried and Me. How are you doing today Dan?

Dan: I’m doing great, thanks!

Julien: The first thing I want to know is: you mentioned before we started that you guys are about two weeks into the tour, playing Colors one night, Colors II the other night. How’s it going so far?

Dan: It’s going pretty well. It’s weird to play two albums that are just a different lifespan apart from each other – 15 years or so, 14-15 years. And then, just an album that we’ve played hundreds of times almost, now – [we’ve] really played Colors a lot: on its initial run, and then a few times here and there, and then we did a 10 year anniversary run on it – and then an album that we’ve now played, five times, you know what I mean? [Colors II is] even longer, it’s like a half hour longer. So yeah, it’s still settling in. But the second album really feels great. Even though now, at this point, that’s our pandemic record. We wrote it during 2020, and it’s coming up [on] four years since we were in that session, and writing some of those songs. To finally play them, and in the context, that alone feels great. So in general, yeah, it’s feeling really good. We were talking again before filming that playing them on the same night would be another story, but separating it [allows for] kind of jumping into the different mindsets, and the different zones.

Julien: Awesome, glad to hear it’s going well! That said, even though you’re not doing them on one night and spreading it out over two, you’re looking at about two and a half hours of music between the two albums, and any other potential songs you may or may not be throwing in. So with that said, what is the preparation process for that? How do you go about learning, or relearning, that amount of complex material?

Dan: Yeah, that’s a good question. [Because] even on a normal tour where we’re pulling stuff from the different eras and stitching it all together, that stuff will come back over the course of like a week [of] dipping in. Generally it’s like one day of trying to cram everything into your head, and then spending the rest of the week playing until you screw up, and then going back and fixing, going back and fixing, and then it’s kind of in there. For this one, I started about mid-January, and I was like, “first, day one: let me just play Colors, let me make sure that’s in the bank”. And 65 minutes later, it was. I was like, “okay, I’m not going to think about that for at least a couple weeks now”. Then I knew the last song on Colors II, we hadn’t performed yet – Human is Hell – and it’s a 16 minute blowout. I was like, “I have not thought about the notes, the sequences, the grooves, the anything, since we recorded December 2020, so I’m going to start there”. It was a solid – with the songs that we hadn’t performed [or] hadn’t played yet, and then getting the ones that we had but maybe not since 2022, get those back in the brain – it was a solid couple weeks before I was feeling good pressing play at the beginning and getting through. Then I would just get in the routine [where] every single day was like, coffee, and then just clocking in. Like clocking in at work, a little 20 minute warm-up or so, and then diving in. Then sporadically, as it was getting closer, sprinkling in Colors. Those double-up days were wild. Some days I would start with Colors – the more familiar one is the warm up, you know? But then there [were] ones where I was like, “well I actually want to feel my best trying to play the newer one,” so I’d flip it. It always feels so good when you’re finally in the room with the guys. We’ve always been a band [where] we hold each other accountable – everyone’s just doing their prep, doing their work on their own, getting their sounds together. A lot of this one for me, like the daily routine, is going over keyboard stuff. Colors II is very keyboard heavy for me, as opposed to – I [play almost no] keyboards on Colors, so stuff like that.

Julien: I see we’ve added a bit of backing track. Very funky. Okay, so it was interesting to learn that you guys make sure that you do most of your prep work, and hold each other accountable, so that I guess when you’re coming together as a band, you know that you can probably put it together with minimal band involvement. But that said, how many times did you get together as a band before you actually hit the road?

Dan: I think we had three dress rehearsals, with production, and then, first show in Charlotte – [basically our] home zone. So that was both comforting to be in the home place, and also kind of like, “oh God, all of our friends and family…” [laughs]  But honestly, considering, it went pretty well. I would say Colors II was like 92% that night. It was pretty good.

Julien: Not bad for the first run! [laughs] That’s awesome. I guess this may be looking ahead a little bit more than you guys are thinking about right now, being on tour, but now that it’s coming up on a few years since the release of Colors II – and I know you guys are always writing – what have you got in queue there, in terms of upcoming projects or upcoming releases?

Dan: Outside of the band, I just finished a record before this tour that’s waiting to be mixed. [It’s] an interesting trio: it’s harp, bass, and drums, and it’s kind of, I can’t even really…“fusion” doesn’t really do it justice, or whatever. That’s a very fun project with my friend Emily, and Chris Allison from Plini playing drums.

Julien: Nice!

Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, [he’s] phenomenal, so that’s really fun. What’s been so nice about having this tour cycle as long as it is – I think just being at this point, 20 plus years at the band – is that we’re able to really lengthen our tour cycles for an album. I mean, it used to be like, [a] year and a half, shut down for half a year, write a record, record, start the next one. Now this is the fourth year of – you know, the pandemic obviously spaced everything way out, and stuff that we had planned for 2020 was bumped to 2021. The Parallax II 10 year was bumped to 2023 from 2022, so stuff like that. But what was so nice about that then is having more time at home, more gaps, and less of a feeling of like, “oh no, I’m only home for a month and a half, I don’t really have time to just like settle,” and not be in my office, or casually get my way into the office. I have to be in there and try to get to the point where I’m creating and doing stuff before I have to start learning music again. Now I can have kind of a healthy break, get into the office, maybe just tinkering with whatever, and finding my way over the last couple years to a couple new tunes that are definitely Between the Buried and Me. But whenever we’re in this pre- “shutting down to actually write as a group” stage, everyone’s kind of doing that: just picking around their ideas, and that’s how you always have that growth. Then it finally shuts down, then we share our ideas, and we start really going at it together. Yeah, I’m excited, of course.

Julien: That’s awesome. So once you get as a band to that shutdown period, where you get together and realize you’re gonna start pumping out Between the Buried and Me material, what does that process look like? It sounds like you’ve written stuff, [and] I assume other members bring stuff to the table. How does it come together in a typical fashion?

Dan: Well, in a typical non-2020 fashion…

Julien: Of course.

Dan: Right. We’ll send some demos back and forth. I always romanticize the idea of being in the room together, maybe on the bus like on this tour, and popping in the cable and being like, “hey man, this is what I’ve been working on!” But that’s kind of not fair to the people you’re playing it to, and also it’s just awkward for you to demand that immediate reaction – you know what I mean? Even though I’m really excited about it. If someone is sending me something new, I want to listen to it, be able to take it in, and then look at the sheet music, and really just wedge myself in. [I’ll] be like, “let me get what’s on paper,” and then what do I hear? What’s happening? Even when a song [or] an initial idea is sent pretty well composed, I think whoever is sending that – whether it’s like me, Paul, Tommy, Blake had a lot of lot of stuff like that for Colors II – I would think each member is sending it on the basis that, “I just went as far with this idea as I could”. Personally, you know what I mean? Now it’s time for the group to get in there. So that’s kind of fun. That’s definitely how the process starts. At this point in my years of writing with various different groups, and just offshoots, and whatever, just writing with people in general, [my thinking] is: I don’t want there to be so much of “just me”. I’m not bored of that, but I do enough of that, enough of writing on my own in my office. I’m just way more excited about what’s going to come back, or what small idea is going to come in and set my brain off, because it just didn’t come from me. That’s always just what’s so exciting, and then for this one, to get back to being in the room. So Automata was the last time that we were able to do stuff on our own, do some sharing, and then get in the room, and really work through the nuts and the bolts, and the bar by bar, and work out the demos. Paul and I just sitting there with acoustic guitars, chunking out harmonies or, “what if we tried this, yadda yadda”, and stuff like that which was just lost during the pandemic a bit.

Julien: Yeah, unfortunately.

Dan: Just totally remote.

Julien: That’s awesome. So speaking of taking inspiration from elsewhere, be it your bandmates or other musicians, I always like to know when I speak to a prolific musician: who are you listening to? Who were you listening to last time you wrote an album and who are you listening to in general now?

Dan: Yeah, I mean 2020…it’s funny, because for the two different nights – y’all said you were here for Colors the other night – I made a very 2007-themed . Nothing that was too on the nose, like obviously we were listening to a lot of Opeth and Dream Theater and stuff, none of that. But it was stuff like some contemporaries that we toured with: our Toronto buds The End, they were on the playlist. They toured with us [during the] Colors era, [on the] original Colors tour. Fear Before the March of Flames, and then stuff like Muse, Mew, stuff from that time that we all, as a band in the van in those days, were kind of jamming on. Then putting together the 2020 , I was immediately like, “oh God, I don’t even want to think about the state I was in in 2020”. So actually it’s all 80s theme stuff, and I think a big part of that was that there was so much comfort listening during that time. I mean, I was listening to a lot of – I can’t really think of much that went into inspiring the actual music that I wrote, but I think it was just, I was listening to a lot of Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Some of my favorite artists, but really those ones that I will just go back to again and again and again, and I’ll always get something out of. Lately, [it] just came out this year, the new Sleepytime Gorilla Museum set my brain bursting. The new Kim Gordon record from Sonic Youth just came out, I actually just picked it up at Pop Music down the road.

Julien: Oh, I’m not familiar.

Dan: Yeah, great shop. That new record of hers is amazing. It’s funny because I feel like I’m not on the pulse of new music, and then there’ll just be a stream of stuff that I’m just gobbling up. The new [The] Smile record is beyond so cool, so yeah.

Julien: Awesome, I’m definitely going to take some of those recommendations. I haven’t checked out most of what you just mentioned there. On a similar note, I always like to know who are some of your favorite bands that you’ve had the opportunity to tour with? You guys have had a 20 plus year career now, and you’ve toured with a lot of great bands. Who are some of your favorites, either in terms of what they do musically, or just who they are as people?

Dan: Yeah, I mentioned a couple from the Colors era that we toured with, which [are] bands like The End or Fear Before the March of Flames, where it was like, we went home and we listened to those records. Those were contemporaries, but also, at that time of Colors where we were trying to separate, somehow [it] seemed like we were building this little community of bands that seemed like they were also trying to do that, and kind of elevate out. And then I started a band with Adam from Fear Before, and he sang on Colors. The band Haken, [the] British band, they’re obviously one of our best friend bands, and I have a band with two of them as well, Nova Collective. But we were just in Europe with them last year, and we tried to get them on this tour, and basically every tour we do in America [laughs] We’re always like, “Haken, just come.” I mean honestly, [The] Acacia Strain, we toured – mine and Blake’s first full US tour with Between the Buried and Me right before Alaska came out in 2005, [The] Acacia Strain was I think opening – I think they opened that show, or were the second of four [bands] with The Red Chord or something, way back – and it’s fun to catch back up with them after all these years. The last tour we did, Thank You Scientist was a band that was, as a group of musicians – to find guys that you could really latch onto, and delve into these musical talks that went deeper than just what we were doing on stage at night was really cool, and really inspiring. So yeah, it’s really fun. It’s fun to go out with your friends that you already know, but every now and then you get to go out with these bands that you really connect with and – yeah it’s really cool.

Julien: Yeah, I think both Brad [the videographer] and I caught you there with Thank You Scientist, on that tour. Big fan of those guys, super fun band. So I guess before we wrap this up, I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’re a big fan of ’90s Ontario-based alt rock. I guess, it sounds like you were telling me off camera earlier that you lived far enough north that you were getting those radio stations across the border which is rare – a lot of those bands didn’t really have crossover success. So who are some of your favorites that you came to realize were not big in the States?

Dan: Well, it’s wild, you had – I mean obviously Our Lady Peace really kind of broke in America with the Clumsy record and stuff, but I’m sure it was still much bigger up here. I Mother Earth and The Tragically Hip, and the like. Yeah where I grew up, in Erie, Pennsylvania, we would get, I don’t know, I wish I could remember what the station was called in London Ontario – it might have been like X-FM something something – but you’d hear this stuff. I would either tune into that station, or our station at home that was mostly playing Top 40 rock stuff, which at that time happened to be just this brilliant, amazing, really [the] last wave of incredible rock music that was universally at that level, and was so fortunate. But also we got Much Music, so I would see [that, and] they seemed much more music- and actual performance-based than MTV was at the time. And MTV even would have special late night specials [where] they’d be airing “Nirvana: Live and Loud”, or their Unplugged series and all that stuff. But when you’re just when you’re a kid, and you’re 10 to 13 just taking in MTV [and] Much side by side, and these two radio stations side by side, and you just realize it’s one thing. And some of that stuff’s really lived on for me. I still listen to probably those first core three Our Lady Peace records, [it’s] really interesting stuff, really great vocal and lyrical stuff. I saw them one of those early years going to concerts, maybe I was in 7th grade, and I think they were second on a bill with Eve 6 and Third Eye Blind. Classic 1996-1997 bill. And all that stuff like that, [I] think of these building blocks that built onto something else, built onto something else, that got me into this, that got me into that. But coming back around to that stuff, I do think – because I was listening to some [of that] stuff kind of recently and thinking on, even a band like The Tragically Hip that this station out of London played so much. I mean, I know they were big up here, but there was really not a presence of them in America. But listening to those bands and being like, there was something different. It wasn’t as dark, and maybe gritty, as the stuff that was coming out of America. I’m always curious at that time to try to draw a line, where the stuff could have come from, and some of that stuff that was coming out, I really don’t know. Even a band like Crash Test Dummies [laughs] They’re Canadian, and I love them, [but] I was like, “I don’t know where this comes from, this is incredible stuff”. As soon as I got my 12-string guitar, I tuned it up, and I was trying to play some Crash Test Dummies. [laughs] So yeah, indelible stuff.

Julien: Yeah, I was going to ask if any of it had any direct, noticeable influence on your playing, and it sounds like it just may have. [laughs]

Dan: You never know. Now it’s really funny, because I’ve in recent years gone back and listened to a song like Superman’s Dead, [and I] of course not only appreciate it, it kind of instills the same thing in me that I would have seen on MTV at the time, or heard on the radio. The way I would have felt then, I can still get a little bit of that with the stuff that I really loved, and really had on a loop at that time. But now I’ll zoom out as an arranger and musician and be like, “oh, well this is a very interesting song arrangement”, where it’s like verse-chorus-verse, and then it just goes into another space to end the song.      You know what I mean? Just ending with this bridge that doesn’t really tie in with the rest of the song, and I’m like, “okay, that’s an interesting [choice], something interesting was happening here”. When you listen to the first record of theirs, it’s really more open in some areas, which is really interesting. I don’t know. Yeah, I love that stuff. I wish I could zoom back to then at an adult age [to] be able to check some of that stuff out live.

Julien: Ah, don’t we all. [laughs] Well, I’ll have to let you go, I’m sure you’ve got a busy day, but thanks again for granting us the time. [I’m] very much looking forward to watching you guys play Colors II this evening.

Dan: Awesome, appreciate it.

Julien: All the best.

Dan: Yeah, thank you.

Watch The Entire Video Interview Below: