Currently out on the road with Flyleaf, American rock icons P.O.D (Payable On Death) are celebrating the release of their latest record ‘Murdered Love’ that has been released.
During their busy schedule and preparation for their London performance later in the year, Fortitude Magazine caught with Marcos Curiel of P.O.D; we chat about, his eye for boxing talent, what’s in store for P.O.D and what fans can expect at shows this year. This is what he had to say:
Fortitude Magazine: Hello sir.
Marcos Curiel(guitar): John how are ya?
FM: Not too bad man, how’s things with you?
MC: Just relaxing, sitting back , enjoying the Southern Californian weather that we have now.
FM: Glad to hear it man, it’s dark and rainy here, but it is nine at night.
MC: That’s why some of the best dark music comes from there.
FM: Well, we’ve got a few,we don’t have POD though.
MC: Well, we’re going to bring the SoCal over to England for Download this year.
FM: Are you looking forward to it?
MC: Of course man, I’m a huge fan of British culture, the football, the music, all that stuff.
FM: I’ve been having a look into your exploits of late, I understand you’re an avid boxing fan.
MC: Yeah, boxing and football. I grew up in a home of boxing-my son does boxing. I never boxed, my mom was like ‘it’s too dangerous’, so I learned to play guitar.
FM: It’s a little bit safer.
MC: I can definitely spot talent in boxing, you know, seeing it in other people.
FM: I wanted to ask you about your guitars; I understand you’ve been a PRS guitar man for some time.
MC: I’ve been a fan dude, for many many years. The way I got introduced to PRS was through Mr. Carlos Santana-I grew up listening to him, his older stuff on vinyl, from Abraxas to, you name it, Moonflower. He used to play a Gibson, then the SG, then he started playing this PRS guitar, I was like, what is that? Then I started to see them in guitar stores, and they were super expensive, hanging way at the top of the store, and I was thinking, I would love to play one, and I’d ask to play one, and the sales person would give me kind of a smirk, as if to say ‘this kid isn’t going to buy this’. But he’d have to do his job and hand it to me, and I tested it out. And at the time, there wasn’t many rock/metal players even using PRS. And I was like, dude, I wanna do that. I want to play what we do in POD, and eventually have a collection of PRS. I never even thought or dreamed of being endorsed by that company, and when we shot our Southtown video, the label we were with gave us an equipment budget, and the first thing I went out and bought was a PRS.
FM: You’re a Custom 22 man I understand?
MC: Yeah, but I’m also using a single cutaway now.
FM: I saw in the Higher video you’re using that.
MC: Yeah, that’s my main baby, that one’s got custom art that my friend did, and hey, if you’re going to get something like that, custom, one of a kind, you better play it right? I’m planning on bringing that one to Europe, it’ll be attached to my hip though, so…. I’ve already had offers, on the last tour some guy offered me ten grand for it, and I was like, well, it sounds good, but I can’t do that, it’s one of a kind you know.
FM: I had a listen to Murdered Love-it’s a very confident album, very relaxed compared to the early Alive/Satellite/Youth Of The Nation material. Whose idea was it to do it with commentary?
MC: I don’t understand-what do you mean?
FM: There’s a little introduction to each track.
MC: Ah-it’s the accent, I thought you were saying ‘common tree'(laughs)! I did a version and then Sonny, the singer, did a version. I don’t know whose you heard but I went through the songs and spoke about my view, and how the songs came to fruition.
FM: There’s not a lot of artists doing that sort of thing, and it was nice to get an insight as to what you guys thought of the songs as a group. I wanted to ask you about having Mr. Jasta on Eyes, as you guys share a label on Razor & Tie.
MC: Our relationship and friendship with him goes way back, even before we were label mates, so, we were actually, if you’ve done your past research on what POD’s done, we’ve always had collaborations, or people coming on our tracks with us.
FM: You’ve had Eek-A-Mouse and so on.
MC: We had Mike from Suicidal (Tendencies), Page Hamilton from Helmet, so we’ve been one of the lucky few rock bands/heavy rock bands that have been able to do it. We love doing it, and we were able to get him(Jasta) on the record. He was one of our top 5 choices, we had other people in mind who obviously didn’t work out, but he heard that song and it just felt natural, so we sent it to him and that’s how that all came about.
FM: About the writing process, when it comes to the lyrics, is Sonny left to take care of that while you’re more focused on the musical side?
MC: Actually, a lot of it is me and Sonny. I do a lot of the musical, riffs and chord progressions and stuff like that, and I also, when I’m coming up with the riffs or the chord progressions I’ll usually have an idea, like I was thinking about this or I was thinking about that, so maybe you want to try and go in this direction with it. Not on every song, but on a lot of the tunes I’ll give him a little push in this direction, and if he chooses to run with it, cool. If he doesn’t, then he’s on his own(laughs). But for the most part he’s open to my suggestions.
FM: Well you guys have been together a long time now-15 years I think.
MC: Yeah, but he’s got to sing about something he believes in, something that he’s truly passionate about, so you give him an idea for a tune; West Coast Rock Steady was one of the singles that came out, and that was definitely one of my ideas, and I said, hey man, we should write a song and give homage to our coast. We’ve always been that type of band, we did a song called Southtown, and we thought it’d be cool. You know, there’s this thing that we’re the super serious band, that we’re always super serious, but we’ve always had songs like Rock The Party and stuff like that, and West Coast Rock Steady came about that way too. Let’s show people that we have a good time offstage, and that we can write songs that are fun as well you know?
FM: Speaking of your songs, I see that you’re cracking on with the video for Beautiful. How’s that coming along?
MC: We may have gotten to a final edit-last night I saw it and I’m pretty happy with it, and the people I showed it to loved it. These aren’t ‘yes-yes’ people, these are people I trust-I think the song is a good song already, and the video just adds to it visually. I can’t wait for the world to see it.
FM: When I saw the video for Higher and your live footage, you always commit to it 100%.
MC: We try to keep the balance-I think you have to. I think there’s a lot of bands that can get away with being super-duper artsy, and they can be distant, we try to have a bit of that but we don’t want the listener to get lost in the video.
FM: You’ve sold millions of records now, and gone platinum a number of times. If you could go through everything you’ve done with POD, what songs really stand out?
MC: It would be a tie between two; Youth Of The Nation and Alive.Those two songs pretty much gathered the spectrum of what we can do. They’re hard, but they’re soft too, and ambient, like Youth Of The Nation. And the rocking, hard, singalong anthem of Alive, which really sets the foundation for who we are as a band, I think.
FM: There’s a deep groove to you guys do, even with the punk edge of Panic And Run.
MC: Yeah, that’s because of what we’re influenced by and where we come from. I give credit to SoCal, Southern California; everybody down here surfs, skates-well not everybody, but most people-it’s the culture down here, it’s very free, and free-spirited and open minded, whether it’s going to beach or the music-reggae, punk shows. What you hear in our music is pretty much our environment rubbing off on us, with us projecting it and amplifying it to the world. Our interpretation of it, because everyone does it their different way, like Sublime have their interpretation of it-there’s so many bands!(laughs) You know, Rage Against The Machine does their version of it, the list goes on and on. I am definitely proud to be where we’re from, and to play the music that we do, to play the music that P.O.D.’s known for, plugging in and going for it, that’s what we do live man.
FM: You’re playing the Underworld, London – have you played there before?
MC: To be honest dude, it’s all a bit of a blur to me, I don’t remember venues’ names(laughs)! I remember that we did a really small show at a place called the Garage, that was a long time ago, and I remember we did Wembley arena, we were direct support for Korn, and I want to say we played the Astoria? I know we played a bunch of venues but I can’t remember. I’ve always had a good time when we played in the UK. The accent alone, sometimes there’s some dudes that I can’t understand, cos I’m like ‘huh’?, but I really enjoy your guyses’ accent, I try to do it but it sucks ass, I can do a pretty good version of it(adopts impossibly cockney accent) ‘Can I get a spot of tea’?(much laughter at both ends)
FM: You’ve been on the road a long time, is there any one incident that sticks out to you as something that you’ve done, with the fans or onstage?
MC: Like performing-wise? Hm, I need to think about this for a second. Well, here’s one. The day before 9/11, we were doing a bunch of promotion for the Satellite album, and the label had us running in jets going different places, and we had this TRL countdown with Carson Daly, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, top ten in country, in the States, and we were getting played, believe it or not, we were in the top 5, battling Britney Spears and N-Sync, and we’re one of the few rock bands crossing over into popular culture, and we got to do this performance for TRL live in Battery Park, which was right next to the towers. And you know, you can never comprehend or imagine what would have happened the next day, so we were there, and a buddy from New York said ‘have you ever seen the towers?’. We were at soundcheck, before we performed, and he’s like ‘just walk over here real quick and check ’em out’. I walked over, ’bout 3 or 400 yards and I looked up, and I’m like ‘daaamn those are high’. And he’s like ‘those are the towers man’, and I was like ‘yeah man’-I didn’t really give two cents at the time, but we went and did our thing, performed live, and I woke up the next morning, people calling me cos they think I’m still there, and seeing the plane fly into the building that I’d been standing underneath. I don’t know if that’s a good enough story for you but that’s definitely unforgettable.
FM: That’s a heavy story, I can’t imagine it.
MC: Other countries have fallen victim to various terrorist attacks; that was a major one for us because we had never experienced anything like that, so… And just being so close to it the day before, when a major historical event was going to happen the next day, that was a big bit of our career. And our record came out on 9/11, and we all thought man, our record’s going to be doomed, no-one’s going to be buying music-we weren’t thinking selfishly, we were just thinking about our career-but we were shocked, and the world took onto Alive, and it became an anthem, and it went platinum in four weeks!
FM: You guys have done some incredible stuff, I’ll say that.
MC: The other thing was having a six year hiatus, and nobody hearing of us, and coming back with the album, and having the success we’ve had with the new album, I mean if we were a new band…When we had our first single which actually went to number one here in the States, it was called Lost In Forever, but I was reading some of the comments, and there was kids on there saying ‘man, this is awesome! I’m so glad there’s a new band like this!’ and I was cracking up because there’s this new generation of listener who think we’re a new band(laughs)! I’d say we’re pretty stoked.
FM: It’s a massive achievement for an artist to cross generations like that, and quite inspiring.
MC: Well we feel blessed for it, thank you.
FM: The UK’s always pleased to have you.
MC: Hopefully we’ll be more consistent next time and get over more often.
FM: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us-all the very best!
MC: Thanks man-thanks for listening!
As told to John Davidson.
P.O.D. Play London Underworld on June 17th.
Murdered Love is out now on Razor & Tie.