Sound CheckDrummer Ian Casselman talks about the misconceptions of Marianas Trench
This year has been a great one for Canadian pop/rock band Marianas Trench.
So far, the Vancouver quartet has taken home the Juno Award for Group of the Year, received the most nominations at the MuchMusic Video Awards for the second year in a row, signed a deal with Cherrytree Records/Interscope Records, and met Sting.
However, along with their popularity surge comes an increase in the circulation of false stories, and Marianas Trench’s drummer Ian Casselman decided clear up a few misconceptions about the band while talking to Yahoo! Canada Music.
“I’ve heard [rumours] that we’re doing hard drugs, or something like that, and I’m like, ‘If anybody in this band were doing hard drugs you would get kicked out immediately,’” the musician said.
He went on: “Josh has a history with drugs and he can’t be around them so it’s hilarious when I see people posting comments on a video or something where we’re [just] really, really exhausted.”
Casselman pointed to the band’s most recent MMVAs performance as an example of when the group was extremely tired and still decided to take the stage, only to receive backlash about their appearance during the show.
“At the MMVAs, we were exhausted and we probably shouldn’t have played it because we just came off four in a row at the end of a 26 run tour in the United States,” he revealed. “We were just really tired and when you hear a comment [like] ‘They’re on drugs’ and this and that, it just blows me away.”
Another myth that the group sometimes deals with is the notion that it’s lead singer Josh Ramsay’s band and the other members act as puppets. In reality, it seems like guitarist Matt Webb, bassist Mike Ayley, and Casselman all put in a lot of effort as well.
“If you have too many chefs in the kitchen, it doesn’t work as well,” Casselman said. “You need somebody to be the creative leader and that’s how a healthy band, in my opinion, runs as long as everything is done respectfully. We have a strong frontman and he does definitely represent the band but at the same time, behind-the-scenes, everybody is contributing a lot.”
Next up for Marianas Trench will be the release of the music video for their new single “By Now,” which the drummer says will be arriving quite soon. The video features elements of “Romeo and Juliet” and the 1993 Christian Slater flick “True Romance."
“We tried to take a serious approach and make it look more like movie footage,” Casselman said. “It does definitely wrap up all of the other videos. It’s a very artsy stab at it [and] it’s not the typical fairy-tale story approach … It looks like a very, very big budget video [but we did it on] a smaller Canadian budget [and] we were very happy that we were able to pull [it] off.”
Filmed in Las Vegas, Marianas Trench’s latest clip covers themes of sex, love and money. Judging by one of Ramsay’s recent tweets, there’s still some work to be done on the video before it’s ready.
https://twitter.com/JoshRamsay/status/357646447686057984
Check out a taste of “By Now” by watching the clip’s trailer below and head here to follow Marianas Trench on their journey.
