WEB-EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: AIDEN’S WIL FRANCIS ON MAKING THE BAND'S NEW ALBUM, 'KNIVES'

In Revolver’s August issue, out now, we interview vocalist-guitarist Wil Francis of goth punks Aiden about the group's new album, Knives (Victory). For those of you who didn't get enough (or are too cheap to buy the fucking magazine), here's the best of the rest of our chat.

REVOLVER What was your goal for Knives?
WIL FRANCIS When I was writing this album, what I really wanted to do was create an album you’re able to sing along to. That’s always been the deal for me. I’m a fan of NOFX and the Beatles and the “Black Album” by Metallica—you can sing along to all that stuff. I wasn’t schooled at Julliard; I’m not a great musician. I just learned how to write songs as I made each record, and at this point my songwriting is way better than it was at the beginning.

How does that improvement happen?
I don’t know how to explain it except for that I’ve done it over and over. This is my fourth full-length with Aiden, and I’ve also done two EPs and a solo album. For me, with every record I’ve gotten better at writing melodies and progressions and structures and all that shit. It’s been a matter of trial and error. Being on a label like Victory, they don’t hire a big producer who’s like, “OK, guys, we’re gonna do a huge fucking pop song.” They just give us money and we make a record. It’s a learning process.

Describe the process for this one.
We wrote 30 songs for this album and just whittled it down. In the beginning, we wanted to do a double album, but Victory said no. We had enough material to do 25 songs that were good, so we trimmed from there.

How did you pick which tracks made the cut?
It was a matter of picking the songs that had the best melodies and rocked the hardest. For us, it’s kind of a weird process: We’re not a progressional band on any level; we have no schooling on our musical ability. Our success has just been by the skin of our teeth, by making rocking songs that kids can sing along to.

That’s always the most important thing.
Yeah, we wanted to create an album full of two-minute punk-rock songs, and we used that criteria for picking which ones to use. A big part of this album writing was trying to get out of the structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-end. Some of the songs are structured that way, but we kind of wanted to… I just realized that Aiden is never gonna get played on the radio; we’re never gonna have a video on MTV with Kanye. We’re not gonna be a huge, successful band that’s played on every radio station in the world. We’re not U2. We’re a punk-rock band from Seattle, and we tried to stay true to that.

Interview by Mikael Wood