The Ohio-based metalcore band Miss May I are certified veterans, now ten years in the game and stronger than ever. As a band of close friends since high school who took all the great advantages of the MySpace era, they’ve been able to grow into a solid metal band that always pushes their own boundaries and are not satisfied with sticking to the status quo.
Miss May I just released their sixth studio album, Shadows Inside, via their new home at SharpTone records and its a fuller sounding and more focused effort than ever before. The last time I talked with frontman Levi Benton, we talked about the history of the band, but I was able to link back up with him recently and we talked about the making of Shadows Inside.
When you released the first single “Lost in the Grey” from the new album, what was the feedback like?
It’s been pretty crazy. The coolest part about everything is that we took so much time off doing this record and we were obviously pretty scare since we had so much off time. The response has been through the roof. I’ve been keeping tallies of negative responses, but it’s all been pretty positive.
Why did you make sure to take some time off to make this album?
We changed labels, management, and basically our whole team. Everything that surrounded Miss May I except Miss May I changed so with that we felt like it was a special time in our careers and wanted to make sure this one was special. We actually brought two producers in on it. We did a bunch of different, special stuff for this record. It came out great. It was six months in the studio so it was a long time.
Going into making this new album Shadows Inside, what was the mood of the band about what you wanted to do with this particular album?
We obviously always want to do better than the last, but this time around, not only did we want to do better than the last record, but we really wanted to shoot for having a headlining record. We never really headlined, we’ve always been a support. We wanted something that was arena sounding and big for the band. We wanted something like when you listen to it, it sounded bigger than a metal band. We wanted it to be big and over the top. I think we accomplished that. That’s why it took so long.
You said you worked with a couple of producers on this record. Who did you work with and what were they able to bring out of your guys to make this that record you wanted to make?
The big difference was we were working with this guy named WZRDBLD (Drew Fulk) out of Los Angeles. He’s a vocal producer. We never worked with a vocal producer before. Its always been sort of techie, shredding guys, which is fine because we have guitar solos and we play really fast a lot. I did all the vocals with him and the instrumentals were actually done with the guy who engineered our last record Nick Sampson, who is like an instrument guru. We tried to take the best of both worlds and mashed them together. It took a very long time to do that because it’s all satellite. Nick was in Michigan and WZRDBLD was in LA, so we were basically recording the record over email back and forth. The guys were there and I didn’t even see the guys the whole time we were in the studio, but it came out great.
As the vocalist of Miss May I, what did you learn working with the vocal producer?
The biggest thing for me is that it was more of the emotion and the focus. I never really focused on the little lines or the little verses. He wanted everything to be different. I didn’t record, copy, and paste across the whole song. It was always something different with different emotion. I never really treated a record like that. I’ve done records in the past where I’ve done three songs in one day. Now, it would take us three days to do two lines on a song. It took forever to get this record done, but spending that much time and that much focus. I’ll never do it another way again. It made the record.
Spending so much time with the little things on the vocals and the emotion behind it, how did you feel when you eventually stepped in the booth and laid down those lines? Was there vulnerability with it?
No, not it all. It’s actually weird because there wasn’t a booth. I was in an open room with him. We just vibed out. We went over every single word together. It wasn’t like writing and then jumping in. The cool thing was that he didn’t want me to write any lyrics by myself. He wanted to do it all together so he knew where I was coming from. That was a really cool thing to have a producer really care about it that much.
How did you go about writing the lyrics together with someone? With other people, there might be a little bit of an ego thing, but with other people, as long as it comes out good, who cares?
It was very eye opening. I’m always up for constructive criticism. I love being able to sit with somebody new and just hear them pick apart what I’m working on. The really cool thing is that we wrote the entire emotion and topic of the record, like each song, without writing lyrics. We did this really cool exercise that I’ve never done. We spent like a week just sitting there listening to the songs, just me, him, and Ryan, and just listening to what the guys had finished and was like ‘What does this really tell you? What vibe is this song giving you? What emotion?’ We wrote paragraph and paragraph about what that song meant to us without even writing lyrics, just listening to it. I think that’s what makes the record so honest is that we were all on the same page instrumentally and then the lyrics came together so well.
Instrumentally, how do you think the band progressed on this album?
It’s so memorable. Everything they were writing was something that it just didn’t sound like a metal record. I know that was our problem at the end was we made these test mixes and the record sounded like nothing else anybody was releasing at the moment, not that it was a groundbreaking genre that we did, it was just that no one was writing a heavy record like this. I think that was what was going through my head when the guys were sending me these weird songs where I’m like ‘I love this!’ This is not just a filler metal song that will get lost in a playlist. We really just made it a point to make these bigger than who we are and what we are.
May Miss I’s new album “Shadows Inside” is now available via SharpTone Records and they are currently on their own headlining tour with Upon a Burning Body, Kublai Klan and Currents. For more information, visit missmayimusic.com.