In 1996, Heckler listed the music writers' top ten albums of the year and Sense Field's album, Building , appeared on almost everyones' lists. Taking a liking to the album's sparkling combination of melody and post hardcore energy was practically unavoidable.
Sense Field's history is an interesting one. The Southern California band started out by self releasing its first two e.p.'s and touring up and down the West Coast. Soon enough, Revelation Records entered the scene. Revelation had long been known as a hardcore and primarily straight edge label. In 1994, Sense Field signed to Revelation and released Killed for Less. The release of this album had an interesting effect on the hardcore scene. Hardcore kids were suddenly sharing an admiration for Sense Field's brand of acoustic tinged, melody driven rock. The Sense Field/Revelation combo proved to be successful for both parties and paved the way for Revelation's expanse into other genres. When the band's next album, Building, was ready for release, Warner Brothers records developed an interest in the band and then signed and re-released the record.
It's now 1999 and after a long break Sense Field is ready to release its new, and first full-fledged major label, album. This conversation with the band took place at their rehearsal/recording studio.
HECKLER: What were your goals when you started the band? I know that your first two records were self-released. Did you ever have the idea of staying independent?
John Bunch (vocals): No, we did it because we didn't know any labels. It was the quickest way to get some music out. We did a five song demo and then were able to scrape the money together to print it into a CD. With the money we made from the first CD we were able to put out the second, seven song CD. We just sold them at shows.
HECKLER: How much time passed between those first two releases?
John: I think the first one came out in 1992.
Chris Evanson (guitar): There was probably about a year in between them. That's how Jordan from Revelation heard about us.
Rodney Sellars (guitar, vocals): Yeah, the T-shirt guy at Revelation was listening to our CD at work.
John: Pretty soon, Jordan was coming to our shows. Revelation Records would never have been our first choice. With their history, we never expected them to want to put out our music. Jordan wanted to break out and get away from just doing hardcore. He took 200 of our CDs and sold them in about two weeks. On our own, it had taken us a year to sell 500. (laughs) We started to sell a lot more CDs. Soon afterwards we did Killed For Less. It was released in the spring of '94 and then the e.p.'s were re-released in the fall on '94.
HECKLER: Was it ever strange for you guys to be on a label like Revelation?
John: A little, for a long time we always ended up playing with crazy hardcore bands. Everyone in the crowd was wearing Snapcase and Bloodlet shirts. A lot of the crowd looked at us like we were from Mars. There's a lot more of a scene for us now.
HECKLER: I remember knowing hardcore kids that owned your CD. It was probably the only thing in their collection that had some melody to it. You guys were their...
Chris: We were their guilty pleasure. (laughs)
Rodney: Hey it's got that star on the label. It gave them permission. (laughs)
HECKLER: Sense Field is one of the bands that was established in the indie world and then jumped to a major label. This hasn't worked out too well for many of your peers (Jawbreaker, Seaweed, Shudder to Think, Jawbox, etc.) Have you felt any negative effect from the jump?
Chris: Not yet. That is true for all of those other bands. It hasn't worked out.
John: It's true that our generation of bands hasn't had the best of luck with the major labels.
Chris: Luckily, we've had a really good relationship with the people from Warner Brothers that we work with. We haven't had to deal with the adversarial relationships that a lot of bands have had with their labels.
John: There's no tension in our situation. It's never been us against the label. I think that a lot of indie bands go into it figuring that there will be problems.
Rodney: It seems like most of our fans haven't ever cared about us signing to a major label. I know that a lot of bands have had to deal with resentment. I think that our fans would like to see us become successful.
John: Everyone I talk to always says that they want to see good things happen for us. I don't think that anybody wants to see us bomb. Also I think that people can see that we've worked hard for this.
HECKLER: It's been quite a while since your last record was released. What have you been doing since then?
Rodney: Good question. (laughs)
Chris: Back in early '97, we finished a tour with Jimmy Eat World and decided that we wanted to take time off. We wanted to really write songs for the new record. We were tired of not having enough time. A lot of times in the past, we had just pulled songs together when it was time to do a record. Building was a mixture of old songs that we hadn't used and a few new ones. We've written a lot for the new album. I think that we got a little carried away. Everything took about twice as long as we thought it would.
John: It's a bit of a dangerous thing to give Sense Field an unlimited amount of time to write and record an album. (laughs)
Rodney: We'll use it.
John: I think we need someone to reel us in. After that last tour, we wanted to do things differently but we weren't sure of where to start. We wanted to learn from our past mistakes and try new things with this record. It took time for us to see where we wanted to go with things.
Rodney: The new album is made up of a couple years of writing. We wrote for a long time and then picked the songs we wanted to use.
Chris: We never intended for the break between albums to be this long.
John: We've learned that we shouldn't take too much time off. I think that from now on we'll keep working.
HECKLER: I know that Building was mixed by Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Helmet, Sonic Youth, Sepultura). Who'd you work with for the new record?
Chris: Richie from Into Another hooked us up with Andy. We were lucky to get to work with him.
John: Andy was great. Really smart and really nice. He has an awesome work ethic. We did our new album with David Holman. He's a rock god. He mixed Bush and No Doubt. We met him a while back. At first he was just going to mix the record. As it turned out, he ended up producing the whole record.
Chris: Back in the 70's he did Olivia Newton John records and the Grease Soundtrack.
Rodney: The coolest thing about this new album is that we got to do some recording in Tito Jackson's old house.
HECKLER: What do you guys do when you're not busy with Sense Field?
Rodney: I'm a four-track fiend. A song a day. (laughs) I'm writing all the time.
John: I'm way into plastic models. Army tanks stuff like that. I built the German North African campaign. (laughs)
Chris: We don't have a manager right now and, somehow, I've ended up handling all of those duties. It's keeping me busy. Especially, because we're going on tour pretty soon here.
HECKLER: What's the new record going to be called?
Chris: Right now it's self titled.
Rodney: It's a fresh start, a new image. (laughs)
Chris: Yeah wait 'til you see our new image.
John: It's similar to Gwar futuristic space monsters. (lots of laughs) Super heroes, capes and tights.