Parkway Drive has been in the news a lot recently after cancelling a major tour and posting many messages about the state of the band. Some of the messages appeared to allude to an imminent demise of Parkway Drive. I had to get to the bottom of this straight away and ask how the band was doing and what the mental state was like that led to that decision.
‘We didn’t want it to basically self combust, because that was a very real chance! We were like “We could try to do this tour, but there was a very real chance that would be last tour this band ever does and then no one gets music anymore.”…it’s been a really, really good process but it has been a very challenging process let’s put it that way.’
We continued the chat about the bands mental health and how the perils of life in the 21st century, as if skating on the thin ice of modern life.
‘…it seems like everything moves in a very very very fast cycle and nothing is slowing down…like the attention span of people is shorter and the demand to pump out “product” of any type of content of anything is very short. And it leaves you very little time to be able to reflect and I guess in that way while we had been busting our ass during covid it was that break from touring that gave us the chance, that little bit of time to reflect…’
I have always been curious to hear how Parkway Drive writes their music and Winston gave me a little insight.
‘There’s really no boundaries to what we do, we just bounce off each other and we find that these different polar points that each individual draws from really gets distilled into this stained glass which is the Parkway picture.’
Of course I had to ask about the new album and tried to get the scoop but he wasn’t letting me in on the secret, bummer! However after continuing the chat we discussed a little further into the concept of the album and he said this.
‘It’s definitely an introspective journey through the music that you’re going to be hearing. But a very varied journey…there’s stuff coming out that we approached in a far different way than we’ve done before. Like even down to the way we’ve written future music. It was like “Alright the world’s ending no holds barred, go absolute ham on whatever you’re going to do” and spend time committing to stuff that you didn’t have time to do in the past in terms of literally learning how to write certain compositions and stuff like that. So yeah, we’ll see what people make of it.
This was one of the most intense and enthralling conversations I’ve had with a guy that I’ve been a fan of for 20 years. Full interview below!
