What’s the most creative way you’ve ever played with your wee wee?

RYAN: In a hot tub. You know those water jets? (Laughs)

BECCA: I don’t have a wee wee.

What’s the most creative way you’ve ever masturbated?

BECCA: Driving down the highway, 55 mph! (Laughs)

ERIK: In the trees when I was skiing one time. We tried fooling around. It was just impossible. So we finished the task for me and went skiing the rest of the day.

Is rock dead and therefore Techno the wave of the future?

RYAN: Rock isn’t dead at all. Rock will probably live a lot longer than Techno ever will. Techno is a fad. My boss is a big DJ down at The Church. We listen to Techno a lot. And I swear I’ve been listening to the same song for the last three years. It all sounds like the same song.

Tell me how PURE DRAMA came into being.

RYAN: PURE DRAMA came about in ’97. I wanted to start an electronica band. I was getting really heavily into Skinny Puppy. I also was a Depeche Mode freak. Prior to that, I had always been into Death Metal. I was in a number of bands. Chastisement and Internal Fate were two I was in. I was a growler (laughs). I decided I needed to try something new. I was listening to Skinny Puppy and the whole electronic sound influenced me. Skinny Puppy was still kind of scary, still kind of dark.

How did you go from growling to being quite a good singer?

RYAN: I wasn’t a real good singer in the beginning. (I’ve had) tons of practice. Becca helped out a ton. I never had voice training. Time went by and I didn’t have a singer. I was working at a haunted house called Brutal Planet. One night, I noticed this girl like, screaming for 30 seconds straight (laughs). There was like no breath or anything between the scream. I was like, “who is that?” It turned out to be Becca. That’s how I met her. We started going out. We went out to Denny’s all the time.

Were you dating?

RYAN: No, not really. We just hung out a lot.

Did you have sex?

RYAN: No (laughs) At first, I guess it was kind of dating. I don’t know. We were kissing- that kind of stuff. It just never went anywhere from there. I asked her if she ever wanted to do a band, ‘cuz I knew she was an awesome singer. She came over of couple of times and sang. And I was like, “wow she’s a great singer.” She came over and kicked ass!

Becca, were you into the same kinds of music as Ryan?

BECCA: No, not at all. I’ve always liked stuff like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin. I always liked The Doors. I was always into older things. A little Depeche Mode. Ryan turned me on to the harder stuff. Like I stole his ‘My Dying Bride’ CD and I still have it. Other than that, I like classic rock. But I’ve grown to like a lot of other music, like electronic and Industrial.

Are you vocally trained?

BECCA: I have extensive vocal training. All the way through High school I had private lessons since 7th grade. I was actually trained for opera. Opera gives you a really good foundation, techniques and all that. What happened at the haunted house was that scream was like a high falsetto type of scream. I used only a part of my vocal chord. It wasn’t like a blood-curdling scream. Now I have vocal nodes. They are like scars on you vocal chords. I was afraid I’d never sing again.

RYAN: We had to stop the haunted house. Every year we’d do the haunted house. I loved it. I love haunted houses. But we wouldn’t be able to talk for weeks afterwards (Laughs)

How did you get the name PURE DRAMA?

RYAN: I thought, what’s encompassing everything and everybody’s life? I thought, well everybody goes through crazy, soap opera shit. Everybody. It just came to me… Pure Drama.

BECCA: There was no hesitation. I knew that was it.

So when did you start adding members?

RYAN: Well, we were a two piece forever. We were tryin’ to develop our sound.

What about the drums?

RYAN: It was all sequenced. I had a groove box. That was my first tool. I had a sampler and all that stuff. So we just put together stuff. We tried to figure out what would sound cool if we were both singing together. We just came up with the idea of singing together and doing harmonies and stuff. I was shitty at harmonies. I couldn’t even hear them. So Becca got me through that. It was pretty cool. A good learning experience. We were trying to figure out what we were. We were playing Raves and shit because we didn’t know what the hell we were. We didn’t really consider ourselves an electronic band, we never really have.

What do you consider yourselves? Bluegrass? (Laughs)

RYAN: We are just a band that plays emotional songs. But we started playing shows and realized we were empty. People can’t relate to two people on stage, not doing much of anything other than singing. I didn’t really want to be the Backstreet Boys or something like that. We decided to get some real instruments. I started playing guitar, but that didn’t work out great because I’m not a great guitarist. The first person we had was a drummer named Brandon.

BECCA: He did exactly what we wanted him to do on percussion and then he flaked. He just flaked.

RYAN: We got a bunch of people at the same time. We got Stu, who was a violinist, and we got Erik who is our guitarist.

ERIK: I had been on the fringe of just helping PURE DRAMA with, kind of just the management of the band. Just some forward direction in what they were doing with their stage show and their presence. I’ve been a guitarist for about 15 years. It was such a different music that I kind of wanted to help them and be involved, but I wasn’t sure if I could musically participate. Through their persistence they said “we’ll take the time and make sure your comfortable”.

What kind of music were you doing prior to PURE DRAMA?

ERIK: A lot of what I was doing at that time was acoustic types of rock.

You all are from totally different backgrounds

ERIK: Exactly. It just adds to spectrum. It just adds to the foundation because we’re just trying to forge a new musical style and a music sound. We’re able to pull from a lot of sources. We’re taking samples from a lot of different things and working it into a PURE DRAMA sound.

Being you’re the guitarist, do you ever want to make your instrument more dominant in the music?

ERIK: No, not really. Because the whole thing has such an orchestrated sound, the guitar has to be more of a texture than a stand out instrument. There are times you can tell it’s a nice, clean guitar.

Ryan, on “Assorted” your voice reminds me of something I’d hear from Erasure.

RYAN: Yeah, I’ve been told that before.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

RYAN: Well, I don’t know. “Assorted” was an experiment of sorts for us. We’d never recorded before really. I mean, we’d recorded a couple of songs, but we’d never tried to do a full-length album. We kind of cranked it out. We were still trying to find our sound. I was still developing my voice. I was listening to Depeche Mode I was listening to that style a lot. I really liked the style. But it wasn’t really where I wanted to be yet.

How is “On the Surface” different from “Assorted”?

RYAN: Well, I think now we’re not limited by the sound. We actually feel it now. We don’t have to worry about what we’re writing, as far as the music goes. Now we can concentrate more on what our feelings are and how we want to express them. Before, I was using a crappy-ass groove box. I was spending more time trying to get it to work than writing the songs. So the songs on “Assorted” are a little limited. Now we’re full. Now we’ve go someone engineering us who’s really good at it.

Who, Scot?

RYAN: Yeah, Scot Gordon of Scary Valentine. I always thought the vocals on his albums were fuckin’ amazing. He’s really good at getting a good sound with the vocals. He’s just a very, very talented person. I was honored that he worked with us on this album. He gave us more life with our vocals.

BECCA: This album would not sound as good as it does or as professional as it does without Scot. He has an amazing ear.

ERIK: He understood the vision right out of the gate. I think that was one of the key things. It was like, complete synergy right from the start.

Where did you get the title “On the Surface”?

RYAN: Well, On the surface is basically people look way too much at what somebody looks like or what they are on the surface. I think people need to start looking deeper into what person is. Not worrying as much about visuals. But more about who the person is. Most of the songs are about people that are worried about what’s going on on the surface.

How do you two decide who sings what?

BECCA: Sometimes Ryan gives me a CD of stuff without lyrics. I try to come up with stuff before he does (Laughs) If I’m not on it, he’ll end up writing something. So any song I sung on is probably because I just hustled. Ryan would be the only one singing on this album if I didn’t.

RYAN: For me it’s not about ego. This is my only release. My only real emotional release is through the music. When I write a song, I have to finish it because it’s all right there in that point in time. So I finish the whole thing. If it’s something we can add more stuff to, we do. But I have to finish the song because it’s the only way I’m going to get that emotion out.

How important is a hit single to PURE DRAMA? It would seem your sound could easily go in a commercial direction if you wanted it to.

ERIK: I don’t think it’s vital that our sound lends itself to one song. We have two vocalists who, at times intertwine their vocals, as well as do more solo kind of songs. Even though there might be aspects carried out through one song, I don’t think it tells you the whole picture of the band or the whole experience of when you’re listening to PURE DRAMA.

BECCA: Although, I think in getting your name out there, having something on the radio like a hit single definitely helps out a lot. Even though, like he said, I don’t think it fully illustrates what we are trying to accomplish.

Would it be easy for you to write a pop song?

BECCA: I don’t think so. That’s not the way we write.

RYAN: Our songs used to be really long. I mean, they’d be over 5, 6 minutes. None of those were radio-friendly. Even though I’m writing shorter songs, the songs really aren’t tailored to sounding like this band or that band. I just don’t like that crap. This whole Limp Bizkit craze. Everybody is hopping on it. Everybody. And it’s sick. I’m just not into doing that kind of thing. I write songs without even thinking about them. (All I care about is) what the song sounds like, if they have emotion.

What about getting signed?

RYAN: We’d like to have a backing. It’s great to have backing. We have a really good market, a specific market for our kind of music. There are a lot of people who support our kind of music.

Your music isn’t immediately apparent as dance music. Do you think you need to get dance club support in order to move forward?

BECCA: We started out trying to be more dance orientated. Where we are now, we gravitated to. There is only so much you can do with that…it’s overdone.

RYAN: It’s emotionless music. There’s absolutely no emotion to it. I’ve always looked at it as music that makes you dance, other than makes you want to dance. You have no control over it. It’s like, that bass picks you up. It’s so constant; there’s no way of getting around it. I just don’t like it. I like music that you actually have to feel. I don’t feel that music. When ever I go to the clubs and I hear that music…I can’t get into it because there is no emotion behind it. It’s the same thing over and over again.

Then tell me more about the emotional element to PURE DRAMA.

ERIK: Well, I think it’s ingrained in the music itself. If you listen to…even the progression of the songs, they run you through some kind of emotional gamut. Not that they’re unfocused, but that through the use of melodies and minor harmonies, it physically pulls on you. From the guitarists perspective it’s great because it’s something I really key in on. Because I don’t do it through vocals, I do it through tones, layers and sounds. We pull on the emotions more than about speaking about them.

BECCA: Ryan is going to roll his eyes when I say this (laughs) but all three of us are Aquarians. We’re very emotional people and we need emotions to live. We’re very sensitive to each other’s emotions. I live emotion. We all live emotion.

RYAN: It’s all about the experiences of our own lives that make us write our music. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What are your songs about?

BECCA: Ryan writes songs in about two hours. Ryan writes when he’s very upset. Very emotional in one way or the other. And the reason he writes so many songs is because he’s always being shafted (laughs) Ryan doesn’t write arbitrarily. He does write lyrics that are pretty “out there” but they all mean something.

RYAN: I never go real literal with songs because I want people to have their own feelings for the song. It might mean something to them that it didn’t really mean when I was writing. A lot of my songs are about relationship problems or problems with my family. Problems with being alone.

What would you say is the most traumatic experience from your childhood?

BECCA: I have a couple, but the one that was really traumatic for me was…I think it was 1987 one of the first Super Bowls the stupid friggin’ Broncos went to. It was on January 25th, which is my birthday. My birthday cake did not say “Happy Birthday Becca”; it said “Go Broncos!” (Laughs). My cake had no candles on it. My friends and I had spent long hours on decorations. My parents and all their friends ripped them down and ripped them to shreds when the Broncos lost.

ERIK: I kind of had an easy childhood. No Broncos (laughs). I had really cool, loving and supportive parents. My parents were supportive of everything I did. What happened to me was when I was 21. I had long hair, motorcycle. I was getting ready to go out and party and screw around. This guy ran a red light while I was going through on my motorcycle and just clocked me. The lower part of my right leg got shattered. The upper part got all bruised. I spent some time in a hospital and then, over the next couple of years, I spent rebuilding the bone in the lower part of my leg. I basically went from making great money and being independent, to moving back with my parents. Having them move everything of mine back into their house. Having the very humbling experience of having them feed me. I had to lay in bed for so long. The biggest thing about it was that I was an ass before it happened. And I still can kind of be a pain in the ass. I was really a negative person. It was kind of an eye opening experience. I was given a second chance at life.

This question is for Becca. Have you had any sexual experiences with Ryan or Erik you’d like to talk about?

BECCA: I’ve kissed Ryan. But that was, like he said, in the haunted house a long time ago. And E.J., no.

Have you seen either of their wee wee’s?

BECCA: One… but I don’t think they know about it.

Which one?

BECCA: I can’t tell you!

I’ve gotta know!

BECCA: (Laughs) I can’t tell you! That’s way too revealing.

ERIK: Well there have only been 4 shows where we had to change.

Did you see Ryan’s wee wee?

ERIK: Well yeah. We have to share bathrooms when we change clothes.

What’s his wee wee like?

ERIK: He’s got this tattoo that says, “Get up on this”.

(Much laughter around the room)