Prayers for Atheists Interview!

Introduce yourself and what you do in the band?

J: Jared Paul, I write most of the lyrics and do a lot of the vocals. I also make my eyeballs bleed booking our tours on-line and handle a lot of the tour managing duties.

A: Alan Hague. I write and record the music - guitar, bass, drums. I also sing. Cousin Tom plays bass and does back-up vocals, and Marco Aveledo beats the shit out of his drums like nobody I've ever seen.


First and foremost. Your band seems to have punk and maybe even hardcore roots. If so, what does hardcore and punk mean to you? and what has it done for you?

J: The parallels between Punk & Hip Hop are crazy. Both working class movements; both grown out of a desire and ability to convey a message with whatever equipment could be found. I have never been anything close to "middle class." I grew up in a broke ass white trash neighborhood. Joey Felicio gave me Public Enemy's "Apocalypse 91" at the bus stop in junior high, and Hip Hop became my main music: PE, KRS, De La Soul, Tribe, Gangstaar, old Cypress Hill, Black Sheep, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Del, old Ice Cube. I found Punk later and when I did, it hit me like a freight train: Minor Threat, Operation Ivy, Bad Religion, Dead Milkmen, Dead Kennedys, Descendents, NOFX, old Pennywise. I started going to any punk show I could get to and made a whole new family but never stopped listening to Hip Hop. Then Sage got me into Anticon, Buck 65, and Atmosphere; and our room mates got us into hardcore: Earth Crisis, V.O.D., Converge, Quicksand, Inside Out. Great songs are great songs and great music is great music, whatever genre. These bands changed my life; pointed me in directions I would've never gone on my own.

A: I heard Black Flag's "The First Four Years" when I was in 7th grade. I never looked back.


I hear a lot of Rage Against the Machine in your music. Did Rage have any influence on you?

J: I think Rage put out 3 of the best albums of our time. And they've put in an incredible effort to encourage folks to get involved in the counter-culture and educate themselves. I don't think my writing or delivery is very Zach inspired... but who knows? He's one of the most underrated emcees of all time; people don't even think of him as an emcee! It's crazy. He raps his ass off.


What kind of message do you try to get across in your music?

J: Each song is different. Overall the message: GO CHECK OUT AMY GOODMAN ON WWW.DEMOCRACYNOW.ORG!!


Politically, there are tons and tons of problems. What issues do you think are the worst and need to be addressed first?

J: Corporate personhood, environmental corporate pollution, the industrial military construct, the prison construct, and countless others. They are all THE WORST and need to be addressed immediately. The best you can do is find the issue(s) you're most passionate about changing and dive in. Learn as much as you can, and use that in whatever projects you sign on to.


I only recently started listening to Prayers for Atheists. So sorry if any information is incorrect here, but you are an atheist and vegetarian band? Straight edge too? If so how important are all these things to you? What do they mean to you?

J: It's a mostly Atheists band, but not completely. I think Cousin Tom's still got some god in his life. Alan and Marco are vegetarian; cousin Tom is vegetarian while on tour and I've been vegan for 13 years. Cousin Tom, Marco, & I are all dead sober, but we don't claim Edge. We have a lot of sXe friends and we love sXe bands but we're not getting tattoos or anything and we don't hate people who drink.

A: Actually, I wouldn't count Tom out from the atheist side just yet. He bought Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great" on our last tour.

What do you feel is the reasoning for the blindness and cold heartedness that humanity has come to? For a good example. The tragedy in Haiti. Everyone knows what happened over there yet people still think it's alright to crack jokes about it. How does this make you feel? and Who or what is to blame for these problems with humanity?

J: The tragedy of Haiti is that it launched the first successful country wide slave rebellion in the world and still ended up socially/financially/politically crippled after having to pay France FINES for kicking the empire's ass. The superpowers of the 19th & 20th century (U.S. included) strong armed them into it with threats of military reprisal, embargos, and other financial penalties. They had to pay a fortune in fines and have lived in poverty since. Even recently our government assisted with the coup against Aristide and helped to insure the denial of Haiti's applications for World Bank loans. It's been the poorest nation in the West for decades. Why did no one care till after the Earthquake?

A: In American culture particularly, there's a huge emphasis on the importance of the self over others. Advertising coaxes people into focusing on themselves ("What kind of car reflects the true you?" and other such nonsense). Capitalism itself encourages the idea that everybody is selfish and should be: if everybody acts selfishly, then wealth will be generated, and the invisible hand of the market will somehow spread that wealth throughout all of society. Which, of course, contributes to the spread of the myth that if somebody's poor, then it's their own fault, so nobody else has any responsibility toward them. You know, forget Social Security, forget Medicare (don't even mention the socialist horror of universal healthcare!) because everybody should take care of themselves. Benevolence is too idealistic.

Whereas, if it weren't for benevolence and working together in general, we wouldn't even have survived as a species long enough to form civilization! Combating this extreme form of selfish individualism is an important step toward a more humane world.


For kids starting bands and wanting to make it somewhere in the music business, what advice could you give them?

J: Stay home. There's a million-gillion bands out there. Get a degree in something that matters or study up on jobs that you can do that mean something to you that don't require a degree. The world is on fire and there are so places to plug in. Be a trial lawyer, or a social worker, a great teacher, an environmental lobbyist, an Independent journalist, an organic farmer, work for a campaign reform non-profit org (peep: www.KnowMore.org). Anything that allows you to make a difference. If music is in you so marrow deep that you have no choice other than to keep making it, then make the best art you can and that's all that's important.

A: Do your own thing. Don't try to be the next Casualties or the next this or that. Do what comes naturally to you.


What's it like working with Sage and being on his label? How's everything going with that?

J: Fucking awesome. They went out there and kicked ass for the album. They are a huge part of why PFA has gotten so much traction in such a short amount of time. We're goddamned lucky to be onboard and we know it. Speaking of which, one of the biggest indie Hip Hop albums of 2010 is coming out on SFR: "Fallen House, Sunken City" by B. Dolan. I've got my copy (pre-release) and it's BANANAS. It's as good as a Sage album. It's gonna be SFR's "Personal Journals." Mark my words. One of the best political rap albums I've ever heard, hands down. And that's kind of how SFR is... you won't find a harder working person anywhere in indie music and he expects the same of the acts on the label. B., Sleep, Buck, Cecil, all phenomenal writers who work hard at their craft, but they're all on their grind trying to push their projects and match the work Sage and the SFR staff do. Booking our own tours, following our album's progress online, constantly being accessible to supporters, and never settling for anything other than the best lyrics and music we can possibly put into these songs. No short cuts, no half-assing.


To me Prayers for Atheists is a very interesting name, where did it come from? If anything at all, what inspired the name?

J: Prayer is older than religion, man. It doesn't mean "beg god for help and you get what you want." It means that people have always spoken to the universe, spoken to ideas and memories that give them strength. It's a phenomenon that's older than speech and you don't need god or heaven or hell to do it. There are many ways to flip the meaning. That's definitely one of them.


What is your opinion on all the mainstream music out there now? Pop, rap, radio rock, etc.

J: I'm a Jay-Z fan. Not of all his choices, but of him as a person and as a writer he's nuts. It's mostly just sad, though. I mean, even as late as the late 90's you could still hear great bands with integrity on the radio: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Tori Amos, Tool, Rage, even Alanis Morrissette. Nowadays, it's unbelievable. It's so uniform and shitty, listening to the radio is like listening to one long commercial... like one long phony string of caricatures and exaggerated cartoons of what music might sound like somewhere if you could only find it.

A: There's definitely been a trend of pop music becoming more shallow as time goes on. Just completely devoid of any meaningful content. But the important thing is that music lovers/listeners obviously want content, so the demand for good music is there. It's just that the supply (at least from the mainstream) is non-existent.


How important do you think it is that kids follow their hearts and don't let anything stop them from being who and what they want to be?

A: It's everything. Idealism alone can't save the world - we need action - but idealism is one-half of the equation. If Rosa Parks didn't feel, on a very deep level, that Birmingham's segregated public transportation policy was wrong, she never would have kick-started the bus boycott that's in history textbooks today. Follow your heart - but don't forget to guide it with your head.


And on that subject, although record companies and what not really opened up a ton of different options and privelages for bands, do you think at all that in some way they turned music into something that it isn't? By turning it into something to make millions of dollars off of.

J: Most record companies suck. They exist to make money and it has clearly demeaned and dumbed down the quality of modern music.


Ok, I stick to short interviews, i just try to keep them as meaningful as possibly. So that's it man. Any final thoughts? Band plugs, album plugs, etc.

J: Just that we think Howard Zinn was one of the most important voices in American history, PERIOD. He's a hero of ours, we mourn his loss, and we want the whole world to know how important his work was to the causes of justice, peace, and equality. Also: B. Dolan's album Fallen House, Sunken City will be out on March 2nd! Sage's album "Li(f)e" will be out in May! The new Prayers For Atheists full length is on the way! www.StrangeFamousRecords.com -- www.Facebook.com/PrayersForAtheists -- www.FallenHouse.com -- Corporate watchdog search engine run by B. Dolan: www.Knowmore.org -- MOST important news we know of: www.DemocracyNow.org

A: Also, we'll be hitting the road, touring the U.S. and parts of Canada this June and July. We'll announce tourdates once they're solidified.