Interview! Blessed By A Broken Heart

Blessed: Tyler (Bass, founder of BBABH) was engaged to a chick and she left him for his first lead singer. He thought his life was over but then had an epiphany… there was more to life than just girls. The experience changed his life and he was blessed by his broken heart. Plus back in the early 2000′s it was cool to have a long band name. Now, we just like going by Blessed.

Blessed: We are always moving forward, never taking a step back. Every line up change was for the better. The original line up was all from Canada, and now Tyler is the only Canadian left. The rest of us are from all over the world…Orlando, Albuquerque, NYC, Montreal, and London. Although we are far apart, we’re closer than ever. The line up now is the most talented and coolest one yet. Your kids, and your kids’ kids will have BBABH to listen to, because we will never die. We will continue to keep the band alive… Go to www.blessed.mu to apply for future employment opportunities

Blessed: You can expect to hear something you have never heard before. Our blend of 80′s Rock & Metal with a Pop influence, mixed with shred & keys is something no one else is doing. We take pride in having a unique sound, especially in a music scene where everyone sounds exactly the same. We wanted to explore musical realms beyond ourselves and compose a musical movement type record that is technical, melodic, and fun for all ages. Something you cant not bang your head and sing your heart out too.

Favorite songs.. that’s a tough one… Each song has a different meaning to each of us. There are no dead tracks on the record, so they are all our favorites. I think I’m most pleased with “Scream it like you mean it”, “Love Nightmare”, and “I’ve Got You.” Those songs, surprisingly, were thrown together really fast. I remember just making a pot of coffee one late night and “Love Nightmare” was completely done by sunrise. “I’ve Got You” was originally an upbeat Van-Halen type tune, but our producer, James Paul Wisner, wasn’t feeling it and wanted to ditch the song. Then we got a crazy idea to turn it into a love ballad. This was like the last week of recording, mind you, so I had like one night to completely rework the song. It’s much easier to write a song, than to rework a song into something completely different. But I was stoked with the final result. Hopefully the song brings back a revolution of “the rock ballad.”

Blessed: Usually the music is written first. I am an engineer and have a Pro Tools rig that we bring with us all over the world. So no matter where we are, we are “in the studio” pumping out hits. I live in Orlando and Shred Sean migrates from NYC to LA, so when not on tour, we fly out and hook up and write all the music. He has songs, I got songs, and we just bang our heads together and make magic. We track out all the music and also track out vocal melodies on guitar so Tony, Tyler, and Sam can write lyrics to it. Sam Ryder came into the picture towards the end of the writing process and laid down some vocal magic on some songs that were incomplete. Its give and take though.. Sometimes the lyric dudes write some riffs and sometimes the music dudes write some lyrics. So we all have creative input.

Its been 3 years since our last record, so people think we have been in a writing drought or whatever, but that’s not the case. We just wanted to come out with something that was special and not just crap out mediocre tunes. Def Leppard took over 4 years to put out Hysteria and its one of the best records of all time.

The best show to date for Blessed was in Tokyo, Japan. We played the Loud Park festival in 2009. We got to share the stage with bands like Dokken, Judas Priest, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth. There were over 20k screaming Japanese ninjas in attendance. The energy of the place was out of this world. We always love going to Japan because we’re huge in Japan… Now we just gotta make that happen everywhere else. 

Blessed: The ultimate tour? Any tour that has good bands on it. Lately we have been touring with some poor talent. Haha, that will change in 2012. Our fans have been bugging us to tour with Family Force 5. I guess both bands bring the party, so that would be a fun time. We wanna tour with Avenged Sevenfold real bad too, that would be a shred-tastic tour. We can’t talk about any future tours yet, but we know we’re gonna be all over the world, all year long. So look out! 

Blessed: There is only 1 Canadian left in the band… so, the rest of us are not about maple syrup and hockey. Tyler is all about that stuff. So the stereotypes are true. He doesn’t say aboot though. 

Blessed: The worst thing about being a Christian in the spotlight is the way other Christians judge and speculate. Many Christian fans of Christian bands think that, because they are in a Christian Band, that they are perfect dudes. We are far from perfect. We are dudes who love God and love music. But we are not Monks. And as soon as a Christian fan sees or hears something about their favorite Christian band, they attack.. and then the rest of the world sees the band in a negative way. What happened to lifting each other up and loving people? Whats funny is the secular world could care less.. its the Church these days that always point out the speck of sawdust in our eyes when they have 2×4′s in their own. Christ was about Love, not legalism.