Three years ago, I interviewed the band Black Veil Brides. I was just a teenager, and boy was I madly in love with the group’s strange makeup, crazy hair, and on-stage personas. Three years later almost to the day, I interviewed Andy Biersak, formerly Andy Sixx- the frontman of BVB. I’m not quite sure what it is about the guy, but boy did I fangirl like crazy before and after. The actual interview, however? Cool as a cucumber. I stepped onto their bus, and was left one-on-one with this nu-metal, hard-rock god.
The band has been touring nonstop, and that must’ve changed the e band somehow. Andy agrees; “It’s natural that your band grows the longer you’re together- we’ve been touring together as a band for almost half a decade now. Internally, we’ve grown stronger. You tend to have issues when you’re younger, but after this amount of time being together we all kind of know each other’s personalities, we’re all very close. It’s fun; we enjoy being on tour now in a way we never used to fully understand. When you first start out, everybody loves being on tour and it’s a party and about halfway through you become resentful of the fact that you never get to be home, you’re tired, and whatever. I think where we’re at now is that we’re just genuinely happy to be on tour. It’s a good place to be in.”
Andy attributes the band’s “large-scale success” like getting songs in movies and having a song at #5 on rock radio to their core fanbase, the ones who really give them that edge to grow and become bigger as a band.
“We’ve got every single kind of magazine award,” Andy states. “My house is just full of different-shaped awards and statues. Alternative Press is going to start doing awards now and I told Mike Shea I can’t wait to have more, like hopefully we can win one so I can have a different-shaped award. The Golden God is much heavier than the Kerrang Award. The Kerrang Award, I can wield it drunk better. At the after-party, [grumbles drunkenly], I think I almost killed some people with the Golden God- it’s very heavy. My award’s too heavy- it’s not a common issue. It’s definitely a first-world problem.”
The band often discusses bullying and standing up for yourself, along with being confident in who you are. However, this isn’t always done for the right reasons by others, as Andy explains, “Bullying’s kind of become a brand- the outcast thing. There are certainly bands who use it to their advantage for merchandising purposes- almost preying on the weak a little bit. Kids will want to feel at home so these bands come in and start to say, ‘oh well we’re just like you’ and they don’t really understand any of it. I think the distinction with us is that each of us came from being different- not necessarily bullied, though. We were never the most popular person, we were always the weird kid. We all moved to LA for a reason. Except for CC, we’re all transplants to LA- we all moved there from being land-basted by those around us and we felt the need to go to somewhere sort of like a safe haven.
“Our audience connects with us on that level moreso because they know it’s not disingenuous. Like, if I went out and was like, ‘Hey, this band is now against eating chicken,’ it would be completely ridiculous. I have no experience with not eating chicken, I eat chicken every day. However I do have experience with being the outsider; it’s a lonely thing and if you have a community to be part of, it’s easier, I think. I think Black Veil Brides creates a community, particularly for younger kids, so they can feel something. [Creating a safe haven] was sort of the intention when we started it. I would go see these bands I loved as a kid and the feeling of community was always great. I started a band with the notion that I wanted to be the band that has the sense, almost like a punk rock band has, that everyone in the room was feeling something. In a sense, not to be ridiculous, almost a religious experience- that’s why we call it “The Church”, because it really is. You have fun, and leave hopefully happier and ready to go to work or school or whatever else the next day in a better mood.
“The aesthetic part of the fanbase, which are those who will eventually leave the fanbase, will not be interested on a core level, or maybe they start aesthetically and then they get into the music. What I find interesting is that people who find us and are intersted, in the same way you’re interested in the Ninja Turtles, stick around and find love in the music. More and more, people are coming to shows and getting into us for the love of the music first, which is really cool for me. I’m self-aware enough to know that there are certain people who listen to the band because I have blue eyes and they wanna look at pictures, like I understand that and it’s okay because my hope is that they can find the music and love it the same way that a lot of people join the fanbase for hearing “In The End” on the radio and they liked it. I think we have a cool dynamic with the fanbase. If you look at the crowd at a Black Veil Brides show, it’s very diverse. It’s much harder for me now to estimate who is a Black Veil Brides fan. It used to be easy to see- the one covered head to toe in makeup. Now, it could be the guy with the beard and the Iron Maiden shirt.”
“I think some people look at this [music] like it’s a race,” he says. “And once you get to play in front of two thousand people and you’re done with the race, you just check out. For me, this is a life, my whole life. I would rather continuously do the things I’ve always wanted to do than drop off because now I have enough money to buy a car or something. I have no other skills. I dropped out of high school- this is the only thing that I’ve ever known how to do. I’ve made the joke many times that my only other career choice was to be a superhero so that’s how far back I stopped caring about anything else- I just wanted to do this. It’s crazy to me that people would not have that level of passion to connect with their audience forever.”
The band always connects with their audience on social media, and are extraordinarily personable with the meet-and-greets they do. You can watch videos of them and see how they’re genuinely silly and have grown more comfortable with who they are and what they do.
Andy Biersak’s favorite movie of all time is Se7en, and his favorite movie quote “Boats are for sailors, guns are for soldiers,” from “Lost Boys 3”, because for some reason, it makes the whole band just crack up and Andy’s getting it tattooed on his ribs this tour, “because it’s just ridiculous.”
The confident frontman of Black Veil Brides got up and I got a picture with him and shook his hand. He even complimented my Brand New tattoo, saying that “Deja Entendu” was one of his favorite albums. That made my heart skip a beat and I realized that though I kept my composure during the interview, I was shaking like a leaf and smiling like an idiot after talking to the exuberant, hilarious, and charismatic Andy Biersak. He’s got that rockstar power to make any teen girl’s tummy fill with butterflies, cause their dads to headbang, and anyone else inbetween to view him as an incredibly strong leader of the fanbase- the Black Veil Brides Army- The Church. “See you later” he smiles. I think maybe so.
