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austinlive: How did the band come to be?
william: We got together in Atlanta in the summer of '99. We'd all known each other from previous bands. Our self-titled debut album was written and recorded during one six-week period in the fall of '99. Upon hearing the finished product, we were inspired to take a big chance. So we pressed up a few thousand copies and moved to Los Angeles. We arrived in L.A. in the spring of 2000 and soon sold out of every copy of that debut album, which is now temporarily out-of-print. Currently, we're focusing all of our resources toward promoting our new (second) album, The Year Is One, which was released on Oct. 11, 2001 and is already in its second printing.
austinlive: 'Comes With The Fall' is an interesting name for a band - how did you come up with it?
william: During the writing of our first album, I was up late one night watching the film "Rosemary's Baby," a favorite among all of us in CWTF. There's a pivotal scene in the movie involving the phrase "comes with the fall." It struck me at the time as something we would use in some way - a line in a lyric or perhaps a song title. A few weeks later, when we went to master the newly completed album, I had the mastering engineer make up some reference discs for us all to have our own copy of the finished product. He asked if we had a name for the band yet. I answered no and then told him to simply put "comes with the fall" at the top of each disc. I was going to propose it to the other guys as a working title for the album. Over the next couple of weeks, as we each kept listening to the new music on our own and staring at this disc with "comes with the fall" written on it, we all thought it would be the perfect name for our band. But by this time we'd spent months suggesting names to one another and having them get shot down for whatever reason, so each of us was gun-shy about saying what we all felt. Finally someone broke it open. I think it was Bevan but honestly I'm not even sure at this point. All I remember was the tremendous feeling of relief and celebration that we finally had a name we felt as strongly about as the music.
austinlive: Who writes the music? lyrics?
william: I write the lyrics. Sometimes we collaborate on the music. Other times I bring in a completed song. On those occasions where I do bring a finished song in to rehearsal, I make sure it's something Bevan and Adam will enjoy putting their personalities into and I try to leave as much room as possible for them to do that. Also, since those guys are my best friends, they're already intimately connected to any song I bring in because they lived with me through the circumstances that inspired it.
austinlive: Who would you consider your main influences?
william: There's really too many to mention. We are fans of all music. From Duke Ellington to Black Flag. Some of the people to whom we are most often compared include Sabbath, Soundgarden, the Stooges, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, and Queen. In a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine, the writer David Fricke compared The Year Is One to "the Presence-era bloom of Led Zeppelin" and likened my singing to "an improbable mix of Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple's Ian Gillan." Suffice it to say, we are not offended by any of these comparisons.
austinlive: What sets Comes With The Fall apart from other bands of your genre?
william: That's for everyone else to decide. We're just doing our thing.
austinlive: You guys have a great website. Have you found it to be an asset?
william: Absolutely. Comeswiththefall.com is our window to the world. People from every place on the globe order albums and t-shirts directly from our online store and generally communicate with us through the site. It's a great way to stay in touch with fans who live in countries we haven't been to yet in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. And, of course, it's a great way to keep everyone here in the States informed of where we're playing next.
austinlive: Tell us about your schedule - do you mainly play in California??
william: We went all over the U.S. in 2001 and plan to do the same again in 2002. But this year, whenever we're not engaged in consecutive months of hardcore touring, we still plan to consistently work the L-shaped zone that runs from Washington State, down through Oregon and California, then east to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. We'll break it up into pieces and do short runs of a few days at a time. For example, next week we're doing Portland, Chico, San Francisco, and Palm Desert. Then we go up to Oklahoma to rehearse for three days and then come down to Austin for the SXSW gig. We're also backing up Jerry Cantrell for his headlining set at SXSW this year, hence the extra rehearsals.
austinlive: What about other interests?
william: Power, astrology, the occult, physical fitness.
austinlive: What can people expect from your upcoming SXSW showcase in March?
william: Same as always - 110% until something (or someone) breaks.
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