UN: To start, I was curious to ask how Embrace the End came together to form. I read that the band is made up of members of First Blood and Killing the Dream, are those bands still active?

Joel: Embrace The End came to be in 2000 when myself, Louie, and a few other people gave up on their un-noteworthy hardcore band with an even worse name, and snatched Bart todrum once he moved cross country from Maryland. From there, Pat was stolen from another badly named shitty hardcore band, Kyle was accumulated independantly & Josh was traded out for Jesse, also of aforementioned badly named band. This lineup worked great, and we became a sweet little unit until this past Spring when Kyle left the band on good terms, and we aquired our new shredder, Karl, from his prog-metal band Sylvara. Kyle still plays in First Blood, but we lost the cool "featuring members of" title associated with First Blood once he quit playing with us. Bart and I still seek out babes and N00dZ with Killing The Dream, and we plan on going out with those dudes this Fall if schedules permit.

Pat: Everyone in the band has other bands that they are involved with, some more serous than others, but at the moment embrace the end is everyone's top priority and is defiantly the most active (and attractive). Having everyone playing in other bands does make our lives more difficult because none of us are the best at scheduling and coordinating, but it really hasn't been much of a problem.

Jesse: Yeah, we were actually kickin' it live before all those fuckers

UN: I have to say that Counting Hallways to the Left is a completely annihilating album, there is absolutely no let up whatsoever. Was it your intentions to write an album that was extremely aggressive the entire way through?

Joel: Funny you should ask because: Yes.

Pat: I have always wanted to make our music as intense as possible, while still retaining some sense of structure and melody. I feel that this record is a giant leap in that direction. We also wanted to make sure we kept out sound hard and abrasive, and not move in a softer direction like many other bands have been doing over the last few years.

Jesse: That’s always been the way we've played together, this band has been going on for years even before I joined and the intent has always been to play heavy, energetic, and fun music. We've never taken ourselves seriously and I'm sure that has hindered us in the past but hopefully people are over listening to bands that think that they're the saviors of rock 'n' roll or whatever. With this record we are ready to take it to a more serious level as a band, but we're still the same silly dudes. As far as making this record, there wasn't a conscientious effort to make it extremely aggressive or annihilate your face or anything like that. If anything I think that there is an underlying melody that surfaces throughout it, and I think that's what makes this album worth a damn. It's about songs, songs that actually go somewhere, lyrically and structurally.

UN: The album name itself is quite unique. Is there a concept behind the title?

Jesse: We wanted to convey the feeling of being pushed down a hospital corridor on a stretcher, heavily sedated, with a calm and sort of bored ambivalence. Actually we had a few other ideas but nothing stuck. It's a concept we were playing around with that didn't really happen. I'm happy with the record for the most part though, It's been a long time coming.

Pat: It also fits in with the over all theme of monotony and meaninglessness experienced and felt in everyday life, a theme that appears consistently throughout the record.

UN: Do you find that having two vocals make it easier to keep the band interesting vocally? How do you figure out who will sing what? It must make the live shows very intense to watch.

Jesse: Pat and I switch off writing lyrics usually song for song and then we get together and work out who's gonna sing which line where. And yes it does get confusing live. If you come to one of our shows you will probably see us fall off the stage or run straight into each other and crack our heads open... We definitely need to work on our choreography. But we try to entertain.

UN: You guys bring in elements of pretty much every heavy genre. Would you say that everyone in the band brings something different to the table? Is it hard to please everyone, or does everyone have equal input?

Joel: Everyone definitely has their own input when it comes to writing songs, but that's probably why it's extremely hard sometimes to decide what should go next. I think that musically we're all on pretty much the same wavelength with what we want to accomplish, so we can't really attribute certain types of parts to individuals. A goal as a band is that we don't want to put anything into a song that we see as sub par, and putting together 30-40 seperate riffs (that everyone in the band digs on) into a single song and making it flow seamlessly from start to finish is tedious work. we've spent 6 months writing a single song in the past, and spending that much time on a single song pretty much makes you hate the song long before it's close to completed.

UN: With Abacus behind you, and an incredibly furious album, how far do you hope to take the band? Is this something you'd like to do for a living? Do you guys want to be on the road as much as possible?

Jesse: I'm really glad to have a label like Abacus behind us. They're kind of an up and coming label right now and are getting a lot of great bands. I can't wait to hear the new records from Swarm of the Lotus and Ion Dissonance, and they are releasing a Turmoil discography. It's just awesome being on a label that has bands we had rocked out to as teenagers as well as the new bands that are really pushing the envelope. They've been entirely supportive and Ray and Stacy are the best guys to work with ever. It's really the best thing that could have happened to us. We are going to be touring for the rest of the year and probably for the next few years for that matter. We've got a new van and we'll be asking to sleep on your floor and eat all your food very soon.