Russell Cerminaro sat down with Eric of Heart Attack Man at their NJ date of their tour with Head North.  Make sure you check out their new album The Mansion Family out now on Triple Crown Records. You can listen to it HERE. 

 

RC: I’m here with Eric Egan, singer and guitarist of Heart Attack Man. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us today.

EE: Thanks for having me!

RC: So I’m a big fan of the band, caught you guys for the first time last time you came around to the Brighton Bar with Secret Mountain. I picked up the “Acid Rain” CD. Jam it all the time, never leaves my center console. Can you tell me about how Heart Attack Man got started?

EE: Originally it started out as a solo project of mine, I was in a band before but I wanted to start something else, do something really different than what I was doing before. I wanted to try something new to me, something that came naturally. The projected started with me just writing short catchy songs, that's really how it started.I didn’t plan on playing shows originally, but then people locally seemed to take a liking to the songs. From there I got Adam on board, assembled a lineup, started playing shows and it's really just progressed from there.

RC: That's awesome! So you're on tour right now with Head North, how has that been treating you?

EE: It’s been great! We’ve been out for about a week now, everyone on the whole tour package is really chill. It’s a really laid back, easy going time.

RC: Glad to hear that, I know touring with the wrong set of people can really take its toll.You got a new album coming out March 3rd on Triple Crown Records The Mansion Family, How does it stack up to Heart Attack Man’s last release Acid Rain?  

EE: I think, really it's just building off of Acid Rain. I’m really happy with it, really happy with what it became. The thing with this is with this record, it’s been done for a long time now. It's been a big process of getting everything in place to release it. By no means are we tired of these songs, for a lot of these songs it the first time we’ve revisited them since the first time we recorded and jammed them in terms of playing them live. They're all still fresh, but we have a lot of new material that we’ve been working on. In regards to Acid Rain and building off of that, I really think it's the next step of it. Taking some of the ideas from Acid Rain one step further, we tried something that we're really present on Acid Rain. We just want to keep moving further and trying new ideas.  

RC: On my way here I was listening to the album stream I heard some funky guitar effects ,some bells even that I was really digging. So you’ve said you've been sitting on this release for a long time, when did you guys hit the studios?


EE: Almost two years ago now, I mean the songs themselves are even older. With the first demo, Acid Rain, and then The Mansion Family I’ll write like 20 songs per release and then just demo everything out. It a really big weeding out process, I end up sitting on them all for awhile. Whatever we end up with for the release has really stuck with me the most and is what I think of as “the best of”.

RC: Seems like a long and draining processes on you, what's the rest of the band role in this process?

EE: I will normally write the song, do an acoustic demo for myself, then do a demo with drums, bass and electric guitar all myself. Real rough recordings, just on my laptop, really basic sound that we can use as a guiding point. Then I’ll send those to Adam, we mess around with the songs a lot. I just lay the groundwork and demo it myself and then we build on it from there. Then practice it relentlessly, then go into the studio and knock it out. We did the whole album in 6 days, we wanted to get in and get out. Granted we were recording for like 18-20 hours a day and we didn’t really sleep a lot, we just didn't want to mess around.

RC: You guys mean business, who produced this record?

EE: Our friend Ian, he lives in Philadelphia.

RC: Ian Farmer from Modern Baseball?

EE: Yes.

RC: The record comes out tomorrow, are you guys going to celebrate?

EE: We’ve thought about acquiring fireworks, we definitely want to do something we have to do something. We’ll probably end up breaking shit.

RC: Well thank you for taking the time to sit down with me, looking forward to your set tonight.

EE: Thank you for your time!