Interview by Tony Cannella
I have always loved the fact that through my work with Femme Metal, I am able to experience so much great music that otherwise I would not be able to hear. Once such band is The World Over. The band has recently been on tour with OTEP supporting their excellent EP, “Mountains”. Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with lead singer Tiaday Ball (granddaughter of the legendary Ernie Ball), and she let us into the world of The World Over. Check. Them. Out.
Hello Tiaday. The World Over is new to our readers of Femme Metal. Can you start off by giving us a brief history lesson about the band?
We first formed in 2013. We all met at L.A. Music Academy – that’s how we first originated. The founder of The World Over – his name is Xavier Moreux, he’s from France – he kind of just pointed at a bunch of people in the school, he was like, “you, you and you, you’re in my band now”. Ryan (Knecht, guitarist) and I, we just were both kind of doing other things and we were just like, “I guess, we don’t know you but I guess we’ll give it a try”. And it ended up being the best thing ever. Xavier had to move back to France, but we’ve been taking over and still are in contact with him.
You have recently toured with OTEP. How has it been going?
It’s been great. It’s definitely been a fun experience. OTEP has very particular fans, so it’s definitely not anything we’ve ever experience before. The crowds have been amazing.
Your new EP, “Mountains” is out now. What can fans expect when they hear it?
I try not to pigeonhole us into one genre, per se. If anything, I would try to put us into at least a rock category, and to try to keep your mind a little bit open. That’s kind of a tough question, because I’m not the type that’s going to be like, “expect to hear the best thing ever”. Give it a listen and I hope you enjoy it, that kind of thing.
Sometimes it’s easier for people who are not as closely connected to the music to make assertions of what it sounds like.
Yeah, I mean I would like to say that it is a mix between the Deftones and PVRIS, with also a little bit of TesseracT. From what I’ve heard from people when they’ve offered like a lot of feedback, they’re like, “you can definitely tell that your main influence was the Deftones for this album”.
One of my favorites songs on “Mountains” is the first track, “Traitor”. What are the lyrics to that song written about?
That’s the one song off the record that probably has the least amount of meaning to me, because it is literally just about revenge sex. I’ve never written anything like that; it was definitely something that was a challenge for me, because I usually like to write things from my own personal experiences and more meaningful sort of things. I was listening to it and I thought this song sounds kind of sexy but also dirty, and I want to write something different that I’ve never really given a shot at. It was fun to try to write something like that because it’s not usually what I like to talk about (laughs).
Another song that I really liked was “Liberosis”. What can you tell us about the lyrics to that one?
“Liberosis” is the urge to care less about things, so kind of the overall emotion that is throughout that track is apathy. A lot of the lyrics that came from that were from an old lyric pile that I pulled from that I was writing the year after I graduated high school. I was having just kind of a rough time with my mom, who I don’t speak with anymore, but at the time I felt trapped by her and the only thing that could really get me through each day was music. The whole theme in that song, the end conclusion, is that no matter what you”re going through, you can always just jam out to your favorite tracks, turn up the volume and just scream along with it. I like to have every song end with some sort of conclusion so that I’m not just venting about crap. I want to always show people that there is something that can come out of it that’s good.
You mentioned your relationship with your mother. Does that sort of fuel your mindset when you are writing lyrics?
Yeah, definitely. I always pull from my own personal experiences but there are some songs, again, like “Traitor” are kind of more based off putting myself in someone else’s shoes. With “Liberosis”, those are from my own personal experiences that I had to get out. I was just writing to myself and I’ve always kept that lyric pile and I finally dipped into it later when we were writing “Mountains”.
Can you talk a little about the writing and recording process for “Mountains”?
If you heard our first record, “Rampart District”, you can tell that there is a dramatic difference between both records, because we were very – I guess – post hardcore before and we didn’t really know what we wanted as a band for our overall sound. Over time, it actually took us a couple of years to really find a sound that we wanted collectively as a band. Pretty much, before we recorded the album in July we met up with our producer Siegfried Meier in Los Angeles – we met with him in March – and we just kind of had a few demos here-and-there. We wrote a lot of our songs with Ryan in our guitar player’s studio, and it kind of went from there. We had a bunch of outside perspectives come in just to co-write with us because we noticed a lot of times we would just get too hard on ourselves in the writing process and constantly nitpick small details. We found that with this record it was really helpful to get a lot of our musician friends, just to kind of get outside perspectives; especially with Siegfried. He was a good guy for all of us to kind of help pull the strings and be the puppet master for everything in the end, to make everything run smoothly. Pretty much all of the writing for “Mountains” was done on our own, then we flew to Detroit and drove to Canada to record everything in his studio and just did that for six days straight with hardly any sleep.
Is there a full-length in the future for The World Over?
That would be ideal. We don’t really want to do a third EP. We want to definitely do a full-length coming up. Actually, before we do that, we have a single that we’re waiting to release, we’ll be doing a music video for that. Within the next few months or so we’ll be making a music video and releasing our new single and then after that we’ll start working on a full-length.
You filmed a video for the song “Mountains”. What was that experience like?
Our friend Kay, she filmed it. Pretty much every time we go out with her is always a pretty wild adventure, where we almost do something that is a little life threatening. We went into to our bass players house and we filled up his entire house with a fog machine and were setting off all of the alarms, but it was pretty great because all of the indoor shots for that music video, it made it look all smoky and ethereal. For some of the outside shots we were in the ocean. We went to this place called the Salt & Sea, it’s like this polluted lake and there were carcasses of dead fish all along the shore and it really smelled like nature’s litter box – it was pretty gross.
What are your plans following this tour with Otep?
After this Otep tour, we’re going to take a month or two to start working on getting the music video ready and releasing that single as well just putting out some more videos and more content, and then start focusing on the full-length. Maybe even another tour this summer, possibly, like a two-week run.
Do you have an idea who you might tour with, if you do some more dates in the summer?
It hasn’t been finalized yet. It’s definitely still in the works, but we’re looking around, like mid-June or the beginning of July.
If you could tour with one band, who would it be?
I think we would all agree that it would be cool to tour with Bring Me the Horizon.
We’ve come to the end of this interview, Tiaday. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us and we wish you the best of luck in the future. In closing, do you have any final words for your fans to wrap this up?
If you haven’t listened to our new album “Mountains” or our record before that “Rampart District”, both are available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and all of that. You can also check out all of our music videos on YouTube at The World Over. Facebook is The World Over official, so give us a like. Thank you for the support.