October 8, 2009
Jordan Healy
The Rebel Yell

Dead by Sunrise releases first album on Oct. 13

What do you get when you combine the lead singer of one of rock’s most successful bands and one of the hottest underground electro groups out there? Dead By Sunrise.

Conceived primarily as a solo project for Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington back in 2005 under the original moniker of Snow White Tan, it seemed unclear if any sort of record would ever see the light of day.
In the past four years, Bennington has managed to get not only a solid backing band behind him, but also a production team in the form of electro-rock group Julien-K, featuring both Ryan Shuck and Amir Derakh, guitarists of the group Orgy.
We sat down with Amir to discuss his involvement with the project and also to talk about the group’s debut album, Out of the Ashes, which hits stores on Oct. 13.

The Rebel Yell: How did you and Shuck hook up with Chester?

Amir Derakh: We met Chester when we were in Orgy. We were recording our second record in a studio in Hollywood and Linkin Park was in the same studio in a different room. Chester was kind of singing in the hall, warming up and stuff. We heard him so Ryan went down and quickly made friends with the guys from Linkin Park. This is when they were doing their first record. It turns out that they were on our label and when our record came out their record came out. We ended up taking them out on tour and we all became friends very quickly. We’ve really been friends ever since and it was just a natural progression to do something together. It was something we had always talked about.

Chester had some of these ideas kicking around a couple years ago and he showed them to the guys in Linkin Park, but I guess they just didn’t really see the potential in them or stylistically I guess they didn’t feel as though it fit with Linkin Park.
He kept playing them for us and Ryan ended up saying, “Chester, these are some really good ideas. What are you gonna do with these things?” He was just like, I don’t know, they don’t really fit Linkin Park. He showed me and we started talking about it.
Chester was a fan of a lot of the work we had been doing with Julien-K and Orgy, with the production that we do. We kind of thought that we would just produce a solo record for Chester.

That’s how it started. The summer of 2005. We just started working on these really raw ideas that we had and he would just play on an acoustic.

We would produce them and he’d come back in to hear them and they would sound like they do on the record basically. He would come down and go, “Holy shit you guys this is amazing, this is unlike anything I could have imagined.”
It kind of quickly came together that it was really more than a solo project, it became a band. The other guys from Julien-K, we all work together as a production team.

Everybody plays multiple instruments and engineers. It was kind of easy for us to pull it all together. It’s like we’re all the same band, but we consciously took a direction with this project that is completely different than anything any of us have ever done.

We knew from the very beginning that it had to be and we wanted it to be. It’s a very different sounding record than Linkin Park, Orgy or Julien-K. That was on purpose, to sort of let it have its own thing, you know?

RY: Along with Chester and the guys from Julien-K, the band also lists a sixth member in its ranks, Anthony “Fu” Valcic. How does he fit into the picture?

AD: Fu has been one of our producing/engineering/programming partners for many, many years. I met him when we were mixing the first Orgy record. After meeting him during that process, we hired him to do work on the second Orgy record. We’ve been friends and worked together ever since. When we started Julien-K, we brought Fu down from Canada to work with us.

He’s been an integral part of production team. Fu and I pretty much do the bulk of that, the production and the recording. Brandon is also a highly skilled engineer as well, and a multi-instrumentalist. He came in later in this project, but he was also a part of that as well.

RY: When you were helping Chester to get these songs together in the studio, what inspirations were you drawing from? Was it a different form of inspiration than you would usually draw from?

AD: Definitely. The songs sort of dictated something different from the beginning. We all knew that we didn’t want to sound like anything that we had done before. We quickly realized it was going to be something more organic, a little more straight-ahead, more in your face.

I think all of us really liked that idea because the other bands that we do are much more processed and programmed. There are some of those elements in this, but the softer songs are much more intimate and the harder songs are much more in your face. I think that we tried to develop the whole thing as we went along. We knew what we needed to do and what we needed to stay away from.

RY: When you were going about writing the record, how would you say it differed from the writing process for Orgy and Julien-K?

AD: There’s one thing that doesn’t differ from the writing process for any of our bands, including Linkin Park. That is that we are a band that writes in the studio. All of those bands write in the studio. We go into a room and we might have an idea for a song and we might not, but it all emanates there and it is all created there.

We’re not a band that goes into rehearsal and just jams on an idea. None of these bands are that way. All of us are very comfortable with that writing style. So that aspect stays the same.

The only difference really is that with this stuff is that it all emanates from Chester. The initial seeds, the ideas. The roots of the song will start from Chester. He’ll come in with an acoustic guitar and strum some things. Sometimes he has vocals, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he has one part, sometimes he has two parts. Then we just go from there basically, whereas in the other bands it’s different.

I know that in Linkin Park, it musically starts with Brad and Mike. In Orgy, it was a bit more of a collaborative effort. Julien-K is sort of the same way too. Most of the songs either come from Ryan or myself. On this one, we just decided to focus on Chester, to let him do his thing.

These songs need to come from him. We will carefully turn this into something much more than he could do by himself.

RY: At first, did you consider this band to be a side-project or did you go into this knowing that it would become something much bigger?

AD: I honestly don’t think we knew at the very beginning. The early songs that we wrote were songs like “Let Down,” “In The Darkness” and “Fire.” There was definitely some magic right from the very beginning and I think all of us sort of realized that the first song we did together (“Let Down”) was just so good.
I was just like, this is a really good song, and it all just came to light that we should be working together. This is cool. It’s a commercial song, but it’s got something different to it. It doesn’t sound like anything that any of us have ever done and I don’t really think it sounds like anybody else. There’s a lot of other really strong songs on the record as well. “Too Late” is actually probably one of my favorite songs on the record, and then “Inside of Me” and “Condemned” is some of the more up-tempo stuff, which I really like.

RY: To date you’ve played several acoustic shows with this group and the band plays its first electric gig this weekend. Are you guys planning to branch out and go on a full-scale tour?

AD: We are going back to Europe next week. We’ve got shows in New York. We’re playing Letterman, Kimmel, MTV. All that’s stuffs going to happen next month. We’re going to start doing some touring, but I don’t know what yet because that’s still being talked about.

RY: Do you feel as though this a collaboration that will continue past the debut album, and into further recordings in the future?

AD: I think so. It’s been really well received so far. It’ll probably take some time before we can get back together to do it again, but it’s very likely that it will happen.