Review Fix Exclusive: Interview With The Art of Dying Guitarist Tavis Stanley

With their major-label debut album, Vices and Virtues, having been released less than a year ago, Canadian rock band, Art of Dying, is working on their rise to the top. On tour for about three years and counting, the band has already opened for popular acts such as Disturbed and Theory of a Deadman, along with playing music festivals such as Uproar, alongside Avenged Sevenfold and Three Days Grace.

“Eight or nine guys on a bus traveling around, it’s tight quarters and it can get a little tough at times, but you always have the show to look forward to,” said guitarist Tavis Stanley.

Even when things get tough, these men always find the bright side, as displayed by their lyrics; each song on Vices and Virtues has a positive message. Their name comes from a longer phrase, “the art of dying is my life to live.”

Stanley explains how they stay so optimistic.

“We stay pretty positive just because of each other, cause we’re such good friends. If anyone has a problem or an issue we really help each other through whatever we need to go through, Stanley said. “We sort of lean on each other, it just kinda works. And we’re conscious of it too, we’re just really conscious of being positive and that’s how we write our music, you know? We have a lot of fun, even when there’s bad stuff happening. We just kind of deal with it then go back to having fun and doing what we do and creating music and playing. It seems pretty natural for us just because we’re surrounded by good people: our labels great, the Disturbed guys Dan and David, our management, it just seems like everyone around us really helps. We love our team. You have to have that support around you otherwise a couple of bad apples could get in there and screw things up. We always surround ourselves with the best people and it really helps.”

This constant optimism is part of what drew Dan Donegan, the guitarist for Disturbed and one of the founders of the Intoxication record label, to the band. Disturbed had taken Art of Dying on tour with them, not only because they thought the new band had potential, but also because they wanted to see what the fans thought. The audience response was spectacular and Art of Dying became the first band signed to Intoxication, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers Records.

Their debut album, Vices and Virtues, sold 4,800 copies in the first week and had made it to number 113 on the Billboard Top 200 and number one on the Heatseekers Albums list. The band has released three singles off this album, “Get Thru This,” “Die Trying” and “Sorry.” They made music videos and “lyric videos” for each, which they have posted on their official Youtube channel and have gotten hundreds of thousands of views on each of them. With 60,000 “likes” on Facebook and over 13,000 followers on Twitter, it’s easy to see they’re on a rapid rise to the top.

But how did it all begin? Just five kids, growing up in Canada, never dreamed they would be worldwide rockstars. For Stanley, it all began at the age of thirteen.

“A friend of mine from down the street picked up the guitar and one day we were sitting around and he’s like, ‘check this out, I learned how to play Stairway [to Heaven],’ and it sounded pretty cool and I didn’t really know what Led Zeppelin was at the time and I said oh let me try and play that, so I grabbed my brother’s old guitar from the basement and he showed it to me and I just got hooked instantly,” he said.

By 18, Stanley began playing music professionally, performing with any band that he could, “get [his] hands on.” He bounced around from band to band until becoming a permanent member of Thornley in 2003. This is where he met Cale Gontier, the band’s bass player. They toured with Thornley around Canada for a little while before striking luck in Toronto about five years ago. Gontier’s good friend, Jeff Brown, a drummer, was in town for a few shows with his band, Art of Dying, and wanted to catch up with his old friend, and Gontier brought Stanley along.

“We all met up and had some beers one night and we just sort of hit it off. We were all hanging out at this bar called the Hideout, and so we ended up closing the bar down and staying until like 5 am, just playing pool and hanging out and we just got along really well,” explained Stanley.

A couple of days later, Gontier and Stanley received a call, the band needed a guitarist and bass player. Without hesitation, the two accepted the offer. They already had a tour set up, their first with Disturbed, that started in a few weeks. They had no time for rehearsal, and the band played for the first time together as a whole during sound check for their first stop on the tour. They fit together like the perfect harmony, as Stanley said it, “that was it, the rest is pretty much history.”

And they hope to continue making history for the rest of their lives.

“We just to keep going and keep praying. We’ve been pretty fortunate so far and we’ve had a lot of success with the radio, and that keeps you going and keeps everyone interested,” he said. “We’re starting to see a change in the crowd and more people coming out to our shows and singing along to our songs. I’d like to just keep doing that and build a following and keep making music. We write all the time and we have a great amount of material just waiting to go whenever we’re ready to record our second album, whenever that happens.” The band has chosen to tour with Vices and Virtues for as long as possible and get everything out of it that they can, before they need to turn in the towel on the album, so fans shouldn’t be expecting another until 2014.

Nobody can tell exactly what the future holds, but Stanley doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

“We just want to keep making music,” he said. “Keep playing music for the rest of our lives.”