There are many reasons why the Amity Affliction are celebrating their Let the Ocean Take Me album with a full-length re-recording project this fall.
At its simplest level, the 2014 original remains a fan favorite, with numerous songs remaining in the Australian post-hardcore veterans’ setlists to this day. So, diving back into their Ocean gave the act a chance to look back at some classic tracks.
Longtime vocalist Joel Birch explains, however, that the 10th-anniversary project also let the band right a couple wrongs from the album — especially when it came to capturing the full heft of his screaming voice.
“I’m never really happy,” he says of his general presence on Amity Affliction recordings, even up to and including 2023’s Not Without My Ghosts. “We always record after we’ve been on a break for two or three months, [but] this time when we did the re-recording, we’d just come off tour, so it was fucking excellent. My voice was in proper shape. It was so easy [for me].”
The original Let Me Take the Ocean also brought on a wave of changes for the band. It was the first of their albums to properly include current lead guitarist and songwriter Dan Brown, who’d initially joined as a live member a couple of years earlier and played rhythm guitar on the LP behind soon-outgoing guitarist Troy Brady. While the Amity Affliction had been touring successfully in their native country, the Ocean era is also when they noticed that crowd sizes at their American shows started blowing up, with Birch explaining that this officially made the U.S. their “second home.”
The new redux project also let Birch reexamine his raw and open lyricism with the wisdom of hindsight. Let the Ocean Take Me often addresses the singer’s battles with addiction, its album-opening “Pittsburgh” concerning a life-changing, alcohol-poisoning-related seizure he’d suffered during the Amity Affliction’s run of dates on the 2007 Warped Tour. But even though he’d entered a period of sobriety at the time of the recording, he fell back into a cycle of drinking soon after they’d wrapped the sessions.
With deep cut “My Father’s Son,” Birch was singing about his family’s history with alcoholism and absentee parents. He hadn’t met his dad by the time the Amity Affliction made the record, but connected in the years since, just as Birch was facing difficult parenting and lifestyle decisions of his own.
“He was an alcoholic,” Birch says of his father. “He chose alcohol [instead of his family], but there were some other sort of circumstances around that.
“I made the exact same mistakes… and then nearly lost my family over it. I had a newborn, and came very close to following his exact same footsteps. But I had met him just beforehand, and when my life sort of fell to shit I called him and he said, ‘Well, you can do what I did, or you can do the right thing. It’s your choice.’ That was all the impetus I needed.
“So yeah, I mean, looking back on that song, especially, just shows I was aware of where I was, but I wasn’t dealing with it. I wasn’t ready to face up to it.”
Tom Ise
Let the Ocean Take Me was the Amity Affliction’s fourth full-length, released a decade into the band’s career. Considering this new re-recording project, what made this particular album such a watershed moment for the group?
JOEL BIRCH We’d added Dan to the band, that made a big difference. He came on-board in much more of a writing capacity. Ahren [Stringer, Amity Affliction’s co-founding guitarist-vocalist] had pretty much written [2012 album] Chasing Ghosts on his own with no help and was pretty burnt out at the time.
And then I guess for me, I’d had my first near-death experience from alcohol the year prior. I ended up with a bipolar II diagnosis many years later, but I hadn’t had it at the time, and [I] was [in] a constant struggle with mental health. I didn’t really want to be writing things that were too close to [home, but] that’s where the basis for the album came from — nearly dying. I’d stopped drinking, but I think within about three weeks of finishing the recording I was drinking again.
“Pittsburgh” kicks off the record, and it deals with this heavy history you’re speaking of. Can you detail where that song is coming from, generally?
Well, I guess around then was when I started to realize why I was drinking. It was becoming a bit of a passive suicide, if that makes sense, so the lyrics deal with that pretty indirectly. That’s what the whole line, “I’ve been searching for an exit, but I’m lost inside my head,” is all about. It’s dealing with the fact that I was drinking to find a way out, in a more final sense.
And yeah, I remember actually confronting it — being in the situation I was in — very vividly. I remember sitting down and violently shaking, and having a really, really bad panic attack. I couldn’t breathe properly. Then I passed out, and I woke up in an ambulance. It seemed pretty straightforward that I should stop doing that kind of thing. It didn’t really work out that way.
And that was at a show in Pittsburgh?
It was on Warped Tour. I think I ended up in a hospital in Pittsburgh.
While this was a point of recognition for you, had your drinking ever come up with the other band members prior to this?
No, no. Not within our band’s culture.
What do you mean by that?
The culture within the band at that point — and following that point — was a culture of substance abuse. Heavy alcohol consumption. A lot of the tired, old [rock & roll] tropes. We pretty much did everything but the groupies — we’ve never been that band, but we’ve had all the drugs. At this point in the band, we were buying cases of Jameson because it was too annoying to keep the bus stocked up if we didn’t have boxes of it.
You mentioned you’d started drinking again after the recording sessions, but has singing a song like “Pittsburgh” over the years helped — even if only momentarily — keep you on a sober path?
No. I think it became a bit of an empty platitude for me, and more so became a sign of how easily you can fail [as] an addict. Because I failed immediately. It doesn’t matter what someone’s projecting outwards. By the time we were touring that album, I was fucking wasted again.
The thing with playing songs over and over and over again is they sometimes get stripped of their meaning until something happens that brings it back into focus. And for me, what brought it back into focus was re-recording it. The songs took on a whole new meaning for me. And then playing the whole album again live was really comforting… it did what it maybe should have done when I wrote it.
What was revealed to you about these songs by reworking them in the present?
The way I was writing back then is different to how I write now. I found some of it pretty funny, to be honest, but I think that’s just an older version of myself revisiting the person [I was] when I wrote them. It seemed like the words of a person that was much more desperate than I remember, which is interesting.
It is like psychoanalyzing yourself, looking back and seeing where I was at mentally and realizing it wasn’t good. I think if you had asked me back then, I would’ve told you I was feeling pretty good, to be honest.
Can you empathize with that person?
Of course. I mean, the major problem is that I’ve had to experience all the mistakes that are the knock-on effect of that [other] person being me. So, it was positive in the sense that I realized how far I’d come and how different I am now.
But I mean… I’m not too different. I’ve still got the same mental health struggles. I just don’t drink. But I came to realize early on in my journey with alcoholism that all the tropes and cliches that you hear when you go to AA are pretty spot-on. It’s still one day at a time. I can never, ever pick up a beer. And I’m not interested in it, which is nice. I’m not really fighting that… but it is always there. The danger of falling back into it is quite scary. That part’s never gone away because I’m just like, “What if I do fuck up? Then what?”
When it came to revaluating and re-recording this group of songs, did you find there was anything missing from the original recordings, sonically or structurally?
Yeah, for sure. There were some mistakes through that record. Some stray cymbals and shit. I never liked my vocals on that record — my dream [was] to re-record everything, pretty much
Tom Ise
The Amity Affliction announced this redux project with a new version of “My Father’s Son,” which is now a key or two lower than the original recording…
Everything is pitched lower. The whole album.
Does changing the key or pitch of a song affect the timbre of your voice, even as the screamer?
It does. What I don’t think a lot of people would’ve noticed is that we have progressively pitched the songs down live over the last 10 years. Ahren wasn’t able to sing as high as he had back then, and so that’s slowly brought the tuning of all the songs down. In some senses, that’s made it more difficult for me, especially for songs from Misery. [The arrangements] get pitched down, [so] my notes come down into a really weird range [where] I find it really hard to sing.
But it made it easier for Ahren to sing. It also made the songs heavier. I guess we thought [Let the Ocean Take Me was] pretty heavy at the time, and then you [compare the songs] to [modern] music and it sounds like pop-punk, almost. It’s funny.
What do you remember about making the music video for “Pittsburgh,” where you guys are all just getting drenched on a soundstage?
That was at a public pool in New South Wales. We got there at about six o’clock at night as they were shutting the pool down, and then we didn’t leave until five in the morning the next day.
We weren’t allowed to drink because it was a council property, and I wasn’t drinking at the time anyway, but we had so much cocaine. It was a weird party for us the whole night. There was a heated pool right next door to the big pool. So, we’d be freezing from getting drenched and then we’d all just go lay in the other pool.
Making music videos is often either the worst day of your life or amazing, and that particular one was amazing. It was long and hard, though, and we had to do some crazy shit. For the ending, we had scuba divers there teaching us how to breathe with the oxygen tanks, just in case we went too deep. But also, at that point in time I was bodyboarding so much that I was really, really fit. Like, water-fit. I was loving it.
Are there songs from this record that hadn’t been picked as singles back then, but have become favorites of yours now?
I think “My Father’s Son” probably should have been pushed. It was honestly in my top three songs off the record, personally, but I’ve never been the guy that gets to choose singles.
What was the most important part of looking back at this period of the band for you?
Like I said earlier… I was singing all these words and I was like, “Fuck, man. The guy that wrote these was just so naive.” Like, “Oh, I’ve stopped drinking for three months, [now] I’m sober!” That was pretty much where I was at [during the recording of Let the Ocean Take Me]. I think I had stopped drinking for nine months total, and I thought I’d beaten it. So, there’s a lot of naivety in those lyrics.
For me, [re-recording] was all about doing justice to an album I knew was the bedrock of the band. I just wanted a better version of the album out there, and I really feel like we’ve done that. So, I’m really happy we found a way to do it.
…It’s also nice to kind of say, “Fuck you” to the old major label.
This is your “Taylor’s Version.”
Yeah! I said we should almost thank Taylor Swift in the liner notes: “Thanks for the inspiration.”
This is putting the cart before the horse, but have the band begun working on any new music?
Yes. I never stop writing lyrics, really, and so I think I’ve got about 15 songs written already, and Dan has just started writing music in the last few months. The next three to four months are going to be where all the heavy lifting gets done, in regards to that. There’s a full album there.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.