Orlando’s Disney Springs welcomed Ilan Rubin’s, The New Regime and Angels & Airwaves to the House of Blues for a sold-out Tuesday night show at the happiest place on earth. In addition to fronting his own band, The New Regime, Rubin will also be serving double duty as the drummer for Angels & Airwaves on their fall tour.
Rubin, who previously drummed for Nine Inch Nails and Paramore, will be performing tracks off of The New Regime’s forthcoming album. The band’s third full-length album, Heart Mind Body & Soul, is being delivered to fans in four parts with “Heart”, the first part of the new album having been recently released via RED MUSIC.
Music Madness Magazine caught up with the busy rocker to talk about his love of music.
Music Madness: First off, congrats on the new music.
Ilan: Thank you very much.
Music Madness: Heart, Part one of four has been released. Why break the LP down into four parts? What was the thought process behind that?
Ilan: I’ll try to give you this answer in a concise fashion. Basically, I never intended on writing a 16 song album and splitting it up into quarters, but what happened was while I was writing a bunch of music and while we were negotiating this deal with Sony RED, more time had passed than I had anticipated, so I kept writing music and I was really liking the newer songs and didn’t want to get rid of any of the older ones.
Then the question came up, what are we going to put out first? We’re going to put out one song, one song just feels like it’s cheap, it’s not enough. Two songs is okay, and then we were thinking, okay, what if we do three? Okay, and then what does that leave you with? Anyway, we thought that four songs would be a great way of giving people enough to chew on for awhile while waiting for the next batch, and the next batch after that, rather than just dropping one super long album and then expecting people to kind of sift through everything.
Four just seemed like a good number and I had more than enough songs, I had 20 at the end of the day. I whittled it down to 16, which was difficult for me, and then we just cut that in quarters, and that’s what ended up being Heart, Mind, Body and Soul. Initially, there’s a song called Heart, Mind, Body, and Soul, then we thought it would be a cool album title. And when I say me, I mean my brother and I.
My brother Aaron manages me and he also engineer’s, mixes, co-produces everything, so we’re just in the studio all the time together. I write, play and sing everything that is The New Regime, so it’s him and I kind of throwing these ideas around most of the time, but we thought it was a cool album title. Then when the idea came up about in terms of splitting everything up and putting it out, we thought it’d be cool to have each EP be its own thing.
Music Madness: Writer, producer, singer, guitarist…is drumming still your first love?
Ilan: You can only have one first love, right? I mean, first is first. Yeah, drums were the first instrument I picked up at seven or eight years old and I still love playing, it’s the most second nature thing to me, but I will completely admit that when I’m not touring, I’m playing everything else. Rarely do I say, Hey, I want to go have a good time. I’m just going to go play some drums, not that it isn’t, but it’s not as satisfying to me playing by myself as it would be playing the piano or playing the guitar because there’s melody, there’s harmony, there are chords.
Then that’s the springboard or a platform to write melodies on top of, and it’s very easy to kind of create from nothing. Whereas if you’re playing drums, it’s great, it’s fun, it’s rhythmic, you can come up with new ideas, but it’s not really writing a song.
Music Madness: Do you think its because its something newer to you?
Ilan: Not necessarily. It’s just there are different things to accomplish, and like I said, between the melody, chords, harmony, all that kind of lends itself to naturally writing something, because ideas are always coming up, but rarely have I been at the drum set, played a beat and thought, Ooh, I’m going to write a song based around this. It has happened. It’s a song called “The Longing”, which is on one of the Exhibits. It’s more isolated, I’d say, than the other instruments, because, let’s say, I play something on the guitar and then I go, Ooh, I wonder what that would be like on piano or vice versa, or this baseline would sound really good on a synth. It just kind of lends itself to being interpreted differently, whereas the drums are the drums and that’s it.
Music Madness: Now with The New Regime, has it been the same group of musicians backing you or does that change from album to album?
Ilan: We do get different things. The songs are the same. I am not over the top in terms of keeping, for example, the drummer, I get that question a lot: what’s it like having somebody else play the drums, and it’s fine, you know. Right now I’ve got a guy named Rob Ketchum, who’s been playing with me since last year. He does a great job, but aside from playing drums really well, he’s a great singer and I have a lot of harmony with him in The New Regime.
He’s kind of playing a Roger Taylor role and doing a lot of high harmonies, but I’m not very strict in terms of this is the way it must be for the drums. The drums are more about feel, it’s not about executing feels, but when it comes to chords, baselines, that stuff, I’m very, this is the way it was written, this is the way it needs to be. For this tour, a guy named Kimball Walters has joined on.
It’s just always difficult because The New Regime’s touring schedules are very sporadic and issues arise between people having other commitments and whatnot, so this is the first time this unit has played, but it’s been going very well.
Music Madness: Very cool. Do you always try to coordinate tours with Angels & Airwaves and The New Regime? Seems convenient.
Ilan: I would love for it to be that way more often. I know it’s not sustainable, but it’s been great supporting, and then playing in the headline act. My whole day revolves around just getting ready to play in both bands, so I sleep extremely well…an absurd amount of hours. I literally roll out of bed, or the bunk I should say, and then I stumble into the venue and pick up an acoustic guitar just like slowly warm up my voice to go through some Beatles songs or whatever.
Then before you know it, I’m sound checking Angels, then I’m setting up New Regime, sound check New Regime. Angels does meet and greets every day, I sign like a 150 posters with the band, and then we meet a bunch of people and take photos and that’s a good time. For example, that ended 10 minutes ago and now I’m here talking to you, which is great.
After this, I’ll continue to warm up my voice, do the first set, be off stage for 15 minutes, do the second set, be off for 20 minutes, then I go to the merch area because the Angels’ merch guy’s an awesome dude who’s been looking after all my stuff, so I go there and just hang and talk to people if they want to talk and just kind of give my thanks. Then before I know it, it’s midnight, one o’clock, and the bus is going to the next city.
Music Madness: Speaking of Angels, how did you and Tom Delonge get together?
Ilan: Tom and I are both native San Diegans. We’re both from San Diego and when Adam Willard was no longer with Angels & Airwaves, for whatever reason that was, a mutual friend put Tom and I in touch, and that was it really. I hadn’t been in a band from San Diego since I was a kid, I’m talking preteens to early teens.
Music Madness: You’re not that old, so-
Ilan: I know. No, It’s weird because you say that, you’re right, but I feel old because I’m 31 and I’ve been playing music for 23 to 24 years now.
Music Madness: It’s crazy.
Ilan: It’s been the vast majority of my life, and especially as a drummer. I was in my first band at age nine. I started touring professionally at 14, so it just all feels like one enormous continuation of this led to that, this led to that, and then before you know it, I’m here in Orlando and you and I are having a conversation.
Music Madness: Do you understand the word downtime? I’m curious because you are a busy guy.
Ilan: Downtime? I don’t like it.
Music Madness: Are you afraid of it (laughing)?
Ilan: I’m not afraid of it. It has to be the absolute right setting for “downtime” because, okay, let’s say, Nine Inch Nails tour, because that’s been the most consistent touring unit I’ve been a part of for the past 10 years.
The schedules have been booked in a way where you do a pretty decent leg and then you have three weeks off, but after a leg of tour, especially with a band of that caliber, I don’t feel like I need a break. It’s a very cush situation. I do nothing all day and then I play for an hour and a half, two hours. That’s not a hard job, so when I get home and literally the three week breaks between The Nine Inch Nail legs, is when I recorded all of this last album.
Ideas were written either in those periods or on tour in hotel rooms, and then I find that moment where I go, now I’m going to record it. I do everything all over again and I get it up to the standard that I’d be happy with, but never in my entire life to date have I been like, I need a break desperately. Just hasn’t happened, but if there’s this odd scenario … My family is very close knit, we all work together, I’m very close with my parents and whatnot, so if there’s ever there’s a time where it’s like, hey, the whole family can get together and go on vacation for a week and everybody’s schedules line up, that’s where I’ll go.
If I can make it, I’m there and while I’m there, I am doing nothing but just hanging. Some people do take their off time very seriously. I don’t. I just don’t feel like I need it. Don’t get me wrong, I would love, and I mean this, would love to get to the point where I’m just destroyed and I need to just lay down for days.
Music Madness: It’s a good problem.
Ilan: Yeah, it’s a great problem. I don’t understand people who want to be musicians, are musicians, then get on tour and they’re like, Oh, this is too difficult. What’d you expect?
Music Madness: Do you remember your first concert and who it was?
Ilan: I honestly don’t.
Music Madness: Mine was Ozzy.
Ilan: With Randy Rhoads?
Music Madness: No, he had just passed.
Ilan: You’ll find this interesting then: I grew up on what I’m still obsessed over, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Cream, whatnot. I discovered Queen a few years later, which is … Will always be one of my absolute favorites, but when I hit the eighth grade, middle school, prime time for that kind of stuff, I got really into Randy Rhoads. I picked up the guitar … I don’t know what it was, it was like that weird blend of rock guitar playing but classically influenced, a lot of scales, a lot of his soul’s are very scale-based.
As I was picking up the guitar, and actually getting serious about it, I started learning all of the Randy Rhoads stuff. That kind of triggered my brain where I’m like, I can play this stuff and I’m learning it and I can get good at the guitar and I got obsessed with it in the eighth grade, so about 13.
Music Madness: You’ve been playing guitar for a long time.
Ilan: A very long time. I’m not saying this to you as a pat on the back to me, but it’s … I find it a little difficult sometimes as a, dare I say, one-man band, whatever bullshit label somebody would put on The New Regime, but I don’t play each instrument because I can get by. I play each instrument because I have put in well over 10 years on everything, playing, working at it, learning, and I’m very proficient at these instruments. The reason why I do everything myself is because I’m capable of doing exactly what it is I want to execute.
Music Madness: And it brings you joy?
Ilan: I love it. Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect everybody to love what I do, but it’s definitely a well thought out, and well written, well executed thing. I’m very proud of the music and I’m not even talking from a technical level. You don’t have to be technical to write good songs, and I’d say the bulk of people who have written great songs weren’t technical in terms of what they did, but it’s all a craft, and I think a lot of people have said that if you want to call music art, all art takes practice, development, and skill, and for some reason, within music, that gets lost from time to time, which I don’t understand.
