How does one describe The Dillinger Escape Plan? Prog metal on an eight day crack binge? God awful noise? Insanity and genius? All of those answers may be correct. But one thing is for certain; The Dillinger Escape Plan are unique.

Ben: It’s definitely night and day, you know. It’s like super here and now, relevant young mall kids who are just really anxious to be exposed to new music, you know, and music is the soundtrack to their lives, that’s very important. And playing the Gigantour where it’s a lot of older bands and a lot of older fans coming out, they kind of already have their minds made up, but also, like the Warped Tour kids, have probably never experienced anything like The Dillinger Escape Plan. So there were some similarities and there was a lot of differences, but the diversity of the Summer itself was really cool for us.

Ben: Well, honestly most of the clubs were really weirded out by that situation, too, ‘cause they’ve done shows for both our bands and it didn’t make sense. The reality is that Unearth has sold more records than us, but they still don’t draw more than us and we knew that. This is a different time; things don’t really correlate like they used to, there’s no rhyme or reason anymore; Nine Inch Nails sells half of what My Chemical Romance sells and they’re playing Madison Square Garden and all these huge arenas and it just doesn’t have anything to do with the sales. So when we’re trying to plan our future, we’re like, “it’s time to stop preaching to the choir.” We haven’t really played with a lot of these bands that are like hip or big or in this new metalcore scene, we’ve kind of strayed away from that and in some ways it’s helped us because we’ve been known as a diverse band that plays with interesting packages, you know, it helped us not be associated with the norm of what’s going on, but then it also hurts us, because there’s a lot of young kids who are exposed to these bands through Ozzfest and all this stuff and whatever the mainstream metal magazines are now and we feel that we could definitely impress and, not necessarily steal, but acquire into our fanbase that we already have. And we feel that part of the reason we do this is to expose people to something that we think is better, (laughs) that we think pushes you a little further, a bit more to think and this and that, whatever, or at least different. So in a way we felt like it was our duty to play with a band that’s exposed to all these kids. Playing with Unearth, not only are they doing really well, but they’ve done all these things that we haven’t done, so it was like “all right, let’s just do a tour like this to kind of grab some of these kids in one swoop.” And like I said, a lot of the promoters were kind of weirded out that we weren’t headlining, but for us, we were psyched. It was like, we get to go on stage and play in front of every kid that’s going to be in that room, whether they think they like us or don’t like us or don’t know who we are or whatever. Our kids are going to be psyched ‘cuz they get to see us early and these kids who don’t know us, who are Unearth fans, are going to have to watch us, ‘cause Unearth is after us. That is an ideal situation. And we’re going to go, fuck shit up and then we’re going to go eat. (laughs) And just be like, “we just fucked shit up; that was awesome, it’s still early.” And every kid in that room will have seen something awesome, in our opinion. That was our goal with that, I feel like we achieved it and it’s probably something we’re going to do more, every now and again, stop headlining and do something like that. I think it worked really well for us.

Ben: I don’t believe anything. The only thing I really stand by, and it’s rarely something that comes up, is that we just really work very hard and we’ve stuck it out when other bands haven’t. That’s the one thing that I really stand by, I never thought of us as any kind of ground breaking band or anything like that. I think we are definitely pushing ourselves and pushing the limits, but I don’t think that anything we’ve done within our music or within the entity that is Dillinger Escape Plan, that we were the first one to do it. Maybe the combination of all creates some kind of monster that’s rarely seen, but in many ways, we don’t wear our influences that well sometimes and sometimes we do, you know, and it’s not as apparent. But it’s definitely honorable to hear those types of things, it’s cool and it keeps us going, you know those types of things are what keeps us going, because it gives us the ability to keep playing. People say “oh, you’ve got to see this band” because of this or this or whatever, whatever their reason is, we’ll take it. But I don’t know; I’d say a lot of the bands we’re compared to or a lot of the bands that are influenced by us, I don’t hear it, personally. I’m just like, “why? Because they have an off-time signature?” They don’t sound anything like Dillinger to me. And a lot of times when you see we’re the “most influential band,” a lot of times, you’re like, “well, there’s a lot of influential bands,” but the kids revolve so quickly, new kids start listening to music and start coming to shows so quickly that they didn’t get to see these bands that we started out playing with that had to quit because they needed to get a job and have real lives, whereas we just don’t care. (laughter) We’re poor and live with our parents. (laughs)

Ben: I really don’t know. Is it not in print anymore?

Ben: I don’t know. I know we did a split with Drowningman on Hydra Head which is out, that was only a certain amount of pressing. We had that one out fairly quickly and it was limited vinyl, colors and all that stuff, but I always thought that the Nora thing was in production. I really don’t know; it’s up to Ferret (Records). It’s one of those things where it’s like “here’s a demo of one of our songs, do what you want with it.” (laughs)

Ben: We were on the Megadeth tour with Fear Factory and Raymond, their drummer, has this video game company and he places music for video games. I guess Fear Factory had a lot to do with video games early on in their career and stuff like that and through that, he started getting involved with the business of video game music and started actually working as, I guess, a music director for these games. When we were on tour, he’s just like “hey man, that one song, I’m putting on the video game.” We’re like “okay” and that was it. It was kinda, I think, just because we were playing every night with ‘em, we were in his head. He heard the song, he liked it and just put it on the game. Asked our permission, we’re like “sure.” That’s how these things work.

Ben: Nah.

Ben: I doubt it.

Ben: That’s a really good question, but… uh… (laughs) I don’t know if any of us have an infatuation with John Dillinger or anything like that… which one of us is Dillinger? Not the stupidest question…

Ben: …but one of the weirdest. (laughter) I’ve been asked if I was a box of cereal, which would I be?

Ben: Yeah. It’s definitely up there. Which one of us is Dillinger and how would we escape? It’s kind of weird because I always think of the symbolism of that is more like the crowd and the kids and the fans of the band, they’re symbolic of John Dillinger in my opinion, and we’re the escape plan, you know? In a way. But I really can’t answer that. Every one of us has to escape from Greg’s ass on a daily basis, but aside from that… pretty much not trying to escape anything. We pretty much take everything full force, head on, you know?

Ben: No problem, thanks.