Nonpoint
By: James Wright
 In 2000 they screamed onto the scene with ‘What A Day’ and blasted us with ‘Mindtrip’. They were melodic, yet heavy and wrote solid songs. This was Florida's Nonpoint.
After some extensive touring alongside the likes of Machine Head, Drowning Pool and as a part of Ozzfest, Nonpoint released their sophomore effort Development. The album proved they were more than just a one-trick pony by adding more commercial elements and more melodies to their existing bag of tricks.
Now with their third album Recoil, Nonpoint has evolved once again. The album is lead by the politically charged call to arms of the first single ‘The Truth’ and complimented by the trippy atmospherics of 'Wait'. This album is Nonpoint’s opus, showing a band confident in their ability to write melodic hard rock with a twist.
Soon after the release of Recoil, we caught up with Nonpoint frontman Elias to discuss his band's explosive new record, how Nonpoint survived trends and why he is proudly a Democrat.
Blistering.com: During the time during Development and this new record, your label [MCA] merged into Geffen. What was that time like?
Elias: It was work for us because we were writing a record. MCA had already picked up the option for the third record before they merged, so it was still work as usual for us. Being in a band has its ups and downs but luckily we have good management, good lawyers and strong interest from labels. We were in the studio for about 12 hours a day, for pretty much a year. When the merge happened it was around Christmas time so we were all on vacation and labels pretty much shut down in December anyways, so for us it was pretty seamless to go from MCA to Geffen and then to Lava. By the time everyone had got into Geffen and the dust had settled, we pretty much knew what was going on and had interest from other labels. It was almost like we signed our release papers for Geffen as we were signing our advance from Lava, it was a matter of 2 weeks. Either way we knew the record was going to be released, so we just concentrated on making the best record possible.
Blistering.com: Is it a scary time to be on a major label right now as an artist?
Elias: No because I have enough confidence in ourselves that we can get past that. You have to be an optimist, not a pessimist in this business.
Blistering.com: Does it help that knowing you built your fanbase through years of touring?
Elias: We have to credit MCA for that because they funded our entire touring career; they spent millions of dollars in supporting our band. We have established our own touring fanbase so we don’t need tour support anymore because our guarantees and merch support anything we need to do out on the road.
Blistering.com: How important will tours like this tour with Sevendust be in the success of this new record?
Elias: Touring with Sevendust is absolutely a blessing. We’ve toured with these guys before and luckily it was the right time. We were releasing a record; they were looking for a support act, so it worked out perfect. We’re all friends with those guys, we call each other on holidays, so touring with them was a blessing that it all worked out. Tours like this are amazing when they fall into place. It’s awesome to be a part of a bill like this because Skindred is awesome live, we bet our lives on our live show and then Sevendust is even more awesome to have on, after us. This is a good ticket for fans because you have all these great live bands. I don’t want them to come to a show just for one band that they like.
Blistering.com: Nonpoint has never really been a radio band yet - ‘The Truth’ is doing really well so far.
Elias: We didn’t choose the song as the single but the label staff listened to the record and I guess that song stuck out a bit. Me personally, I probably wouldn’t have picked it first but now that they did I wouldn’t have done anything different. When we write songs we don’t even think of what people are going to like on radio. When we write songs we make ourselves happy first and then think of our live show. We want to write songs that move people and make them want to dance, cry or even give them goose bumps. We like the emotional roller coaster part of our music writing and we try and make each song do that.
Blistering.com: The Truth seems to have this political overtone to the lyrics and yet Nonpoint has never been known as a political band.
Elias: Well the song was originally about the whole merger question we were talking about in the first couple questions. Geffen merging to MCA and not having any answers to what were asking. Labels are like these big giant machines and you need eight signatures to get $100 approved and it was hard to get an answer to if we were writing the record for Geffen or if we should be shopping it around. The song kind of came about because it was like, what’s going on with our lives behind closed doors and wanting to dig a little deeper to find to find answers.
Blistering.com: I had interpreted it as a political statement about the current state of world affairs.
Elias: Well it is an election year so that doesn’t surprise me. As difficult as it’s getting to get radio airplay and media in general, it’s exciting because the American public is digging a little deeper to find out what’s going on overseas and with our government. People are making it a responsibility to get out and vote and make some kind of impact on what’s going on with our children, brothers and sisters. We’re sending our family members to foreign countries to protect something that we don’t even know the whole truth about. I’m hoping that we’re getting educated this year.
Blistering.com: Have you had a chance to see Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” yet?
Elias: I definitely saw it and it’s an inspiring movie. Obviously you are looking at things from the perspective of Michael Moore but at the same time there are a lot of things that you can’t alter, like sound bytes of what our president has said; it’s pretty shocking.
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