ALBANY—New Jersey emo/post-hardcore outfit Armor For Sleep—one of the early breakouts of the 2000s East Coast scene explosion—have fully reawakened as of late, releasing the band’s first new LP in 15 years, The Rain Museum, back in 2022. Now in 2023, the group is amidst a national headlining tour honoring the 20th anniversary of Dream To Make Believe, AFS’ uniquely conceptual 2003 Equal Vision Records debut.
With plans for the band— singer/guitarist/founder Ben Jorgensen, lead guitarist PJ DeCicco, bassist Anthony DiIonno and drummer Nash Breen—to play Dream To Make Believe in its entirety, as well as newer music from the latest record, Jorgensen recently took the time to chat with me about both the band’s early history, as well as its present. From his home in Los Angeles, the New Jersey expat discussed how insomnia, theoretical physics, Avril Lavigne and sci-fi nerdery all played a part in the creation of the band’s landmark first album.
BRENDAN MANLEY: You’re touring at the moment in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the band’s debut, Dream To Make Believe. When you look back at that time period now, what do you remember most?
BEN JORGENSEN: There’s a lot. That album, for me, is so raw. I wrote it when I was 17 or 18 years old and I was just a kid in the scene who was trying to figure life out, and for the first time expressing myself, and it feels very vulnerable. That is the first album that we came out with, so it’s interesting that people connect with it. It makes me realize that sometimes the art that people connect to is imperfect and coming from a place of vulnerability. It was not the most refined album. I remember being overwhelmed that we were making our first record, but that adds to the charm of it. I think people who connected with it were going through the same things I was going through as a wee lad, so it’s great. It’s interesting, because for many years I was like, “I could have worked on that more,” or “It could have been cleaner,” but now I’ve just come to accept it in all of its glory. It’s amazing to talk to other people who have connected with it.
BM: Topically, it’s an interesting record as well, with a heavy focus on space and time travel. How did those elements inspire the album?
BJ: That’s just me. My dad was a theoretical physicist and I grew up loving sci-fi. I’m wearing a Jurassic Park t-shirt right now. I’ve just always been a nerd, so that’s just always been my spin on things. At 18 years old I was a weird loner who was just thinking about space and time travel and nothing…all the weird stuff that kids think. I put that in my music, and that was a little different than what was going on at that time.
BM: Definitely not your typical brokenhearted “scene” lyrics of the era.
BJ: Yeah, and it was also like 2000 and 2001; that was before the scene exploded in any kind of way. There was no getting rich and famous being in a band. None of that existed. That would come like four years later, when the major labels would descend upon the scene, but Armor for Sleep had a very innocent beginning of just being weird and writing weird songs. Honestly, I was surprised that anybody liked it at the beginning.
BM: From what I understand, that time period has a lot to do with where the band’s name comes from, as well.
BJ: Yeah. When I started the band when I was 17, I had just quit playing drums for the band that I played with from sixth grade through high school [Random Task], and kind of burned my bridges with my best friends, because I wanted to play guitar and sing the songs that I was writing. I was by myself writing songs and I was in a super creative zone and I couldn’t fall asleep until like 5 a.m. Then I would sleep for a couple of hours. I was just writing songs and thinking about art and drawing pictures and taking pictures, and so that period of my life—that creativity—was my “Armor for Sleep.” It was what kept me awake at night, dreaming about what my life could be. I thought that name was fitting, and it was a lot better than the other terrible band name ideas I had at the time.
BM: Dream To Make Believe’s lyrics rely heavily on interconnected concepts, and it seems much of the band’s work that’s followed is also conceptual in nature. Do you always write with a broad album concept in mind?
BJ: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s just the way that I operate. All the bands and all the albums that I liked, I just got way more into the bands that put out albums that had a deeper meaning. Like for instance I was into Nirvana; I don’t think Nevermind or In Utero had any deeper concept, but when I listened to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, I was like, “Wait, there’s a common thread here. There’s some kind of story.” That just always intrigued me a little bit more and I’ve always been borderline obsessed with the art that I consume. When creating my own stuff, I just wanted to do something similar, and that’s just naturally what comes out. So yeah, with everything [I write], I try and put a common thread or dual meaning behind it.
BM: With that in mind, what’s happening conceptually on the band’s latest full-length, 2022’s The Rain Museum?
BJ: I had an idea for a concept album after What To Do When You Are Dead (2005), and we never got to make it. We signed to a major label and the thought around that time was not to do a very heady concept album. The major label was like, “Why don’t you just do a simple Armor for Sleep album?” We were just dumb kids trying to make the adults in the room happy, so we never made that album. (The band released Smile For Them in 2007, instead.)
When COVID hit, I had all this time on my hands again. I wanted to do another Armor For Sleep album, and I thought it would be the perfect time to resurrect this idea that I had from back in the day. I started writing it, and it was gonna go according to plan: It was just going to be the straight-up story based on the short story that I wrote. But then unfortunately, my marriage that I was in for eight years did not turn out well and I was going through a very dark time and a very dark breakup. I was writing what I just wanted to be this recreation of this concept album idea, but I was writing myself into the story and writing all these emotions about the breakup into it. I was gonna stop and separate it into two different albums, but then I came to the realization that for the modern incarnation of that album that I wanted to make, it made sense that it was a combination of this story from the past and what I was going through in my life. I think that gave it something more real than just me being a nerd.
Ultimately, not to get too deep into it, but being nostalgic about this idea that I had in the past, and also being nostalgic about bringing the band back and the sound of the band, ran parallel with me being nostalgic and looking back at my relationship and all the pitfalls in it. I just felt like those two things wove themselves together to make something unique, that wound up being the album that I think I wanted to make in the end anyway. It was just a moment in time when those two things made sense together.
BM: The COVID era was such a life-changing time for all. It’s always interesting to hear how people have responded and/or changed from it. Between that and your divorce, it’s really powerful to see how you’ve used that dark time to create something positive.
BJ: It took me a while to realize, but sometimes the things that you think are the worst and the most painful actually lead to a change for the better. When I was going through my dark time, I heard that a lot: “You don’t realize this now, but this could be leading to a better life.” I thought a lot of that was [bull] when I was hearing it, but I think there is some truth to that. I think of the redwood trees. They need a forest fire in order for the seed to sprout. I always think of that: This thing will never grow unless the entire forest is decimated, and that’s the way nature works, sometimes, and sometimes I think that’s how our lives work. That helped me get through to the other side, just having faith in things like that, even though I didn’t see it at the time.
(Editor’s Note: According to the National Park Service, coast redwoods are adapted to fire and other disturbances and fire is an important part of the forest ecology. Seeds germinate best on mineral soil as is exposed by flooding, fire, or wind throw. Fire return intervals range from as long as 500 years on wetter, northern sites to five to 25 years on drier, southern sites.)
BM: Shifting back to the subject of Dream To Make Believe history, how did Gabe Saporta (singer/bassist of NJ’s Midtown and Cobra Starship) figure into the band’s early days?
BJ: Gabe definitely played a huge part in our trajectory, and also in my life. He went to my high school—a private Jewish school in New Jersey—but he was four years older than me, so when I was a freshman, he had just graduated. But I have an older sister named Leah who was in his grade, so growing up I always knew about Gabe, because he played bass in a band called Humble Beginnings, who were like the best pop punk band in New Jersey back in the day. My first encounter with Gabe, I put on a show when I was 13, and Humble Beginnings played. I was just a 13-year-old kid who was a fan of his band, but we stayed in touch. I was also friends with his younger brothers and was over at his house a bunch when he was at college in Rutgers.
When I put out the Armor For Sleep demo (2001), I actually don’t even know how he got a copy of it, but he got a copy. Midtown was on hiatus at that time, and he really connected with the demo and wanted to help us out, so he took me under his wing and was our de facto manager for the beginning part of our band. He actually helped us with Dream To Make Believe. We were working out a deal with Equal Vision that he was helping us navigate and the deal was still up in the air. Before that deal was figured out, Gabe was like, “This is taking some time. I know a producer in L.A. [Ariel Rechtshaid]. He used to sing in The Hippos. He’s starting to produce bands and he’s a really talented guy. Why don’t you guys just go fly out there, and record Dream To Make Believe?” Gabe paid for the whole thing. He was like, “We can go back to Equal Vision and say, ‘We have a record. It’s already all done. Do you want to sign the band or not?’” They wound up signing us, and Gabe got reimbursed for helping produce the record.
We were very excited to have him as our big brother. Midtown had made a lot of mistakes with some of their business decisions, so Gabe setting us up was almost like him doing things right again, and we benefited from the knowledge that he had…. Without Gabe, things would have gone probably a lot slower for us, for sure.
BM: What was that recording experience like, especially since teaming up with Ariel Rechtshaid was your first time working with a real producer?
BJ: It’s funny, because Ariel has gone on to be a massive producer, working with Madonna and Usher and Haim and Vampire Weekend (as well as Adele, Beyoncé and U2, among others). Grammy winning stuff. But Dream To Make Believe, I think it was the first album he properly produced, so it wasn’t like we were going to some big producer who intimidated us. Most of the vocals I recorded were in a garage. He was still living at home with his parents, so it was a makeshift studio in a tool shed in his parents’ backyard. But he was super talented and really cared about making the best record that he could, and we’re very, very thankful that he was there.
The studio where we recorded drums was basically right on Venice Beach, and we actually were hanging out there and saw Avril Lavigne walking down with her guitar player. That’s when “Complicated” was the No. 1 song in America and we were like, “Hey, come to the studio and hear what we’re doing!” So, we actually hung out with Avril Lavigne for a couple of days. I went to a Dillinger Four show with her at The Troubadour, which was pretty cool. Dillinger Four are one of my favorite punk rock bands.
BM: We should also talk a bit about the scene that produced you. What was the vibe like in New Jersey at the time?
BJ: Growing up going to shows in New Jersey, the thing that attracted me so much to it was how vibrant and crazy it was. The first shows I would go to were mostly ska and punk shows; there would be like 500 kids packed in a VFW hall or a church, and that was so infectious and crazy. I didn’t know that was just isolated to New Jersey—Long Island I’m sure had the same thing—but that really was a unique thing going on, that the East Coast was just blowing up with this local scene. I was so excited; that’s what made me want to start my own bands and play shows with my friends and that completely changed my life. From when I started going to shows, that was my identity. I lived and breathed shows and bands and taking in as much information as I could, buying records and looking in the “thank you” sections and trying to figure out what was hardcore, what was emo, what was punk rock. That was just my life. I’m definitely happy I grew up at the time in New Jersey, because I don’t know who I would be if that hadn’t happened to me.
BM: And it happened to so many others, too. New Jersey really produced a remarkable crop of bands around the millennium.
BJ: It was like a runaway train, when a band like Lifetime comes up that was just so good, then Chris Conley from Saves The Day is so affected by it and wants to take elements from Lifetime and make it more appealing. When I heard that, I was also listening to Thursday. So many bands in New Jersey spawned so many more bands. It was infectious.
BM: Obviously, you’re committed to playing all of Dream in its entirety on this tour. How does the prospect of that feel, and what can fans expect in the set, in addition to that material?
BJ: Well, I gotta be honest, we haven’t played a lot of the songs on Dream To Make Believe I think ever. There are a couple songs on there that we just never played. I’m almost excited that we’ve put our feet to the fire and we’re like, “We’re gonna commit to do this album, front to back.” Fans want to hear that record too, so I’m excited for that, of course. Dream To Make Believe is not that long of an album—there are only really 10 songs on it—so that’s obviously not long enough for a full set. Once that album is done, it’s gonna be like a party and we’re gonna play the songs that we love playing live: a lot of the energetic songs from What To Do When You Are Dead we always love playing, and some songs from our most recent album. Basically, we’re just gonna feel it out. We’re gonna rehearse a bunch of songs and take it night by night, pretty much just celebrating the fact that we’re still playing shows in this band. We have amazing fans that have supported us over the years, so it’s really a thank you to everyone that’s been a part of this.
BM: Armor For Sleep has existed now for more than two decades. Which of your records are you happiest with?
BJ: I’m always going to gravitate more towards the latest thing we’ve done. The Rain Museum, our most recent album, is closest in alignment with who I am now, lyrically and also musically. But I’m never gonna be one of those people that discounts the earlier material, because I completely understand that that’s affected the most amount of people over the years. I would never force that on other people. But yeah, I’m always going to be most personally affected by our newest stuff.
BM: Fans up here are definitely excited for the show. When was the last time the band played the Albany area?
BJ: It’s been a long time. (Ed: Last known 518 show was 4/1/07 at Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, with Underoath and Taking Back Sunday.) I remember playing a show that was incredible, and that was the first time I was like, “Oh man, Albany has got it going on.” I had no idea, you know? We live right next to New York City; Albany always seemed like a foreign country, but after playing that show, I remember all of us were like, “Wow, Albany has something special.” We’ve always been excited to go back to Albany over the years, and we’re certainly excited to come back in November.
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Armor For Sleep headlines Empire Live in Albany on Friday, November 10th at 7:30 p.m., with special guests The Early November and The Spill Canvas. Tickets can be purchased online here.
