Carnifex Are Late Bloomers

"We're a little older, between 25 and 30," Carnifex vocalist Scott Lewis told Noisecreep. "Most people equate this genre with younger kids, but for us, Carnifex is far from being our first band. This is my seventh band!"

Seven bands? Clearly, Lewis is dedicated to making music as a career. "We've tried to go as far as we could with our other bands," he said. "Everyone does this when they are 15, and we all started then. For guys like me, we're looking at 11-12 years of doing this." But it hasn't been all glory for the members of Carnifex. "We're at this point where we've been shamed so long by our family and friends to get a real job and stop dreaming. Now, I am finally getting somewhere."

While "finally getting somewhere" means signing to a bigger label like Victory and gaining more exposure, it's not a loot-and-ladies lifestyle! "We still don't make a dime, so to people we know, it's totally worthless," Lewis said. "But for us, someone is paying for us to record and to go to Europe, so that's good enough for us. We get to hang out with friends and see the world. You get to be your own boss, sort of, in this situation. We monitor ourselves, and try to do the best with what we got."

Lewis did take a break from music for a bit, though. He had given up touring and got the full-time job that his friends and family were so suggestive of. But he eventually gave in to the gravitational pull of music. "I gave up for a little while," he recalled. "I did the band thing for six years and it was different back then, not to sound like a real old person. There was no MySpace or internet then. For me and Shawn [Cameron], our drummer, it was culture shock.

"The methods we knew when we were trying to get the band going were different. Now, no one is walking up and down the line of kids standing in line at clubs, handing out demos and flyers rubber banded around it. No one does that s--- anymore. Bands now have a manager and a deal, and have only been a band for like three months! We've been a band five years, and we're just doing our second record now. These kids get stuff done. They must know something, since they kick our ass half the time! It's great that the scene thrives that way, or it'd be dead without that vitality. But for us, it was a slow start."

When Carnifex formed, it was another series of culture shocks for the pair. "To switch back to full-time with Carnifex was hard," Lewis said. "Because you pay the monthly bill and the car payment, and then when you stop doing the full-time job, you think, 'How do you get rid of it?' Shawn and I moved into the same place, shared a car and ended up selling the car we shared to buy a van for a band, then gave up the shared apartment, and were living in the van.

But they weren't homeless. Turns out they went on tour, so there was no need to have an actual abode! "Touring kept us from needing a place to stay, since we were always out and had no money to pay for a place," Lewis said.