Killswitch Engage’s South American Travels Documented in Tour Diary

Killswitch Engage's fall 2009 South American tour is captured in a behind-the-scenes video diary series airing at the Web site of the band's label, Roadrunner Records. A new clip is added every Monday for six weeks through mid-February, capturing the Massachusetts metalcore band's first South American jaunt.

"I don't know if they just wanted to stuff us full of food everywhere we went," bassist and founder Mike D'Antonio tells Noisecreep of the hospitality. "The cool thing was that I'm an 18-year vegetarian, and we have a vegan on our crew. The rest of the guys are super meat eaters. But all the food was amazing ... some of the best I've ever had. There were so many vegetarian restaurants."

Good times and full bellies aside, the band got a hard lesson in environmentalism, too. "Our first two shows were in the Sao Paulo area, and we went to the last remaining bit of rain forest there," D'Antonio says. "Sao Paulo used to be all rain forests. They left one spot in the town as a reminder of what it used to be like. It can't be more than a city block wide. Pretty small, but amazing to look at. It doesn't have all the animals from the rain forests, but it has nasty spiders and crazy snakes. So, you don't want to venture off the path too much.

"It's very beautiful," he continues. "But it's extremely sad. At least they preserved some of it, so people can hopefully remember that it shouldn't go on and maybe put a stop to it."

Oddly, the band didn't shoot the South American tour for a long-form film or DVD release. "We brought someone in to film the first three shows, those are the clips that you see. We couldn't afford to keep him there all the time. The whole time I kept saying, 'This would be the best DVD if we had arranged it sooner.' Next time," he promises. "It really is off the hook there."