Sky Eats Airplane Embrace Technology and AOL IM

"Our entire writing process is done over AOL Instant Messenger, so there's our little plug to AOL," Sky Eats Airplane guitarist Lee Duck told Noisecreep. "We pass information over file transfers. It's like AOL wrote our album!"

While we love the nod, Sky Eats Airplane are happily and successfully embracing modern technology to make music, which is especially beneficial since the band members are spread across the country. "We'll send files, give each other points, send back ideas and work on it more," Duck said. "It's back and forth. We don't sit in a room and hammer out riffs together, because in that setting, people get frustrated or even hungry, so you say, 'Let's settle on this riff,' because of outside factors and you regret it when the album comes out." Drummer Travis Orbin pointed out that "it's fairly mechanical music without much improvisation, so it lends itself to that sort of writing process."

But what about things like, well, band practice? Sky Eats Airplane, who've offered up a metalcore version of Limp Bizkit's smash hit "Nookie," have that in the bag. Vocalist Jerry Roush and Orbin, who don't live in Texas, which is the band's base of operations, fly out for practice a week or so before tour. "We figure out the set list and stuff a week in advance," Roush said. The band enjoys this way of existing, as Duck said, "Being around each other all the time means we might get sick of each other and who wants to write like that? We have our space and do this on our own time."

The band also used web networking in the most creative of ways, locating Roush via an online audition. "They put up an instrumental song from first album and asked for vocals," Roush recalls. "I was living in New York and went to a studio in Brooklyn where it cost about $15 an hour to record. After I sent them my audition, they sent me another instrumental of an unreleased song and I did vocals for that."

Duck laughed when recalling the terrible submissions the band received, saying "People were doing the T-Pain thing or the cookie monster screaming. We made compilation CDs of joke ones that came in. It was so funny. We had like 25 of these horrible auditions."