Introducing Element Eighty

On January 4th, 2004, at the Webster Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut, I attended the Sevendust show with Ill Nino and this new band called Element Eighty for Ball-Buster. I was backstage just having a good time and then all of a sudden I hear the support act come on. I hear this big thick gigantic sound of heavy distorted guitars and screaming vocals mixed in with melodic singing. I wondered who it was. I exited backstage and went into the crowd. The band playing was Element Eighty. I was enthralled by their sound, image, and performance & wanted to do an Interview. After their set I approached the lead singer, Dave Galloway. He agreed. This is what happened.

Travis: What’s happening with the tour so far?

Dave: The tour is going very well so far. We’ve been out for about a week with Sevendust and Ill Nino. We did a New Years Eve show in our home town of Dallas and just came to do the tour immediately. Everything is going real well. And Sevendust and Ill Nino are nice to us and the crowd response has been awesome. 

T: I know that you are from a small town in Texas. What did you guys do for fun besides play music? 

D: We’re all from small towns. We did all kinds of stuff man. Matt our guitar player was always into metal and wanted a guitar for a long time and got one in junior high school. The rest of us, we’re always into music as well as sports. I was a long distance runner and some of the guys were into football. Then we got the band going.

T: How did the band get a record deal?

D: We’ve been together for about three years. The way we did it was in our town there weren’t too many places to play and the ones that did wanted a lot of cover bands. So, we had to play cover songs and mix originals in. We would play four hour gigs when we were first starting out. People were really into our originals, so we started getting booked in bigger places like in Dallas, which was the big goal. What we did was when we played gigs and got paid we kept in it a band fund and saved up all the money back because we wanted to do something bigger with it, ya know. Then we listened to a bunch of local Dallas bands and settled on the one that sounded the best and picked this one guy named Eric Dalagard and just pretty much harassed him to do our independent record. We gave a copy of it to a radio station called 97.1, which is a great radio station for local bands. They have a program called the local show on Sunday nights and they started playing us, so we got a bigger fan following. Eventually before we were signed they added the song “Goody Bye,” which is on our CD now and when you do that it shows up on rock radio records and all that stuff. So, labels we’re looking and seeing we were unsigned and on the Dallas charts. So they started paying attention and did a few showcases for different labels and Universal was the label that we felt comfortable with. Universal has a good reputation with a lot of great bands on the label that have a lot of success and we felt it was the best label for us.

T: This is your first CD. What do you think about the business?

D: You think and hope it’s all luxurious and all the good stuff, but it’s really not. I mean it is to some extent, people really treat you nice even when you’re the opening band for someone that they really admire. They don’t know that you’re living in a van with no food and can’t pay your bills. [Laughs] But sometimes you have a couple of people that don’t like you, but it’s totally cool, man. For the most part it’s really nice to get to travel and meet new people. 

T: What is your single “Broken Promises,” about? 

D: It’s about a couple of different things. Just basically about a relationship. For me personally, it’s about my wife and little girl and for me to leave them all the time is hard. For that song for me is about her. You know, everybody has a different meaning for that song. Matt and I wrote the words to that song and blew up different ideas, you know, he wrote some parts and then I wrote some parts. But generally, I wrote the majority of that song and wrote it for my wife.

T: What’s the next single from this record?

D: There’s a couple up in the air that we’ve talked about. I know that they’re throwing around the idea of “Good Bye,” and “Scars.” But I think we are definitely going to go with “Texas Cries,” as the next single. That’s the one I really feel good about. 

T: What’s next for you guys? 

D: We’ll be doing this tour until the end of February. After that we don’t exactly know. There’s talk we’re going to try to get onto OzzFest. Our management is just looking at a bunch of different options right now for us. There’s definitely more touring whether it’s OzzFest or just some other tour, I expect this year is going to be pretty much full of touring and getting our record out.