Derek Archambault of Defeater/Alcoa eager to return after surgery

Interview by Jason Schreurs

Derek Archambault has had a rough couple of years. The lead singer of hardcore band Defeater, and the man behind the acoustic-based solo project Alcoa, recently had hip-replacement surgery after a workplace accident had resulted in almost two years of chronic pain. After some serious contemplation, Archambault turned to his fans and started a crowd-funding project to raise money for his surgery. Now he’s readying the release of an acoustic covers EP, fittingly entitled Thank You, as a way of rewarding those who helped him when he needed it most. Now on the mend, Archambault is looking forward to getting back to Defeater and writing the follow-up to 2013’s stellar Letters Home album; a staggering slab of hardcore with a haunting narrative about a tragic family.

First, though, let’s find out how Archambault’s recovery is going.

How are you doing after your surgery?
I’m doing great. I’m walking with just a cane now, which is much better than the normal hip-replacement patient, but the normal hip-replacement patient is also about 30 years older than me on average. But, yeah, I feel fucking great and the pain that I was in is 100 percent gone. I still have a little bit of surgical pain now and again, but nothing like the pain I was in. I was just a miserable son of a bitch and in constant pain for about a year and a half, and it reflected in everything I did.

So how did you get injured to begin with?
I had a fall down a flight of stairs and I’d sprained my hip, and I’d also broken my ankle in the fall. It was at work and the focus was on my ankle. Defeater immediately went on tour and the focus was just on the ankle break, not my sprained hip. I was told I might develop early arthritis, and then three months later I started limping and my hip starting getting worse, so I just thought it was arthritis, but it progressively got worse and worse and worse, and I had no fucking idea what was going on because I wasn’t warned that I could have damaged the vascular system. Basically, what had happened was my vascular system just shut down in that particular area and the bone stopped getting nutrition, so it died.

I know some people have a hard time asking for help, and you reached out to your fans and other people in the scene with a pledge fund. What was it like asking for help?
Oh, it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. I’m a very stubborn, prideful person and I don’t like asking anybody for anything. It had gotten to the point where I had no other option because my worker’s comp claim had been denied and I’m still in a court battle for that, but I could have faced another two years of waiting for the case to be settled and waiting for surgery, and the band would have disintegrated in that time. So it was either figure out a way to get surgery or just wait for my hip to break and have to get emergency surgery and pay something absolutely fucking ridiculous. And then I’d have to ask for help afterwards. We were all a little worried about the pledge fund, but my band were all behind me in asking for money and I tried to keep it as personally oriented and focus it more on my solo project, Alcoa, rather than it being a Defeater-based project, as to not have it be the band asking for the money; it would just be me doing it personally with the consent of my band members.

How has it been for the band during all of this?
Everyone has been supportive. The timeline of everything getting fucked up is we were on tour last fall with August Burns Red and I was already in massive amounts of pain and walking with a severe limp. My left leg was about an inch and half shorter than my right at this point. I had finally got my old job to send me to the doctor again for the worker’s comp case and I got new x-rays and he said I should not go out on this tour and it was the day before we were supposed to leave, and I had just gotten the news that my hip was dead and it was just going to get worse, and it was just going to break. So I went on tour and lived with the pain and still tried to perform as well as possible. And then we had this European tour booked with The Wonder Years, and I had done an Alcoa tour right before that, and I had gotten the news that worker’s comp had cancelled my upcoming surgery date and they weren’t going to pay for it, and they demanded that I get a second opinion and do all of this other crap. It was a total nightmare. We had the tour booked already and knowing that I wasn’t going to get that surgery and I had maybe 10-20 percent function in my left leg, and I couldn’t stand for more than five minutes without being in pain, so I had to either constantly move around or lay down, I couldn’t perform that way again. So I talked to the band and told them there was no way I could do The Wonder Years tour and perform and have it be acceptable by my standards, and also not put me at risk of breaking my hip and having to call it off anyways. So that’s when shit really hit the fan, and not really knowing what the future held.

So then what happened?
We were home for a few months. I went to the second-opinion appointment and that doctor said that everything was inconclusive as to if the fall had any hand in my hip being fucked up, and this and that, and this and that… So come early summer I started throwing around the idea of the crowd-funding thing and we were all against it at first, but then we lightened up and did it. And then I recorded that covers EP.

With the continuing narrative on Defeater’s records, and the characters in that story, are you constantly writing and keeping track of where you want it to go?
I haven’t written a word during the break. I function a little weirdly, I guess, for writing the records. For one, I need to have all the music done before I can even start to think of any sort of phrasing or anything for a song. I think it stems from how I wrote the first record, because Travels was already written before I was in the fold. When I had become friends with these guys they already had the record written and I had every song in front of me and I got to pick and choose where each song would go on the record. Sequencing is a huge part of what I love to write to. I get to pick where I want the record to go, mood-wise. I just write on a whim. I sit down and listen to a song hundreds of times and figure it out. So I feel like if I try to write anything before there’s any kind of music, I’m just going to scrap it anyways, so there’s no fucking point.

Those characters in the story must be circling around in your head though, because they’re such a huge part of the band.
Yeah, and for all intents and purposes they’re real to me. They’re like my Glass family, from Salinger’s short stories, and they’re real in my head and I think about them constantly. I think about what could be, and what I could have changed and how I could have written more detail in the stuff I’ve already done or whatever. But I like to be as close to in the moment as possible when I’m writing, because that’s just how I function the best; making sure it’s fresh to me so I don’t get tired of it.

Is it like turning on a faucet for you when you start to write the lyrics?
Yeah, once I get going it’s a lot easier for me to keep it going, rather than try to do it in little spurts here and there. I’ve never been able to just write half a song and then put it down and pick it up days, weeks or months later and be satisfied with it. I usually just scrap the whole thing and maybe keep a line, and then I’m onto something entirely new.

How do you think Defeater will be different now that you’re not in so much pain anymore? Do you think it will change the tone of the band?
Well, I was in moderate pain when we recorded Letters Home, but it wasn’t that bad. By the time we were touring on the album it had gotten bad and I was walking with a severe limp, and I had to rest all of the time. But when I wrote Letters Home, I wasn’t in that much pain; I just thought I had arthritis, so I was in constant pain but it was just dull. It didn’t get really bad until maybe August of last year.

It must be a relief to not have to feel that pain anymore.
Oh yeah, it’s like night and day, with my outlook on life and just everything. Even in the last three weeks I’m more positive than I have been in the past two years.

Alcoa‘s Thank You EP is out December 2 on Bridge Nine Records.

Defeater‘s Letters Home is also available on Bridge Nine Records.