Without even a major label backing them, New Jersey’s Armor for Sleep has managed to live up to the media hype generated early during their career. They now play sold-out shows and have created a loyal fanbase on the east coast and beyond. So just what is it about Armor for Sleep that sets them apart from other bands? We spoke with singer and guitarist Ben Jorgensen about their upcoming album, What To Do When You Are Dead, and we’re convinced that even the biggest skeptics will be unable to resist giving Armor for Sleep a try.

Interview by Vivian Hua

When did Armor for Sleep first form?
The band first started in the summer of 2001, right before September 11th. I call that the beginning of the band. That was just me throwing around songs, and I made a demo by myself before I had a band. It was called Armor for Sleep. I guess we had all the members we have now about a year after that. So the idea of the band started in 2001, and we were a full-functioning touring band in September of 2002.

Did you guys know each other beforehand?
Yeah... well, we all kind of grew up in the New Jersey scene when we were in high school. None of us were popular in the schools that we went to, but we all knew each other because we spent every single day thinking about music. That was our lives in high school, so we shared that.

How old are you guys now?
We’re 21 and 22. I’m 21, and so is Anthony. Nash and PJ are 22.

In the beginning, what were the biggest challenges you guys faced?
Since the beginning, people in record labels were interested in us, and people from bands liked us. I guess our biggest challenge was breaking into kids and having them like us. We kind of had to prove ourselves, because when we started, we were considered a “buzz” band. The industry was talking about us. They were like, “Are they going to be able to win kids over?” or whatever. We hated that, because we didn’t want that pressure on us. We just wanted to grow like every other band. We had to tour our asses off and prove ourselves, and that’s hard. It takes a lot of time to play a city five times in a year.

Where did all that buzz come from?
Honestly, I don’t know. It just somehow happened. My friends asked me, “How did you get that?” and I… don’t really know. I guess it hit people in the right way, and it hit the right people at the right time.

A lot of your first album lyrics were about dreaming and sleeping… what significance does it hold?
I don’t know. I guess at the time I felt disconnected from a lot. I kind of saw writing songs as an escape. The metaphor for dreams and sleeping was just another world I could jump into. That’s kind of the place I was living at the time. I was really living on the outskirts. I had no friends; I barely left my house. I went to the mall, and I felt like a ghost. It was weird. I wrote these songs just to express how distant I felt from everyone. The last thing in the world I expected was for people to listen to it, and for it to mean something to them. I was just kind of writing it because I was really disconnected from everything.

Have you ever tried lucid dreaming?
Have I tried it? Yeah. I have tried it a lot.

Does it work?
I guess not. I’ve been able to be in a dream and be aware that I’m in a dream. Sometimes if I’m in a nightmare, I’ll be like, “Everything that’s going on is too crazy. This can’t be real,” and then I’m like… “Wow, I’m stuck in a dream right now. This is really weird. I can’t get out.” But lucid dreaming is actually when you control your environment. Where you can say, “I’m in a dream! I’m gonna fly!” and then you consciously do that. And I haven’t been able to do that.

Are you still as shy as you were before being in the band?
I don’t think of myself as a shy person. I think I’m always interacting with people, but ever since I was at a young age, I hear people saying stuff about me, through my friends or whatever. I always had the reputation of being shy. It’s weird, because I’m not consciously shy. I think I’m interacting with people, but I think I don’t talk as much as people around me. It’s not cause I’m nervous or anything – it’s just that I get lost in thought, and I don’t realize that twenty minutes have gone by without me saying anything. It has kind of changed me, because… wait, you know what? I take that back. Who doesn’t get nervous talking to new people? But if you’re at a show and all these kids want to talk to you about your lyrics, of course I’m going to talk to them. Being in this position has kind of taught me that it’s okay to talk to people sometimes, and it’s not always a bad thing.

What kind of themes and experiences shaped this your new album?
A lot of people say that the first record was a concept record. I always looked at “Dream to Make Believe” as just a bunch of different songs thrown together that had some kind of theme. The new album is kind of like telling a story, and it’s called What To Do When You’re Dead. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s basically about looking through life as though you’re dead. It’s imagining what would happen if you died. I wanted to be really honest. I felt like I owed it to everyone to not clam up, and I thought the best way of doing that was kind of morbid, but it would be to imagine myself being dead. I thought about what family and friends would think about how I’ve affected them, and it was just kind of a way for me to look at how much I’ve done in my life so far, if I’ve done anything at all. I thought it would just kind of be a cool thing to write an album based on me being dead, and me trying to reconnect to the people in my life from the afterlife. So I wrote this whole album about me being a ghost trying to contact them.

What do you believe happens to people after they die?
I don’t know. I want to think that something happens after you die, but I feel like I don’t really subscribe to that. I think it would be really cool to be a ghost stuck between here and somewhere else, but I don’t know if that really happens.

So do you write all of the songs yourself? What is your songwriting process like?
Usually I’ll show up to practice with a song, and I’ll be like, “Alright guys, tell me what you think,” and they’ll be like, “That sucks,” or they’ll be like, “Wow, that’s really cool.” Then everyone kind of throws in their ideas and we talk about it. So it’s kind of like I write the skeleton of the song and then I bring it to them and they play around. And then I go home and write all the lyrics and all the melodies myself.

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