Antiquiet: How much of yourself did you put into the lyrics?
Billy Howerdel: If there’s a story to a song, a lot of times I took something that might be emotionally charging me, and what I would say, or if there’s a misunderstanding and someone had the wrong idea behind your intentions, I kind of ran with that. Even if it was in a sarcastic way, just running with that theme. I wrote Enemies from the point of view of a friend of mine that I haven’t talked to in twenty years, what that guy would think coming back seeing old friends of his and not letting them let go of the past. There’s kind of a recurring theme of people never letting you change. You get a couple fresh starts in life, and one of ‘em is graduating high school, moving on going to college or whatever you’re going to do. You can change your name if you want to, cut your hair, but if you go back and revisit those old places, the past doesn’t forget about you. You can have some shit resurface that you thought you’d lived down. I pretty much wrote it from the story of Frankenstein, as well as this guy that I grew up with. (laughs) But every line in that song is a conversation that I’ve had with somebody else…

Billy Howerdel started out behind the scenes in the music business, doing guitar tech work for everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Guns ‘N’ Roses over the years. He stepped into the spotlight in 1999 with A Perfect Circle, a band he founded with Maynard James Keenan of Tool. Eight years and two platinum albums later (three, if you count the remix CD), APC is on indefinite hiatus and Billy has returned with Ashes Divide, a new band with a new album, Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright. As chief songwriter, producer and vocalist for Ashes Divide, Billy’s both the brains and the brawn of the project. “The Stone,” the first single off Ashes Divide’s debut album, hit radio in late January to critical acclaim. Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright drops April 8, 2008.
We go back a little ways with Billy from the APC days, back when Skwerl and I were wee little fanboys running a fansite for APC. Well, actually, I didn’t run shit- I just wrote things down. But they were good years, and it was fun to play catch-up and take a long look back at the path of fallen dominoes- as well as the road ahead.