LiveDaily Article

[Gabby]

Nothing we haven't heard before, but some good insights from Emma nonetheless.

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Touring can be a maddening experience for some, including the American-by-way-of-Australia rock band Sick Puppies [ tickets ]. For its third US album, "Tri-Polar," the act decided to take those feelings and roll them into the aggressive rock collection, which hit stores last July.

"Before you really get put out there in the deep end, you don't realize how mad you can go at times," said bassist Emma Anzai told LiveDaily. "Touring seems glamorous to some, but what people don't realize is it feels like you're living in a bubble, and you're living in a bubble for a few months at a time. When you only have a week off at home, it's a false sense of reality. It's hard to grasp reality when you're out there. We're all living on a bus with nine to 12 people at a time, going from one city to the next. You don't really have time to settle down or anything, which is fine. But I think that's what brought it on. You get pushed to the edge in a lot of ways--mentally, physically and emotionally. I think that's what brought on all that aggression, just that raw emotion at least."
That aggression paid off. Sick Puppies' first single from the album, "You're Going Down," was a No. 1 record on the Mediabase and BDS Active Rock Charts. The song also served as the theme for WWE's Extreme Rules pay-per-view broadcast last summer. It is used on the WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 video game as well.

"We were lucky enough that 'You're Going Down' was used as a theme for [the pay-per-view]," Anzai said. "The WWE treated us to a couple events and we went. One was in Orlando, FL. It was pretty awesome. I was never a huge [wrestling] fan. We had it in Australia, but I never got into it. Mark [Goodwin, drummer] was a fan, though. We were able to meet wrestlers like The Big Show. I think we met John Cena. We got to meet The Miz. It was really cool to see how it works backstage. It was really good."

The band's second single from the album, titled "Odd One," was released to rock radio on Nov. 10.

"It was one of our favorite songs," Anzai said. "I think because of the subject matter, the content and lyrics are kind of close to us because we felt like that in high school--like the outcasts and odd ones. It was cool to be able to recreate that and make a video for it--and to have it be a single was very cool."

As a matter of fact, it was in high school that Anzai met lead singer Shimon Moore. The two became acquainted after she moved from Japan, her father's home country, to Australia.

"I grew up in Australia for the most part," she said. "My dad's Japanese, so I spent a few years of my life in Japan, but it was mainly Australia, yeah. [Japan] was very different. It's a non-English-speaking country. That makes things a little more complicated. But my dad is Japanese, so I grew up with both languages. It's very different. It's a different culture. It was hard to be the only foreign kid in school. It made me feel a little weird and like a little outcast. That's the nature of being a kid. You're a little sensitive to these things. I'm glad I spent a few years in my life really immersed in the culture; I would have never have done that. It's really nice to know what another culture's all about. You have to have respect for that kind of thing. I'm glad that it happened.

"But, when I moved back from Japan to Australia to finish my high schooling, I met Shim in high school. It was in Sydney, Australia, and I was a grade above him. We were starting to get into music. We met in the music room at lunch time. I think they double booked the room. None of us wanted to leave because we both really wanted to play. It's the only time we ever really got to play because you had to borrow the instruments from school."

The two ended up performing together in what Anzai called a turn of fate. Moore and Anzai had the same tastes in Silverchair and Green Day.

"After that, we couldn't really find anyone else to play with," she said. "I said, 'Let's start a band.' I was really serious. He was like, 'Oh. OK.' That's where it started."

Now, the band is preparing to support Nickelback on the next leg of its "Dark Horse" tour. That's something that Anzai called "really exciting."

"We just got back [from Australia] in November," she said. "We toured with them for a few weeks. After that, they gave us the tour for America. We were real stoked about that. It's also with Shinedown and Breaking Benjamin, which are two of our favorite bands to tour with."