Songs For The Emt

DS Exclusive Interview: Mike LeDonne (Chaser) discusses life as a ...

All right, so for our readers that don’t know, tell us your name, position in the band and something about yourself.

My name is Mike, I’m the singer for Chaser. I am a father, I have two beautiful kids, a lovely wife and I work as an EMT driving ambulances for a day job.

So “Accion” just came out.

Yeah “Accion” is the 7’ version of the “Action” EP.

All right, so tell us a little bit about that.

The EP is comprised of 3 b-side tracks that didn’t end up making our last full length album “The Big Picture” and they’re actually really cool songs, a couple of my favorite songs that we’ve done. But they didn’t make it on the record, because the CD “The Big Picture” is kind of like a theme album where it all has one essential theme, and the lyrical content just didn’t quite fit. So we decided to save them, hold off from putting them on the record and save them for a release like this. And we wanted to pick a little more than 3 songs on an EP so that’s why we added 2 more acoustic tracks.

Then what’s with the Tabasco sauce guy on the front?

Tapatio

Ah, that’s what I meant

Yes. A lot of the people that know me, know I’m a hot sauce fanatic. I eat tons and tons of hot food and Tapatio is the iconic hot sauce everybody knows about so I thought it’d be cool to use his image and clean it up a little bit, we thinned out his moustache a little bit to avoid any copyright issues. We put the Chaser logo on top and he’s pretty sweet. It’s one of my favorite album designs we’ve ever had

How has the band been since Cameron left and Blake joined?

It’s been good, this is Blake’s first show, so we’ll find out how he does but he’s actually in another band, so it’s not his first gig, he’s played lots before. He’s definitely excited and we’re excited to have him. Cameron was a big influence on our musical direction, he wrote a lot of music, so I’d say the biggest change without him is the style of music. I think it’s gonna end up more towards our older style, like our “Numb America” and earlier material, because those are the songs I wrote, and now that I’m the main songwriter again, that’s probably how it’s gonna be from now on, unless Blake has a lot to say.

So obviously everything’s civil between you guys?