CausticTruths.com recently caught up with POISON THE WELL drummer Chris Hornbrook. The entire story appears below:

By Morley Seaver

Along with the new Poison The Well record, Versions, comes another set of changes. Drummer Chris Hornbrook says the band has once again welcomed a new bassist and guitarist.

“It does affect things and it doesn’t,” he says. “I think at this point, it doesn’t because we came to the conclusion that it’s always going to be the three of us, even when our old guitar player Derek was with the band, it was the four of us. It was always like a revolving bass player or a revolving guitar player. It sucks because every time that we’ve brought a person in, we’ve tried to bring him in to our circle and have them be a part of the band, and make them feel like they’re part of it. But for some reason it has always backfired for one reason or another. Usually it boils down to, they’re really cool and they can’t play their instrument very well or they can play their instrument really well, but they’re not very cool to be on tour with. It’s kind of seems what it’s boiled down to, at least for bass players.”

He says that name of the new record reflects the ongoing turnovers in the band. “The title means pretty much just different versions of this band,” says Hornbrook, “whether it’s with Derek or Jason or Ben or our old manager or being on Atlantic, it’s just been revolving different, multiple versions of this band, with myself, Ryan and Jeff kind of being the witnesses to it. We felt, because of the past three years, it was an appropriate title for the record. We tried to go through a bunch of titles and once Jeff kind of presented the title to us, we knew that was it. We thought this represents the record and where we’re coming from.”

The new record has a few surprises as well, some that you wouldn’t associate with Poison the Well, like horns. “Well I don’t think anyone was intentionally looking for horns so to speak,” he says. “It just seemed like it would work. I think one of the producers suggested ‘Why we don’t have like an Americana horn section and I think Ryan kind of took the ball and went okay, that’s really cool and wrote the melody for it said ‘Let’s try it’. Our engineer, Eskil, plays an array of instruments, one of them being the trombone so we knew we’d have that in there. We doubled two different types of horns and it just worked. They just sat back and did it and we listened to the play back and it was like ‘This sounds great. This is cool. This has never been done before in the type of music, the scene that we came from.’ This is different and it’s cool and we’re into it and it’s not going anywhere and hopefully kids don’t hate it (laughs)."