Interviews

Joseph D Rowland - Pallbearer ‘We've Had a Long Standing Great Fanbase in Australia’

Duane James

Dad. Metal Bogan. Duane's World.

Mar 9, 2025

7 min read

The mighty Pallbearer/Conan Australian tour kicks off with a this Wednesday in Melbourne and when this show was announced back in November, the first bloke I told about it was my mate Paulie Surridge, worshipper at the altar of doom and owner of Higher Ground Tattoos and Records in Kurrajong. His reply of “What the holy bullshit are you f*ckin serious? Whoa Jesus that’s massive!” wasn’t the finest display of his grasp on the English language, but it was a firm indication of the enormity of this touring collaboration.

So how enormous are we talking here?

Both Pallbearer and Conan, who are sonically at different ends of the doom spectrum, have produced, over the last two decades, some of the more adventurous and well crafted albums of the genre. Also these guys are geographically separated by a lot of water and have to cross a lot more of it to come see us. Pallbearer come from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA while Conan hail from Liverpool, England. Not exactly neighbours, and Australia isn’t exactly down the road. Add in the fact that it’s been 8 years since either of these groups has graced our shores and this is a rare treat indeed.

So when the opportunity came up for Wall Of Sound to have a brief pre-tour interview with Joseph D Rowland, bass player and founding member of Pallbearer, it was only fair that I asked the doom lord himself Paulie Surridge to sit in on the chat.

‍Paulie: We’re talking to you from the future. It's Wednesday morning, right?‍

‍Joseph D Rowland (JDR): Ha, Yeah.‍

‍Duane: We wanted to talk to you about this upcoming tour that you guys have got, Pallbearer with Conan. We haven't seen you guys for eight years and then you're bringing Conan with you on this tour to Australia. How did that come about? How did the two of you get together and make this one big tour?

‍JDR: So we’ve been talking about doing some shows with them for forever. A few years back we did a tour in Europe where Conan's tour manager ended up jumping on the tour to do merch for us and tour manage. We had a crew mishap where one of our crew members needed to go home because of an emergency and she jumped on at the last minute and we got to be really good friends with her. She was kind of putting a bug in our ear about doing some shows with Conan at some point, which we had passively talked about but had never been in touch with them about or anything. They're obviously a crushingly awesome band.

So a few different ideas have gotten thrown around and then our paths kind of converged on this to be able to do some shows together in a really special scenario for both of us. I think obviously since it's been a long time since we've made it over to Australia, it's going to be very cool.

‍Duane: Yeah, well it sounded to me like something ,like you were all sitting around at a pub, threw a few beers under the bus and go, we should go to Australia together.

‍JDR: It wasn't necessarily a discussion that we had with them. I think that they were already lining up a tour. They have some dates in New Zealand and in Southeast Asia I think. So it just kind of worked out schedule wise that it made sense to make the tour happen when we were both looking to be over there at the same time. Instead of them being in Australia five days ahead of us or something. Just make it work together and make it even hopefully bigger and better event for everybody.

‍Paulie: I think it'll definitely be bigger and better with two incredible bands playing. Just exciting.

‍Duane: We were sort of wondering how a mob from Liverpool and a mob from Little Rock got together.

‍JDR: Yeah, we've crossed paths with them here and there at festivals and I used to live in New York City for a long time and I saw them play in Brooklyn multiple times when they played at St. Vitus Bar and stuff like that.

‍Paulie: We were talking about the new album. Well, the latest album Mind Burns Alive. One of my favourite albums of last year. I found it quite dark but still very cohesive. What's the writing process of albums like? Is it organic? Do you go in with an idea? Do you go in with just a riff or do you have everything written and go, 'okay, this is what we are doing'. It sounds so complex and there's instruments on there that you wouldn't expect from a typical Doom album, like saxophone and stuff like that. Even the textures, it's not like a slow, down tune, repetitive riff. I can feel the emotion in a lot of the songs. Is that what you set out to do? Or do you just get into a room and turn your amps on and then start jamming and go, well that sounds pretty good. That's a good song.

‍JDR: No, we're not a very jamming oriented band really. Pretty much every record that we've done throughout the years, it all sort of starts with a set of songs that I write and then a set of songs that Brett writes. He's the lead singer and guitarist in the band. So he and I kind of split the duties 50/50 on the writing. Typically things will start with, he and I separately, we’ll have, maybe it could be anywhere from some rudimentary skeletal ideas of the songs or complete pieces. But usually we'll have a couple of those done. A piece or at least mostly done and then we'll kind of bring them to the full band and let everybody bring their specialty to the mix and we'll kind of sculpt and adjust the songs from there. I’m a fraction of as good of a lead guitarist as Brett and Devon are. I can let them know the ideas, the directions I might have for the guitar solos and stuff, but I don't have the capability to execute the technical stuff that they might.

‍Then Brett will bring ideas and I'll be like, okay, I know exactly how I want to shift the bass line around to make it work with the vocal and maybe bring some counterpoint into the mix and stuff like that. So anyway, there's that component of it. Then in terms of the conceptual aspect, typically kind of in the same vein, once we are feeling out, are these sets of songs kind of more emotionally raw or is it going to be introspective or very bludgeoning or whatever. We’ll sort of start to have an idea of what the lyrical concept and the thematic elements of the albums will be. Usually Brett and I have found ourselves to have already sort of been pointed in the same trajectory on that stuff, even without having had a discussion ahead of time about it. So that’s a component of our long running chemistry as a band. We've been a band for, I think this year will be 17 years. Brett and I were in a band prior to Pallbearer for several years. So he and I have been playing music together for, I think this year will be 20 years.

**Pallbearer** last in Australia in 2017. Photo: **Den Rad**

‍Paulie: Wow. You guys are friends outside of the band. Do you hang out when you're not making music.

‍JDR: Oh yeah. Essentially now that I moved back to Arkansas, as I had mentioned earlier, I lived in New York for a decade, now that everybody is back in the Little Rock area again and we hang out all the time.

I think that may result in the next record might have a more jam-centric component or something too. We have the capability to write in a different capacity than we have in a long time if we want to.

‍Duane: Do you have any idea when that next album will be? We only just got your new one last year.

‍JDR: Don’t think it'll be anytime soon, but I'll never say never. We've been hitting it hard on the touring front lately and haven't really had time to fully devote towards building towards the next release. But we've definitely been talking about things, so who knows? It could happen fast.

‍Paulie: Your live set, will it be a mix of everything? Will we get some earlier stuff from Foundations or will it be just newer stuff or you haven't even worked that out yet? Do you work it out on the night? What do you feel like?

‍JDR: We’ve been wood shedding the possibilities for the live set at our rehearsal space for the past month. I think for the Australian dates it's going to be more of a career spanning mixture. Maybe leaning slightly into the material from the new record.

But I think because, especially because we haven't been to Australia in eight years, as you mentioned, we feel like we owe it to everybody there.

We've had a long standing great fan base in Australia, so we don't want to show up for the first time in almost a decade and then only play new songs. People deserve to see. I think we have a whole record that we put out before Mind Burns Alive that no one has gotten to see any material from. And obviously Foundation's of Burden, Heartless.

‍Duane: We haven't experienced Forgotten Days either...

‍JDR: Right. Yeah.

‍Duane: Is there a reason you returned to Arkansas? Is it just a matter of wanting to be back home? We've read about Little Rock.

‍Paulie: We’re fascinated with Little Rock.

‍JDR: Little Rock is a great place. It's definitely a big change from New York City. One of the main factors was after COVID-19, the rent prices and just overall expense of living in New York doubled basically and I didn't feel like it was sustainable for me to stay there any longer. As a by product of that, I was working more and more, having less time to focus on the band, just to kind of get by up there. So I decided that maybe I'd make things easier, hopefully for everyone and come back to Arkansas. I ended up buying a really nice house here that I've been building a studio in and we recorded part of Mind Burns Alive in the early stages of that studio. Yeah, it's really, I think been beneficial on a lot of fronts for us.

‍Duane: We often, because on top of being a tattoo studio, we're also sell records. We have a scenario where the world's about to blow up, you’re only allowed to take one Black Sabbath album with you. Which Black Sabbath album would you take and why?

‍JDR: Mob Rules

‍Paulie and Duane: Hahaha Yes!

‍JDR: I don't know. That's my favourite Black Sabbath album. I think it has some of the coolest and darkest songs on it. I love the Dio era stuff.

‍I love the classic Ozzy Sabbath stuff, but the Dio stuff I feel like, I think I really connected with that at a really pivotal time in my life and it also just sounds really killer. I feel like the recording, particularly on that record, is something that I've always kind of aspired to with some of the drum and bass tones and stuff on it. It's just a really, really cool record. So that would be the one that I would take.

‍Paulie: Very cool.

‍Duane: We are itching to see you guys. You've got both Celestial Oath and Potion supporting you here in Sydney, and they’re both killers. So between those two and then Conan and of course Pallbearer, we're not missing it for anything.

‍JDR: Hell Yeah.

‍Duane: Plus it's going to be Paulie's birthday, so we're going to make a night of it.

‍JDR: Oh ho. Alright!

‍Paulie: We’ve got a lot of gigs on in March, but it’s definitely the highlight for a lot of us.

‍Duane: Joseph, it's been unreal talking to you man.

‍JDR: Great to talk to you guys.

Interview by Duane James and Paulie Surridge of Higher Ground Tattoos and Records @higherground_kurrajong

Catch Pallbearer and CONAN across Australia from this week - last tickets here