Patrick Miranda - Movements 'Setting Our Sights As High As Possible'

After a long 3 year wait, Movements have finally gifted us with their second album No Good Left To Give. I grabbed vocalist Pat Miranda for a chat about the new album, fighting gargoyles, moshing on Minecraft and much more.

Congrats on your upcoming second album! How are you feeling about its release?

Thank you so much! We’re so excited, it’s been so long since we’ve put out any sort of new music, everyone has been so antsy for it to come out. Not even just us, but our fans and our family members. We’re so stoked to have something to finally put out into the world.

I understand one of your tour photographers Anthony Purcella also created the collage for the new album cover. What was the vision behind this?

Anthony shot the photos for the collage, but the collage itself was something I put together. I printed out all of Anthony’s photos and was like, how can I make them completely different to what they are right now. I’m really into collage right now, I think there’s something so cool about being able to take multiple images and multiple pieces, ripping it all up and putting them together to create something new. To me you can create such a different mood with multiple images than you can with just a single image. The idea through much of the record is weaving your way through whether it be relationships, or gender identity, or sexual identity. I wanted to find a way to visually represent that. The idea of taking these faces and shooting them in a way that kind of distorts them, so when you look at it, you don’t necessarily see two different people, you don’t see male or female. You see one face, you see one person of being. And it’s not until you start to dissect who’s who and what’s what, that you start to understand how they fit together. It’s very much a general overview of multiple themes that are displayed on the record.

I’ve been lucky enough to hear the new album and one of my favourites is ‘In My Blood’. Do you have a favourite track from the album?

 Awesome! I think my favourite is the one that just came out, ‘Skin To Skin’. I think that it’s such a dancey, fun vibe and it’s very different to what we’ve put out in the past. I have a huge affection towards oldies music, or at least my idea of oldies music. The intro especially gives me the same feeling of the intro of ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’ by Tears for Fears. It’s such a good feeling song and it makes me so happy. When I heard the riff Ira, our guitar player made for ‘Skin To Skin’, I immediately was like, this reminds me of Tears For Fears, we HAVE to write this song. It’s just super energetic and I am so excited to play it live.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56AEljO0dsk

I can’t wait to see it live one day! The track ‘12 Weeks’ has some lyrics that really resonated with me, I’d love to know the meaning behind it?

 Although ‘12 Weeks’ is about a pretty specific topic, in many ways it’s kind of general and I intentionally kept it that way so it could be open for interpretation. The idea for me is this doubt in your mind that comes from always be the one person to fall out of love and hurt another person in a relationship, because you can’t seem to stay connected to them for periods of time. The idea that if they had never met you, or you had died long before any of that happened, their life would be significantly better. That idea that you’re just a burden and that nothing you do is positive. Which sounds extremely morbid and fucked up, but dealing with depression and anxiety those are prominent themes of what goes in my mind. It also ties into the theme of No Good Left To Give, feeling like you’re always the person to end up with nothing left to give in a relationship and feeling like they would be so much better if you were just dead.

It’s been 3 years since your last album. Did you spend a large chunk of that time writing and recording the new album or did it come together quite quickly?

It came together pretty fast. Especially in comparison to Feel Something which we wrote over the course of like a year and a half, where as No Good Left To Give we wrote it about 8 months or so. And that’s just because over the last 3 years we have been so busy, we toured pretty much non stop and have just been go go go go so often that it was hard to find time to write. We would try and write on tour and it was hard to focus, just all the different factors with trying to write on a bus or a van on the road while you have to think about a million other things at the same time. We decided to intentionally take time off at the end of 2019, we only toured once in 2019 then went straight onto writing and recording in September 2019. We wanted to hit the ground running in 2020, put out the album early in the year and then tour for the rest. Then the pandemic hit and all the plans went out the window. It’s been a learning experience, you just never know what could happen.

Due to COVID-19, you had to come up with a cartoon plan B for the video clip of Don’t Give Up Your Ghost which turned out amazing! I understand this is something entirely new for the band, how did you find the overall process and are you happy with the outcome?

That was something that was definitely a ‘COVID choice’. We probably would have never done an anime type video had it not been for the pandemic and the fact that we could just not get together. I think it turned out much better than any video we could have done ourselves. It’s just such a different vibe, there’s so much more flexibility when it comes to being in an animated video in comparison to an actual video. We never would have been able to have a video where we literally fought gargoyles! There’s so much freedom and a fun element to having an animated video. The two animators, Ben Kadie and Eric Bradford worked with us from the background city design, to what car we were driving, to where our tattoos were placed on our arms, to our movements when playing our instruments. It was so intricate and detailed that it really did feel like we were apart of the video, not just watching ourselves being put into it. We had a great time with it.

I mean, it definitely doesn’t get much cooler than fighting gargoyles right?!

Totally!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNyC0GmHpWY

You’ve toured with such a broad range of artists, from Good Charlotte to Boston Manor. Is there anyone you’d love to share the stage with in the future?

Absolutely! Our goal is to continue to grow as much as possible and get on bigger tours as much as we can. My number 1 artist that I would really love to tour with is Bring Me The Horizon. I think it would be such a fun tour, especially if we got to do it in the UK where they are so big. I’m also open to the idea of switching things up and going for more of mainstream rock tour, like I would love to tour with Fall Out Boy or Twenty One Pilots. We want to set our sights as high as possible, at this point we’ve already accomplished so much so we want to see how much more we can do.

You guys played at the Block by Blockwest fest in May, was that your first virtual concert and how did you find it?

 Yeah it was our first virtual concert. It’s funny, originally we weren’t even going to be on the line up. They had approached us to do it pretty early on when the pandemic first hit and at the time, we were like we’re not going to be able to get together to record a set for it, not realising we could use a pre recorded set from a show we had already played. After they announced the line up, their servers crashed the day of and they had to postpone the entire thing. So we asked about using a pre recorded show, and they were like yeah! We basically took a show that we had played in New York city and I had a buddy of mine who’s an audio engineer overdub every time I said ‘New York city’, I would intentionally (poorly) overdub myself saying, ‘Minecraft’. At one point (which actually became a meme), when I said ‘I want to see you jump’, I would overdub to ‘I want to see you SPACEBAR’, because in Minecraft jump is spacebar. *Laughs* it was just super fun and silly.

You guys have previously streamed on Twitch playing Warzone, have video games been a big form of entertainment during COVID-19? Who has been getting the most wins?

 Oh yes! I was never really a huge gamer, but our drummer has always been super into gaming and he slowly transitioned our bass player, then our guitar player and they all bought gaming laptops on tour. I was always like, ‘I don’t need that, I’m not going to spend money on that.’ But then the pandemic hit and I had nothing to do all day, so I started playing video games and sure enough I ended up buying a gaming computer. It’s also been a great way to connect with our fans. I am really bad at video games in general because I am not very coordinated so I very rarely win Warzone, but Ira is extremely good. It’s definitely been a good way to pass the time.

Are there any plans to come back to Australia to tour the new album when international travel is allowed?

 As soon as we are able to come back we will. We were supposed to come back this year but obviously things got messed up, so as soon as we’re able to come back we will!

Hopefully that won’t be too far away now! Thanks so much for speaking with me Pat and all the best with the album release!

Movements' new album, No Good Left to Give is out this Friday through Fearless Records. Pre-order here
Interview by Rhiannon Porter (@rrhiannonporter)

Movements – No Good Left to Give tracklisting:

1. In My Blood
2. Skin To Skin
3. Don’t Give Up Your Ghost
4. Tunnel Vision
5. Garden Eyes
6. 12 Weeks
7. Living Apology
8. Santiago Peak
9. Seneca
10. Moonlight Lines
11. No Good Left To Give
12. Love Took The Last Of It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrrKQpdSi0g