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Articles : “We’ve got a ton of new material” – An interview with Joe Buras (Born of Osiris)

By on June 19, 2019

Sometimes when a band has been on a break from recording and touring for a while, a new tour can be a reunion of bandmates of sorts. Such is the case with American progressive heavy act Born of Osiris. The band is about to hit our shores for a tour with fellow American heavy hitters Chelsea Grin, and especially since the band members are scattered literally to the four winds across America these days, keysman Joe Buras is looking forward to catching up with the other members as much as he is to touring Australia.

“I’m excited to see my bandmates,” Buras states, “we used to all live in Chicago together, but now we’re separated between Chicago, Texas, California and Arizona, so I’m excited to see the boys. We’ve been off tour for three months, and that’s a pretty long break for our band.

“It’s crazy because we’re all flying into Australia from those places, so we’re just going to meet up and hopefully get a really long soundcheck to get everything working. We’re playing the same set as from our US tour in February and March.”

With more than ten years and five full-length records behind them now, that setlist promises to be a crowd-pleasing and career-spanning one for their Aussie fans. “Most tours we play a lot of the first album, The New Reign,” he recalls, “and so we’ll be playing a lot of that as usual, and playing something from every record besides that, and then obviously The Simulation, the new one.”

This will be the band’s third time Down Under, and not only are they coming with Chelsea Grin, their longtime friends and a band that they have shared stages with many times over the years, Buras feels the first couple of times they were things were not managed as well as they possibly could have been. This time it is feeling far more complete and together.

“We just got off tour with Chelsea earlier this year,” he says, “so it’ll be nice to come to Australia with them. We’re psyched because the first two times we came, we felt that the company we came with wasn’t the most legit. Not that it wasn’t fun, but this time it just feels a little more well put together as far as the scheduling, the itinerary, the tour manager, it just feels a little more legit this time.”

The seeds of this Aussie tour were apparently sewn on that US tour earlier in the year. “We were on tour with them and the idea got brought up,” he remembers, “we weren’t sure, and we went back and forth, so then we talked to them and they said they really wanted to do it, and we said ‘okay, let’s do it!’ That tour across the States was going really well so we thought ‘why not!’ Overall, it just made a lot of sense.”

Well over a decade into the band’s career, Buras is a little caught between feeling the years and the mileage, whilst still getting a kick out of hanging with the younger bands they tour with and recalling the days when Born of Osiris were just starting out. “Sometimes I feel it!” He laughs, “it’s interesting, sometimes we tour with some smaller, younger bands and they’re doing their second or third tour ever. You look at them and you can see some of yourself. I remember our second tour ever, it was with Misery Signals, and I was like ‘oh my gosh!’, I was freaking out, I was nervous and really excited and it’s just this whole moment.

“to be at the other end of it, and talk to younger people that get to tour when we headline, it makes me feel established, but It also gets back to that kind of feeling as well.”

Despite the heavily dispersed geography of the band members in 2019, and despite only recently having released a new record, Born of Osiris are a band that likes to remain constantly creative, always exchanging ideas with each other via email and phone, and fans won’t have too long to wait before album number six hits the stores, the airwaves and the interwebs.

“We’ve got a ton of new material now that we’re working on,” Buras reveals, “so we’re just trying to figure out the best time to hit the studio again. We’re going to do Australia obviously and then the US again straight after that. Then I think we’re going to do Europe in the Fall. I think we’re going to try to hit the studio between the US and Europe, or maybe we’ll possibly wait until after Europe and do some recording in the winter.

“We haven’t decided yet, but it’s not too far away.”

About

Rod Whitfield is a Melbourne-based writer and retired musician who has been writing about music since 1995. He has worked for Team Rock, Beat Magazine, themusic.com.au, Heavy Mag, Mixdown, The Metal Forge, Metal Obsession and many others. He has written and published his memoirs of his life and times in the music biz, and also writes books, screenplays, short stories, blogs and more.