Cool interview by The Gauntlet.

Interviewed: Jared

Interviewer: Jason Fisher

Date: 2009-06-04

Enjoy:

The Gauntlet: Tonight’s the first night of the tour? How is Colorado working out for you?

Jared: It is great. It is great to be out here. Denver has a massive underground network. There is this massive underground family in Colorado.

The Gauntlet: Always good to start out a tour where you are loved.

Jared: Oh yeah, we got love. Even when the numbers aren’t huge, it is still love, right? As artists, we tell ourselves numbers don’t matter. Sometimes it is hard to get on stage when there aren’t many bodies on the floor, but that is when you see what you are made of.

The Gauntlet: So you guys mostly have west coast tour dates right?

Jared: Yeah, I am not sure of the routing but I think that is what I saw. This has been a great year for us, just a lot of constant love.

The Gauntlet: You are very positive in your mindset right now. I am sort of shocked having listened to the latest Hed pe album New World Orphans.

Jared: I hope it is not a bleak message; I don’t want to invalidate your opinion though. The album is there to point out some much needed knowledge. We are going to win. We will win against these dark forces. With the next album, we will concentrate on the solutions. That type of comment has been bothering me lately. When you are a student of this esoteric wisdom, you have to move through that shadow. There is a lot of information that is daunting. Once you have the information, you can move on to the solutions.

The Gauntlet: In all fairness, the album was written and recorded in a different era.

Jared: You are right, the album was done in June of 2008. My perspective is so different now, so different. At that time, I was just like we need to drop a bomb on Washington as it was hopeless. I came to the realization that is what they want you to think. They don’t want you to have any hope. The fact that Obama even got elected just flies in the face of everything as far as I’m concerned. The fact that millions now have love and hope in their hearts; that just goes beyond Obama. That is more than he can even accomplish in office. There was a time I was saying some pretty disgusting things about Obama from the stage. It isn’t like here comes another black guy that loves Obama. Then there were some things that caught my attention. I feel like I was a part of a mass movement of love.

The Gauntlet: I’d like to see a little less talk and see some action.

Jared: He is one guy that came into a very corrupt and cancerous system. People shouldn’t expect so much from him. He was the best of the choices. If McCain and Palin won, we’d be involved in even more wars. I believe in the power of thought. Every thought effects reality. He got millions of people thinking good thoughts, hopeful thoughts, loving thoughts. All of that goes out into the ethers and effects reality.

The Gauntlet: For me, the jury is out on him. I don’t like the fact that he went to last year’s Bildenberg meeting. That shows me he is one of them, looking out for his own power and wealth.

Jared: You gotta realize this. The same way the dark forces have infiltrated all the good organizations, we need to infiltrate them. People need to think with a little more complexity. If all these organizations are dark, we need to infiltrate them?

The Gauntlet: How can one be sure that was Obama’s intentions are good?

Jared: How can we be sure about anything? We need to understand this spy vs. spy thing. It is a back and forth infiltration. I am just done with all the bullshit. I am at the center of my being and I want to keep hope alive. We can take the power back; we have the power to do that.

The Gauntlet: It seems like we have almost made a 180 from where we were a few months ago.

Jared: That statement in itself says it all. You have to keep all those feelings. They want us to be caught up in survival mode. We have to be careful where we place our thoughts. If you are only thinking of bad shit, that empowers the bad shit.

The Gauntlet: Hed pe has always added a taste of social issues to its’ songs.

Jared: Early Hed pe, I was heavily on drugs. The albums were a lot about smoking weed and fucking bitches mixed with a bit of social commentary. It was a progression from 9/11. It woke up a lot of us. Maybe we should thank the people who did it because millions of people had to wake up to what the planetary situation was. 9/11 was the catalyst.

The Gauntlet: It changed everyone’s life whether you were affected by it directly or not.

Jared: At first I was like ‘go get em’. Then I was like there seems like a conspiracy that went on.

The Gauntlet: A lot of people looking back see that there was something else to what we were told, when did it click for you?

Jared: I think about a year after it happened. I saw the project for the new American century website that we needed to rally the troops before sending them to the Middle East. That blew me away. Then obviously no plane went into the pentagon. Someone handed me a DVD, I think it was called In Plain Site. Steel towers don’t fall from jet fuel and fall into their own footprints. These scientific conclusions came into my brain. There were a lot of people pointing me into the right direction.

The Gauntlet: That was 2002, it is now 2009. Why wasn’t there this Hed pe revolution earlier?

Jared: You can hear in the first album on Suburban Noise Records Back 2 Base X things started going that way. With this last album, New World Orphans the focus became really sharp.

The Gauntlet: It sounds like the shit just hit the fan on the new album. You are angry on the album.

Jared: Sure, that is just rage. That is probably the point where I was at. I never wanted to convey a message of giving up, but it was defiantly 2 minutes to midnight. People needed to wake the fuck up. They needed to be provided with certain bits of knowledge which was my intention.

The Gauntlet: Are fans embracing the message?

Jared: We are a part of that movement now; that truth movement. We have a tidal wave of support.

The Gauntlet: What you are out there preaching is labeled by the media as conspiracy theory.

Jared: They do that with everything. That is the way they turn things. The mainstream media is by and large owned by those who want to enslave us. It is in their best interest to make fun of those things that they are afraid of: whether it is UFO’s, lost history, or secret governments. You should really look into those things that they make fun of.

The Gauntlet: Will the next album be more of a solution?

Jared: I don’t want to be part of the problem. What I discovered is a lot of people who are into this type of knowledge, you have to move from that shadow of information and into the next point which is how do we bring them down. This is the love vibration. That will take all their power away. Rage on the frontlines is still rage regardless of what side it is on. It still fuels the darkness.

The Gauntlet: You wrote and recorded this album in June of last year, in November, there was a positive change for you. Is it now hard for you to sing these songs as they are no longer where you are at?

Jared: Sometimes I have to adjust my lyrics. It is not that difficult though. It is more difficult to get up and sing about a dirty sex song than to revisit a political idea.

The Gauntlet: Is it difficult to sing songs from the first two albums then?

Jared: Yes, but that is just because my musical tastes are so different. We also haven’t had those guitar players in the band for 10 years. I’m not even into some of that trippy stuff anymore. I am more into that hardcore punk vibe now. I am more into the style of our new guitar player. I thought of taking some of those old songs and making them more his style. I won’t do it though. If you come to our shows now, it isn’t a bunch of fans from the 90’s, it is a bunch of newer fans. The 90’s fans make up such a small part of our market.

The Gauntlet: I like hearing the new stuff, but love the nostalgia.

Jared: Sure, you are summing it up though. It brings back memories for you. You feel that old vibration and you are transported and I do respect that. But I have to respect my artistic integrity and where my heart is at. I feel like I am fulfilling a purpose and I have to respect my fans. We do play the old shit and I do respect my old fans. There are some songs that people want to hear, like “Swan Dive.” I am not going to play that song. I don’t like it. It speaks of a time when I was not empowered and suicidal. I am not going to revisit that vibe. It is personal.

The Gauntlet: They have the CD, they can listen to it there.

Jared: [laughs]

The Gauntlet: Are you happy with the lineup?

Jared: Oh, am I ever. Things are going great. Everything is great right now, not just with the band.

The Gauntlet: You do seem like you are in a good place.

Jared: It is not just today; it is just where I am.

The Gauntlet: You aren’t back on drugs are you? No happy pills?

Jared: No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t even smoked weed in 25 days. I have smoked weed longer than most people have been alive. It is not like I am missing out on anything. I am a stoner. When I smoke weed I over do it. I wake up and don’t stop till I go to sleep. Where does it all end? There was a voice in my head that said it was time to take a break. I don’t like the word quit. As for right now, I am not going to be smoking. I stopped smoking cold turkey, but to say I will never do it again, that is predicting the future. How many people’s predictions never come to pass? I am just living in the moment and in the moment I am not smoking. I am not going to smoke this whole tour and this is a 3 week tour.

The Gauntlet: When you come to LA, I’ll be there dangling a joint over the stage.

Jared: There is always a proverbial joint isn’t there?