With The Dillinger Escape Plan having toured all over the place for the last couple years celebrating Calculating Infinity with original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis, some fans have continued to ask the obvious question: what about Greg Puciato? The question on everyone’s mind really should be, “would Greg Puciato ever come back to TDEP?”
Well, we now have a bit of an answer from the man himself, as Puciato addressed the question while speaking with Lochlan Watt on Music Is My Life (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). And what we got was a lengthy, albeit in-depth, look into his thought process about the end of Dillinger and his relationship with the band he fronted from 2001 to 2017.
“It’s hard [not to] because it’s in your face all the time. It’s in my face all the time. It’s impossible [not to think about it]. Every single show, there’s people with the shirts, every single show there’s people outside that [have] a record [for me] to sign. They’ve got Ire Works, they’ve got One Of Us Is The Killer, or they’re asking me about it. But I’m proud of it. I’m not, like, ‘Fuck, that’s not me anymore. No one talk to me about that.’ I’m proud of it. It made both of our, and everyone involved, lives possible to a degree. Everything that anyone who is majorly important in that band has done since stemmed from our involvement with each other. So I look at it positively. There’s not a single ounce of me that has any negativity towards it.
“And, yeah, I would say that every day of my life, I’m aware of it, but I’m not thinking about it, if that makes sense. Because you can’t — you need to let yourself be who you are right now. I think the only way to do that is to keep looking forward. You can be aware of what happened behind you, but you don’t wanna like turn around and look at it. Just kind of be aware of it. It’s no different to me than high school or middle school or elementary school. You know that you went through it, it’s a huge part of your development, you’re proud of everything that happened during that time, or an ex or something like that, but you gotta keep going that way.”
We get older, we change and that’s ultimately for the best. Read ya loud and clear, man. But what about his thoughts about Minakakis’ return to the band? Surely he’s got some thoughts about that.
“Calculating Infinity is massively important. I bought it the day it came out. I was a fan of that band… But, yeah, Dimitri was perfect on that record. That record’s got a vibe that, unlike all of our other records, it’s a very isolated vibe, whereas after that, we started becoming a different band, where we had pretty much a lot of different possibilities vocally and creatively. But I think that that record is so pointed — it’s such a pointed vibe — and for me it’s still cool.
“It’s so funny ’cause people expect me to have some negative [opinion of what they are doing], like, ‘Fuck that.’ But I wasn’t on that record. What would be goofy is if I was included in that. I don’t have anything to do with that record. Why would I go out and play that record? If they’re doing like a playthrough of that record, I don’t need to be there just for the fuck of it. If they went out and did a Miss Machine playthrough, or a One Of Us Is The Killer playthrough… I mean, they, obviously that’s not gonna happen, but…”
Puciato fronted the band for 16 years, with his final album being the 2016 album Dissociation. That album ended up getting a year long tour, with the band playing three final shows at New York City’s Terminal 5. As for whether he’d ever join the band to celebrate one of the albums he was on, Puciato sounded less sure that it would be a thing at all.
“There’s something about doing that, to me, that you really gotta put a cap on it if you were to do it. I feel like it would be a concession in a way to like be, like, ‘Oh, I’m no longer…’ That’s what I used to think. I would be, like, ‘Oh, I, I need to be creatively valid now.’ It doesn’t really interest me, ’cause it takes a lot of your time to do that. And I have a lot of gas for doing new things. I wanna write new music. I wanna write new songs, do new things, collaborate with new people. I’m excited about music, I’m excited about art, and I’m excited about singing. You already have to drag around something you already did when you go on tour. We already were playing songs from 15 years ago when the band was still going. We were playing Panasonic Youth every night, and it started to become, like, ‘Fucking hell, man. How many times…?’ … So you gotta step away. So when the band ended, I would’ve told you no way. There’s no fucking way. It’s gonna take too much of my time. I came outta that band just feeling like I was shot out of a rocket and like I had so much fuel for doing new shit. There was no question. I wasn’t, like, ‘What am I gonna do now?’ I was filled with fuel.
“Now — would I do it? I wouldn’t do a Miss Machine playthrough, ’cause I think that’s a little weird. There’s no real need. They’re doing a one album playthrough, because that’s the only album really that there is [with Dimitri], besides the EPs and stuff. It would have to encapsulate everything from Miss Machine to Dissociation, and it would have to have a cap on it. Because the more you start doing that — it’s easy money too, and then you’re, like, you start feeling, like, you’re getting this money, but your life is passing. I’m 46 almost, and it’s, like, what am I gonna do? Do it for a couple years, then suddenly you’re 48. You can’t let it take up too much of your time. You gotta just keep doing new things. And then you get hooked… There is something about it where you have to feel good about the fact that you got enough new things going that that’s not your whole identity anymore, and you could still go back to it without it sucking up all your time.”