This is just a backup of the original interview. You should check the original one here.

Interview

By Matt Peiken @ Wilson County News
With Vinnie

Few musicians get two cracks at being the next big thing. But after watching the premature crash and burn of his first band, an indie rock darling called the Movielife, singer Vinnie Caruana went back to construction work in Long Island, NY, and plotted his next musical move. He wrote his own songs for the first time, then went about recruiting several friends to round out his new band and help bring his songs to life. The result is I Am the Avalanche, whose self-titled debut platter of upbeat, dark-themed, guitar-drenched songs bear only marginal musical resemblance to the tunes Caruana sang in the Movielife.
There's so many bands out there and the scene has become such a blob of media and MySpace that it's hard to get recognized just for what you are.

I Am the Avalanche is touring with Halifax and Punchline into Christmas week. The band has tours booked after the new year with MxPx, No Use for a Name and Suicide Machines.
People see I was in Movielife and it's like 'Let's give him 20 seconds to see if it's as good,' or if they like it at all, and I don't fight it. We just get in our van, get on stage and try to blow everyone away.

Caruana has certainly armed himself with explosive material. His new songs are kinetic confessionals of torn loves, self-inflicted wounds and an underlying, naïve hope things will get better. Though the songs largely paint pictures of love gone wrong, Caruana's lyrics could easily be metaphors for his musical life. He was 18 when he and four friends formed the Movielife, jumping into a wave of young, hard-edged, hardcore, screamo bands that caught national attention and defined the Warped Tour sound. The Movielife released four albums before imploding in 2003.
Movielife just started off with poor communication and it never got better. Then when (your popularity) shoots up and you have a thousand kids to see you play, it masks problems, and we were never talked about. That's why there were so many member changes, and we never really learned to address it.

Fresh on the heels of a broken band and a broken lovelife, Carruana moved to San Francisco at the invitation of Daryl Palumbo of Glassjaw to work on Palumbo's new project, Head Automatica. Carruana also began writing his own songs - in the Movielife, Carruana wrote the lyrics and left the musical element largely to his bandmates. When friends raved about his fledgling songs for friends, Carruana moved back to New York to form a new band around them. Carruana credits previous band experience and the natural maturing for putting I Am the Avalanche on an emotional and psychological foundation he says he never saw with the Movielife.
In essence, I didn't go to college, and I grew up on tour and learned all my life lessons on the road. Movielife was a great experience, but we had such an identity crisis. When Avalanche gets off the stage, we're all hugging each other and kissing each other on the neck and asking ourselves what more we can do to get the music to even more people. We've all paid our dues in other bands, but this is a new band and we deserve to be sleeping on floors and paying our dues all over again.

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