Interview With Jarad Dawkins Of Teenage Metal Band Unlocking The Truth

By Andrew Bansal

Hailing from Brooklyn NY, Unlocking The Truth is a three-piece teenage metal band that has gained praise and acclaim in their already seven-year long career. Playing at the Coachella Valley Music Festival, sharing the stage with Motörhead and Graveyard to put on an impressive performance at a sold-out Club Nokia in Los Angeles, opening for Guns ‘N Roses in two of their Las Vegas residency shows, touring with Queens Of The Stone Age, and partaking in Heavy Montreal are their achievements from the year 2014 alone, and besides, they’ve made numerous high-profile public appearances over the years. The band is now slated to go on a short run of tour dates with Living Colour. I recently spoke to drummer Jarad Dawkins about all things Unlocking The Truth. Check out the conversation below.

Jarad, it’s a pleasure having you on Metal Assault for an interview. First of all, for people not familiar with your band, can you tell me how long you have been playing drums and how did Unlocking The Truth form?

The band formed in 2007 when me and Malcolm were hanging out, watching wrestling and the Japanese animated show Naruto. The music and the background inspired us to form a band and to create music. Individually, Malcolm has been playing for eight years now, and I’ve been playing for ten years.

But aside from getting inspired by these Japanese animations, when you started playing drums, which drummers did you look up to or try to emulate?

The drummers that I looked up to during those days were Mike Wengren from Disturbed and Rob Bourdon from Linkin Park. But of course my musical tastes have changed now and today I look up to Steve Jordan, Vinnie Colaiuta, Dennis Chambers and guys like that.

Very cool. So, this year you guys have doing a lot of shows. You did the Coachella Valley Music Festival this year as well. What was that experience like for you?

The Coachella experience was great to have, just because we were the youngest band ever to play Coachella in its overall history, and it was good exposure for us to have. It was the biggest crowd we’d played in front of, basically.

Right, and around your Coachella date you did some other shows too, playing with Motörhead at Club Nokia here in LA. I saw you guys at that show. That must be special to get to do that with a band like Motörhead at such an early age. Did you get to meet Lemmy or any of the other band members during the evening?

It really was. We did get to meet Lemmy. We met him before we went on stage. He actually gave us some great advice which was, “Never let go of what you’re doing, stay strong and just keep on doing it because it’s going to turn out good.” That spoke to me in so many ways because there was one day when I almost just wanted to quit this. But once he told me that, there was no stopping and no going back. We’re just going to keep at it.

Unlocking The Truth (Jarad is the leftmost)

That’s definitely great advice from the great man. But what made you think of quitting in the first place?

It was getting very stressful. Even though once you get out into the music business and things like that, you have a lot of people that contact you for interviews and things like that, but it was just getting a little bit stressful. So I just wanted to stop everything for a while, but what Lemmy told me was the turning point and now there’s no stopping us.

Awesome, and I believe all three of you guys are going to school as well? So, how does that work? Are you able to take care of both your studies and music at the same time?

Yes, the main thing is you have to be focused on what you’re doing. When you get home, you do your homework and after that you have you individual practice and then go to bed, and on Fridays we meet up with each other to have band practice, things like that.

Related: Review + Photos: Motörhead, Graveyard & Unlocking The Truth Perform At Club Nokia

Unlocking The Truth links: website | facebook | twitter | instagram

Upcoming tour dates:
08/23 – Brooklyn NY – Afropunk Festival *
09/13 – Los Angeles CA – The Troubadour *
09/14 – Sacramento CA – Aftershock Festival *
09/18 – Toronto ON – The Opera House *
09/19 – Ferndale MI – Magic Bag *
09/20 – Chicago IL – Park West *
09/24 – New York NY – The Studio @ Webster Hall
09/26 – Philadelphia PA – The First Unitarian Church
* = w/ Living Colour

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