Any musician will tell you that a good rehearsal space is hard to find. Even if you do come across an affordable, spacious, and well-ventilated room (trust us, that last one’s important), there’s always a chance that the bossa nova sextet practicing down the hall won’t be fans of your brutal tech-death. Now, metalcore legends Trivium have found a smart way to bypass this issue: simply buy an airplane hangar and make it your base of operations!
Recently speaking to Rock Sound, Trivium frontman Matt Heafy revealed that the band have purchased a decommissioned airplane hangar, and plan to use it for writing, recording, rehearsing and livestreaming.
“Most bands, I think, are in the kind of position that we are that you rehearse somewhere that you don’t love,” explains Matt. “It’s kind of crappy; you’re paying rent to someone else. Just thinking to ourselves, we don’t wanna be paying rent — we wanna be investing in ourselves and our future, and we’ve always wanted a headquarters where we could do everything. And we’ve talked about the idea of a place where we can rehearse and also store but eventually make records in. And then when we started seeing how much we love livestreaming, it’s a place that we can stream every single thing from — we can stream our tour rehearsals or do special little sets there that are still free on our channels.
“The hangar we’re getting is huge. And the first step, we’ll build in and enclose in a section of it where we’re able to rehearse in there, and it’s an all-in-one spot. And then we’ll gradually build downwards, build a recording studio below that, and then we’ll build outwards. And I imagine it would take three to five years of building that most outwards section of the hangar where the airplane would fit…So we’d eventually have it fully equipped.”
While this might seem like one hell of an expense, Matt makes it clear that his is not a band that throws around money for no reason.
“We’re very, very smart with our money,” says Matt. “We’re not a loaded band by any means. I am not living in a mansion. We have just what we need. We love just having what we need. And the same idea was for the practice thing. So we were, like, ‘Let’s find something that is exactly what we need — exact size, exact shape, somewhere where we can do exactly what we wanna do.’ And so she kind of led me to this one agent where I found a bunch of places, and I talked about the idea of an airplane hangar, ’cause I saw one hangar at a different airport.
“I mentioned it to my mother-in-law just in passing, and she was, like, ‘You know who owns one of those?’ [My wife] Ashley’s uncle. So I contacted Ashley’s uncle and his son, and I’ve been dealing with his son now. They happen to own multiple of these extra hangars. So it’s buying from my family, which is even better. So we’re setting it up with one of our family members, and the process is kind of going through. We’re very close now. It’s not complete. It’s not the size of a commercial plane…it’s not the Iron Maiden-size hangar like that; it’s more modest than that. But it’s good that we’re able to keep it all in the family; we’re actually able to support our family, so Trivium can buy from them. They’re acting as the agents, and we can work from there.”
You can listen to the full interview here:
Whether or not Trivium’s hangar is the focus of mili-tary in-telligence, and whether possibly they’ve seen too much, remains to be seen. In the meantime, get ready to see some hangar-filmed Trivium concerts in the near future.
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Words by Chris Krovatin
