Inside the Hotel of Between the Buried and Me

Between the Buried and Me opened its own hotel…sort of.

The North Carolina prog-metal masters started welcoming guests into its latest mind-bending sonic lodgings with the recent concept record, The Blue Nowhere, which was released on September 12 via InsideOutMusic.

Vocalist-keyboardist Tommy Rogers admits he always wanted to write about the inner workings of some sort of ethereal hotel, and the band’s eleventh album brought that vision to fruition.

“That was the simple idea of me starting it. The history, the architecture. The idea of all these different lives coming and going throughout history in these spaces has always been interesting to me. From there, it evolved,” Rogers shares. “It’s almost like life wrapped up in this hotel and the whole journey and experience of being human, and how we’re always looking for things to fulfill us or make us feel grounded or complete in some way.

“The Blue Nowhere for me is trying to find that peace and that place,” he continues. “It shows the chaos and ups and downs of humanity and living in this world. I just wrapped it up in this bizarro hotel where things are ever-changing and may not seem what they seem.”

Between the Buried and Me is certainly no stranger to creating such heady abstractions. In fact, Rogers, guitarist Paul Waggoner, bassist Dan Briggs and drummer Blake Richardson have made a career of crafting some of the best alternative-metal concept records of this millennium, particularly 2007’s Colors. But The Blue Nowhere doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into a box, as it’s not so much the structured narrative you’d expect from a BTBAM “concept record.” This time, it’s more of a feeling that links the ten tracks together. The fictional Blue Nowhere hotel is where all of these songs cohabitate, albeit in different rooms or on different floors.

“It’s not a story [of], ‘This happens and that happens.’ It’s a place where these songs live. Very early on, I realized that these songs feel like they’re in their own world, even though they are part of the same record,” Rogers explains.

“I think you can throw on a random song and be transported to somewhere different than you would if you would listen to another track on the record,” he adds. “I can literally have each song live in a different space throughout this story that I built. It was a fun lyrical project for sure.”

So make your reservations now to be at Summit on Friday, October 24, when the innkeepers bring The Blue Nowhere to Denver. Hail the Sun and Delta Sleep are also on the bill.

The album also showcases BTBAM at its absolute best, which isn’t surprising at this point. If you know anything about the musicians, you already know they can play essentially anything and it’s going to sound authentic to the band. The first single from The Blue Nowhere, “Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark,” offers an upbeat, jazzy, borderline yacht rock look into the album — something seemingly completely out of left field. But follow-up teaser, “Absent Thereafter,” is a ten-plus-minute rager filled with the signature heaviness and scale-scattering riffs that have become the band’s hallmark. Meanwhile, “Pyschomanteum” and “Slow Paranoia,” a pair of back-to-back epics that both clock in at over eleven minutes, are quintessential Between the Buried and Me, jumping effortlessly from mathcore to classical to prog rock to a surprising little lounge-music interlude.

“We’re really in a place where there was a lot of, for lack of a better word, magic happening in the writing process,” Rogers says. “Things were happening quickly, but they were also very adventurous. It felt new to us. It was a very inspiring session for sure.”

The Blue Nowhere was also the first BTBAM release to feature a full-blown string and horn section, and as is the norm, was written between the members remotely.

“We were all writing on our own, and especially for this record, we really wanted to start with a blank slate,” Roger says. “But it’s in you. The goal is to write good songs and good records. When we all get in the weeds, all these different sounds come out and different ideas that create these songs. There are always surprises. It’s just fun. Especially with this record, you can hear that we’re having fun.”

And it’s just as enjoyable to visit… er, listen to The Blue Nowhere.  

“The thing for us, it’s all about, even though our music is very dense and there’s a lot going on, we want things to be very organic for us,” Rogers concludes. “And you can feel the joy we have when we’re creating this fucked-up music.”

Between the Buried and Me, with Hail the Sun and Delta Sleep, 7 p.m. Friday, October 24, Summit, 1902 Blake Street. Tickets are $49-$107.