Trivium is putting some of the profits from their July 2020 livestream event A Light or a Distant Mirror toward buying a decommissioned airplane hangar. The hangar will be used as a headquarters for the band, a location for rehearsal and livestreams, and for storage of their equipment. It's also the coolest thing possible to tell someone your band owns.
Trivium vocalist and guitarist Matt Heafy explains the decision to Rock Sound (via Ballerbmouth).
"The hangar we're getting is huge," said Heafy. "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 well 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, we'd make it look like that Full Sail show. So we'd eventually have it fully equipped. And then hopefully things keep progressing, even despite whatever the fates might be throwing at us that we can turn it into where there's full cameras set up, there's full soundboard, everything is ready to go, so if we wanna do the full event, we can do the full event from there and it's ready to go."
So how the hell does one go about buying a hangar? Don't worry, Heafy explained that as well.
"Man, that's a great question," said Heafy. "We've been renting at a pretty sketchy place. Most bands, I think, are in the kind of position that we are that you rehearse somewhere that you don't love; 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.
"I contacted our real estate agent, who helped my wife and I get our house way back, who just helped Paolo move. Paolo actually lives nine minutes away from me now, which is amazing — he just left Chicago during the pandemic; he got in a car and he was, like, 'I'm outta here. I'm [moving] by you guys.' So we contacted her and we were looking at commercial real estate. I saw a bunch of different places.
"I'm not saying now is the time to buy, but I kind of figured now might be an okay time to look. And we're very, very smart with our money. 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. And 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."
Heafy recently signed a solo deal with Roadrunner Records and is working on a new project with Ihsahn.
