Better Lovers’ Greg Puciato Names His Favorite Power Ballads

What are Greg Puciato‘s favorite power ballads? The Better Lovers singer who is currently getting some attention for the band’s latest power ballad “At All Times” from the Highly Irresponsible album gushed with Full Metal Jackie over having the opportunity to record this type of song and shared some of his favorite power ballads in the process.

“I’m a big power ballad fanatic,” confessed the singer. “I grew up in the ’80s just sitting in front of MTV.” During the chat with Jackie he shared two choices for his favorite power ballads, confessing that Aerosmith’s “Angel” is the one he most reflects upon as being his introduction to power ballads. “Love resonates with people. There’s nothing corny about love, you know,” says Puciato, who also shares his other favorite power ballad in the chat.

Within the discussion, Puciato discusses how he’s adapted to being part of Better Lovers. He tells Jackie the biggest challenge to joining an already established group of players and how they were able to overcome their biggest hurdle. He also speaks to how having a variety of musical outlets has allowed him to evolve as an artist and why he’s addicted to collaborating. Plus, he plugs Better Lovers’ upcoming Blissmas holiday show and what it was like to become part of that tradition.

Check out more of the chat below.

It’s Full Metal Jackie and this week we welcome to the show Better Lovers frontman Greg Puciato. We are here to talk about Better Lovers. This band has absolutely been on fire since debuting “30 under 13.” The latest is “At All Times,” described as a power ballad. Who saw that coming?

I know, well, I’m a big power ballad fanatic. I grew up in the 80s just sitting in front of MTV. So starting with Aerosmith‘s “Angel” … I’m a sucker for him, man. Once I stopped trying to be cool all the time, you get older and I actually can admit to myself that I like power ballads and hair metal.

But that goes across the spectrum. I like pop music and stuff like that too. I think they resonate with people. Love resonates with people. There’s nothing corny about love, you know.

Better Lovers, “At All Times”

Was it more of a challenge taking on this song given that most of your material tends to skew heavier?

Well, most of Better Lovers does, but I mean, not for me. I have a band called the Black Queen that is just nothing but romantic songs and a lot of my solo stuff too. So, I mean, it wasn’t [a stretch] for me. It was a welcome thing for me. I don’t feel we have enough. We had enough aggressive aggression on the record and the EP was just purely blistering.

I feel like it’s nice and even with its placement on the record. It’s next to last. The record’s really relentless and that track being where it is on the record gives it a nice breather. I’ve checked out some comments online and I normally don’t, but just because of the nature of the song. I’ve just been looking around a little bit and I’ve seen people be like, “Yeah, I never expected a Better Lovers song to make me cry or think about my girlfriend and how much I love her.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s cool.

Do you have a favorite power ballad of all time?

There’s so many good ones if we’re in the rock world, if we’re staying in the metal rock world. I really like Whitesnake‘s “Is This Love?” Let me see. Aerosmith‘s “Angel.” Just because it was one of the first ones and I remember hearing it when I was a kid and being like, “Wow, this is really good.” I like them all. There’s so many good ones.

Aerosmith, “Angel”

Greg, this band formed out of the ashes of Every Time I Die. And it was a very public and very dramatic split that Jordan, Steven and Goose went through. And anytime there’s previous drama, I would have to think there’s some concerns about starting up something new. Were there conversations had or boxes that needed to be checked for you personally before you wanted in?

Well, mainly I was wanting to make sure that I had something to bring to the table that  wasn’t just going to be Every Time I Die meets Dillinger Escape Plan because Dillinger Escape Plan was almost eight years ago for me. So I’m a much different person.

The things that I have coming out of me emotionally and stylistically, I didn’t know what I would have to offer to that kind of music at this point. I didn’t even know what I had in me in that realm.

When they sent me those songs and they asked me, I didn’t know this at the time, but they didn’t have like a runner up. They were pretty much like you were the guy. We just forced you into. We made sure that you were in this band. We weren’t going to let it go. And they really didn’t.

I ran into Jordan at a Jerry Cantrell show because I sing with him. We were in Vegas and Jordan came to the show and he was like, “What have you been doing?” He sent me these songs and was like whatever you want to do. If you want to sing on one, if you want to sing on two, we don’t really know what we’re going to do with them. And now that’s kind of where it was. It wasn’t really intimidating.

It wasn’t like we’re starting a band and we’re going to go full blast and it’s going to be this thing. It was really organic in a way that  doesn’t happen when you’re an adult because everything’s so planned. You meet someone and you’re like, let’s do a collaboration together and it’s got a plan and you’re going to come up with a name. This was not really like that at all. They’d sent me songs in a Dropbox. They didn’t have names, and they were just like, whatever you feel like doing. And I did like 20 seconds of what became “30 Under 13,” and then that was enough for me to be like, “Okay, I’ll finish this one.”

Then it was like, “I’m going to finish four of them. Let’s put out an EP.” I guess we’ve got to call it something. Now we’ve got a name. Suddenly people are like, are you guys going to play shows? And it’s like, well, we only have four songs, so let’s write a couple more. That way we can play shows. And then it’s like we’re a band and people are hyped, and now we’ve got merch and then we’re doing a record and now we’re all systems go. Everyone’s really into it and really on board with it and it’s never once felt to me like Every Time I Die with Dillinger Escape Plan.

Will Putney said it doesn’t really feel like that at all to me. I think a lot of that reason, too, is because I hadn’t talked to those guys in a long time. I hadn’t heard from Jordan or talked to Jordan, and we hadn’t crossed paths or played together in like a decade. So it wasn’t really fresh in my mind.

Greg, you’ve expressed in the past the importance of finding a personal connection to the music. Obviously the guys have a past working relationship with Will Putney, so it was easy to find that shorthand with him. But how is it for you coming in with demos already existing and finding where your place would be in the music and what stamp you wanted to put on it?

That was another thing. I didn’t have any personal relationship with those guys. For me, every thing I’ve done since Dillinger, I’ve been really good friends with the people that I’ve been working with outside of the thing beforehand. It wasn’t like people that I didn’t know that well and me trying to integrate not just into the music, but integrate into their personal pre-existing relationship with one another.

That’s the thing that took the most time. There’s really nothing you can do to force that to happen. You just have to spend time together. And we got on tour pretty quickly and went out with Underoath when we only had four songs released. We didn’t do it in a way where we were all in separate hotel rooms or even in a bus. We were in a bandwagon and we were spending a lot of time and we were sleeping right next to one another and only getting like one hotel room and all sleeping in it and someone’s on the floor and things we didn’t even really need to do. But in hindsight it was really good that we did because it allowed us to really expedite the bonding as people.

During that process, I feel like musically, even though you’re not writing when you’re on tour, you’re gelling just from playing with one another, getting to know one another. You’re starting to fall in love with the band together. It’s not just a name. You’re getting a tattoo of a cartoon frog on you. You start to really bond with each other in the music. We did all that before we started writing our debut LPs, and I think that made a massive difference. I think if we would have written this record when we wrote the EP, having not spent a lot of time together personally and musically, it would have been a much different album.

Greg, in addition to the Dillinger Escape Plan, recent years have seen you collaborate in Kill or Be Killed and The Black Queen and spend time touring and working with Jerry Cantrell, I’m sure there are things you take from each experience. How has this made you into the musician you are at this stage in your career? And do any of the other experiences impact what you’ve brought to Better Lovers?

Oh absolutely, absolutely! Everything impacts everything else. That to me is part of the excitement of staying on the creative artistic journey. I’m really into self expression and learning about my instrument. I don’t really care about heavy music any more than I care about any other kind of music or heavy vocals any more than any other kind of vocals. It just happens to be that I operate in that medium.

But all those other things, making solo records, like I made two solo records, you learn a ton. Singing in a band like the Black Queen, where really my voice is not competing with heavy guitars at all. So I have to sing much lighter and I have to access emotions that maybe 10 or 15 years ago I would have been embarrassed to sing about.

READ MORE: Greg Puciato – How Jerry Cantrell Made Me a Better Singer

A really direct recent thing, Jerry Cantrell, singing with him on stage and then seeing him operate in the studio, it changed my voice. It changed my ideas about what I consider to be good singing. Because when you’re singing with Jerry onstage and you’re singing the songs like “Down in a Hole,” if I was in the crowd, I would be looking at me with my arms crossed being like, “Who is this? Why? Who dares to sing these songs?” Besides that, Jerry is a perfect singer. He’s got perfect pitch. And if you’re harmonizing with him and you mess up and you even go a little flat or a little sharp, it’s you. It’s not him. He doesn’t mess up.So it really makes you [take a closer look].

Greg Puciato With Jerry Cantrell, “Down in a Hole” (Live in Toronto)

Everything I’ve done since Dillinger has grown me so dramatically. It’s addicting. I love collaborating to that degree and even Better Lovers already, I’ve grown so much from playing this kind of music again, but with new people. I’m just figuring out how my voice has changed in the last seven years since I’ve done this kind of music and how my writing sensibilities have changed everything. It’s a process that I never want to stop, honestly. Like, I don’t think I’ll ever be a person who’s just doing one thing.

Greg, in a social post not long ago, you spoke about coming up in the early 2000s scene with Poison the Well and Eighteen Visions and the competitive spirit with your early tours. One comment you made was the desire to steal the night every night. It’s a very youthful sentiment coming from a place of hunger. Having more of an established career now, do you still feel that sense of competition? And does being in this band that perhaps may be viewed as having something to prove fuel that a bit more?

You know what I wish? I feel like the cool thing would be to say, yeah, but I don’t. I don’t feel competitive with other bands. I feel competitive with myself. I’m viciously competitive with myself. If I feel like I had a bad show or if I did something stupid and forgot a part or my voice messed up because I went out last night and I knew I shouldn’t have. Today, my voice is struggling a little bit. I will beat myself up for a really, really long time over that. So, that to me is where the competitiveness is now. But my friends and the other bands, I want them to kick ass.

Even for us, if we play after a band that really lights it up, it makes you better. You want to be your best, but you also want your friends to succeed and you want them to kick ass.

It makes me happy to see people that I know and don’t know, young bands, it makes me happy to see bands do great work on the record or onstage. I don’t feel competitive. Having something to prove is a different sensation than being competitive. And I think when you’re young, you have a lot of both. And then as I’ve gotten older, the feeling competitive with other people thing has sort of gone away.

Greg, one thing that struck me about the Dillinger Escape Plan is the supportive nature of the musicians from each of the eras of the band. You’ve voiced your support for their run of shows with Dimitri celebrating the Calculating Infinity album. Have you or would you be interested in catching any of the shows? I know you’ve discussed being a fan of that album before you were in the band.

Yeah, I just saw Billy the drummer and I hadn’t seen him since all these shows started. But, yeah, we’re friends. I want them to succeed at this. That was an important record. I don’t see it as being a continuation of the band during its actual life. I see it as more of like a honoring of a time that most people who found out about that band didn’t get to see. And that’s really cool.

Yeah, I would definitely love to see it. I just haven’t had the opportunity to because I’m just never home, especially with now that Better Lovers is the thing. I’m actually really never home now. I miss everything. You know, you live in L.A.  There’s things happening all the time, things that you wish you could go to. And I’m never ever around for any of it now.

Greg, as the year winds down, your touring is heating up and carrying over into 2025. One thing that has carried over from the Every Time I Die era is the annual holiday show. What has it been like to put on and take part in something like Blissmas that is more diehard fan centric with the band’s home base.

It’s unbelievable. It was unbelievably intimidating the first year because even though we share a lot of fans and most of their fans know who I am, I had never been a part of something like that. Even though Dillinger Escape Plan were like from the tri-state area and primarily known as being from New Jersey, me and some other people in the band were not, like we never felt like a lot of like a hometown energy there. It wasn’t like we were just overwhelmingly bigger in New Jersey than we were everywhere else.

But those guys are like the mayors of Buffalo. Like they can make happen stuff that really changes the city. Case in point, Micc and Jordan just bought a bar in Buffalo together and since they’ve owned it, the bar has been like way more popular because they’re just so deep, their roots are so deep there.

This year Blissmas turned into such a huge thing. It’s like a three day thing. There’s a wrestling ring involved, there’s beer happening. There’s like almost 3,000 tickets sold already. And that is really something cool to be a part of. Even though I don’t live in Buffalo and I’m not from there, it immediately has endeared itself to me.

Micc, after the show last year, I went out with those guys and it’s kind of overwhelming the amount of people that were coming up and just being like this was like a part of their life. Going to Buffalo during the holiday season had become a part of a lot of these people’s lives. And they had friends that they knew because of it and saw once a year because of it. And the idea that they are managing to keep that going in this new band, really it means a lot to people. And I’d never been a part of something like that, so it’s been really, really cool.

Thanks to Better Lovers’ Greg Puciato for the interview. The Highly Irresponsible album is available now and you can pick that up and get touring information through the band’s website. Also stay up to date with the group through their Facebook, X, Instagram and Spotify platforms. Find out where you can hear Full Metal Jackie’s weekend radio show here.