“But I literally had to install it while they were gone without telling them, otherwise they wouldn’t have let me do it,” the grateful son says. He’s paid their monthly mortgage payments, and bought them the latest Apple computer. Today, Fuentes can afford to thank his frugal folks. He does the same for the group’s stage sets and tour merchandise: “I’ll draw something or even make dioramas to give the production companies ideas of how we’re going to build this, and what it’s going to look like,” he says. He sketched out the tool-strewn cover for “Misadventures,” then handed it off to a professional artist.

“A Flair For the Dramatic” picked up enough tour-request steam to warrant the hiring of guitarist Tony Perry and bassist Jaime Preciado - and Fuentes leaving university for good.ĭesign is still a big part of his life. Simultaneously, he and his sibling disbanded their old combo Before Today, then recorded a debut themselves as Pierce the Veil. Thanks to his father’s love of art, Junior drifted toward the visual, too, and started studying graphic design in college. I was determined to never play a simple power chord.”Īt the same time, he continues to love the inherent power of Spanish and flamenco guitar: “How you can make a person happy or sad, just by playing certain chords or scales,” he says.Īccordingly, the deluxe edition of “Misadventures” boasts filigreed acoustic versions of two album tracks, “Floral & Fading” and “Today I Saw the Whole Wide World.” “When I was younger, I wanted to make songs only out of those pretty jazz chords that he taught me, mixing them with fast beats. “Still, in almost every album, there’s one of my dad’s chords that he taught me, some weird, spider-fingered thing,” he says. With his brother Mike, a drummer, he formed Pierce the Veil, which plays The City this week, backing “Misadventures,” its frenetic fourth album. I just couldn’t do it.”Įventually, Victor Fuentes III caught on, sped up his fretwork, and began incorporating what he learned into his songwriting. “They were really hard, and not easy for a 15-year-old to play,” he says. Dad was happy to oblige, teaching his son complicated jazz chords. There were six-strings all over the house, growing up, he recalls, which piqued his curiosity.

In many ways, the singer-guitarist for post-screamo punk powerhouse Pierce the Veil owes his band’s existence to the influence of his father, a jazz guitarist and painter. The apple didn’t fall far from the aesthetic tree in Vic Fuentes’ San Diego-based, Mexican-American family.

Saddest pierce the veil songs