Boredom was the main thing that motivated Mercedes Lander to pick up the drumsticks.
"There wasn't any drummer that got me interested in playing music," the drummer for the band Kittie said during a telephone interview from El Paso, Texas. "But I did listen to a lot of '70s and '80s bands, because that's what was out there when I was growing up."
When Kittie formed in 1997, the band was just a group of teenage girls who wanted to play music.
"It was all just for fun," Lander said. "We didn't start off with any set ideas of who we wanted to be or how we wanted to play. We did think it would be great to play some shows, but we weren't bent on it."
Still, once the band started playing gigs around their hometown of London, Ontario, Canada, things began to change. "We started playing there, and then we started playing more shows on the continent," Lander said. "It was a natural progression."
In 2000, the band released its debut recording, "Spit." The album took the metal world by storm and Kittie found itself on tour with Slipknot, and then it was participating in the groundbreaking metal festival Ozzfest and eventually headlining the Sno-Core Tour.
While on the outside it might appear challenging to be in an all-female grind-core band in the male-dominant world of metal, Lander said there are other challenges that are worse. "One of the biggest is keeping sane on the road. A lot of people don't realize or know what it's like to be on the road. They don't know what it takes to be on the road. But playing the shows is the payoff.
"The biggest reward, for me, is playing in front of people every night."
This time the tour is supporting the new album "Oracle," which was released late last year, and which was produced by GGGarth (sic) Richardson, who has worked with Rage Against the Machine and Ozzy Osbourne. "We didn't feel any pressure recording this album," Lander said. "One of the reasons was because we knew that we were going to top 'Spit.' I think it was more of a relief getting the new songs written and recorded."
One of the tunes featured on "Oracle" is an angry cover of Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell." "We all decided to do that song because we were suppose to be featured on a Pink Floyd tribute album," Lander explained. "But that project got scrapped and we still had this song. So we decided to put it on the new album to get it out of our hair."
Looking down the road, Lander said she and her bandmates are pretty confident about their future. "We're going to make more records and tour."
E-MAIL: scott@desnews.com