Hellyeah’s Chad Gray and Christian Brady with Chelsey Yeager at The Golden Tiki’s Vinnie Paul Memorial Celebration. (Hew Burney)
It’s no secret that the late Vinnie Paul (RIP) loved Las Vegas, the place he called home. One particular club in a corner of Sin City honored this proud resident posthumously with a shrine dedicated to him, just inside The Golden Tiki. This isn’t the first that the tiki-themed bar and hangout spot off the Strip has done something in honor of the Pantera/Hellyeah heavy metal drummer – last year, their “Cabinet of Curiosities” collection of celebrity shrunken heads by Smithsonian artist Terry Barr grew with the addition of Vinnie Paul’s shrunken head, in true tiki culture fashion. This week, The Golden Tiki took that a step further by creating an entire shrine dedicated to Vinnie Paul, with a late-night event attended by Vinnie’s girlfriend, Hellyeah bandmates, friends, and fans, all gathering on November 11th to pay tribute to the icon. The Las Vegas Review Journal has the full story.
For rockers and metalheads in the Vegas area, or those who may be planning a trip, be sure to stop by and pay your respects at The Golden Tiki’s shrine of Vinnie Paul, in honor of the music and the memories.
All That Remains released their ninth studio album just last week, with a heavy heart surrounding this release for the band and fans alike in light of the recent passing of Founder/Lead Guitarist Oli Herbert. Frontman Philip Labonte says the following of the release and the band’s future plans: “Losing Oli has been a tremendous blow to the core of ATR, but I know he wouldn’t want anything other than for us to continue. He loved this record so much — it’s some of our best work. We look forward to sharing the music with everyone — seeing our fans from the stage. From where Oli loved most. It’ll be cathartic. We’ll need it to be”. Victim of the New Disease is out now on Razor & Tie, and the band plans to go through with their original plans of a European tour alongside Sevendust this December, with guitarist Jason Richardson filling in for the run. Follow their journey via: https://www.facebook.com/allthatremains.
Jinjer is on their way to the release of a brand-new EP as a highly-anticipated follow up to the recent reissue of Cloud Factory. Micro will mark the first new studio release from Jinjer since 2016’s King of Everything, and a taste of the 5-track EP has already been revealed to the world in the form of its first single and opening track, “Ape”, which you can check out via the Napalm Records Official YouTube Channel right here. The single is also available via iTunes (affiliate link). Bassist Eugene says of the release: “Nearly two and a half years since releasing and touring for our ‘King of Everything’ album, we all got the urge to start writing new music again. The passion to create new songs had grown bigger than you could imagine and we converted all that energy into something special and brand new … And it seems like we’ve created a monster and I can’t wait for all of you to give it a listen!”
Micro will be out on January 11th, 2019, with preorders available now via the Napalm Records Webstore. A few days remain before Jinjer wraps up the North American tour alongside Devildriver, but the band will get right back out onto the road in Latin America to headline a month of dates before heading out to support Amorphis and Soilwork in Europe for early 2019. Keep up with the latest via: https://www.facebook.com/JinjerOfficial.
This Fall, Unleash the Archers embarked on the Apex North American tour, with fellow Canadians Striker and Helion Prime out of the U.S. as special guests along the way. When they reached their stop at the Kingsland in Brooklyn, I had the chance to sit down with Unleash The Archers’ frontwoman Brittney Slayes, where we covered a lot of ground, from Apex, influences, and Unleash the Archers’ evolution over time, to playing the upcoming 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise, and Brittney’s excitement over the band’s recent visit to NASA.
Some of the latest news from the band is the “Ten Thousand Against One” lyric video, Apex was released last year, but what made now the right time to revisit that particular track?
It was just kind of a celebration for the North American tour in support of Apex, we had done Europe but not the States in support of the album, so Napalm was kind of like, “Why don’t we have a little fun and release another single from the record?”, so they actually suggested doing “Ten Thousand Against One”, and they put together a really rad lyric video for it that we’re super proud of. So really, Napalm was just like, “Let’s do something!”, and we’re like, “We’re not going to argue with that!”.
Well, I think it worked out, because it’s awesome. Now, Apex marked the 10th Anniversary for Unleash The Archers, looking back now, how do you feel the band has changed or developed over this time?
Well, it doesn’t feel like ten years, that’s for sure. I feel old now. But, the band has definitely changed a lot, we had a huge lineup change in 2013 where we lost one of our main songwriters, but we brought Andrew on board, and it just kind of created this shift in the whole sound, so we have a much more traditional Heavy Metal sound now, and I’m excited with the direction that we’re going in. I’m always down to change and to grow, and to let the music take its course and just see where we are. Like right now, I’m listening to a lot of Black Metal, so you never know what the next record could hold, right? So having a kind of change in lineup and influences is always a good thing, I think.
Absolutely, changing and developing your influences as well.
Exactly, you don’t want a band that just writes the same record over and over and over again, and I mean, as much as there are some bands that I love where I’m like, “Yes, please continue to write the same record over and over again”, but I always find myself going back to that first version of it. So, you know, you’ve got to try and change it up a little.
You have such a powerful voice and wide vocal range, I really admire you as a singer. At what point did you discover that you could sing in this style? Had you been singing all your life, did you have vocal training?
Well, I’d always been a really big fan of Heavy Metal, since I was eight years old and I was listening to Megadeth, Pantera, Tool, White Zombie, whatever I could get my hands on, or whatever my brother had in his CD player, actually, is what I would listen to. But I’d also been singing since I was very young, like really, really young. There’s a photo of me when I was six or seven, I think, with my Dad’s SM-57, not plugged in, of course, because I didn’t know about those things…and I’m on this weird little stage thing that we had at our house, it was actually the fireplace mantle, but it was my stage. And I’m up there with the microphone at a pretty young age, so I’d always kind of been a musician, I’d always been a singer. But it wasn’t until late high school, when I kind of rediscovered Heavy Metal…you know, I had the early high school *laughs* Britney Spears, S Club 7 time of my life. Got past that, and then got back into Heavy Metal and realized that I wanted to sing Heavy Metal. It wasn’t just about listening to it, it was about it being a bigger part of my life. So when I started dating Scott, he was actually in a different metal band, and I would go to their shows all the time, and I was like, “Wait a minute, I could totally do this!” So when that band broke up, he and I started Unleash The Archers together.
Awesome, so it was always there and you just kind of developed into it, I like that.
Well, at the same time, 3 Inches of Blood was really big, and they had just released Advance and Vanquish, which was their big album for me, and I went and saw a few of their shows and I was like, “Yes, I need to perform live like they do”, and it was a really big click, you know?
And about Apex, a specific track I wanted to ask you about, as a bonus track, you guys covered “Queen of the Reich”, so what led you to choose that particular song to cover?
Well, I love Geoff Tate, he’s a really big influence for me. Actually, in the early years of Unleash The Archers, I was trying to figure out my voice, because I was still very much influenced by classical at the time, you know, I had been a choir singer my whole life, but I didn’t want to be that same symphonic operatic vocal that’s out there, so I was just trying to discover my sound and what I could do differently as a vocalist, and Geoff Tate was a really big influence for me. Listening to how he does that falsetto, it’s kind of like a midrange falsetto, there’s still so much power behind it. So I listened to a lot of Queenrÿche, especially the Best of, which of course, had “Queen of the Reich” on it. When we had the chance to do another bonus track for the Japanese edition of Apex, I was like, “Why don’t we do that song?”, because I love Geoff Tate, and it’s called “Queen of the Reich”, and the whole album is kind of about this badass sorcerer queen, so I think it fits. And the band was down with it.
Since you are a Geoff Tate and Queenrÿche fan, I’m curious to get some of your thoughts on the recent days of Queenrÿche…you know, the split, new singer, Geoff Tate doing his own thing, just your thoughts on what you’ve seen as a fan.
Well, it is unfortunate that they’re not together anymore, but musicians, you’ve got to change and you’ve got to grow and do your own thing, and sometimes people grow apart, and that’s totally fine with me. I think that Todd is doing a killer job, I listened to their new album front to back millions of times, the last Queenrÿche record, it was constantly on in my car, it was so rad and such a great album, and I loved it just as much as I love Operation: Mindcrime. So I’m okay with growth and change.
Another big point of news for Unleash The Archers would be the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, it was actually just announced that you guys are going to be part of that next year, so how are you feeling looking toward that, and had you been part of that event before?
No, I kind of had this weird secret pact with myself that I would never go until I was playing it, because I’ve got so many friends that are part of it, and are just like, “It’s amazing!”, “Such a rad time, you need to come.” And I was always like “Ugh! I want to so bad”, but I just felt like I would jinx it or something, if I went on the cruise before being an actual artist. So, I’m really excited to be able to finally go, so then maybe now I can go as a fan as well.
There you go, a fan checking everything out, then get on stage yourself.
Exactly! And then not have the stress of having to perform, because I know I’m totally going to be just stomach in knots the whole time. I’m going to try and enjoy myself, but like you can’t enjoy yourself too much, otherwise you — *laughs* I don’t know, it’s going to be a good time.
Brittney Slayes and Andrew Kingsley during the UTA show at the Kingsland
*laughs* It will be, definitely! There’s a sort of Canadian/US connection happening with this tour, because there’s you and Striker of course, but then you’ve also got Helion Prime, a US band – and this is actually not the first time you’ve been involved with Helion Prime, right?
Right, I did a guest vocal with them on their newest album with them, and then sort of the mastermind behind Helion Prime is Jason, and he has another band called Dire Peril, and I did a song with Dire Peril called “Queen of the Galaxies”. So Jason and I have been friends for a really long time, so when we had this opportunity, Helion Prime was actually my first choice to be the opener of the package. So when he was like, “Yes, we can do it, but we’re not going to have enough time to get our singer on board, but we have Mary Zimmer, who’s willing to do it”, I was just like, “Yes. Just yes. Just please come on the road with us”. The whole tour has been super rad so far, and really great people, so no issues! *laughs*
That’s awesome – now, you also have a new bassist on board for this tour, so can you talk about how he came to be involved with the band?
We actually know Nick from when we toured in 2015 with a band called Crimson Shadows, he was filling in on bass for those guys. So when we knew we needed someone who could spend five weeks in a van with us, he was our first choice because he’s such a rad dude. He’s just a ball of positivity and positive energy, so he was definitely our first pick, we knew that. He’s a guitar player, actually, but he plays a rad bass. He’s just a fill-in, he doesn’t play bass full-time, so it’s kind of a one-off thing, but he was definitely top of the list.
Yeah, you need that kind of positive energy around you when you’re going to go on tour!
For sure, I mean, you’ve got to be careful. Touring is not easy, and it’s not for everyone, and a lot of times, you get a new member, and then you go on a couple of tours, and maybe they learn that the road life isn’t something for them. So, we knew that Nick was well-seasoned.
There you go. Something else I definitely want to ask you about, because I saw it on social media, and now seeing you today has just affirmed it, you guys had a visit to NASA recently – you’re even wearing the T-shirt there —
NASA swag!
Yeah! NASA swag. *laughs* Can you talk to me about that visit?
Oh, it was just the coolest thing ever. A fan actually reached out, who works at NASA, and said, “Hey, I see that you guys are coming through Houston, do you want a tour of NASA?”, and I was like, “Yes! No question!”, like is this real? And he’s like, “You get VIP passes, and we’ll take you behind the scenes and everything”. So yeah, it was pretty incredible. We started in Mission Control, but they were very busy actually, we didn’t know who the special guest was coming the next day, so he was just like, “I’m sorry, we can’t bring you down the floor, but normally we could go and see all those cool desks where people are working and see what they’re doing”, but we couldn’t that day because Ivanka Trump was coming the next day, so we didn’t get to go down and actually see it, but it was really cool just being there and seeing them all. And what’s really neat is that they’re not allowed to leave their desks except for this five minutes of darkness when the ISS is not in communication range, it’s like this really weird dark spot over, I think it’s Southern Europe, or Southeastern Europe, and so they all get up, go get their coffee, get their food, go to the bathroom, and everything, and then they have to be back at their desks in time. So that was really cool to see. And then, we got to go to the actual mockup of the ISS, which was life-size and real, everything except for on the ISS, all their tools are just hanging from the roof, from everywhere because there’s no gravity, right? So you’re just floating, and there is no up and there is no down – but on the real one, we couldn’t really have that. *laughs* So that was super cool, and then what was really neat is when we were standing outside of the Orion capsule, which is going to be replacing the shuttle program, that…everyone was all kind of upset when Obama shut down the shuttle program, but then Trump was like, “We’re going to start something else”, so it’s Orion. And we were looking in and getting to see everything, and there was a whole gallery up top of all the regular tourers, watching us get to be down there in the capsule *laughs*. I felt really bad, but I was also like, “Okay, this is legit. This is really cool”. And then we got to go to the neutral buoyancy lab, which was freaking rad, because there’s actually live astronauts down in there. And what it is, is just the outside is the same, and so it teaches them how to do spacewalks, and how to work on the space station, and Canadarm and all that stuff, so they can run through it before they have to actually go up and go out and be out in space, in that vacuous abyss. So we got to watch them working down there, and it was really neat, and then I have a video, I haven’t posted it yet but, of the actual astronaut emerging out of the water, and then we got to take pictures with him and everything, and it was probably the coolest thing ever, and I totally cried because I was like, “Oh my God, I’m meeting an astronaut, this guy’s going to go into space and see Earth from”…*tearing up* …It’s just the coolest — I love space. *laughs* I fucking want to be an astronaut so bad, but anyways, yeah.
No, I love your enthusiasm for this, it sounds like you’re really into it.
I read a lot of science fiction. *laughs* Just going to be honest.
Nothing wrong with that! I love how excited you are about it.
Dude, NASA is rad! And like, NASA does not get enough love out there in the world, I’ll tell you that much. For everything they’ve done, and the ESA too, the European Space Agency. And even freaking China and Russia, all the work that they do, and how they’ve progressed human life, I mean, think of all the things that exist now, probably because of NASA and all their scientific leaps and stuff that they come up with. So, life as we know it, is the way it is because of how hard those scientists work.
That’s an awesome way of putting it, too. You said you read a lot of sci-fi, what’s the latest thing you’ve been into?
I’m actually in the middle of The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, it’s fantasy, but probably my favorite science fiction writer is Alastair Reynolds, who is an actual Astrophysicist, so he knows the things that we can and cannot do with current technology. And so he writes very realistic science fiction, so things like faster than light travel is not something that we’ve been able to figure out, or something that we think we’ll be able to figure out in the near future, so he’s come up with ideas for getting super close to that, but not quite. Just super rad books to read when the science is real.
So I guess that fills the downtime in the van then, while you’re traveling around.
It does, yes. *laughs*
Jumping back to today, you’re playing the Kingsland in Brooklyn here tonight, it’s a relatively new venue, intimate vibe, cool place. How are you feeling about tonight?
Oh, I’m pretty stoked. Apparently, there’s a lot of tickets sold, and it’s going to be a hot one, so…I’m fine as long as the crowd is singing along, it’s a good night for me.
And just to wrap things up, can you give your thoughts on the rest of the tour, and what’s on the horizon for Unleash The Archers?
Well, we’re going to do 70,000 Tons in the winter, and release an EP probably, in late spring, and then we’ll take a bit of a breather, and then start writing the next record.
Sounds great. Well, I’m looking forward to the show tonight, thanks for sitting down and talking with me, Brittney.
Striker (via www.striker-metal.com). Interview with Dan Cleary (center) and Tim Brown (2nd from the right)
The unveiling of Striker’s latest full-length Play To Win is almost here, with a release date of October 26th bringing the latest chapter in these Canadian Heavy Metallers’ discography to the world next week. The band has been on tour for the past month or so alongside fellow Heavy Metallers out of Canada, Unleash The Archers, and when the Apex tour brought them along to the Kingsland in Brooklyn, NY, I was there for all the action. I sat down (well, stood in a hallway/stairwell, technically…hey, it’s Brooklyn.) for a quick Q&A session with frontman Dan Cleary and guitarist Tim Brown.
I’m just going to kick things off by talking about your new record, Play To Win, coming out in just a few weeks – can you start by talking about your approach going into the new record, coming out of the self-titled?
Dan: I think we kind of approached in a way where we wanted to sort of focus on what we were really good at, we thought that our wheelhouse is more like a melodic Heavy Metal style, little bit less full-tilt on the Speed Metal thing, and maybe try a few more different types of songs, stuff like that. So it’s a little different, I mean, in the end, with every album we aim for something and then it’s totally different by the end.
Tim: That’s about it. Lots of shred – shred harder than ever.
All right, that’s a good approach when you’re doing a record like this. And this record is being released independently, just like the last two, so what was it like for you to venture into that initially?
Dan: It was kind of nerve-racking, I mean, it’s a lot of work. But at the time, when we split from our last label, we just thought it made more sense with the style of music we’re playing, it’s maybe not as commercial and stuff, it’s harder to make money, so we figured no one’s going to work harder at it than us. So we thought that’s probably the way to go, but at the time, we were sort of like, flip a coin and be like, “Which way should we go with this?” but so far it’s been really great for us.
And in terms of the actual logistics of how you went about doing it independently?
Dan: Well, we just started contacting as many people as we could about how we could do it, whether they were willing to work with us, and we were actually pretty surprised at how many people had already either heard of us, or were just willing to work with us just based on us emailing them. So it was like, the doors are there, you just have to knock on them and see if anybody will open up.
Tim: That’s pretty much what happened, as a band, your money’s as green as anyone else’s.
For the new record, “Heart of Lies” is your first single, can you talk a bit about what went into that track in particular?
Dan: Yeah, that’s like sort of more of a classic Striker sound, what we found is a little bit of heavy metal, speed metal and thrash metal and hair metal, sort of everything melded into one track. That was sort of our flagship one, because we didn’t want to put out…well, we’ve got a variety of songs on the new album, so we wanted to make sure we put out something that was in line with what we’ve done in the past, and then we’ll sort of sucker the people into listening to the rest of the album after *laughs*.
There you go – grab and pull ‘em in, right? *laughs*
Dan: That’s right. *laughs*
So then, the songwriting for that one is a traditional approach for Striker, you would say?
Dan: Yeah, I think we’ve always approached the songwriting in kind of the same way. This time we were trying things a little bit differently, different instruments and stuff like that. But primarily, we’re a guitar-driven band, so that’s where we start everything is with the riffs.
All we’ve heard of the record so far is the single, but once everyone gets a chance to hear the full thing, what would you want someone listening to the album to take away from it?
Tim: We always like to say that if you’re coming out to a Striker show, if you’re not having fun, we’re not doing our job, so that’s kind of what we want to convey on the album as well. It’s a really fun album, gets you going.
Awesome. Anything to add, Dan?
Dan: Nah, that’s pretty much it. We’ve got a juicy ballad on this one so get ready for that! *laughs*
*laughs* All right! But, it sounds like it’s all about the classic heavy metal fun, which is cool. So both of you being in Striker for a while now, obviously there’s a traditional classic kind of influence on Striker, you guys make that pretty clearly known, but have you discovered any other kind of influences along the way – something that’s come across your path that’s affected the way you play, the way you approach your own writing?
Tim: We listen to all kinds of music, I mean, we’re stuck in a van or a bus for like, way too long every day so one of the easiest things you can do to occupy your time is put music on and it gets kind of boring listening to the same stuff over and over and over, so we listen to all kinds of weird stuff in the van…from like Hawaiian ukulele music to you know, Ultimate Shred and super brutal stuff. You name it, we’ve listened to it.
Dan: I think when we were young, we had like that sort of Elitist Old School Metal vibe, and we’ve sort of shaken that along the way. Because you really box yourself in if you’re only wanting to listen to, like, albums from 1984 or whatever? There’s only so many. And like, new music is pretty exciting right now. I think there’s so much going on, there’s lots to listen to.
And there is like a classic, traditional sound as a style that’s very prominent now on the metal scene, especially from bands out of Canada. Do you feel this is, as a lot of people are saying, a “New Wave of the Traditional Metal”, or just that it never really went away to begin with?
Dan: I don’t know, really, because it’s like a “new wave” that’s been happening for like 10 years now. So it’s kind of just like a thing that’s going on, I think there’s always a palate for that. When we were kids, or like when we were in High School, what we liked to listen to was like, Metallica, Megadeth, Testament, stuff like that. So we got into it sometime when we were kids – I don’t exactly know how, but it just happened that way. So there’s probably just cycles of people just finding out about that music and it just keeps rolling.
I just want to ask you guys about you personally, for each of you, tell me about the first time you picked up each of your respective instruments.
Dan: When I picked up my first voice, it was when I was…no, I’m just kidding. I started with guitar, actually, and my Dad had an acoustic guitar, and they were like, if you play this for this many months consistently, we’ll get you an electric guitar. And I did, and so that was the end of piano lessons. Gone, only electric guitar. And then, I started singing because nobody else wanted to sing in the band, which is, I think, a common problem. Nobody wants to sing, nobody wants to play bass either, but singing is the hard part, especially when you’re in High School and stuff, you’ve got to push yourself out there a bit.
Tim: I actually started out as a vocalist in a band before Striker, in high school. We were writing songs, playing music, whatever, and the guitar player in the band at the time was like, “Hey man, here’s a guitar, I’ll show you how to play some songs”. I had no idea, had never touched a guitar in my entire life, and I said “What the hell? This is really fun”. I just had a lot of fun, like your first time you touch a guitar and you’re like, “What the hell is going on? How do people even play this??” So I just thought it was really interesting, and I started playing it, and then I got a guitar for my 17th birthday, and I just couldn’t stop.
And jumping to the modern day, you guys are here at the Kingsland in Brooklyn playing alongside Unleash The Archers, just your thoughts on the show tonight?
Dan: I think it will be really good, this whole tour’s been like, crazy. We weren’t sure what to expect, two Canadian bands, but we just got off two sold-out shows in a row, so hopefully tonight is a similar experience. But this tour’s been really, really good.
Lastly, just to wrap things up, what can we expect on the horizon for Striker?
Dan: We have a European tour with Skullfist starting in November, and all of November, we’ll be in Europe. And then we’re starting to book our next European tour after that, as well as another North American tour, while trying to book our other little tour, we’ll also have new music videos and all kinds of fun stuff coming up.
Lot of good stuff to look forward to and you’ll be on the road a lot, so plenty of chances to catch Striker out there. Thank you guys for talking with me, it’s been awesome.
2018 has been a big year for Kobra and the Lotus so far, with the highly-anticipated Prevail II completing their double album series and kicking off a North American tour in support of the release. When the band came through the East Coast and made a stop at The Kingsland in Brooklyn, NY, I sat down with Kobra Paige before the show to discuss what’s behind the Prevail I and II records and the band’s latest unique music videos, as well as Kobra’s background as a lyricist and musician, digging into what it is that motivates her in studio and on the road.
Just to start things off, you recently released the completion of your Prevail series, Prevail I and Prevail II, just a couple of weeks ago. What made you set out to do the double album series in the first place?
It was actually a cast away idea my father had, he said, “You guys should do a double album, I was just hearing Bruce Dickinson talking on a podcast about how your generation doesn’t do it anymore, so why don’t you guys?”, and I really rejected it hard immediately…but then after five days, I wanted to do it, and I asked the guys and everyone jumped in. So here we are, with the double album finally released for everyone to hear as one piece.
And I heard that it was actually all one body of work that you created a couple of years ago at this point, so did the fact that it was all there already build a lot of anticipation for you guys when you were stretching it out over all this time for the two records?
I mean, I know it did for me, I couldn’t wait for the second record to be out, and I couldn’t wait for us to play the new songs that I knew we had. I was dying to just refresh the setlist, period. So it was wonderful to finally have Prevail II out. I did find it hard to sit on our material for that long, but at the same time, I’m very grateful that it happened that way, and it was very smart that Napalm had suggested that. Because it would have been a lot of great work that we had worked so hard on lost in the shuffle of a big body.
Right, so spreading it out had everyone appreciating it a little more is what you’re saying.
Definitely, definitely. People are really vibing with Prevail I or Prevail II more than the other in some ways, they’re finding their songs that speak to them the most, and I think that that also has been aided by them being separately released, so that they can digest the first one, and now the second one is there for them to have space with.
Nice. I want to dig into the songs a little bit, one that was a great and very unique music video, I thought, was “Let Me Love You” – you had that Anime music video thing going on, so where did that whole concept come from, why’d you guys decide to do that?
Well, Japan always gets a special track, or a bonus, and there’s no way around it in the industry, so I thought, “Let’s do it in Japanese as a bonus”. The video just turned into something that was a really fun idea, and also a way for us to share it with the rest of the world, because the bonus track for Japan will never be on an album for sale in any other country but Japan. So people that do want that single are going to have to import someone selling their album off of Kijiji or eBay or whatever, which sometimes they do, but this video provides the opportunity for people to actually hear it everywhere without taking away the special aspect that we were trying to give to Japan.
Do you actually speak Japanese, or did you learn just for the song?
Neither, actually, I worked with a coach for around a month specifically for this song, a Japanese woman, and she was amazing because we had to rewrite the song so that it made sense for people in Japanese. It still doesn’t flow quite normal, I’ve heard, even from her, but she finds it interesting because you can hear that I’m not Japanese. So the most important thing was that the words made sense, and that they were still beautiful and convey the right message. So we worked really hard on that and I worked really hard on making sure I pronounced it as best as I could. We did several Skypeing sessions for weeks, I was very diligent about it, and when we did record the track, I had her on Skype in the booth with me for six hours. So we stopped, we did several takes of the song and we stopped after every like, half line, making sure it was making sense, that everything was right, then going through it as a full line, making sure there were pieces that were right…yeah.
Sounds like a really intense recording session there!
It was very tedious, but it was well worth it.
Now, is that along the lines of how you do typically record vocals, that stop-and-start, or do you prefer to just go in and streamline it, how does it usually work with you?
It really varies, actually. Sometimes I’ll do four takes only and that’s all I’ve got – songs like “My Immortal”, basically I just did four takes and we just cut from that stuff. It puts a little bit of mental pressure on you too, if you know that there’s four and you’re not going to do any more on that during that day. Of course you can come back, but we usually don’t, and I appreciate having a producer for the very reason that they are objectively telling me, “No, we really got it”, because sometimes I won’t know myself. I could keep going and beating a thing to death, when it really is there, I got something that is presentable enough and representing me.
Something else I thought was very unique for you guys to be doing was your cover of “The Chain”. I love the video, it’s also a little out of the ordinary for Kobra and the Lotus, but very cool.
Thank you!
So why that song? What does that song mean for you guys to have covered that, and how did you approach putting your own unique twist and spin on it?
Well, “The Chain” was picked by me, I’m massively in love with Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, and I wanted to have a really fun and strong closer for the Prevail II chapter, and something that unified both albums together, just ended on a note of unity and oneness. That was very, very important to me with the messages that I was conveying on both albums, and in music in general, with this band. Martin Wolff knew that we wanted to do this, he’s a Danish songwriter that we were in the studio working with, so he really worked the ideas around musically changing it, and he made a different riff. And that was it, we had that and Jasio recorded that, then I went and basically just cut up the shit out of it with Pro Tools in my kitchen in Denmark, and made this crazy-ass little blip that was just like a song you couldn’t recognize “The Chain” from, and Jacob thought it was nuts. He thought it made no sense to his brain at all and he said, “This makes no sense, blah blah” and I’m like, “Just record it, it’s going to make sense as soon as we do this and you see how the layers are actually going to come together”. It’s pretty much like there was dough, and I came back with a decorated pizza with candy, popcorn, and he was like “What the hell?” and I’m really happy that we stuck to it. And Napalm ended up loving it, so they suggested we do a video, so I thought the synopsis would be really cool if it was very, very natural, the guys were dressed in their natural state, like how you’d find them on the street any day, and just a big feeling of community and bringing it back to what the true nature of the music is about.
So now, of course, you’ve been on tour with Texas Hippie Coalition, which track from Prevail II would you say you’re having the most fun with bringing from studio to stage?
I think everyone is really vibing with “Velvet Roses”, actually. And we’ve noticed that it really does get people going in places, which is really cool because it’s the next video.
Ah, good to know! Nice little preview there.
*laughs* Yeah, little tidbit. So that should be pretty fun to see how people respond to that. But otherwise, yesterday we heard people at the top of their lungs singing “Let Me Love You” and “Light Me Up”, which was really cool.
Awesome, and it’ll be cool to see what people vibe with tonight as well.
It will, it certainly will. Actually, a girl came yesterday dressed in my outfit from the “You Don’t Know” video, so it’s been pretty interesting, people have different stuff that speaks to them.
Yeah, definitely. And in terms of things speaking to people, I think from the lyrics point of view, you’re very proficient in expressing stories and emotions and things like that. There always seems to be a message of some kind that comes across. So I’m curious, before you were doing Kobra and the Lotus and being a professional musician signed to a label, were you always writing stories and lyrics, or is that something that developed for you over this time?
I guess when I was younger, I would write short stories…but not really. I was into musical theater, but I think the most relational thing to this feeling that I have in music, for me specifically, is that I was just involved with a lot of volunteer work of different kinds when I was growing up. Just getting involved with different communities and seeing what their walks of life were, my parents also exposed us to a lot of new cultures that didn’t have what we had in our first world culture, and that was very impactful on me. So that is really the reason that I’m in music now, because I think it’s something that is really necessary for connecting people in a separated world. That’s the strongest purpose I find within this. Everyone has their own thing, but mine is definitely how it connects people together.
And I think that shows, it comes through clearly. Also, during the recording process for the albums, I think especially for Prevail II more so, you were blogging during the process…so how was that for you to be opening up and showing people that inside look?
I mean, it’s great. I wish we had time to do more, it actually was a ton of work, so we couldn’t keep up with it. We have a ton of GoPro footage that will never see the light of day, but I think it’s great, I wish that we could show people more, I wish we could actually show them what the road is like, and just see what it takes to even get here, where we are at this point. Just to see the lives and the work and everything, it’s just interesting. I am all for authentic experiences, as much as possible, so I am definitely the opposite of the artist just trying to make things look cool when I just want them to be seen for what they are. *laughs*
That’s great though – genuine, I like that. And fans like that too.
It is, and I’m not sure, but it makes me happy. *laughs*
And speaking of getting a look into life on tour, I know you have to be getting ready to go in there soon, so I will wrap things up now by just asking you your thoughts on the show tonight and just an outlook into the near future of Kobra and the Lotus.
Well, I’m really excited. We’re in Brooklyn, New York, I think it should be a really good show. It’s really tight and hot in there in the Kingsland, so I think it’s going to be pretty packed, pretty warm, and make for a really fun time. And I expect to see a lot of familiar faces, we’ve always had a good time in the New York area, yesterday at Dingbatz in Jersey was really great, and probably one of the strongest crowds we’ve seen on the tour so far, so I expect it to be similar tonight. It’s going to be really fun. We’re still working on tours because we have a lot of promoting to do for this new album, Prevail II, and we are definitely looking at plans for a sixth album to start on.
Wow, already in the works.
Definitely! We’re young, there’s a lot of ideas floating around, everyone’s got a lot of energy, I think it’s time to just harness and take advantage of it while we can.
Awesome, and sounds like a plan. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me.
Hammerfall made a majestic return to North America this spring/summer, following their successful 2017 run with 2018’s “ReBuilt to Tour” as Flotsam and Jetsam filled the spot of special guests along for the ride. One of Hammerfall’s stops along the way was at NYC’s iconic Gramercy Theatre, and shortly before the band took to the stage, I had the chance to sit down with founder/guitarist Oscar Dronjak for an interview, during which we covered everything from the recent ReBuilt to Tour run and new music that’s on the way, to hockey, whisky, and champagne – an all-around good time and fun chat.
You’re currently on the ReBuilt to Tour 2018 North American run, following up on your last time in the US with Delain. I heard that you actually postponed the release of your next album in order to come back to the U.S. and Canada this time around?
Yeah, more or less. We were supposed to record it a couple of months earlier, but that would not have given us enough time to…if we wanted to do this tour, that would have clashed with the songwriting period. I mean, I’m still writing songs – I actually finished one two days ago on the bus, which was a first for me ever in my entire career. So we decided that if we were going to do this tour, which we wanted to, we’d have to move the album release a little bit, and that was fine with the label.
Nice, I had heard that you guys really wanted to focus on the chance to come back to the U.S., following up on how successful it was last year. Were there any particular cities or venues you’ve really been looking forward to returning to?
Among our favorite ones, audience-wise – to be perfectly honest, the last tour? If it had not worked, we would probably never come back again, that’s basically what it was. We’ve done 5 tours – 4 before that – over the years, it’s been spread out over 15 years or whatever it was. But still, nothing really took off for us. I guess you would have to tour more, and not wait five years to come back, and do it a little earlier. But this was make it or break it for us, basically. And that tour was so fantastic that we said, “We’ve got to come back right away”. Just to try and see if it works again, you know? The first time we ever played in Baltimore was the last tour, and I have no idea why we haven’t done that before, ‘cause it was absolutely fantastic. And we played there two days ago and it was just as good then. It felt like coming back was a really good idea. Canada is always great, and New York City is always really good for us – for some reason, that has been since the beginning. L.A.’s always L.A., but we’ve had really good experiences there, we usually record the vocals to our albums in L.A. because we work with a guy called James Michael, producer and singer of Sixx A.M., and Joacim really likes working with him…and James clearly thinks it’s pretty fun too, otherwise he wouldn’t do it all the time. *laughs* So we go to L.A. a lot, and L.A.’s more like a second home in that respect, if we have any here in the U.S.
I did see on social media that you guys were in L.A. earlier this year, or rather, Orange County, since you went to NAMM and the Hall of Heavy Metal History Induction – how was that?
Oh, that was a lot of fun. We had a really packed schedule. The first thing was, we wanted to go to NAMM, so we tried to get a show during that time which, it’s very difficult to play in L.A., but we did a show in San Diego since it’s not that far away, and we didn’t play San Diego on the Delain tour that we did last year. So that was the first time in a really long time for us. And then we had another show come up just the weekend before in Colombia, so now we had two shows plus the NAMM show we could do, and then Joacim just filled up our schedule, *laughs* so it was just the most intense ten days ever, we didn’t have any break at all. But it was fun, it made it feel like it was worth it, not just lounging around for the sake of it.
That’s great. And then, of course, you’ve also been touring alongside Flotsam and Jetsam this time around, and it’s kind of “classic thrash meets classic power metal”, so how has that been so far?
Oh, it’s been great. We met the bass player during NAMM – we didn’t know he was going to be there, he just said hi, and that’s really good to have met him, he seemed like a really nice guy, which they all turned out to be, so we’re having a really good time. Like you said, it’s a classic thrash, and a classic…I don’t want to use the word power metal, because I don’t…
I was going to ask you about that too, actually, a lot of people say Hammerfall is “power metal”…
Over here, you do.
…But I’m curious if you guys even associate with that at all.
No, not at all, not even one second. There’s a lot of reasons. Mainly because when I formed the band in 1993, and the only power metal that existed, at least from where we were, we called it “U.S. Power Metal”, which was like Savatage, Omen…that type of music, which we weren’t at all. We were more like Manowar, Judas Priest, that sort. So for me, that was heavy metal, we always wanted to be a heavy metal band. And when we started recording albums in ’97, there still was no such thing as power metal until the power metal movement came a couple of years later. I guess we had something to do with it, but I still think Hammerfall is different from the bands you would normally put into that category. Just because we have a song that’s called “The Dragon Lies Bleeding”, doesn’t mean we were a power metal band, you know what I mean? But then a lot of people lumped us into that category, and I don’t like that at all. The main reason I don’t like it is because when we started playing in the mid 90’s, there was so much backlash…well, not backlash because we weren’t famous or anything, but anytime we were doing anything, people were like “hehe”, snickering and laughing like, “Are you really going to wear those leather pants?” “Don’t you know it’s ’95 now, it’s grunge”…whatever, all that bullshit.
Oh, got it. I mean…I have leather pants on and it’s not the 80’s.
*laughs* Of course, well, times have changed now. But this was back then, and because people didn’t take us seriously, we said “fuck you, we’re doing what we want to do”, and we embraced the moniker of heavy metal. So it became a badge of honor instead of anything else. So that’s why I don’t like the power metal name, I don’t want to associate. Not that I have anything against it, a lot of bands I like, like Stratovarius, I think would be considered power metal. Edguy, for example, a lot of European bands which I think are really good. But I think that Hammerfall is different from those bands.
Well, that makes a lot of sense. People do tend to put a label on something and say “This is all it is from now on”, but I see where you’re coming from.
Well, I like to do that too. When you read a review of something, it’s always easy if they put whatever type of music it is, even if it’s not really that type of music. I mean, if somebody were to say Hammerfall is power metal as opposed to, say, thrash metal, then I go, “Okay, I can buy that”. But if you’re going to go specific, it’s got to be heavy metal.
Heavy metal, that’s right. You were talking a bit about the songwriting for the new album, and you know, Hammerfall does have a distinctive and iconic sound, is there a process or a go-to method you guys have, or it really just kind of comes about however it does?
*laughs* Yes and no, I think, in this case. The previous albums, many of them, that was just “Well, whatever happens”, because we wrote the music that we loved, and we still do. But this is going to be our 11th album now, after so many songs, you think about it a little bit differently, especially now that I’m 20 years older than I was when we released the first one. So, I learned a lot during those years, and I think it’s more like…the actual music, or riff that comes out, it just comes out from within, basically. But the songwriting, when I’m working on the songs, and just the small variations in details, those are much more thought through now than they were before.
Now, a little off-topic from music here, you guys are very active on social media, which is great, you immerse fans in whatever you’re doing at any given time, but I’ve been seeing a lot of fuss lately over the IIHF, the Hockey Federation, and Sweden just won a World Championship there, so you guys are big on hockey, it seems.
Yeah, Sweden is a big hockey country. We have, of course, football, or you call it soccer here, that’s the biggest sport, but hockey is not far behind, it’s really, really popular and has been since forever, basically. So we are big fans of that. We actually sponsor a hockey team in, it’s the Swedish version of the highest leagues, it’s the NHL for Sweden. It’s from Joacim’s hometown, and we have our logo on the inside of the ice rink.
That’s awesome!
It’s really cool.
So it’s the SHL that you guys are involved in, but do you have any interest in the NHL, when you come to the states, ever catch any hockey games here?
Yeah! Well, I don’t think that we have as a band, but I’ve been to games before, yeah. And we were actually discussing, we just had dinner now, and we were discussing if we were going to try to make it to Vegas for one of the Stanley Cup Playoff Finals. I don’t know if that’s even possible to get a ticket or whatever, but we were just discussing the option, because one of the games is on an off day for us. So theoretically, we could fly in in the morning, watch the game, and then fly back to the next city the next morning. But it’s a bit difficult, it’s going to be expensive and a really long flight, because we’d be playing Toronto so we’d have to stay over there and fly to Vegas.
That’d be a long way, yeah.
8 hours with a layover, I just checked it, so it’s probably not going to happen. I mean, if we had tickets, yes, for sure, we’d do it, but that’s the next step, we’ve got to get tickets if we even could get them – you know, Vegas, hometown, first season for them ever and they’re in the finals. Probably going to be very hot tickets.
I’m sure. Maybe next time around, you guys can catch something.
We’ll watch it from here.
So something else I caught on social media, you guys have some new merch on the way as well?
Yeah, we have a new webshop, we never had that before, if you can believe that, in all these years. We had a really good merch shop with Nuclear Blast, our previous label. With Napalm, it hasn’t worked as well, because they’re a smaller label and we do move a lot of merch. So we wanted to take charge ourselves, which we did, and I’m guessing you’re referring to the ice hockey t-shirts ‘cause we were talking about it, it’s hanging right there *points to merch table*. We brought it for sale and it’s doing really well, people seem to think it’s really cool.
People love hockey and they love Hammerfall, so it’s the perfect combo!
*Laughs* Exactly!
And something else, in terms of products with the Hammerfall brand on it, is the Hammerfall Champagne…that’s definitely a step outside, something unusual, for a metal band, especially.
I think it’s the first time anybody has done that as far as I know. We got a whisky before, we did that, but Joacim is a big champagne guy, he’s really into it, he studied how you make it and stuff. He did make the champagne, not himself, but he was there when they put the stuff together, added the sugar, whatever the hell they do. But he was really into it, really focused on tasting it and making sure he liked the taste of it. So he was really invested in that. I’m not a champagne guy, I drink it, but it’s not my favorite thing. But this champagne I actually like a lot. I think it tastes really good. And it’s not the cheapest, it’s a proper champagne, from the region Champagne in France, so it’s the real deal, basically. But I really like it.
Well, if it’s got the Hammerfall logo on it and all…
Well, you never know. *laughs*
*laughs* I would hope the band members would like it, with the name on it.
It would be difficult. But on the other hand, the whisky, it seemed people loved the whisky, we did two different versions of it, and people said they tasted really good, but I hate whisky. So I would never drink it, I haven’t even tasted it. Well yes, I have tasted one of them, actually, just to have tasted it, but I had to rinse my mouth afterwards. *laughs*
Also, the champagne is primarily marketed to Sweden, but will it be available in the States at all?
No, I don’t think so. First of all, it was a very limited edition, just one…whatever they make champagne in, like 5000 bottles or something like that, it was very limited. But second of all, the Swedish alcohol laws are very strict for exporting and stuff, so it’s very difficult. I know that the importer in Sweden who helped us get everything done is working with some…French? Well, of course, French since it’s champagne, but also with some German or something, and maybe our label in Germany also had put in an order for it, I’m not sure. But, so there are some places where they could get it, because they have the connections already, but it’s not something that’s going to be worldwide, unfortunately. I mean, a lot of people ask about it, but we can’t do it, you know?
Right, you personally are not going to bring it. *laughs*
We even had to buy the bottles ourselves, you’re not allowed to give bottles away, unless you bought it from the beginning of course, but from the distributor, they couldn’t give us anything, we had to buy it. Got a discount, but still. But it’s worth it. My mom loves it, she’s not a champagne drinker either, but she definitely doesn’t drink whisky, so at least now we have something she can actually taste.
Back to the present day tour, you mentioned you just finished up a song earlier, I just want to hear a little more about what you guys have got in mind, plans for the next album?
Yes, we’ve got a pretty good outline already, which, I mean, Joacim is a good planner, so he always thinks ahead.
That’s convenient.
Yes! Because I’m not. So it works really well. To be honest, I don’t know where I would be if he wasn’t as driven with these things as he is, planning ahead and making sure that we do things the right way, like booking the studio in time, and stuff like that. So what we have planned is, we’re going to do the festivals this summer in Europe, we got a second market tour going on in Europe as well, places we haven’t visited in many years, sometimes never, so that’s going to be fun. And then we start recording January of next year, that’s the time – to release, about August, I think it was. It’s not set in stone yet, but it’s probably going to happen. There would be something drastic to change that, I think. Kind of looking forward to it, but at the same time, not, because I’m not at the point where I feel comfortable with all the material yet. I haven’t gotten used to the songs yet, I can only trust my gut instinct if it’s good or not, I have to listen to them a lot more. But it’s very difficult to listen to the songs that you have done when you have to start working on the next song. I don’t want to listen to this and then write something that’s very similar to that. So there’s a balance that has to be upheld a little bit. But I’m getting there. Right now I have 6 songs from my part, I write the music, Joacim does the vocals, for the most part, and the lyrics, of course. But my part, in 6 songs, I can safely say is done now. So now I can listen to those, go back to them, and maybe add some details and tweak them a little bit if necessary, and then start working on the rest of them. We still have plenty of time this year for that.
Yeah, the whole rest of the year to go.
But I almost panicked when we started talking about when the album was going to come out, because I wasn’t ready at all! Not at all ready to start writing stuff, ‘cause that’s a whole different mode for me to be in, songwriting and performing live has been two very separate things for me, always, and I never thought I could combine them, but…it works. I mean, I didn’t really write a lot of new stuff, but I worked on the song for a couple of hours, like it wasn’t ready, but now it is ready. I moved stuff around, you know, “Ah, this needs something here”, stuff like that. And I was very happy about that. Normally when we do the tour, you’re kind of sick of music, don’t want to deal with Hammerfall stuff because I play this stuff every night. But I have to say I’m a lot more mature now than I was 20 years ago, now I take things a little bit more seriously.
Well, I know you’ve got to kick off the VIP Meet and Greet in a few minutes, so since you’re about to meet some fans, let’s wrap things up with a message to your fans.
First of all, I would like to thank the people who read this, because like I said in the beginning of the interview, the people who supported Hammerfall in the last years, and especially on the last tour, they are the reason why we came back. It seems like we made the right choice, because it’s been going really great, and we are infinitely grateful for that, actually, to be able to do this. Because for a long time, we didn’t think we’d be able to have a future, like we didn’t consider this as a potential market to go to, we have to be able to come home with, at least, to not lose money, and if we do a long tour, we have to come home with something, because this is our jobs, basically. So, by coming to the shows and buying the merch, and supporting us in that way, that gives us a chance to do what we love, and come back and perform for you again. I can say already that we will be back again, a lot sooner than 8 years or whatever it took between the last two tours. So, to everybody, thank you so much, you are the true Templars of Steel.
Excellent, well, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me, it’s been a lot of fun.
NYC Rockers Station recently released their second album More Than The Moon, followed by some touring which brought them to a newly opened venue in Smithtown, Long Island, New York known as The Rail on June 23rd, 2018. It’s a pleasure to catch up with this talented group – I first interviewed them when I was in college radio right around the time their self-titled debut record came out – always friendly and a lot of fun, Chris Lane and Patrick Kearney even came in studio to do an acoustic set. We always seem to touch base whenever they’re in their hometown, the New York/Long Island circuit – this time around, after their show at The Rail, Chris gave me an inside look into the making of and the meaning behind More Than The Moon, and we faced some comedic interruptions as we discussed music video antics and the Long Island music scene.
The first thing I want to start with, the latest news with you is of course, More Than The Moon, and there’s a lot I want to get into about it, but let’s start with the origins of it, just what got you started working on a new album following the self-titled.
Sure, so oddly enough, “More Than The Moon” is really an old song of ours, we had it when we recorded our EP, and the reason it didn’t end up on the first record was because we didn’t feel it would stand out, because there were other songs just like it. You know, the same kind of moderate ballad tempo idea, so we didn’t really want it to get lost in the shuffle, so we said we’d hold onto it for a second album, if we made one. We recorded the first album in 2014, released it in 2015, and we wanted to do a follow-up album right away, we had material, but the problem was that we were so busy playing shows and promoting it that we just didn’t have a block of time to do it. So we took on some new management, and it was very short-lived but they convinced us to record two singles instead of album, which is why we released “All You Need Is A Heartbeat” and “Never Enough”. We did that, and then we changed to our current manager, and we were like, “We’re going back in the studio, this is happening now”. So now this kind of puts us on a tour/album cycle where I think every year and a half or so we’ll record a new album, so there will be an album three!
Nice! So what’s behind the title, More Than The Moon?
Well, it’s one of the songs on the album, and the name of the song comes from the movie Arthur, with Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli.
Oh, I love Arthur!
As do I, it’s my favorite movie. And, she says that she was convinced the moon was following her, so when I heard that, I kind of internalized it and the song is about just…silly games in dating. Especially long ago when I was single and in the city, I had just moved there, it was just funny how certain people acted, and how it was all just kind of a game. So it being “more than the moon” is just thinking that it’s real when it’s actually real. Thank Liza for that one.
And the album art is interesting, it’s catching on and getting popular, I see on social media people are even getting tattoos of it?
It’s weird, I wouldn’t even get a tattoo of it, my mom wouldn’t get — look, if Patty Lane is not going to get a tattoo of her son’s album cover, I’m a little afraid when you want to. But I think that’s awesome, I mean, I think there are four or five people now with More Than The Moon tattoos, it’s crazy. And it’s incredibly flattering. It’s the phases of the moon in dot form, and I made it, and I had Krista, who’s our merch girl/social media person and graphic designer, she does everything with us, she took what I had made and fixed and made it actually not stick figures. I thought it was really obvious at first, and then I showed it to the band and no one knew what it was, and no one has gotten it. So I was like, “Okay, so it’s just going to be like a cool looking piece of modern art?” and they were like “yeah, why not”, so that’s why we put it on. It was there because it was there. I mean, I like the way it looks, and it means something if you explain it, but pretty much it just looks cool, you know what I mean? It’s kind of like the first album with the girl on the cover, it doesn’t mean anything, it just looks cool.
It’s just there, I get it, and that definitely suits the style you’re going for.
The vibe, yeah. I think the second album sounds a little different, so it’s going somewhere where album three ultimately will be different.
But still along the same lines, where you know you’re still listening to Station…
No, it’s going to be dubstep.
…
…
…I think you guys could pull it off. *laughs*
Eh, I don’t know. My whole thing about songwriting and production is that they are two completely different things. And I believe very strongly that a good song can be played as a rock song, a country song, a pop song, a dubstep song. What we choose to do production-wise is kind of the mood and spirit that we’re in at the time. So don’t get me wrong, I know we’ve got the long hair and the 80’s vibe, but the 80’s production that went along with the first album, I mean it’s there in the second album too, sure…it’s really just a product of us treating the songs the way we think they would sound best. So our credo is like…we have a song on the new album called “Walking Away”, and it’s completely acoustic, and there are only three parts in the song other than vocals, literally, and it doesn’t sound like the other stuff, but I thought what we did to it suited it. So our thing is that we serve the song, and if we all of a sudden woke up and started sounding country, I would expect us not to try and cram it into something else, just try to make it live and breathe, and it represents us. I think that bands that try to get into this world of, “Well, this song’s not about that, therefore we can’t play it”, I think that’s ridiculous. Write what you like and write what’s inside of you, and just do your best to make it as presentable as possible.
I understand what you’re saying, you’re not trying to take that song you wrote and force it under a template of production.
Yeah, it just doesn’t work. And to be honest with you, that gets really stale real fast. I will say, we’ve made two albums, so I would like to hope that we’re very early in our career. But even now, I listen back to things and think of other things we could have done, I think of little ways to improve on stuff, and I’ll always do that, you know? But at the same time, I can only imagine what it would be like if you had four or five tools only that you could use, and had to apply them to everything you did. Because if you did, I’d go crazy. Like…”there’s a goat that belongs in this thing, it has to be at the end!” You couldn’t do that, you’d go nuts! So, yeah.
*laughs* Also, I wanted to ask you about the music videos, when I was watching the video for “I Won’t Break Your Heart”, I noticed it said “Concept by Chris Lane”, so tell me more about that concept, and what was going through your head for that?
I like making the music videos, I’ve made all the music videos in terms of conceptualizing them and trying to set up the visuals, I’m really into that. And I also kind of like fun and happy and smiley things, so the concept of the video was that when the Station music is playing, the blank canvases come to life. And it presented a serious challenge because we filmed it here on Long Island, but the lighting consistency that you need in order to do that is monotonous. So our Director of Photography and just overall good guy, Igor, who we’ve worked with on several videos now, spent so much time lighting everything. We filmed the video in about an hour and a half, and we spent about nine hours lighting it. I can’t tell you how much sitting around and like…imagine trying to move something by half an inch, and back a quarter of an inch, and back an eighth of an inch. I mean, that’s what it was all day long. And my wife Tesh, she does interior design and stuff, so she helped stage the entire thing, helped clean it up in terms of making everything presentable, and weighing the different shapes against the wall…
Cool.
No, it wasn’t cool! Because all of a sudden she’d be like, “This deserves a long one”, and we’d be like, “We don’t have lighting for a long one!”, and it was just…a long, long, long day. Our parts were shot the next day on a green screen, so that’s a very weird experience as well…
[At this point we’re interrupted by a somewhat drunken patron who mumbles a compliment to Chris saying he “has some Slash in him”, and proceeds to make somewhat nonsensical suggestions on things to do musically “for next time”. He bids us goodnight, and Chris and I are both left thoroughly confused about what just happened. Priceless moment, as we continue on with the interview.]
…so yeah, that was a real pain in the ass.
I did want to ask you about…I haven’t interviewed you guys since before this happened, but you played the M3 Rock Festival last year.
Yes, we did!
I love the M3 Rock Festival, and I was really excited that you guys were playing that. So tell me about that whole experience.
I mean, it was a great experience. It would have been really great if they had opened the doors when we started playing, so that was a whole thing.
Oh, no!
No, they treated us really well, and the truth is that, we play a lot of festivals, and it’s very different to play a festival that’s built into a venue, because little things like press and trying to get around backstage was much easier there. It was a great experience, it was a short set, and lot of people really represented, they had flyers, they had this giant banner they made, t-shirts, and everyone was just really cool. It was a huge stage, so it was a really nice experience, a lot of fun.
Yeah, things do tend to move quickly there. But, any festival, that’s the case. And I also saw a snippet on social media, you guys played a show at Sweetwater Headquarters, you want to talk about that?
Oh, yeah! Yeah, so we were just recently on tour in the midwest, and we had a day that we were going from somewhere in Ohio down to Nashville – on the way was Fort Wayne. So, we’re musicians, so we get a lot of stuff from Sweetwater, and they’re always the best people to deal with, so we reached out about performing nearby and they’re like, “We actually have a venue on campus”, and it is a campus! Sweetwater has a whole building to go into different things that run the business, and a giant slide. We played an acoustic set in their restaurant/cafeteria area, and they were great, they gave us a tour, we all spent money because we all needed stuff, it was a great experience. It was a really cool place though, because it’s really well set up, it’s well run, and it’s open to the public, but it’s also functional. You can go and buy guitar strings, but there’s also the shipping end of it, and there’s a restaurant, and there’s a hair salon, and there’s a gym…you know what I mean? It’s really cool, it’s just very well set up, and I had no idea it was there. Because we had passed the building a million times, but from the outside, it looks like a corporate office building, it’s not, it’s just great.
You’d never know the wealth inside, right? The multitudes of…stuff!
Yeah, I had no idea — Goddamn it, Tony! The drummer is interrupting our interview now! What do you have to say for yourself?
[As Tony runs past carrying gear, he responds to Chris’ joking anger with a small squeak resembling a “meow”.]
…That’s going to be a hard sound to transcribe.
*imitates the sound*
Small, vague squeak? Anyway, I know you guys have to get your gear out of here, so I’ll start wrapping things up, coming back to tonight, you just got off the stage of a new venue, The Rail here in Smithtown…this is home turf for you!
Yeah, I grew up on Long Island. This is farther east than I grew up, but I grew up in Plainview. What’s really unfortunate is that when I grew up, in the time of Emo, and me, Mister “I Love Van Halen”, hard to get a date during that time, but I grew up in a time where there were tons and tons of music venues on Long Island. Not only were they music venues, but they were accessible to local bands who were trying to build a following, and people would go to hang out at these places. I went through high school having them around me, I went to college and I formed a band, and I came back, and they were all gone. And there have been places that we’ve embraced that were around, there used to be a great venue farther east, in Port Jefferson called Lulu’s, that we loved, unfortunately it closed down. And the reason is that it’s very hard to support the scene out here. So when we heard this opened up, all my friends’ bands who are here, we’re doing the cycle, all playing here! One was last week, I was here last week seeing them, I’m going to be here next week, so it’s cool. It’s nice to see that there’s an original local style venue, and not just something that touring acts can come through, it’s something that a local band can play, because honestly, other than this venue, I know of maybe two. It’s really sad to see, but I’m happy to see that there’s a glimmer of hope that means that maybe others will open.
Absolutely, it’s definitely exciting to have a new venue, plenty of great things on the horizon for the future. And speaking of that, why don’t you just tell me what’s on the horizon for Station?
Well, the near future, the next three months, we’re going to be playing shows all over the place, probably a big show at the end of the summer in the city, but we’ll be everywhere. Maryland, Raleigh, Atlanta, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut…everywhere but New York, pretty much. And then we’re off for the month of October because Mister Singer is getting married, and then when we come back, we hit it really hard with some touring and probably we’ll be in the studio in the middle of next year. So pretty much, we have shows all around sporadically, until October, and then some aggressive touring coming up.
Aggressive touring, sounds like a plan.
A lot of time in a bus!
I mean, that’s not a bad thing.
No, we have a power converter, so our hair dryers work.
Oh, perfect, that’s all you need. *laughs* All right, well, some great things coming up, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
Thank you!
Station: (L to R): Chris Lane, Tony Baptist, Emi Asta, Patrick Kearny
30 years of Operation: Mindcrime – Geoff Tate has been celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the iconic record this summer by taking it to the road and performing the album live from start to finish. When he and his current band lineup made a stop at the Revolution in NY, I sat down with him for an interview on the latest in the world of Geoff Tate, where we discussed the anniversary celebration, Geoff’s recent activities with bands like Avantasia and Angra, his daughter Emily’s involvement in music and the current tour, the Insania Wines brand, and more.
So just to get started off, the focus of the night would definitely be 30 years of Operation: Mindcrime. It’s not the first time you’ve performed the album start to finish live, you did it for the 25th Anniversary as well, but how does it feel for you to say “30 years of Operation: Mindcrime” and still be celebrating this iconic and well-loved work of yours?
It really is an album that I’ve appreciated more and more the more I’ve performed it. I really wasn’t planning on doing a 30-year anniversary, but I got so many requests from different promoters around the world, and they said, you know, “Let’s do it!”, so I thought, “Well, 30 years is a good time to do it because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sing it when it’s the 40 year Anniversary”. I hope so, but I’ll be well into my seventies by then, and I’m thinking “Jeez, I don’t know”. It’s pretty strenuous music to do when you’re in your seventies, but we’ll see. Hopefully I’ll still be able to belt it out.
I think you’ll still be rocking it.
I hope so. But I thought, “Well, you know, I want to do it well one more time”. So this is the 30 year anniversary and it’s great, and I’ve got this great young band of very enthusiastic young musicians who are incredible players who grew up on the music, and it’s really a treat for them to play it. So that’s kind of infectious, that kind of excitement, I feel it from them, their enthusiasm, it affects me and makes me enthusiastic, you know? It’s like that chain reaction, so we’ve been having a good time. We’ve been on tour since January, and we started in Europe and now we’re in the States and so it’s been a unique experience, I’m really happy that I did it. Very happy with this group of people and really happy with the reaction from the fans, and all the memories that people have associated with the music. It’s wonderful to hear their stories every night at the meet and greets, and hear how the music has affected people.
Definitely a lot of enthusiasm coming from the crowds. I know there’s a line wrapped around the venue right now, people just waiting to get in, so they’re definitely excited about this.
Phew! Good. *laughs*
*laughs* And, talking about the touring band, I believe one of your daughters is involved with the band as well?
Emily, my youngest daughter, is a singer, a fantastic singer. And she has a band called Til Death Do Us Part, and they have a new album out, and they’re touring with us, opening up. And we thought, wow, it’d be great, since Emily’s out here…so she’s singing the part of Sister Mary on stage with me, which is great. A fantastic experience for me and her, and the last time we did something together like this was the American Soldier tour, and she was like nine years old, something like that, and she sang with me on a song that we had recorded on the album, called “Home Again”. And now, years later, she’s grown up now, so it’s kind of a neat thing to see her progression, and it’s also kind of fun hearing the reaction from the fans who haven’t seen her or heard from her since the American Soldier tour, and here she is as a grown up woman now, you know? *laughs* They still think of her as being this little nine-year-old girl.
*laughs* That’s definitely great, getting the family involved! Are any of your other daughters involved with music?
No, she’s the only one that really…it caught her, you know? I was kind of always hoping that some of them or one of them might have followed in their father’s footsteps, so to speak…I’m lucky to have one, you know. I’ve got five girls, so at least one of them following in the music, I’m happy about that.
It had to catch on with at least one. I did want to talk to you about, well, we’ve spoken a couple of times before, over the phone, for interviews during the time of the album trilogy of Operation: Mindcrime…
Yeah.
…So, now that project is all complete, how is it for you now, kind of stepping back and looking back on the whole project?
Well, I’m really not one to look back. This 30 year anniversary of Operation: Mindcrime is as much of a look back as I go. *laughs* And that’s looking way back. I’m kind of a guy that is always looking at the next thing that I’m doing, so I’m happy to get the last of the trilogy albums finished, I’m glad that it’s out now and people can enjoy it and find all the mysteries that are associated with the story. I’m glad it’s out and done, it was a wonderful experience being part of that whole presentation…but a lot of work. Two years, three albums, that’s a lot of work to do. So now I need a break, so now I’m touring. *laughs*
Taking a break but still out on the road!
I’m relaxing now.
During the Operation: Mindcrimeproject, it was kind of a rotating lineup from stage to studio and back again, so is that still the plan moving forward now that the albums are complete?
Yeah, I like a rotating project of different people coming in and out, I like to work with a lot of people. Just before I started this tour, I was in Germany singing tracks for the new Avantasia album, I’ll be touring with them next year starting in March. I’m kind of going from one big project to another big project, you know, so it’s kind of fun. *laughs* But yeah, I like to keep changing it up. I’m working with another European band, called Bonfire, in the fall, I’m doing a special guest appearance with them. I’m doing some dates in Brazil with a band called Angra…yeah, I just kind of try a lot of different things, you know? Things that are interesting to me.
That’s great, and yeah, I’m definitely familiar with Angra, how did that connection with them come about?
I met them on my travels, and Felipe Andreoli is a guy that I really connected with, great bass player, and he introduced me to his band and that just kind of started our relationship, and since then, we’ve done a couple of different touring projects together. Felipe put together a wonderful band of fantastic Brazilian musicians to support me in Brazil for some shows I did there last year, where I met Bruno Sa, my keyboard player now, who came and started touring with me, so…it’s all kind of incestuous, I know. *laughs*
*laughs* Just all connected in some way.
We’re all connected by six degrees of madness, I think.
There you go, the best kind of connection. I also wanted to ask you about your wine brand, the latest news with Insania Wines, you have some that just became available in the US, I believe. Can you tell me a little more about the wine brand, what got you started with that whole scene?
Yeah, well I’ve been making wine since 2007, and that’s my first vintage. And it’s a passion I’ve had, I love wine. I love all kinds of different wines, I love to travel, and I love to try wines from different places I go, and so I’ve had a lot of experience…drinking? That doesn’t sound right! *laughs*
*laughs*
You know what I mean!
Yeah, you know, a…specialist? In wine, however you want to say it.
I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of wine, but…
Connoisseur, there it is.
But not really a connoisseur…you can appreciate wine from a number of different vendors and winemakers, and there’s some fantastic wine-growing regions around the world, and I try to travel through them and experience them, and decided to make my own. So now I make Insania, which is my brand, and we make a Pinot Noir, a red wine, and a Pinot Grigio, which is a white wine. And they’re grown at a wonderful vineyard in the Alsace region, which kind of straddles the border of Germany and France. And it’s a wonderful area, fantastic grapes, and a centuries old tradition of wine-making there. My wine maker Friedhelm Rinklin is a fourth generation wine maker, he’s fantastic. And his family has been farming this particular piece of land for four hundred years. Isn’t that something?
Wow, that’s definitely something.
It’s something. So, they kind of know what they’re doing.
I would hope so, after four hundred years.
Yeah. And it’s all organic grapes, which I love, I’m a big supporter of the organic movement. So anyway, that’s a little bit about the wine, and now it’s available in the United States for the first time, we’ve had our first shipment coming to the United States in March, so now people can find it here. It’s easier to buy it online now, we ship it to you, and in some states we have distribution, you can find it in wine shops, Whole Foods, places like that.
Very cool, good for you. And you were mentioning your Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio…when it came to selecting the styles and types of wines, how did you go about making those choices?
Well, I love Pinot Noir. I love Pinor Noir that’s grown in France, I love it in Southern California…there’s some wonderful areas in the world where it grows. A certain strand of it grows well in Germany, too, and France. But I wanted it to be bigger and more full bodied than the German style normally is, so Friedhelm and I worked for six years to develop a great variety that would work really well in our area. So we did that and I’m very happy with it. It’s a big, bold Pinot Noir. A lot of times, Pinot Noir are kind of touchy and maybe more of a medium body wine, but this one’s big and bold and it has a lot of personality. It’s really great with food. So that’s kind of why I chose it, just because I like it.
It’s a good reason.So now, getting back to the musical side of things, something else I wanted to ask you about, late last year you collaborated with the organization MercyWatch, had that charity auction and concert, so how did you get involved with that?
I met a very inspirational man named Dennis Kelly, he is a real powerhouse of a personality who believes in humanity and helping people. And he started this project that’s called MercyWatch, and they are just like on the ground, in the trenches, working with people who are experiencing homelessness and have drug addiction issues and mental illness. And he put together this fantastic group of doctors, and therapists, and counselors, and psychologists, professionals in the medical field who volunteer their time, their energies, and their money, to help people. And he asked me if I was interested in that kind of thing, I said I was, and he said, “I thought you were because of your music, I’ve read and listened to your music over the years, and I’ve seen some examples of your humanity in your music”. So anyway, we got into a conversation that led me to be interested in what he was doing, and since then, I’ve done two charity shows for him, and I’m just about to put out a song for sale that the proceeds go to MercyWatch too. Just haven’t finished it yet because I’m touring. *laughs*
Well, little hard to do that from right here in the bus, right? *laughs* But still, that’s great. It sounds like you’ve got a lot of great things going on.
I do! I’ve got a lot of stuff going on, I was going to try to slow down a little bit, but it seems like when you try to slow down, you get more opportunities that come up. So I’m lucky that I get to pick and choose now, kind of, what I want to do, but…there’s just a lot of things I want to do! *laughs*
Nothing wrong with that at all! But it looks like there’s mostly touring on the horizon…
Yeah, I love touring. I love traveling, I love touring, I love seeing old friends, and seeing what’s going on. It’s cool to go to places over and over again, because you’re not there every day, you come maybe once or twice in a year, and you notice the changes, I think. I love this area around here, Amityville and Long Island, I’ve got a lot of great memories from growing up in the rock and roll world, traveling through here playing clubs, and big places and meeting some real exciting people that have been part of my life in the industry all these years. It’s just wonderful looking back at all the memories, all the experiences, it’s countless.
That’s awesome, and as a native Long Islander, I’m happy to hear that you like the area, and we like having you here as well. So to wrap things up here, why don’t you just give a little message to the fans who are just as excited as you are for the show tonight?
I want to say thanks for listening all these years, and I hope to keep making music.
Thanks so much for sitting down and talking with me, this has been great.
From Out of the Skies, Bulletboys have arrived with a new record this year, and the follow-up to Elefanté is full of surprises for fans, new and old ones alike. It’s always a pleasure to chat with the great Bulletboys frontman Marq Torien, and just before the band embarked on their first-ever journey to Australia, I was able to sit down for a in-depth phoner with Marq, discussing everything from the new record and tour to a few exciting announcements.
I’ll just get started right off talking about your new album, From Out of the Skies, I’m really excited about that…
Well, thank you!
…Of course, because I know anything Bulletboys is always going to be great, but especially because I’ve been seeing the steps and stages along the way on social media, right from when you first started recording in Studio 606 last year. Lots of great things surrounding the album, but let’s start with songwriting – what was your approach initially going into this record?
To try to outdo Elefanté. *laughs* I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve been asked that question before…you know, we released Elefanté about three years ago, and we received so many accolades and amazing reviews, and we charted Top 5 with it at CMJ National Rock Radio Charts, and we got a taste of a little bit of success with that record, and when I put together this record, I wanted to do something that was completely paying homage to my R&B roots, my punk rock roots, funk roots, and metal and hard rock. So, I wanted to write something that was different for the eyes and the ears of our fans, but also for new fans, just to facilitate something that’s basically, from our supposed genre, that came from a different place and that also showed the prowess of the different musicalities that this band has.
That’s cool – I definitely really love the sound of the first single, “D-Evil”, so what’s behind that one?
You know, all the songs on this album basically have some sort of correlation with the city of Los Angeles, where I’m from, so a lot of these songs are storytelling of different situations, people, what have you, being born and raised here. “D-Evil”’s just basically a song about people taking the other side and trying to do something in a positive light, but trying to facilitate evil. In the song, it says, “You’ve got that evil up inside you”, and the other voice is saying “No, no, I don’t want any of that”, you know? *laughs* “I have to deal with that every single day”, and the chorus is, you know, “Y’all are living your lives like it’s the end of the world”, so that statement is that a lot of people have lived in that type of situation here. They start believing in their own self-truths and self-lies, and all of a sudden you’re caught up in this crazy game of trying to be this famous person here in the city – some people make it and some people don’t. So that’s basically what that song’s about. And I’m very, very fortunate to have one of my best friends on that song, Mr. Jesse Hughes from the Eagles of Death Metal, who came in with his amazing voice and sang the choruses and pre-choruses with me. It’s just magical that he came in and sang on this stuff, I just love him and love the band.
Awesome, it definitely all came together really nicely. That is interesting about the Los Angeles connection there, I hadn’t really picked up on that in the record, but it is making sense now that you mention it. We have talked about that before too, your L.A. roots, so it’s good you’ve got that correlation.
Thank you, you know, I have a couple catch phrases and basically, we’re bringing the Southern California swagger with this record. We’re also bringing a punk rock and a punk-n-roll chic vibe on this record. It definitely embodies the sounds of L.A., and for all intents and purposes, every song has a flow to it. So, the record flows, it was written kind of in old-school format where if you listen to the whole record, it just flows down, you’re able to have peaks and valleys and twists and turns on it, so definitely, this record is quite a different record for us. But we are completely stoked, and with all the rad accolades we’ve been receiving for this, it’s been very, very humbling.
Oh, I’m sure. And it is interesting because you guys, I think, have a very unique sound anyway, but a lot of people do associate you and the Bulletboys in general with the 80’s Hard Rock/Glam Metal scene – you played Hair Nation Festival, things like that…but your sound has changed considerably in recent years, and especially from Elefanté and now Skies, it seems you’ve got this classic/modern blend with your own twist, it’s like you’re morphing over time.
Yeah, you pretty much summed it up in a nutshell. I mean, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We, collectively, were able to really dig in and just say, “What would be good for us?” You know, sometimes we’re worried about our families, friends, and fans all the time, and basically I kind of stepped back and really said, “What would be good for us?”, you know? And Chad goes, “For us to do our own thing, what we want to do. Let’s not put this pressure on us that we have to write constantly for the older fans or for this and that, let’s write for us.” So these past two records, we really wrote them for us, and not in a demonstratively selfish way, but in more of a…trying to find where we were coming from, and especially how would we have reinvented the band, where we were going to go to. I never wanted the Bulletboys to be known for just a sex joint cock rock hair band, you know, from the music from our past and stuff. It’s very eclectic still, when we go into our second record still, we did different things…”Hang On, St. Christopher”, we had that as our single, so there was always something different that we were throwing out, rather than being part of all the rest of the bands that came out from that time. So we’ve always had this eclectic thing and eclectic sound, and I’ve always thought we had this punk rock sneer and the band’s attitude, and people are always like, “Oh well, you guys are kind of like Van Halen”, and I’m like, “Well, we’re not, we’re kind of like the evil Van Halen”. *laughs* You know?
*laughs* I love that!
For real, and I mention that statement all the time, because we kind of were, and now we’re like…when I talk with my really close friends, I say we’ve been kind of labeled as the villains of our genre, because a lot of bands don’t understand what we do, and don’t understand how we’re getting away with doing new music. Like when we play our shows, people are screaming new songs and songs that they are familiar with from Elefanté, and our new songs too, so some of the bands that we play with from our supposed genre, they’re going, “How are you guys doing this? I mean, you’re playing a song called ‘Symphony’ off your record, and everybody’s singing it. I’ve never heard it.” *laughs* It’s like, you’ve never heard “Symphony”? Come on! So that’ll happen and they’ll be like, “No, I need to go get that record!”, and it’s like, “Well, it’s obvious I’m completely behind the times because the crowd isn’t”. So we get that a lot, but we also get the fact that we like to play with other bands out of our genre, and we’ve done that many, many times. I feel, in this day and age, that we should all be playing out of each others’ genre. We toured a lot, to be really, really honest with you, Chelsea, we did most of our touring in the 90’s, so we came in the tail end of the 80’s, and everybody that always wants to bring us the old, “Yeah, you guys are from the 80’s”, we’re actually from the 90’s because we did tour and release most of our records in the 90’s. So a lot of those bands from that other genre, from the Seattle genre or what have you…we have a lot of fans from all genres. So we’re like this anomaly because of the fact that we do that, we have all creeds, all colors, all sexualities, all everything, because we love everybody as a whole. We have no ego in my band, we’re more on a punk rock level. We love on everybody, we do more benefits than we actually do anything else, we’re always giving back to the community, that’s a very big thing to me. We came from a genre that was very selfish, where I believe that a lot of bands were very – and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way in saying this – it was more of a “me”-generated music, and by being still able to be in this business and facilitating music in this business, I’ve changed a lot. I’ve gone through a lot in my personal life, so I really tried to step up musically, as we all do collectively in this band, to do something on a positive note. So that’s where we always are and we’re always doing these different things, so we don’t do the normal things that maybe bands from our genre do, and we never became…what Guns ’N’ Roses did, you know, how huge Guns ’N’ Roses were, or Bon Jovi, so we were always kind of this underdog band, and going back to the record, this new record facilitates that because the sentiment on this record is basically the underdog who never wins. So that’s what this new record is all about, it has those feelings throughout the whole record, but it also has a light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s kind of where we are as a band. I don’t mind the moniker of the villain because we’re fun-loving villains, and a little villainy is pretty badass in rock’n’roll these days. *laughs*
Oh hell yeah, definitely! *laughs* I always love interviewing you, Marq, you’ve always got this great positive outlook and you seem like a really positive person. You know, you were saying about making the decision to write what you want to be writing and doing things your way – not only is that good for all you guys in the band personally, but I think in making that decision to do your own thing rather than attempting to appeal to any specific target, you’re also widening your fan base even more by doing that.
You know, here’s the thing, Chelsea. I deal with a lot of negativity in this business – and thank you for saying that – I do get in certain situations sometimes where I feel very negative, and I try to get out of those feelings. I have some great people around me, it’s not the easiest to do what we’re doing right now with a band like us. There’s not always the financial capabilities, so we try to do the best that we can with what we have, and we try to appease our fans, and try to do everything, but the fact that we’re still doing this is actually a blessing. We’re very, very fortunate to be doing what we’re doing. We just got back from a fourteen-day UK run, which was really great and very successful, and on May 3rd, we’re heading off to Australia for the first time, and we have four dates out there. So everything’s happening for us right now and we’re really stoked. With our company that we’re with, Frontiers Music Srl, we are kind of an anomaly there too, because we’re not this classic band doing the classic albums, we’ve moved on and they’re letting us grow, which is great. We’re doing a lot of things that a lot of those bands from that label aren’t doing. You know, we traveled to the UK, we’re going to Australia. We’re off on our spring tour here for about a month, and toward the latter part of the summer, we just signed a contract to be doing the Sirius Hair Nation/Live Nation tour. So we’re very, very excited about that.
Very cool! I actually had not heard about that.
So we’ll be playing some badass venues, yeah! I’m just announcing it today, letting people know, we’re going to actually be shooting a commercial today for the event, and I personally, for my band and myself, I would like to thank Live Nation and give them so much love, and we’re very humbled and very appreciative that we were called to do this. It’s a really big thing for my band, and we work very, very hard and that we’re getting accolades from Live Nation, just want to pass on the love to Live Nation, tell them how much we love them.
Good for you guys, I love this.
Yeah, man! You know, we’re just doing our thing. For as long as the band’s been around, the fact that we’re doing our thing and we’re getting people that are being champions of our band from other genres, the fact that we recorded this at 606 and Dave Grohl let us in and Jesse sang on this…it’s just very magical to me. It’s a very magical situation and I really feel very blessed, and every day I wake up and I say, “Man…we’re moving it. We’re movin’ and we’re shakin’.” *laughs*
That you are! And that is exciting about the Australia tour as well, I was going to ask you about that – Is it the first you’ve ever visited, or just the first you’ve toured there?
No, it’s our first time ever in Australia, I’ve never visited there and we’re really looking forward to it. We leave for there out of LA on the third, then we’re out there playing shows, then we come back. We’re out on our spring tour with a great band opening up for us called 20 Spot, out of Chicago, lllinois. And we also have Enuff Z’nuff, going to be performing some select dates on that tour, so we’re just moving, we keep going.
And Enuff Z’nuff was on that UK tour with you as well, right?
Yes, they were – I have a long friendship with Chip and he’s out there doing his thing, they’re getting ready to put out their new record, and they just sound great. I love playing with Chip because he’s an amazing musician. It’s just fun for me, we’re going to be playing with a lot of different bands this year, so we’re really looking forward to it.
Just a few days ago you – minus Bulletboys, I believe it was just you individually – performed in a Nick Menza tribute, at the Lucky Strike Hollywood, how was that?
Yes, yes, that was great! I got called in kind of last minute from my drummer, and we were able to jam on a couple Van Halen songs – you know, I love Nick Menza, I can’t believe he’s gone. Amazing drummer, he had a fondness for my band and for what we do, so it was just nice to be there and be able to give back to his family. There was a lot of great musicians there and there was a lot of stuff happening that night, so it was great and we really had a wonderful time.
I also hear you’re going to be on AXSTV soon? I saw a little snippet on social media…care to share what that was for or is it going to be a surprise reveal?
No, absolutely! Shout out to AXSTV, thank you for having me. It was really, really cool, it’s going to be a special that they’re going to start doing, basically talking about the 1970’s. My show was about 1973, I got to talk about a lot of the bands that were around at that time and their music, their eclectic music…I really can’t get into the bands just because I want everyone to watch the show, but it was really amazing, we got treated so well and it was something that I’ve never done before. There’s going to be a lot of rock personalities on this show for AXSTV, this event’s going to be very, very rad. I believe that Lita Ford was doing something also, she was there before me, and I ran into my good friend Erik Turner from Warrant, who I love dearly, got to see him. And we were real excited chatting about stuff, saying about how this show is really, really great because they actually got guys from our genre to talk about a different genre. So I think that’s really rad of AXSTV, and we’re very grateful that they asked us to do it.
You know, I’ve always loved AXSTV, and I’m really looking forward to this program now that you’re telling me about it.
Oh, I love AXSTV, I watch it all the time. I mean, I really do, there’s so many great things on there from interviews with Dan Rather to concerts…we don’t get to see that anymore. I was watching a John Fogerty concert the other day, and I was going, “God, I just love John Fogerty!” Oh my God, I’m such a big Creedence fan from day one, from when I was a kid. You see John up there playing and the band sounds incredible and he just looks great and sounds incredible…so, I hope that God blesses me with as long a career as his.
Aww, absolutely. So jumping back to the album From Out of the Skies, have you started including any tracks off of it in your setlists yet?
Absolutely, we actually play about two or three songs from the new record, so you will definitely be hearing the new record, plus our big hits and video hits, and songs from Elefanté. We’re just throwing in a bunch of different eclectic songs, so we’re trying to make sure that our hits are there, but also to take people on a great, magical, rad journey with us as we perform live.
And it always is a lot of fun seeing you guys perform live.
A lot of energy.
Yeah, so much energy! One of the most memorable ones I’ve seen was the Hair Nation Festival, that was such a large-scale outdoor show, it was a lot of fun with you guys, you had the Pistolettes…
And the horn sections, yes! I love to do that, the big shows, I love to bring in the horns and bring in the gals from the Pistolettes and really take it to another level. Bands aren’t really doing that from my genre, so that’s something that we like to do for the fans and for us, you know, it’s really fun for us.
And it’s a pretty large-scale U.S. tour following your brief blurb in Australia there, it looks like you’re covering a lot of ground.
Yeah, we sure are!
Well, thank you so much for talking with me about all this, I’ve been excited to talk with you about the new record since I first heard about the single coming out, and when I saw there was a new music video, it was like “Yes! New Bulletboys, awesome”.
Yeah, man, we love that video, it just was super great, it had a lot of stuff that we’d been talking about, so we’re getting ready to hopefully shoot another video, but we’re going to be shooting different things from the city here, and taking film of different places where we’ve been – of course, the UK, and what have you. Our next video’s going to be really rad.
And what track is that going to be for?
You know, I can’t really share that right now. I would like to, but I’d like it to be a surprise for everybody. I wanted to say one thing though, we do have a Japanese release of this record, and on that Japanese release, there was a bonus track added that we did, and we redid the classic song from The Temptations, “Get Ready”. And it sounds just amazingly rad, and was actually supposed to be on our record that was going to drop in the States, but for some reason that song never made it on the record. It should’ve been, but it was actually used for a bonus track for Japan. So there’s a little…intrigue for the record, so for anyone out there who gets the Japanese version, they’re going to be hearing a song called “Get Ready”. So, we’re just really down with that song too and we will probably be playing that live and it will actually be coming out at some point to facilitate what we’re doing with the record here in the States.
Sounds like everyone needs to get their hands on the Japanese version now.
Yeah, man!
Especially if you’re going to be playing it live. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you on this upcoming tour, so I’ll be catching it then too. So just to wrap things up here, Marq, do you want to just give an outlook of the near future for the Bulletboys, and maybe a little message to fans?
Yes. Travel, travel, travel, rock the house, blowing roofs off of places, and bringing love and compassion to every place that we possibly can, and I want to thank everybody for being so kind and so loving and so instrumental in making this new record, for us, a success. And thank you, Chelsea, for having me.
Thank you! And that sounds like a great game plan, I love it.
Thank you, Chelsea, we love you so much and thank you for your thoughts on the record, I’m glad you love it. We’ve been getting nothing but 5/5 and 10/10, so it’s completely out of control magical to me. I’m just completely humbled by the whole situation for real.
Thanks so much, you guys are awesome – I’ll be seeing you pretty soon out on the tour!
Trauma is back with a killer new record, As The World Dies, recently released on May 11th. With the lineup of Donny Hillier (Vocals), Joe Fraulob (Guitar), Steve Robello (Guitar), Greg Christian (Bass), and Kris Gustofson (Drums), Trauma recently hit the road for a brief pre-release tour from West Coast to East and back again – and I sat down with the band in Brooklyn for a great chat about As The World Dies, the music videos set to accompany the record, how the current lineup of Trauma came together, plus plenty of stories from past 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruises (which, after this interview, we all expect to see Trauma on in 2019!).
Starting right off, first thing I really want to talk about is, of course, the new record. We were just talking about it, I’m excited about it, I think every track on it is killer. It’s coming out pretty soon and after being separated for a long time, it’s great that Trauma has been so active these days, between Rapture and Wrath a couple years back, now you’re on this record, As The World Dies, so let’s start by talking a bit about what went into the album.
Donny Hillier: The person that put the most work into the album is Joe, because he also produced it, wrote the music on the majority of the songs, so…Joe, have at it.
Let’s hear it, Joe.
Joe Fraulob: Well, I don’t know, I first got in the band about a year ago, these guys had the gig for 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise and were looking to kind of revamp the lineup, so we got together and the first song we wrote, even before we played on that, “The Rage”, we just wrote it right away and the chemistry was good right from the gate. So, after we did that show, the plan was right from then, “Let’s make a record”, and we ended up, as the record was getting started, getting Greg Christian on bass, and just went from there. I mean, the chemistry was good, we wrote up the songs really quick, but the goal was just to make the best album we possibly could that sonically sounded the best. And like you said, we tried to make it so every track was good, you know? No filler, just like an old-school record, like the original Trauma records! 45 minutes long, ten songs, you sit down and listen to it, and hopefully once it’s done, you’re like, “That’s it? Let me turn it on again”, you know? One of those types of records. So we’re really proud of it, I’m really proud of it, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and it came out great.
Awesome.
Donny: It is the best, it’s the best thing.
Joe: We’re really excited about it, we’re playing like 5 songs off of it right now and a bunch of the old stuff, we really like it.
Greg Christian: For me, and I’ve been on a lot of records, this is my favorite record that I’ve done. I just can’t wait ’til this comes out so people can hear it.
Donny: The record’s kind of leaking out to people, and that’s really good because we’re getting some really nice thoughts on it. You know, and it makes us feel like we’re on the right track.
Kris Gustofson: You know, it’s really hard to do after the band had been on a hiatus like it’s been, and the last record that we did, it was good but it doesn’t compare to this one at all. And also, we didn’t have this lineup.
Donny: We didn’t have two guitarists.
Kris: True!
Donny: And that’s a must.
Yeah, I was going to ask you guys about that, because it is a new lineup, but Donny and Kris, you have been in Trauma for the longest time. Do you see this as following up on Rapture and Wrath, or something just completely all new and separate?
Kris: Something completely different. You know, the Rapture and Wrath thing, that came about – we worked on the tunes and everything for that quite a bit, but…we felt after we recorded it, when we heard the playback of it and everything, it felt like it wasn’t the record we needed to do yet. It was okay, but I just felt that it wasn’t up to par yet at all. And it had a lot to do with, we didn’t have the songs, and we didn’t have the right lineup. That’s what I think.
Donny: I agree. Because we were gone for so long, really what we did is we worked with what we had and just kept pushing for the right people, and just kept going. We kept moving, and we had challenges here and there, but we just believed that we could rebuild a kickass heavy Trauma. And I think we’ve done that.
I think you’ve done it too.
Donny: Great!
Kris: Actually, one thing I would like to say too is, being a drummer in this band, the one I’ve got to say is I’m really proud of the guys in this band. It took us a long time to really find the right guys, and thank God we were able to pull it off.
And the current lineup that you have, how did it all come together and come about?
Steve Robello: I think it started with me. They called me, and because they had done the Rapture and Wrath record, but their bass player at the time had trouble with his passport, and so I was asked to come in to play bass. Just as a favor, to go out, they had some Europe dates, and I said, “Yeah, cool, okay”, and I went out and did it, it was fun, I came home and said, “Hey, thanks a lot”. Then, they called me a year later and said, “Hey, we’re kind of looking for a guitar player”. We were working with various other guitar players and it was going pretty good, but I don’t think we really had the chemistry. I made a phone call to some friends in Sacramento and Joe Fraulob’s name came up…and when Joe Fraulob came onto the scene, it was amazing for me personally as a guitarist, because we have really similar styles. Not only our influences, but I think our stage thing, everything about it, has been very very seamless, and it’s been great. Then, you know, I’ve got connections with the Bay Area – you know, Testament and all that stuff – so, we were again looking for a bass player, and it took a little coaxing to get Greggy in the band, but…last piece of the puzzle, man, it’s…
Kris: Absolutely.
Steve: That was it.
Nice, the most recent addition, right?
Steve: Yeah.
Greg: Well, because I was really just set on doing the Trinity Fallen thing and it just didn’t really pan out. Basically, the guitarist that I had for a long time ended up leaving and we got another guitarist in, and the whole style of it kind of changed, and it ended up being really different from what it first started out with. And when all that kind of fell apart all around me, you know, I’d been talking to these guys about Trauma and I just went for it 100% at that point.
Joe: You know, I remember you kind of came in just to do that one song originally…
Donny: “The Rage”.
Joe: …and it just came out so awesome, dude. Like, it is a really good chemistry, it all matched together, and actually on the recording, all of our styles go together well. I’ve always played in like, one guitar bands, and so that’s why, like Steve was saying, when we hooked up, it was sort of amazing that our styles came together so good, you know?
Steve: I knew within…literally, I don’t think I ever told you this…but I knew within a half hour, “Yeah, this is the guy that I want to be in whatever band with, that I want to write songs and play with”.
Donny: But you know what was a funny twist of fate though, was Steve was going to be the other guitarist in the lineup that did Rapture and Wrath, but he had to leave the band shortly after joining, because he started a brewery: Cool Beer Works, Cool, California.
Steve: *laughs*
*laughs* Throwing in a subtle advertisement.
Donny: And he started a brewery/restaurant/nightclub, and as an entrepreneur, that took all his time, so he had to drop out. But if he had been there that whole lineup, that album would have sounded different.
Kris: Oh, heck yeah.
Steve: And for me, I always told myself if I ever get in another band, I’ll never play in another two-guitar band…but yet here I am.
There you are again. And you guys were talking about the setlist earlier – kind of a mixture of classic and the new record, so I did just want to ask a little more about that – you’re got the tour run going on right now, so what is going into this Trauma setlist? How much of the new record are we going to hear?
Donny: Five songs from the new album, two songs from Rapture and Wrath, and the rest, Scratch and Scream.
Good balance, I like that.
Joe: Yeah, that sort of varies too, depending on how crazy people are getting, we’re playing a few extra, or…maybe one less. *laughs* No, it’s been going pretty good actually, we’ve been having some really good crowds and a lot of old-school fans bringing their Scratch and Scream records, tickets, and all that, so it’s really fun.
Donny: I signed like, three Metal Massacre II albums in Chicago, which was a real surprise. It always surprises me when people whip that out.
That’s pretty cool. I also heard mention just now of the 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise, so you two (Donny and Kris) were on it, were the rest of you part of Trauma yet?
Donny: The four of us, without Greg.
Kris: Greg did it with Testament.
Joe: Yeah, that’s what sealed that “This band is awesome, but the bass player isn’t the right guy”.
Steve: We had just one missing piece, and…
Joe: …And I remember Steve even said, “You know who would be the perfect guy would be Greg Christian”, and we were like, “Yeah”, and then he’s like, “But…that probably isn’t going to happen”.
Ha – well, it happened!
Donny: So we would like to do 70,000 Tons of Metal again, with Greg Christian.
Joe, Steve, Kris: Yeah!
Yeah, there you go! Go for 2019.
Greg: I would like to do it again with Trauma this time. We were on the very first one, Testament and I. And I guess they did it since then, after I left the band, but that was the only time I was on 70,000 Tons.
Donny: Yeah, he was on the one where the beer ran out.
Greg: Yes. They were a couple of hours late pulling out of port because there was a big funeral procession for some police officers that had gotten killed in Miami that day, and one of the production trucks got caught up in the traffic, so it was a couple hours late leaving port, and by the time we rolled out of port, they had sold as much booze as they normally do on a four-day trip.
Kris: *laughs*
Steve: Wow!
Greg: They had drank the ship completely dry, by the time we got to Cozumel, Mexico like halfway through the trip, there was not a drop of alcohol left on the ship. And then they restocked like four times the normal amount. It was kind of funny because we went to a little private get-together at the guy who puts it all together’s apartment or hotel after that first cruise, and he was telling us what the Royal Caribbean people told him – first off, that yes, it went really well and they were going to do it again, you know, that was kind of a test run – and a couple things that they brought up was one, they sold like four times as much booze as normal, and the other thing that was real interesting was that compared to a normal Royal Caribbean cruise, there was not a single complaint from anyone on the 70,000 Tons when there was normally like…however many people complaining about, you know, the food or somebody being rude to them, like that, but there was not a single complaint.
Because Metalheads are the best, that’s why.
Steve: That’s the metal.
Joe: Yeah, it’s incredible too, it’s just all packed with Metalheads that are crazy, and everybody just stays up all night, bands running ‘round the clock, four different stages, every kind of metal, yeah, it is awesome. It’s the most hardcore Metalheads in the world.
Steve: Over 70 countries.
Joe: And everybody gets along.
Kris: The guy that puts that on, he’s got it dialed. The sound in every room is, like, perfect.
Joe: It’s a great time though, if you’re into metal, you have to go on that.
Kris: I mean, people from around the world, you know, the thing sells out every year, something anybody that’s into this kind of music should check out.
It must be interesting for you guys, because I’m sure the concept of a cruise just for metal music is not something anybody would have thought of in the Bay Area Thrash formative years there.
Greg: Especially like a Royal Caribbean cruise. There were a couple fights on the first one, but nobody wanted to press charges or anything, and the only damages were, I think one railing got kind of knocked over…
Not bad, not bad.
Greg: …and there were a couple cigarette burns in the carpeting. Considering the amount of booze they sold, and everything else, the Royal Caribbean people were totally down to do it again.
Well, that’s not the worst things to come out with, sounds like it went pretty smoothly.
Donny: The staff consistently told us it’s their favorite cruise of the year, they really look forward to it because the people are so cool.
Greg: ‘Cause normally, the staff are not allowed to fraternize with the guests, but on the metal cruise, everyone was always trying to talk to people on the staff, “Hey, come on, have a drink with us”, you know like, at first the people who work there were all nervous about it, but by the end of the cruise there were all lightened up a little bit. They all thought, “Oh, we’re all going to get in trouble here with our bosses” or whatever, but nobody cared. It’s a different mentality than the old rich people who usually go on a cruise.
So getting back to As The World Dies, any plans for music videos alongside the album?
Joe: Actually, we’ve got a really cool artist guy right now that’s doing a lyric video, but his videos are insane, there’s a lot of really insane art that he puts out. So we’re doing a lyric video for “The Rage”, should hopefully be out almost right away, but then we’re probably going to do a regular video.
Steve: I think the one that I see the most is the second one we’re going to promote heavily, it’s called “Savage”. And it’s about, you know, an abused woman getting back, and when I see the imagery of that video, it’s basically like the movie, I Spit On Your Grave. Brutal. You know, “You messed with the wrong chick”. So I think that’s going to be a really good one to do the actual video to.
Joe: And hopefully we do videos for a lot of it. I mean, we want to really work the heck out of this record, because like you were saying and like we were saying, we really believe in it. So hopefully there will be quite a few videos coming down there.
It’s kind of a shorter but very solid touring run that you’re on right now, so what are the plans for the near future with Trauma?
Greg: Hopefully to get on tour with a national act, a proper tour. I think that once the record comes out and if it builds a little bit of hype, that’ll put us in a much better position to do that.
Joe: Yeah. Getting the record done was our priority, we even had some other opportunities to tour that we were just set and we were adamant that, “We’ve got to finish this record”, and we’re not going to rush it and we’re not going to do any of that. We wanted to do something perfect, or as close as we could make it. So it’s coming out, going to radio here pretty quick, and then we’ll see once we start selling it what happens, but yeah – like Greg said, I think we’ll be able to go out and do some bigger tours, and just keep building it.
Sounds awesome. Well, thank you guys all so much for sitting down with me, this was really fun talking with you.
*Assorted “thank you’s” from the band*
As The World Dies is out now via The Orchard/Sony. Visit: https://www.facebook.com/TraumaThrash/ for more on the band and all the details on the record.
Between his time in Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, Dio, Blue Oyster Cult, and so many other iconic bands and projects, Rudy Sarzo is unquestionably a legend of the rock world – not too long ago, this legend made an appearance at the Long Island Kiss Expo, in support of his book Off The Rails. During his time at the Expo, Rudy took part in a Q&A session, giving the audience the opportunity to ask him questions about his remarkable career. Though I did get an extended opportunity to ask plenty of questions during our interview later on, I still hopped up and chimed in during the Q&A simply to ask about how Rudy got involved with The Guess Who. He mentioned his time in Geoff Tate’s Queenrÿche, and said that while he was touring with the band, Sass Jordan came in for the part of Sister Mary – her husband is the lead singer of The Guess Who – and when the band needed someone on bass a few years later, she suggested they call Rudy. Here’s what he had to say about it: “I grew up listening to The Guess Who, and playing their music in teen dances I used to play back in the 60’s and early 70’s, so I was very familiar with them, and I got the call and I’ve been having a blast. At the time I got the call, it was not official that the original bassist was retiring yet, so he would just go on and off the road. Then after about six months doing occasional dates with them, they asked me if I wanted to be a permanent member, and I said “yeah, of course” and I’ve been there ever since having a blast. We have a new record coming out in September, we’re touring, hopefully we get to tour in this area here, Northern East Coast. Meanwhile, we’ve been touring the Caribbean, we were in Nassau, the Bahamas, and it’s great. Then back down to Orlando, we’re going to be at Orlando Epcot Center doing four days coming up in a couple of weeks”.
A nice update on The Guess Who’s activities, with an album on the horizon later this year. Now, I’ll fast forward to our interview shortly after the Expo, where we discussed everything from Rudy’s book, his love of animals and stance as an animal rights advocate, stories from the studio with Quiet Riot and Rudy’s background in audio engineering and recording right down to bass techniques, and even his appearance on a television show intrinsically connected with Long Island. Rudy Sarzo is a delight to speak with, and he seems to enjoy conversing and getting to know one as a person just as much as sharing his vast musical knowledge and stories of his incredible career. I’m happy to share my interview with him right here:
I want to pick up where we left off, I asked you a question during the Q&A about the Guess Who, how you got involved with them and all, discussed the Guess Who and how you got involved with them and during your answer, you also brought up Geoff Tate’s Queensrÿche, also known as Operation: Mindcrime, so I just wanted to know a little more about that.
When I was playing with him, it was just known as Geoff Tate’s Queensrÿche, to differentiate it from the other Queensrÿche. And while we were on tour, both sides came to an agreement which I was not privy to because it was none of my business, but one side retained the name, the brand, Queenrÿche, and Geoff Tate, I don’t know what kind of arrangement he had with them, but he decided to call his band Operation: Mindcrime, which I was not a part of. I was part of it prior to that turning point.
Right, that clears things up. The first real thing I really want to talk with you about is not necessarily about music, but anyone who glances at your social media can tell you’re definitely an animal lover, but you seem to be quite the activist for animal rights. Is that something that you’ve always been involved with throughout your life? What got you on the path for that?
“Always”…that is a really good question, because once you bring the “always” into something, “always” has a beginning. Right? And “always” to me means like from the very beginning, and from the very beginning was not so, because it wasn’t until…I’ve had four Yorkshire Terriers, we have our fourth, who happens to be a puppy, she’s not even two years old yet, and I’ve learned so much from having a furry baby in our family. You know, unconditional love, and then I became aware of the cruelties of animal shelters, kill shelters, especially, and the problem that we have in the U.S. that there are so many kill shelters. To me, if I can accomplish one thing in my lifetime, the epitome would be to be involved in abolishing kill shelters in the United States. It’s just so terribly cruel and unnecessary, especially when so much money is going from our taxes into things that are not necessarily for the better of mankind, and I mean humankind, man and womankind. *laughs*
*laughs* I got you.
It’s for the better of humanity in general. So if we could devote some more money into helping the problems, you know, we have overpopulation of non-rescue animals – by non-rescue, I mean strays, there’s a lot of strays. Neutering and fixing them, that would be a major solution. It’s really expensive to have them neutered and spayed, really, so it would be more organizations that devote their time and money to be able to do that on a massive scale, I think that would really prevent a lot of the overpopulation that we have. And also, education. Educating people about how to prevent cruelty. And it never ends.
Unfortunately, yeah.
And all I can do is just create awareness that if you’re looking to rescue a furry friend, that these certain ones happen to be available, and hopefully it’s in your area.
I think it’s a great cause, and I notice a lot of the social media boosting and spreading the word. Have you had people come back and get in touch with you and say, “Hey, yeah, I went and adopted that one you posted”?
Yes, I have, a lot. It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling that you get, especially when people get back to you and say, “Hey, thank you for making us aware of this certain furry friend. We were looking for one and just happened to see your page and it’s really changing our lives”, you know, because once you…Do you have pets?
Not currently, no. I did while growing up, but I travel a lot, and it’s kind of difficult in that type of situation.
It is a commitment, it really is. It definitely is a commitment, to actually give the proper love and attention to your pet, it is quite a commitment. I can see somebody young like you, I mean when I was your age, I was just devoted to my career and I wasn’t getting married or anything, it was just about me, but basically I didn’t want to drag somebody that I would love through all of the sacrifices that I had to do, I don’t want them to suffer for it, to be part of the sacrifice. So I was on my own until I felt that I could take care of my significant other.
And now you’ve also been taking care of a couple Yorkies!
We’ve been having Yorkies since my wife and I knew each other, even before we were married, we had a Yorkie. We’ve been together since 1981, so Willow, Baby Willow, is our fourth one.
And she’s cute! This is great talking about animals, but I do want to get at least a little music talk in here as well. You were at the Hall of Heavy Metal History last year, I actually had the opportunity to cover that event, so I’d like to touch base on that a little, get some of your thoughts on the whole induction ceremony?
It was truly an honor to be inducted into, actually, the first year of the Heavy Metal Hall of Fame. I think because what I do brings me so much happiness and satisfaction, and the last thing that I think about is to go beyond that, to get some kind of award for it, and I’ll go like “Wow! Great, that’s fantastic”, because it means recognition. But I’m already getting so much out of it that it sometimes doesn’t even seem like it’s fair because it goes beyond my goal. My goals are very simple, to be as happy as I can be making music with people that make me happy, and to be able to have a career doing it. Very simple goals, you know? I don’t do things for any critical acclaim, I just do things that make me happy. I am my own worst critic, and when I’m alone and I’m making music for myself, then my target is my own personal critical acclaim, which I never achieve anyways. *laughs* I’ll always find something wrong.
Honestly, I get that. Especially when practicing bass, or any kind of music really, I’ll be the first to say “this sounds awful!” when it actually might be okay, but you’re your own worst critic, it’s true. But what’s great is you can definitely tell that you’re achieving your goals in that sense of being happy doing the things you want to be doing, because not only are you known for such a multitude of bands and such an excellent history, but it seems like you’re always involved in one project or another, sometimes even one-off collaborations, especially around NAMM time. Things like BashFest, Ultimate Jam Night, you’re always active with those.
Yeah, well, specifically around NAMM is the Randy Rhoads Remembered, that of course, if anything in the name of Randy is going to happen, and I get asked to participate, of course I’m going to be there for all the obvious reasons. But as far as my contribution to any celebration of Randy Rhoads, is the fact that I was there, I’m the only guy who actually was blessed to have played with Randy in both Quiet Riot and Ozzy Osbourne. And I experienced so many things that people might not even have any ideas about Randy, I experienced his growth from being the local guitar hero to becoming the legend that he was once he joined Ozzy. And every time I go on stage and I perform those songs that Randy wrote, I’m transported. And what I bring to it is…legitimacy as far as my contribution. My being there, I’m going to play it the way that it was played. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, it’s going to be authentic. Authenticity, I think that’s the word I was really going for, not legitimacy, but more authenticity. So at least that will be covered. And Brian Tichy, who is the creator of Randy Rhoads Remembered, he’s such a stickler for detail, and he brings that too, so you know that the rhythm section is going to be authentic, the way that it was played and it should be played. And then, all the guitar players that participate, they bring their own style and slant and expression of how Randy’s music really touched them. But it’s always really fascinating to hear their own version, which I think Randy would really appreciate that rather than to hear clones, Randy clones, that he really would want to hear like, “Okay, this person has been influenced by me, but look at what this person has blossomed into as a musician”. So what happens is, Brian and I, we keep an authentic foundation to it, and we let the guitar players express themselves.
I saw the Randy Rhoads Remembered event last year, actually, right after the Hall of Heavy Metal History induction, and that was the first time I had gone to that event. It was quite profound, I did some interviews on the red carpet with some of the guitarists, and it was just such an interesting experience because all of them had their own stories about in what way Randy had influenced them. Whether it was specific details like “Oh, this one thing he did on this record made me think this way”, or just broad concepts of Randy as a person, as a musician, as a whole. So that was quite the experience, that event, it’s great. And, speaking of the NAMM time, I did want to touch a bit on gear, you are involved with NAMM most of the time, you have a few signature basses, between Peavey, Spector, things like that, so do you have any particular favorite bass guitar brand or is it more so different features from different ones?
That’s a really good question. I grew up with one single instrument. I had a jazz bass that basically, I bought in 1967 and I played it all the way through Ozzy, then I don’t know what happened to it. *laughs* I literally have no idea where it went, I know it went somewhere, but it was not stolen, I can tell you that. But I don’t know what happened to it, but anyways. What I’m trying to say is, sometimes, especially back in the day, musicians were just known to play one instrument. Because, basically, there was really very few available. Gibson had an EB, which is what I played before I had the Fender Jazz, and then after a little while I played a Rickenbacker, a very rare model, and then I stuck with the Jazz because I found the Jazz was very functional for the music that I was playing at the time. I was doing a lot of R&B, bar music, this was around…late 60’s, early 70’s. And it was like a multipurpose, if you owned a Jazz bass, you could play Funk, you could play R&B, you could play Rock ’n’ Roll…what is now known as Classic Rock, which before…it was FM Radio. FM cuts, you know, not necessarily the hits, but it got played on FM. And prior to Disco, I was playing a lot of FM type of music, which is now known as Classic Rock. Bands that, later on, I got to play with. Blue Oyster Cult, The Guess Who, which I am now a member of, and also when I was playing with Dio, I was playing a lot of Rainbow, which again was a lot of FM, and even Black Sabbath with Ozzy and Ronnie. But nowadays, there’s so many different brands and so many different styles to play, that people have more than one brand and more than one bass in their tool box. For example, now, even though I have my own signature model of the Spector, the reason I take a different model of Spector on the road, is because I’m playing with The Guess Who and I need more of that classic rock sound, which I get with the Coda, which is more like a Jazz Bass, sort of.
Like your first bass!
Yes, like my first bass, exactly! But it happens to be a Spector, and so just because you have a signature model, doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice the sound that you must supply when you perform live. In the studio, when I track, I usually audition all my basses against what the sonic direction of the band or project is, and I send a few different sounds, or different tracks of different songs to whoever’s producing it, and the ones that I get the most comments on, that’s what I stick with for the rest of the record. So it’s like “Oh, they’re really liking what the bass sounds like on these tracks, okay, I know what I played, so I’m going to give them more of that”. Because, the better your instrument sounds, the more up in the mix it’s going to be, the more it becomes a focal point. If you have kind of like a middle lukewarm tone, and sometimes – I’ve done this in the past until I’ve learned my lesson – that I’ll give the engineer, the mixer, a lot of room to play with my sound, so they can be flexible with it and massage it to sound like the way they envision it…it doesn’t work. *laughs*
It doesn’t work?! *laughs*
Yeah, it doesn’t work, because giving them too much leeway…
…So much that they don’t know what to do with it?
Yeah, exactly! So much that they don’t know what to do with it. Because I know what it should sound like in my head, and I give them like one effected track, which means that it has like an amp, or sometimes a plugin that sounds like an amp, you know, with a lot of grind to it and a lot of growl and stuff, cut, and then I give them the direct track, which is just the bass right into my recording device. And what happens is, they either only listen to that and that’s what they put up in the mix, and since it might be the type of tone that sits well with clean guitars, but not necessarily…Marshall-driven…you know…
Yes! I know exactly what you mean.
It gets blown out! All the punch, everything is gone, because there’s no overdrive to it. So I’ve stopped doing that, all I do now is say “Okay, I’m going to send you what I think you should make it sound like, but I’m going to give it to you now”. You know what I mean?
Make it easy for them.
Yeah, “I’m going to do your work for you”. And it’s fine, because I know that that tone is going to sit really well in the mix.
I’m going to say by now you probably know what you’re doing. *laughs*
No, it’s not that I know what I’m doing, but sometimes when you’re not in the room with the producer or the engineer, you’re second guessing a lot. And what I used to do was like, okay, I’m trying to not guess as much and not give you as much possibility to play with the tone, and it’s not working out. So now, I’m very specific about the tone, and I’m fine, because I know it’s going to work. It’s the best of the alternatives.
I like this kind of talk because I’ve done a lot of audio engineering and mixing myself —
Mixing music?
Yes, I’ve taken courses in that, did a lot of that in college in addition to playing bass —
In what style of music?
Just about everything. In the course I took, we just did all sorts of things, bringing in random tracks, or the professor would come in with a couple of instruments like, “All right! Sit down, you’re going to record something now”, and I’d be like, “Okay! Let’s do it”, and he’d just guide us through…I would think it’d be pretty hard to teach audio engineering, because a lot of it depends on your own ear that you’re training as you learn it. So he’d just either sit there and say, “I would do it this way because…”, or just say, “Do it, now what do YOU think it should sound like?”. But anyway, what I’m leading into asking you is about you originally learning the engineering side – have you done engineering and mixing yourself, or is it more so that you just do, well, what you were just describing?
When I record, I do the engineering myself. The first recording studios I ever entered, and I’m talking about the real deal, I learned a lot from the engineers, who were actually people that would make our demos, let’s say with Quiet Riot with Randy, demos on Spec time. Spec time is when, say somebody blocks out a session and they finish at 10, they’ll call you up and say “Listen, if you can be here by 11, we can get you like four or five hours”. And usually it’s the second engineer, not the main guy, but the engineer that’s part of the studio. The guy who knows how to calibrate the machines, the assistant engineer, basically, that comes along with the studio. But this guy is an engineer in training, but already knows, let’s say the board is already set up for an actual recording artist, so you’re using the EQs and the tracks the way that they’re set up and everything.
You’re just kind of bouncing off what just happened, that type of thing?
Yeah! Exactly. So, I used to just bring in that ’67 bass, plug it directly into the board through some Pultecs, some limiters, LA7s, and there was the sound. The engineer had to do very little, it was there. And Randy would bring in like a little Champ, 1×10” or 12” speaker, I believe, plug that in and mic it, and there it was. And whatever drums we’d bring in, you know, it was very simple but very fast to get it done.
Just a get in, get it done type of thing because it’s already set up.
Yeah, because you really didn’t have enough time. But, half the work was already done before you got there, because you were tracking on somebody else’s pre-EQ’d system, or board. So that saved a lot of time, and since we were not even paying for the session, we really couldn’t complain much. But I would say it pretty much, it sounded like a real record. The only real difference was that it was not mastered, so you would not get the dynamic range of a master recording, but at least the tones were good. And so I learned all that. The sound should begin with your hands. Proper technique of playing, if you’re not playing properly, no EQ, no engineer’s going to save it for you. And then also, the difference of working with British engineers and American engineers, a total different education. I never really got to work a record with Roy Thomas Baker, but Roy was like, he was like the big guy that you really wanted to work with back in the 70’s because he was doing Queen, he was doing Journey, he was doing Foreigner…hits, hits. And he was an engineer originally, a lot of these guys that became producers were actually engineers, so they were hands on. Eddie Kramer would come in, and whereas other engineer/producers would close mic every single piece of drum, Eddie would just throw three microphones up, and it sounded huge. It sounded beautiful.
Yeah, of course, the Kramer technique is practically a known practice.
Because you know, you have to…minimum EQ is what I learned, and the microphone placement, and also placement of the kit within the room to get the room sound. And as far as bass, it’s technique, the sound is in your hands, a lot of times when I record, if I’m doing like…Thrash/Death metal tracks, I use a pick, and I put foam in the back to mute the strings, because I want to hear attack. Attack. And it’s got to be really fast, really crunchy, really growly, but not overtones. You want to eliminate overtones, one note carrying over into the next note because of harmonics. You want to deaden the harmonics.
Right. Because it’s Thrash, it’s Death, it’s heavy.
Punch, punch, punch. Each note has a very short lifespan. You don’t want a lot of ringing or anything like that. And then, a couple of days later, I might be tracking a whole different style of music, and then I treat it completely different. I might be playing with my fingers, I might just be playing slap. Sometimes I play slap just to get tone rather than because I’m playing a slap style. I’m getting a slap tone. I was slapping with Ozzy, like “Suicide Solution”, it was all slap. But not slap funk, it wasn’t that, I was doing it for the attack. The cut that you get when you slap.
I feel like I’m getting a music lesson sitting here with you, this is cool!
*laughs* We’re talking about music, you’re talking to a guy who’s been doing this for a long time, so…
*laughs* Yes, but I mean these specific things, I can apply to my playing too. So, coming back to the present day, being at the Long Island Kiss Expo, and of course, you’re promoting your book “Off The Rails”, and I’m not going to ask the typical questions about Randy and what it was like to work with him, because I happen to know your go-to answer is: “It’s in the book”.
It’s in the book.
“It’s in the book”, yes, because it is! But what I do want to ask about the book, is there any specific thing, whether it’s a specific part or aspect of it, you really hope people connect with?
Oh, that’s a really good question, what to connect with…I sat down to write the book because the number one question I get asked when I travel around the world is, “What was it like to play with Randy Rhoads”. I get it less now because, what I do get is “I read your book”, where it used to be “What was it like to play with Randy Rhoads”.
Before the book existed.
Right, now it’s “I read your book”, and it’s more a commentary of, thank you for writing the book, and things like that. But your original question…you know, that’s really good! I get very little questions because I made sure that I did not leave anything out. Another reason why I wrote it is because there were so many conspiracy theories surrounding Randy’s death that they were just getting out of control. Just the most ludicrous stuff, and I wanted to put that to a rest and say, “No. It did not happen like that”. So that was another motivation, you have to have a lot of motivation to start something and finish it.
Especially a book, that’s a big undertaking.
It took me a year and a half, I had a few bands I was playing in. I started with Quiet Riot, then I did a short tour with Yngwie Malmsteen, then I joined Dio. Those three bands. Three bands, two laptops. And I’m talking about when everybody is busy, or having fun doing something like sightseeing or shopping in the mall, I’m in my room working. I have some writer friends of mine who gave me really good advice, which was, “If you can get one page a day, you’re moving forward”. So that was my goal, one printable page – not a draft, an actual like…
…Finished.
Yeah, finished page. And yeah, every time I finished a chapter, not only did I send it off to my publisher, but I asked myself, “Would Randy be proud of this?”, to read this. And that was my measuring, my yardstick, my standard, to be something that Randy was proud of. Yeah, but, that’s a really good question, I think that a lot of the people who were really interested in what happened got to read it, and got a really good sense of the truth, the facts, surrounding everything.
Good, that is a really good purpose in doing that as well.
Well, my motivation, my purpose, yes.
So another thing about being here at the Long Island Kiss Expo, another connection with Long Island in general that you have is, not too long ago, you appeared on the show, Long Island Medium.
*laughs* Yeah, yeah.
Just wanted to ask about that a little bit…
Yeah, I’m really good friends with Teresa and Larry, and I’ve known them for like seven years now, and we have a mutual best friend, and that’s how we met. And we were hanging out, doing stuff, going places and spending time together, and I had never really had a desire to be read, because, you know…they are our friends, it’s not the reason why I hung out with them. They’re a lot of fun, great wonderful people, but not because I wanted a reading, I never asked for a reading, and then one day we were having dinner at their place in Los Angeles, the Caputos, and we’re having dessert, kind of like wrapping it up, and she starts giving me a reading!
*laughs* Just out of nowhere.
Out of nowhere! Out of nowhere. And then she also gave my wife a reading, and I was like “Wow”, it was very…I mean, things that not even my wife knew about, details came up, about certain people. And it was really lingering, it lingered with me, the words that she said. It gave me a bit of closure, about certain things that she talked about. About relationships that I had with certain people that we didn’t get closure on, they passed on, and then the reading came out and it was like “…wow”. So that was really a gift and a blessing that she did that. But it was unexpected. And then a couple of occasions, we would be out, and she would be talking about it, about the people that were there from my life. And again, it was not expected. And then I get a call from her producer, and he goes, “Hey listen, we’re doing this segment where Theresa’s going to go to a music store, and she’s going to get some accessory for Larry”, because every time I would get together with Larry and Theresa and our mutual friend, we would jam. Make music, stuff like that. So, that was basically the premise, she was going to get Larry some accessory, guitar straps or whatever, so I said, “Oh yeah, sure, I’d love to”. So the cameras start rolling and the producer added, “Oh, and Theresa’s going to do the usual, she’s going to find somebody at the store and read them”. I said, “Okay, cool”.
You didn’t expect it to be you.
No, that was the last thing! So cameras were rolling and I’d been wanting to get Larry a guitar for his birthday, I thought he was going to be there because there was no prep, I didn’t talk to Theresa, they just said, be here at a certain time and day, okay, I’m there. Cameras are rolling, “Hey, Theresa, where’s Larry?”, “Oh, he’s not here”, “Okay, let’s go in the store and get him some accessories”. So we’re talking and doing this thing and all of a sudden I go, “Where’d she go?”, because see, no matter what you’re doing the cameras are following you. I’ve done reality shows before, so I just let the camera crew do whatever they’re doing, and I do my thing. So I start looking for Theresa and I find her in an area in the back of the store where they keep the Latin percussion. Like the maracas, and tambourines, and stuff like that. And then she picks up a guiro, this percussion instrument, and I go “Oh, you’re holding a guiro”, and then she makes…a comment about guidos, you know. *laughs* So we’re talking about that, and that’s when my Dad comes through! And everything that she talked about, and it just happened, but certain things that she talked about, no one knew about. And it was just incredible because suddenly I realized that I was the one! *laughs* That she was reading.
*laughs* Turned the tables on you there.
Completely unexpected, and I was just blown away. I’ve seen her perform so many times, and it is incredibly moving and her command of the place is just amazing. And I know how hard it is, as a performer myself, to hold people’s attention for two hours, and all eyes are on Theresa. I’m in the audience watching this and I’m just going “I can’t believe this”. Just one person with one microphone, and a whole arena. Huge personality. An arena’s attention, which is almost impossible to do.
Definitely. That sounds like it was quite the experience for you! Cool though. I know you do have to get going pretty soon, so I just want to start to wrap things up here by getting back to the Long Island Kiss Expo here. How about a little wrap-up of your day here today, how the whole event went, and a little outlook on what’s in the near future for you?
Well, it’s always special for me to come to the Long Island, New York area because I know how tough it is, again, they’re the most sincere audiences I’ve ever played for, and the most soulful, and if they love you, they mean it, and if they don’t like you, they’ll let you know immediately. They’ll really let you know! *laughs* And so, I really appreciate it when I come to New York and people come to me and say, I was there for a certain show and it meant so much to me, because at the end of the day, what do we have? We have our memories, and it’s not just our memories, it’s our being able to connect. I’ve been a fan longer than I’ve been a professional musician, so I know what it means to me when I look back at certain bands that really inspire me, certain musicians. And to have people basically echo their feelings towards me the same way that I felt about other musicians, it means a whole lot to me. It really does. Just like when I see new, up and coming musicians. When I see a lot of potential, or that magical chemistry, those ingredients that it takes to separate you from everybody else. Especially nowadays as it’s evolving. But it’s all the obvious reasons, in a nutshell, right now, we don’t have the industry system, the big machine that used to take diamonds in the rough and get them ready to be global artists. And I’m not just talking about being successful in the United States, I’m talking about success as a global artist. Being able to release their music in Japan and Europe and South America, and all the corners of the world, and have an impact. That system does not exist anymore…for rock bands. It might exist for pop and urban, and so on, or even country, but as far as what we know as a rock band, it’s not really there.
It’s very different. A lot of “do it yourself” kind of things these days too.
Exactly, as a matter of fact, The Guess Who, this new record’s pretty much a “do it yourself”. Except! What we have going for us is that our guitar player, Will Evankovich, he’s a world-class producer. He is our guitar player but he also co-wrote and co-produced along with Tommy Shaw, the new Styx record.
Very cool!
So it’s not really “do it yourself” because you have the producer *laughs*, but it’s pretty much so.
But at the same time, he’s part of the band, so he’s invested in the project.
So what happens is, you work on a record, and then you reach out to labels, rather than to be working with the label or an artist relation person from the label on the material, and getting their input about what songs to have, or the direction, the mixes, or the production – no, you don’t get that. So you finish something and then you go out and say, “Okay, how do you like this?”
Right, it’s like, “Here it is! Now someone take it”.
Right, exactly, rather than to be working with a label from day one, and have them say “No, we need more of this”, or “less of that”, in the musical content of the record.
It’s been really great getting a lot of your insight on these types of things, because you’ve had so much experience, so many wonderful experiences, and you’re truly a wonderful musician and person.
I’m still learning, I’m still growing, and yeah, that’s all I do all day long, I try to expand my musical vocabulary. I don’t try, I do it, and then it gets to a point that sometimes you just don’t have an outlet. Like right now, as a pet project, I would love to have a jam band. You know, one of those jam bands, like Phish, My Morning Jacket, bands like that, which I love…to be able to express myself with everything that I’ve been learning.
So go for it!
Well, it’s easier to talk about it than actually do it, because I have to find the right musicians, or people that have time open to dedicate to it.
I volunteer. *laughs*
*laughs*
But that is a cool idea. So just to sum it up here, you have The Guess Who on the horizon, you mentioned earlier in that Q&A that you’ve got some dates coming up —
And the record’s coming out in September. It’s called “The Future Is What It Used To Be”, and it’s a really, really good record. It’s not really a departure from what The Guess Who fanbase expects, but it also adds a contemporary sound, not only musicianship, but also songwriting.
That’s really good, something to look forward to, and I know fans of yours are definitely excited about the new Guess Who stuff! Thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me, it’s been wonderful.
Chelsea, thank you, and thank you for coming out to the Expo.
Michael Sweet recently took to the Northeast for a few acoustic solo dates to kick off the month of March, and one of the stops along the way was the Chop Shop Pub in Seabrook, NH. There’s plenty to talk about in the world of Michael Sweet lately, so we sat down for an interview to discuss Stryper’s new record and new member, Sweet & Lynch, Joel Hoekstra, Michael’s autobiography, the Sole DVD release, and much more. After a brief pre-interview chat, the roles were reversed for a change, as things started out not with a question from me to Michael, but from Michael to me.
Have you ever seen an acoustic set by me?
I have not, actually, but I’m looking forward to it.
It’s a whole different thing, obviously. Because when you’re in a Rock/Metal band and you do acoustic sets, it either works or it doesn’t. So I hopefully have figured out a way to make it work, you know. I do “To Hell With The Devil” acoustically, which is odd, but it works.
That’ll be interesting to hear!
It is interesting, it somehow works. Somebody shouted it out – I was taking requests and they shouted it out, and I thought “Ah, that won’t work”, I did it once and I’ve been doing it ever since, so it’s kind of cool.
I’m excited about tonight’s show, it’s going to be fun to see the acoustic side of Stryper.
Yeah, and we might have a hundred people in here or something, it’ll be very intimate, kind of low-key, but that’s another part of the reason why I do this and why I love it. Because it’s just a whole different vibe, it’s really cool, and the people here are fantastic.
Awesome, so you’ve played here before, then?
I haven’t, no, my first time here. Pretty much every place that I’ve done acoustic sets at have all been different, and I haven’t returned. It’s usually a different place every time I go back to that market or that city or that town. I don’t know why it works out that way, but this is the first time here. Never heard of it, had no idea what to expect when I came in, and these people are just rolling out the red carpet for us. I mean, they’re cooking us lobster, they’re really going all out, it’s amazing.
That’s a real New England welcome there, cooking you lobster? I mean, come on. *laughs*
Oh, it’s crazy! So cool.
Certainly on the Seacoast here.
Yeah.
So of course, with the acoustic set, you’re doing your own thing tonight, but I do want to touch on the most recent news and upcoming release, which would be God Damn Evil, new Stryper record. Why don’t you take us to the moment you decided as a band to move forward with a new record, what sparked that decision?
Well, we have been trying since 2005 to really stay up on releasing new music. We feel that it’s very important, myself especially – I mean the other guys do too, but I’m kind of to some degree the driving force behind that – I think it’s important that we stay creative, and the only way to stay creative is to write and record new music. A lot of bands have kind of given up on that, and they don’t have that same passion they had 30 years ago to record new music, and I only know this because I’ve talked to them and they’ve said “Ah, it’s not worth it anymore”. I don’t want to be like that, I don’t ever want to get like that, I want to always retain that passion. So, that being said, it was a few years ago that we released Fallen, so it just felt like time, you know? After a year, it starts feeling like, “Okay, let’s start talking about a new album”. We decided to go with the title God Damn Evil because we had the title, my brother came up with it a few years back. We didn’t feel like that was the right time, because it’s pretty…you know, for a band like Stryper, it’s quite a controversial title or statement, and it can confuse a lot of people. So you want to be cautious of that, but at the same time, part of what we do in our art is to make a statement, musically and lyrically, and that’s always been important to us. We felt like in 2018, it was the perfect time for God Damn Evil because it’s a prayer request from us, really, asking God to damn evil. I mean, we haven’t really seen the level of evil in my lifetime that we’ve seen just in recent times, you know? The Vegas shooting, the school shooting, there just seems to be so much stuff going on in the world, not just our country, but in the world that’s just at new levels of evil. It’s just out of control. So we felt like, “This is the time. Let’s do it”, and some of our fans are confused by it, they think we’re just using God’s name in vain, or shock value, or swearing, or what have you, and it’s really not that at all. Musically speaking, I have said that it’s our best album to date and I guess that it’ll have to prove itself and we’ll have to see what the fans think. But the band thinks that already, we’re excited about it.
That’s good, I’m excited about it too, it’s coming out not too far in the future, and you do have a recent addition on bass – Perry Richardson from Firehouse. First off, how did it come about? Bringing him specifically into the band – and how has it been with him on board?
It’s been great, I mean, we parted ways with our original bass player, Tim, and we started looking for bass players – with Stryper, it’s not as easy as it might be with any other band to just replace a guy because we have so much to think about. It’s not just playing bass, but it’s singing, it’s their values, we want people that are in line with our values and our faith, who we are and what we are. So that makes it a little more difficult to find. Perry’s name came up, and we all just sat around and thought about it, and thought, “Wow, this guy’s perfect”. So we flew him out, and the moment he walked into the room, he just brought this joy into the room, he smiles all the time – it could be the end of the world, and he’d be smiling, saying, “Hey, it’s going to be okay.” He’s one of those guys, which is really cool. Then we heard him play, and we were super impressed, and we heard him sing, and we were super impressed, and we didn’t tell him that day that he had the gig, but we knew he had the gig. He went home, we tried to do it the right way, we all talked about it, we all felt like “This is the guy”, and that was it. We called him and said, “You’re in”. And he’s really perfect, he’s a perfect, perfect match for us.
That’s excellent. And I wanted to ask you about the single “Take It To The Cross”. People have been clamoring about what a different sound it is for Stryper, sort of a thrash vibe in there, and I saw that you said it was actually a tribute to Rob Halford, your favorite metal singer.
In a sense, yes, because when I was singing that chorus, I was definitely channeling my Rob Halford, if I have any Rob Halford.
I think you do, I think it was there.
It’s really weird because with that song, it’s a love or hate relationship. People either love it or they hate it, literally. If you read the comments, one person will say, “I love it, best song they’ve ever done” and the next comment is, “I hate it, it sucks”. Next comment, “Wow!”, next comment, “Ugh”.
Extreme reactions, in any case.
It’s crazy! There’s no middle ground with that song. None. And we kind of expected that, we didn’t throw it out there thinking everyone’s going to love it, we’re not that naive, so we knew it was going to cause a stir. But we wanted to do something different with the chorus, not the typical angelic harmonizing and what’s expected, we wanted to do something a little more unexpected.
Yeah, it’s a little rougher, but in a good sense.
Well yeah, I mean, honestly, taking myself out of the band, I think it’s a cool song, it was one of the most exciting songs to record. Every time we got to that song, we’re like “Yeah!!”, everyone would come in like, “Let me hear that again!”, so we had a blast recording it, and you know what? That’s all that matters. And if the fans connect with it, great.
Absolutely. And on the same line as the whole Rob Halford thing, knowing that you are a Priest fan, what are your thoughts on the new Priest record?
I haven’t heard the whole album yet, but I think a friend of mine’s bringing me the CD tonight. I’ve only heard, like, four songs, and I really like it. I think right off the bat, from what I’ve heard, it sounds like it’s probably going to be their best album in a long time. I don’t know because I’m a fan, and I grew up with the early stuff, I don’t know how it’s going to compare with those, but I’m sure it’s going to be amazing, and once I hear the whole thing, I’ll be able to let you know. I’m a Priest fan through and through, I feel they can do no wrong. Some albums are stronger than others, but every album they do is great, there’s always something great on it.
Exactly. Also, was that the first you’ve done that, paying tribute to a musician you admire through your original music, or your vocals styles, anything?
Not really, there have been other times when I’m singing a particular song that I’m thinking of other people…a lot of times when I’m playing guitar solos. I was really inspired, although I don’t play anything like either one, but I was really inspired by Randy Rhodes and Eddie Van Halen, personally, growing up. I’m sure many other guys were too, of course they were, but I find when I’m writing solos, I’ll be thinking of Eddie or I’ll be thinking of Randy. You know, “What would Eddie do? What would Randy do?” Vocally, it’s usually Rob Halford or Ronnie James Dio, but it’s not like I try to emulate them or sound like them – I never will, I have my own thing, love it or hate it. I’ve been called, what is it? The Dennis DeYoung of Metal or something like that? Which I think is funny. I love Styx, but I never really sat and sang to Dennis DeYoung songs, but I guess I just have a similar tone. I don’t know.
Well, it’s the flexibility, I think, a variety of vocal styles – things like that.
Yeah! Absolutely. And I love Journey, I mean…growing up, I would listen to Priest and Maiden, and then I would listen to Journey, so we were all over the map. We really appreciate just great music, and I loved so many different styles of music back in the 80s. I love New Wave, I mean…a good song’s a good song.
I agree.
It doesn’t matter what style it is.
I do agree, because there does seem to be a lot of segmenting – there are the purists in their own genre, people who will say, “I’ll only listen to this kind of music and nothing else”, but it’s good, especially from a musician’s perspective, to be open-minded.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, that’s the one thing about “metalheads”, or groups of metal people, whatever you want to term them – sometimes you’ll get those guys that are like, “Oh my gosh, you like this, you like that? That sucks!”…you know, you’ve got to be open-minded because that’s how you grow as a musician, and that’s how you grow as a listener. Because when you find a really great song that touches your heart by the lyric, or the melody, or what have you, and it’s not the style you normally listen to, that opens doors. It opens doors for your ears, your heart, your mind, and it’s a cool way to live, I think. Not just with music, but with books, you know, whatever you’re taking in. It’s important to open those doors.
Wise words. Now, with all the Stryper goings-on, what made you break off into this acoustic mini-tour you’ve got going on here right now?
I mean, we try to not oversaturate and tour every year, because we find when we do that, it’s not helpful, it’s not good. We see numbers kind of start to decline in certain markets. When we go out every other year, they grow. So on the offtime, I either record solo albums, or Sweet & Lynch albums, or I go out and I tour acoustically. I do maybe 20, 25, 30 of these shows a year, and it’s just so simple. I live two hours from here, so I throw my guitar in the car, throw some merch in, Lena, my daughter, and my wife, Lisa, we hop in, we go, I play, go home. We’re going home tomorrow morning, but we could go home tonight. It’s just simple and I enjoy it, it’s a nice break away from the craziness of traveling with ten people on a bus, setting up for three hours, loud amps and *imitating high-pitched guitar sound* “WAAH”, it’s just nice doing it this way, I enjoy it.
Yeah, definitely. And you mentioned Sweet & Lynch just now, I did want to touch on that as well – Unified, you released that a few months ago, so any further word? I don’t know if you’re planning on any touring or shows, or is this more the type of thing that sticks to the studio?
You know, it’s a good question, and it has many different answers. I really want it to happen, to go out and tour, George and I, but it never seems to materialize for whatever reason. Because, he’s really busy, I’m really busy, and it’s very difficult to make it happen and put it together, but that being said, we’re working on it. And I think there’s going to be more from Sweet & Lynch…at least another album, maybe two, maybe more. I enjoy recording with George and I hope he enjoys recording with me. We respect each other, and I think somehow, in an odd way, our collaboration works. We’re from the same era of music and we’re really, Dokken and Stryper, kind of cut from the same cloth. We’re both a little more melodic, we were heavy but we were melodic, it was about vocals and melodies, you know, and not just screaming and shredding guitar and stuff. So we’re from that same time period, we come from the same spot, so George and I are just a natural fit, and we work well together.
It’s a great fit, and you make great music together.
I hope so, we try, people seem to like it, and I know there’s a lot more left in us. George is very active, he does probably three albums a year, maybe four albums a year, it’s crazy. I do, usually, a few, one or two. But I try not to do too much because I don’t want to ever get to that point – and I’m not saying he is – I don’t ever want to get to that point where I’m compromising quality because I’m just slamming stuff out. I want to do it right and get better with what I do, and not regress, but I want to progress.
Of course. So now, what’s going on, or what’s coming up, rather, with you and Joel Hoekstra? I have seen some social media hints toward that…
Yes. Well, hopefully, that’s going to happen too. We’ve been talking about it, I think, for three years now. I just saw him on the Monsters of Rock Cruise, and we’re both still very excited about doing it. It’s going to happen. Closest thing we got to it is, on my last solo album, he played on three tracks, and he just killed it. Took the songs to a new level. But when we write together, I think that’s going to be just amazing. He’s a great writer, and he thinks more in line with where I’m coming from too. He’s one of those guys that was born a little later, but he’s a old soul. He should have been back in those times. So I think when we actually write that album and do it, I think it’s going to be very special. I’m hoping, the best album I’ve ever been a part of, and it’ll be cool.
You were talking about releasing 1-2 albums per year, it does seem like you’re very active with recording, you’ve always got some kind of project going on, and another recent thing that I feel might have even slipped under the radar given Sweet & Lynch and Stryper news would be Sole, the DVD that you released. Could you talk a little about that?
Sure, I mean it was a thing where I went and did one of these acoustic sets at a place called the Narrows, and someone had the idea to make it a DVD, so I said, “Let’s do it”. Had no label in mind, no company that was behind it or anything, so we said “Ah, let’s just release it on my website”. So I did, I just kind of threw it out there, put it on my social media, said, “Here’s the DVD”. I think we printed up a thousand copies, it’s almost sold out, but there’s been no real push or press or marketing campaign, or anything like that. It was just a fun thing to do. What a lot of people don’t know is it’s not just me singing, it’s also a lot of interview footage, it has me telling the story behind every song, some really funny stories too, and then there’s a lot of rare Stryper footage in there as well, from way back in the day that nobody’s seen. So people don’t know that because I didn’t really promote that, I probably should, but it’s a really cool package. A guy named Andrew Joyce directed it, produced it, and he’s just so awesome. He’s only like 26 years old, 27 years old? And he’s just so talented, so I’m really happy with how that turned out.
That’s excellent. For the past couple of nights that you’ve been doing shows, you’ve had a few openers, including a young singer by the name of Moriah Formica – I know that you’ve had some involvement with her music…
She guested on my album One Sided War, “Can’t Take This Life”, and she did a version and I did a version, and I also produced a song of hers called “Time”. And that’s really cool, that turned out great. And then she was on “The Voice”, she did really well on “The Voice”, she’s really making a lot of noise, she’s out there touring, she’s very talented, a powerhouse. She’ll sing an Ann Wilson Heart song, “Crazy On You”, with her and acoustic guitar and just kill it. She’s really great. She played with me last night and the night before.
That’s great, it seems like you do a lot to support up and coming artists.
I try. Because I remember when I was young, you know, I worked really hard, and the struggle that it was, and that was then – imagine now. It’s much more difficult now. So when I hear someone that really has the passion, and really has the drive, and really has the talent, it makes me go, “Hmm”. I remember seeing Moriah for the first time when she opened for me in New York a few years back, and I kept going out of my dressing room watching her and listening, and I was just so blown away, and that’s where it all kind of connected. Introduced myself, said, “Hey, I’d love to help in any way possible”, and we wound up working together. She’s so good though, I really think that we’re all going to be hearing a lot more about her in the future.
Yeah, wish I could see her play tonight, but I know she’s not here.
If you can see her ever, go see her. I promise you you’ll walk out of there completely blown away.
Nice. So, as I keep saying, it seems like you always have a lot of different projects going on, and you had your book, Honestly, I’ve heard that you’re thinking of having a follow-up to that coming out as well.
I am. I’ve been talking about that for a while, and I felt like so much has happened between the time we stopped writing the book…which was a year before it came out…to now. So much has happened, and it’s definitely another book, easily. And there’s some other stories too, that I didn’t leave out of the first book, but I just didn’t really get into. I didn’t purposefully leave them out, I just didn’t talk about it. After the fact, you realize, “Oh my gosh, yeah, I forgot about that story!”, you know? You start remembering all this stuff. So there’s a lot more to talk about and, you know, I enjoyed writing that book, it was a chance for me…I always said if I write a book, I want it to be brutally honest, good or bad. Even if people might have me say the story, then they look at me in a different light and think, “Ah, he’s not who I thought he was”. I’d rather be honest and say, “This is really me, I blew it, I did this, this and that, and I regret it, but I’m a new man now because of it”, and that’s kind of what I put in my book. And most people really got it, some people were like, “Man, dude. It really changed my opinion of you”. Well, you know, I’m sorry to hear that.
That’s all part of it, I think, when you’re writing a book. You are opening up and perhaps exposing a bit of vulnerability in that sense, for people to change their opinions…
I mean, I wrote the opening, the foreword was, “I drink, I occasionally smoke, I occasionally swear”, or “cuss”, or whatever word I used, and people were up in arms over that. It’s like, “Wow, what?” Well…yeah! I like a good cigar, I like a good bourbon on occasion in moderation. And I don’t have any issues with that. And it’s funny because a lot of people who are Christian people, they will come up to me and say, “How can you do that? I can’t believe it”, and usually I find when I get into conversation with them and I dig a little deeper, I’ve found out that they have an issue with it. They’re a recovering alcoholic, or they’re addicted to cigarettes, and so they have that wall that’s like, how can you do it, because I can’t do it, you know? And you say, “Well, I’m not you”. So it’s a real fine line because of who I am and who we are.
True. But it’s a still a good step – a bold step, but a good one, to come forward with a book.
Again, when I die and I take my last breath, I want to be remembered for…if I’m remembered for anything, I want to be remembered for being real. Just being a man of integrity, but also a guy with a real heart who just kind of lays it all out on the table, and you get what you get with me. That was the whole point of the book.
So I won’t keep you too much longer, I know you’re going to be heading on stage soon, but you also have another new song from God Damn Evil coming out next week – it’s “Sorry” that’s on the way, should be exciting to hear another new track.
Yeah, that’s the follow-up to “Take It To The Cross”, “Take It To The Cross” was the shocker, not expected, stirred the pot, all that stuff. “Sorry” is a song that’s coming out as a follow-up which will make everybody take a deep breath and relax.
Are you apologizing for “Take It To The Cross”? …I’m just kidding.
No, I know you are, but no. “Take It To The Cross”, we felt was the perfect song to go out with and we wouldn’t change a thing. But it is funny how it really got some people worked up. It’s crazy! It’s just music, it’s just a song. But “Sorry”, “Sorry”’s going to be that song where you’ll hear those vocals, you’ll hear more of that Stryper thing, whatever it is. More straight ahead, more radio friendly, you know? Just…
What people are expecting from Stryper.
It’s got no surprises in it, you know? So I think it’s going to be cool and it’s a very strong song that we’re super excited about. And we’ve got a killer video to go along with it as well.
Excellent!
Yeah, really great music video. We’re slowly getting back into our own in terms of production of music and production of videos. It feels like 1987 again in that big…you know, the video looks super big and expensive, and the song…it’s really cool.
Awesome. Well, that’s definitely an exciting thing to look forward to, so again – God Damn Evil, out April 20th on Frontiers. In light of the release, you’ll be heading out on a Stryper US tour, so just to wrap things up here, tell us what to expect from the upcoming tour, and a closing message to fans?
We’re trying to put together a setlist that’s going to fit everything into it, and that’s difficult because we’ve got a big catalog, so it’s hard to fit all the songs that people want to hear into one setlist and not play for four hours, or even three hours for that matter. But it’ll probably be about a two hour setlist of 21, 22 songs, and some talking and whatnot. We’ve got all the old classics in there, we’ve got probably about four or five of the new songs, we’re really going to play a good amount of the new songs because we want people to hear those songs. And I just sent it to the guys literally yesterday, a rough version of it, and I said, “Add what you want to add, and tell me if you want to cut something”, and I haven’t heard anything. So we’ll see. But it’s going to be a long, great setlist, and we’re super pumped, we’ve got a lot of shows booked and coming up in 2018. We’re really excited, and you know, I just want to thank the fans for supporting us for years, it’s pretty cool. We look out in the crowd and we see so many of the same fans we’ve seen for 34 years, which is amazing. And we also see their kids coming in in Stryper shirts, there’s a new generation of fans as well. So we’re really blessed in that way, we’re very blessed. We’re one of the fortunate bands going right now, I’ll tell you that.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Michael, this has been great fun talking with you.
In December of 2017, Judas Priest held an NYC album listening session and press day in conjunction with Sony Music and Epic Records. I got the chance to sit down with Rob Halford, Richie Faulkner, and Scott Travis for an interview. From Firepower to touring and recording, Rob Halford’s coined term of the “Metalsphere”, right down to video games and Reddit, we covered a lot of ground and had a great chat.
I just want to start off by asking, you have Firepower coming out next year – what made now the right time to start working on this album and get it out there?
Rob Halford: I was passing the mic to Scott Travis, who deferred, so I’ll pick it up. You know, I don’t think there’s ever a time to make a record, you just instinctively know that that’s what you want and need to do next, and that’s been the case with Priest for over four decades now. We’re a working metal band, you know, we get together, we write some songs, we record them, we go out and tour, we take a little break…and repeat. And that all builds up to this great metal treasure trove that we have surrounding us in the Priest world, and now it’s the opportunity for Firepower to be born into the “Metalsphere” – ah, that’s the first time I’ve said that in this interview. And that feels great, it’s a bunch of all the things that we love to do, this is how we see and perceive and want to represent Judas Priest in 2018, and we’re so excited as a band to have this opportunity again. It’s all been placed out for us by our fans, everything that we do is relevant to the connectivity of our incredible Judas Priest worldwide fanbase, they’re part of the motivation that keeps up fired up to make a record like Firepower.
Firepower, not to be ironic about it, but it is a very “powerful” title, like most Judas Priest albums – so what’s behind the title, where did that come from?
Richie Faulkner: Well, after the recording sessions, we went to an Indian restaurant most nights during the week, and “firepower” is what usually happened the morning after because of the spicy Indian food…
Rob and Scott Travis: *laughter*
Richie: …no, but really. It became pretty apparent that there was an energy, there was a lot of intensity, a lot of firepower – there’s not really a better word for it in this album. So, the songs were energetic, they had a great vibe, it was a very powerful to be making, in my opinion, for a band that’s been going over 45 years. Creating new music with this much intensity? It’s an indication of the firepower that’s still within the band and the genre and the fans. So when we had the track “Firepower”, and we were looking at potential album titles, that one seemed to be a perfect summarization of the content within. Once you decide that, it then leads to a visual, an image which is obviously a powerful one, there’s fire and there’s a Priest monster on there…you know, but it all comes from the music, it all comes from the sound and the vibe that the music’s giving off. It’s a powerful statement, it’s intense, it’s energetic. What better name than the firepower of heavy metal, you know what I mean? And it refers to, as Rob said before, it’s the firepower of heavy metal, it’s the stuff that holds us all together, whether you’re creating music or whether you’re a fan of heavy metal, we all know what that intensity’s like as a fan. So yeah, it’s a representation of the music and the power of heavy metal.
Awesome.
Rob: *claps hands* Round of applause for…Richard Faulkner!
So I do want to ask for a little bit of a look into the recording process, I’m curious about what your style is like as a band. What seems to be increasingly popular these days is musicians remotely recording parts on their own time, sending it in to each other…is that what you do, or do you get together and pull it all together in studio at once?
Scott Travis: It’s not what we did on this record, which was a great pleasure for all of us, because we wanted to do “the organic style” recording where we’re all in a room together. Generally, after these guys write and formulate songs and they banter about and come up with good demos, then we get together and start recording the drums first…so, in the past, we have dabbled in what you described earlier about being in different locations, maybe doing things not so organic like we did this time, and we hope that that translates into the sound of the record, which we think it definitely does, it definitely created a – well, just a more humanistic way of making music. You know, if Richie’s sitting ten feet from me on a stool and Ian’s over there, and Glenn’s over there, and Rob’s behind the curtain so to speak, just so he can have some vocal independence and not bleed through the rest of the mics…(to Rob) is that right?
…But, it’s just an actual thing when you’re playing with people and you have the visual context as well as the audio, because obviously we’re all wearing headphones and can hear each other, so anyway…That’s how we recorded this record, we think it translates into a slightly different sound than some of our previous recordings in the most positive way. Having Mr. Tom Allom and Andy Sneap behind the mixing desk along with Mike Exeter as an engineer was a beautiful congregation of all of us trying to get together to do the same thing and have one goal of making a great Priest record.
Now, getting a little more into that “great Priest record”, as you say, I just got out of the listening session where we were also shown the music video for “Lightning Strike”. I just want to ask more about both the song and the video, what went into that particular track?
Rob: Obviously any kind of visual interpretation is valuable, and we’re in a different world now to where Priest began, so we know the opportunities that are afforded you across various platforms – as they’re called these days – and one of the great ways to communicate your music is to have some kind of visual interpretation. This is just a way of getting the song across more than anything else, it’s a very exciting piece to look at, the kind of thing you can watch over and over again. But the whole essence of the idea is just to send out this song, “Lightning Strike”, to our fans for a first listen – the first complete pass of a song, that’s always exciting to do. And that’s what it is, you know, it’s a combination of cuts, edited pieces from a Wacken performance a couple of years ago in Germany, and some recent footage that we cut. So it serves the purpose of just getting the song launched out to our fans around the…*laughs* Metalsphere.
Metalsphere!
Rob: That was the word I was looking for. Old “Metalsphere”.
Scott: *laughing* We hope to have a few more video cuts off this album. Having videos, I would say, is nothing new, although someone reminded us in an interview earlier today that we didn’t do one for Redeemer, which is…our mistake, really, in a way because – I’m holding up my phone – everyone has these small TVs now in their back pocket, where you can pull up anything and you can see everything as well as hear it, i.e. videos, so like Rob said, this was just something we whipped up together real quick to get that song out there with the video, we hope to have a couple more.
Definitely, to get the excitement going.
Scott: Totally. People want to see it as well as hear it.
And just another track that happened to jump out at me – the transition from “Guardians” into “Rising From Ruins” – at first, I thought it was a standalone instrumental but then I noticed the transition and buildup from one into the other, so I was curious about the connection between those two songs.
Richie: The intro was something that was around…we put it together, the song “Rising From Ruins” was put together out of different parts, there was half a song here, and a riff here, and as you put stuff together, that’s usually what happens…and the intro was a standalone piece of music I put forward, it was a piano thing. I wasn’t sure if it was relevant but you never know, and as Rob says, you put everything on the table and sometimes you surprise yourself, you put something on the table, it might not fit in your mind, but somehow in the context of a song or a record, it absolutely does. And that’s what happened with this, so we then put a part of “Guardians”, of the intro, in the song “Rising From Ruins”, so it almost reprises the intro if you know what I mean. It just seemed to connect really beautifully. And being a piano part, it wasn’t completely out of the question, Priest have used piano before —
Rob: “Epitaph”.
Yes.
Richie: — “Epitaph”, exactly. So, it’s just one of those things, whenever you putting ideas down, there’s nothing that was before it, if that makes sense. You don’t quite know…there’s no blueprint. So you’re putting out ideas that might stick, that might not stick, they might be relevant, might not be. And sometimes you surprise yourself. Hence, a piano-style intro, you know. But it seems to work, again, in the context of the song on the record. Anyone else?
Rob: No, I just think that in terms of what Judas Priest represents as a band, we have specifics in the world of Priest and it includes that kind of experience, you know. By definition, we’re well-known for certain kinds of songs, and these are just extra adventures, really, in…not exactly the same things, but…it’s Priest —
Richie: I just realized as well! When you put them together, is it “Guardians Rising From Ruins”? Is it? I’ve never seen it like that before, I just realized, is it the guardians that are rising from the ruins?
Rob: Well. You know, Richie, I’ve never thought of that either, but I suppose it could be! I suppose it could be, you know, what are the guardians, who are the guardians, maybe we are the guardians? Maybe metal is the guardians, like the guardians of the metal galaxy?
Richie: There you go then.
Rob: It’s quite possible that that’s what it could mean. And this is the joy of Judas Priest, we let everybody bring their own interpretations to the table, we have a lot of fun thinking when we’re making the music, especially when we come in to titles and the lyrical content. We have our own kind of concept of what a song might mean, but how it might be interpreted by our fans could be completely the opposite, and that’s the joy of music, really, in the way that everybody brings their own kind of vision to the pieces that you make. But yeah…the “Metal Guardians of the Galaxy”.
There you go, there’s something. *laughs* So then, right around the album launch, you’re kicking off a grand scale Firepower world tour, and in terms of what audiences can expect, obviously plenty of content from Firepower blended with the classics – any thoughts you care to add to that about the tour?
Rob: We’re trying to put a setlist together and the further we go, the more of a challenge that is, eighteen studio albums, about ten songs per record, how much is that? 180 tunes.
Scott: At least.
Rob: At least, to look at. But here’s the thing, we know we’re going to go out and play “Breaking the Law”, we know we’re going to do “Living After Midnight”, and why shouldn’t we? We love playing those songs and every time you play a song like that, at the moment that you’re playing it, it’s the first time you’ve ever played it because that’s the way life works, you know. So there’s that excitement because the song is never the same when you play, but also it’s just the connection that you see, that you’re making with that particular piece of music at that moment with your fans that have waited two or three years to see you again and again and again. So this is really the great part of being in a band is that you have this opportunity to you know, leave your house, lock the door, and come back about a year or so later after going all around the world and seeing your glorious fans all over America, South America, Canada, over in Japan, all through Europe, our home country, the UK. This is what we live for besides making metal, writing metal, recording metal…the whole thing becomes a substance as a reality, this is why we do this because we’re standing on the stage with all of our glorious fans united in the spirit of what metal represents, and celebrating the whole experience together on that given night. And so, having said that, *laughs* we still haven’t got a clue what the setlist is going to be. We do know that those songs I’ve mentioned and other have to be in the setlist, but it’s going to be tricky to pick the tracks from Firepower because we’re so committed to every song. You know, any band that you go and see, there’s the opening sequence, there’s the middle sequence and the end sequence, so you really have to put time and thought and effort into how you’re going to make that whole flow go through the night. But it’ll be fun, we’ll probably play a couple tunes, maybe three tunes from Firepower, and there’ll be stuff from British Steel, hopefully from Painkiller again, and…we might try and find some deep cuts that we’ve never played before, even if it’s only one song, we’ve been thinking about certain tracks that have never been performed before by Priest, and that would be a thrill.
That would be exciting.
Scott: Great segue, because…what Priest song would you like to hear us play live?
Oh my, that is very much on the spot.
Scott: Only one!
Honestly, my favorite Judas Priest song, it may not be a deep cut…
Scott: Doesn’t matter.
I’ve always loved “Freewheel Burning”, that is absolute top for me.
Rob: Okay.
Richie: Killer!
Scott: Fair, fair.
And right next to “Freewheel Burning” is also “Love Bites”, pretty much that whole [Defenders of the Faith] record is right there at the top for me.
Richie: The interesting thing is these days, the world, because of the connectivity of the world we live in, fans will tell you. They will message you, they will say “We want to hear ‘Sinner’”, or “We want to hear ‘Saints in Hell’”, they’ll make you aware. So instead of before, like maybe 20 years ago, you wouldn’t get an idea of what people wanted, now they tell you what they want.
They tell you straight out.
Richie: They’ll say, “We want this”, you know what I mean? And it’s a great position to be in with eighteen albums to choose from, really. Sometimes it makes it harder, because if you picked all the songs that everyone wanted to hear, you’d be there for…
Rob: You’d be on stage for a week.
Richie: Exactly.
At least!
Richie: But again, because of the connectivity these days, and how connected all the fans are, they’ll tell you straight away you know, and you take that…some of them have good points, you know.
Rob: It’s the passion, isn’t it? It’s the passion as we say time and time and time again how grateful we are to our fans for supporting us and giving us this life in metal music. Yeah, as Richie says, the fans are really hardcore about certain songs that they want to hear, we try and accommodate as best we possibly can. There’s always that, “Well, they didn’t play it this time, maybe they’ll play it next time” type of deal, which is a fact. So we’ll do our best to try and cover all the metal bases on the Firepower tour.
Excellent. And then, not to do an on the spot type of question, but if you had to pick one song that has been your absolute favorite to play live, consistently over the years, what would it be? I’m asking this of each of you, actually, whoever would like to start.
Scott: Actually, I enjoy “Metal Gods”. It’s just a cool grooving song, it says it all – in other words, it really does fit the band, obviously the guys wrote this song many, many years ago, maybe before they really were Metal Gods. Now, Priest is “The Metal Gods”, and led by “The Metal God”, singular, Halford. But no, I really enjoy that song, that’s a killer song.
Rob: For me, it’s always going to be “Victim of Changes”, just because in that one song, you’ve got so much metal going on, you’ve got the intro twin guitars with that great riff, then you’ve got the bludgeoning experience when the whole band crashes in, you’ve got the breakdown section where it cools down a little tiny bit, and then you’ve got the climactic dramatic ending, you’ve got so much going on within that piece of music that, for me, it’s a real special tune.
Richie: Well, I was going to say “Victim of Changes”, now I don’t want to sound boring, so I’ll have to pick another one. But, for all those reasons Rob said, if an alien came down from wherever —
Rob: An alien?
Richie: An alien! And said…*with an accent* “What is this Judas Priest?”…That sounded like Polish…
Rob: *laughing* That sounds Russian!
Richie: Okay, but if an alien came down…”What is Judas Priest about?”, you’d have to show them “Victim of Changes” for all those reasons Rob just said, it’s got the intro guitars, it’s got the high screams, breakdown, the clean passages…but just to pick another one, I don’t think I could. That one’s, as you said, consistently my favorite, and there’s actually a part of that song where I have been known to actually exclaim.
Rob: Exclaim?
Richie: “Ahh, this is so fucking good!” …Not quite like that, but I think I’m doing it, you know, when Glenn plays his solo.
Rob: Yes!
Richie: And it’s coming to a climax at the end of everything, I’ve actually been known to just scream my head off, ‘cause it’s so intense, so great, such a great song. You know, so I can’t really top that, really.
Now, there is a question that’s probably on a lot of fans’ minds, and I have to ask it…how often do you find yourselves playing your new “Road to Valhalla” video game?
Rob: Ah! Well, I’m the world’s worst video game player so you shouldn’t ask me. I’ve tried to do that, you know, I do know a little bit about that world, and as I understand it, they may even be considering it for the Olympic games at some point in the future. Because it is, when you see some of these high end players play, it’s absolutely scary and again, some of them – they are a team, aren’t they? They’re a team battling the other team? And the skill that’s involved, and the reflexes, the coordination, it’s just mind-blowing to watch how incredibly talented these players are. So, having said that, *laughs* I think I’m still stuck on Level One. I’m still on the bike and I’m still stuck in Valhalla, which is not a bad place to be. But I will say this about the “Valhalla” game is that it was something that we as a band had never done before, and we’re not the first band to do it, but I thought it was just a great moment to show that you can marry the music of Judas Priest into an online gaming experience. It worked really well, it turned out great. For some of them you never know, you know, the high-end ones where it’s almost real, like the new “Star Wars” one…why did that get all that flack, Richie? I still don’t understand that. The battle thing…?
Richie: It was the way that you leveled up through the game, so essentially, they call it “pay to win”. So someone with a load of cash can go in and buy a load of stuff and get everything, whereas other people would have to spend hours and hours and hours to get the same stuff.
Scott: So it’s like real life.
Rob: *laughs*
Richie: Exactly!
Rob: Well, no, I understand what the fuss is, because I’m a Reddit freak, I love Reddit, you know? And I’m seeing all this going down on Reddit and I can’t quite grasp it, and I thought I knew what it was and you explained it correctly, Richie, and that absolutely sucks. It sucks, it just takes all the fun out of it.
Richie: They changed it pretty quickly, by the way.
Rob: Did they?
Richie: Yeah, within the first day they took that element out of it. Made it more fair.
Rob: Well, I hope that goes the same way as Net Neutrality because that’s just a horrible thing waiting in the wings. Anyway yeah, Metal listeners, check out “Valhalla”, the Priest game. I think it’s on Apple.
There it is. And we also learned a little bit about Rob Halford’s internet habits in terms of Reddit just now. So I think fans will like that!
Rob: *laughs* I love my Reddit.
Honestly, I could have millions of questions and sit here talking to you all for hours, but I have been given a time limit and I’m sure you don’t want to sit here talking to me for hours, so —
Rob: Yes, we do.
Oh, okay. *laughs* Well, I will just ask you to wrap it up with a simple straightforward thing – a message to the fans from each of you.
Scott: Personally, and I know we all feel like this because we’ve been saying it in interviews and we’ve talked amongst ourselves, we’re really looking forward to the new album, but definitely to the new tour, it will be almost three years since we’ve been on the road and been able to be face to face with fans and that’s really what, I think, being a live performer is all about. Obviously, when you first start playing music, you hone your own craft and then you, of course, want to get with like-minded people that share the same musical direction. That’s cool, and then the big culmination is you have to go and play in front of people, otherwise you’re just a star in your own zip code.
Rob: What is that, a star in your own zip code? Did you take that from somebody or did you just make that up?
Scott: No, had that one for a while.
Rob: Let me just follow up by saying everything that Scott said, but we love you, our fans. Thank you so much for supporting Priest and being with us for so long, and you new Metalheads that might be coming to see Priest for the first time, you’re going to love it. You’re going to be with a great bunch of people – we’re all together in this metal community spirit, so thank you, check out Firepower, and we’ll see you on the road. Here’s the Falcon Faulkner.
Richie: Oh man, how can you add anything to that?
You get the closing statement, Richie!
Richie: I agree.
Rob: There you go.
Richie: Just end with that.
That’s a perfect closing statement.
Richie: Well, I totally agree, again, it’s my second studio record with the band, and it’s my third world tour. And just to be a part of a band that’s been going almost 50 years because of the fans is an amazing thing to be a part of, and I think it’s an accolade that the band deserves. And I’ll see you out there on the road with Firepower.
It’s no secret that Judas Priest’s upcoming studio record is already setting the world on fire like a bolt of lightning – sparked by the recent unveiling of the video for “Lightning Strike”. Firepower is on its way, set for a March 9th Epic Records release, and now the official audio for the title track is available to stream right here: http://smarturl.it/Firepower. In case you missed the first single of “Lightning Strike”, head to the Official Judas Priest VEVO Channel on YouTube to check it out: https://youtu.be/CUzcxJNZKC4. Judas Priest will head out on the first leg of the Firepower tourstarting on March 13 in PA, and running through the rest of the spring and summer, with more dates continually being added. For more info and to keep up on all the latest with Firepower, visit: http://judaspriest.com.
