Post by Mebert78 on May 23, 2009 18:26:29 GMT -5
www.nonelouder.com/profiles/blogs/blood-at-the-crossroads-an
When work ensured on the writing process for Blood, did it vary at all from the work on O.S.I’s 2006 release Free?
“It really wasn’t a whole lot different, we’ve kind of settled into a really comfortable relationship the way we do things, Kevin and I, we tend to both like to work alone. With ‘Free’ I believe there was a short period where Kevin was here at my house in my studio and we did some things together. This time around we did everything apart except for the mix; we get together and mix it together. But other than that it was pretty much the same, you know, I start off here with writing some songs and demos and I send them to him and he kind of goes through them and picks ideas that he’d like to work on. He does his thing and then sends them back to me; it’s really a long process of back and forth of us sending ideas back and forth to each other so we get somewhere where we both agree it’s a song, then we move on.”
What is it about working independently that appeals to Matheos?
“For me, I like to work alone because I like to let ideas sit for awhile, maybe overnight, maybe even longer, and listen to it with a fresh ear in a couple days. And I think maybe when I’m around other people I get a little bit inhibited, I don’t try as many things as I would when I’m alone so I can fall flat on my face by myself. And the other thing too, I guess sometimes when I have done it before, when I put something down on the fly and there’re people around I’ve been happy with it, but overall I like to put stuff down and give it a couple days. That’s why it’s such a slow process with us, I mean we can sometimes go back and forth on one song for months at a time.”
Matheos, half of the creative force of O.S.I., and his counterpart, Kevin Moore, are musicians with vastly different musical tastes. Is that meeting at the crossroads kind of process something that is frustrating to Matheos, inspiring, or both?
“Yeah, probably a little bit of both. It doesn’t really come into play as much though as far as our influences, I think that the end result is more of what we like sound-wise. I guess what I listen to maybe influences what I write and what he listens to maybe influences what he writes, but as far as an overall concept we don’t really talk about it like I want to go this direction, he wants to go this direction, it’s really just what each of us does individually. I think more less our approach to music overall is the same – how we like things to sound, how we like to work; the influences are more just on an individual basis.”
Have Matheos and Moore run into any situations yet where one of them wanted a song or part to go a certain way, but the other had opposing views?
“Yeah, we’ve had those situations. More so I would think – well, the first record was really difficult because it was the first time we were working this way. Up to that point I had never really dealt with someone taking my songs. When I bring a demo in it’s pretty much done, it’s got drums, bass, everything in it, and when Kevin first got involved he would really tear them apart and reconstruct them so that they weren’t even recognizable anymore,” Matheos chuckles slightly, “So it was really rough for me on the first record, but I found that after I got away from it for awhile that I really enjoyed actually listening to my ideas being deconstructed and taken in a totally different direction. It really opened me up to a lot of things. The second record was a little bit easier; I think we had probably more disagreements at that point when we were mixing as far as what we wanted the record to sound like. And this time around it was relatively trouble free. I mean, we run into those situations where we both hear something different but we’ve learned to keep at it until we come up with a comfortable compromise and hopefully we don’t have to do that too much.”
For Blood, Porcupine Tree and King Crimson’s Gavin Harrison filled the role of drummer after the departure of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. How did working with Harrison differ from Portnoy?
“Well the biggest difference is when we did the first two records with Mike – number one: the songs weren’t complete when Mike put his drums to them. Remember I told you before I would come up with demos and send them to Kevin, well on the first two records for the most part the songs weren’t Kevin-ized, shall we say, when Mike started working on the drums – that was done after the fact. Especially on the first record. On this one we pretty much got the songs done – 90, 95 percent – including a lot of the vocals and things before, and you know we just used programmed drums for our own purposes. And then when they were done they went to Gavin. So he had a lot more to work with. He heard a lot more vocal melody lines – which he was insistent on hearing to write his drum parts around those so that they would compliment the vocals. And the other thing too is that he did them at his home studio in London so we weren’t even there, whereas when we did the first two records we were, all three of us, in the studio.”
Modern technology has opened that window of opportunity where musicians don’t have to be in the same room, the same city, or even the same country anymore to work on a joint project.
“It’s amazing. Yeah, I was here, Kevin was in Florida for the most part, Gavin’s in London, we had a guest vocal, Mikael Akerfeldt, in Stockholm, and it all came together in hours of working with each other.”
The act of having a guest musician play on a record has become quite trendy as of late.
“Yeah, I think it’s kind of what we were just saying too about the accessibility of home studios and being able to get somebody to put down a solo or whatever at their home studio and email it to you, it’s not like it was before where you had to fly somebody into the studio and pay the studio time, so it’s a lot easier, a lot more accessible for people to use all kinds of different musicians. If you’ve got a couple hours of a hole in your schedule you can get it done and mail it off rather than penciling out three or four days.”
And how did the idea of bring Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt on board come about?
“Well, it was Kevin’s idea – I think he suggested to me early on that he wanted to know what I thought about using a guest vocalist again this time because we used one on the first record but we didn’t on the second one. And I pretty much leave that up to him, he’s the vocalist, if he wants to add another voice in for some different atmosphere that’s fine with me. But he asked me what I thought and if I had any suggestions, and I suggested Mikael actually. I’m a big fan of his and his work with Opeth. And it was great. Again, it was kind of like with Gavin though, we weren’t really in touch on an eye-to-eye basis when he was working on the stuff. A lot of email back and forth, but we gave him a choice of – I think – three songs, two or three songs, we sent him demos of and let him listen to them and let him pick which one he wanted to work with.”
When Mike Portnoy was working with Matheos and Moore he’d expressed some dissatisfaction with how O.S.I. turned out. Portnoy, who’s known as being the creative force behind Dream Theater, found it difficult to not have as much say with O.S.I.
“Yeah, I think that was one of the big frustrations for all of us, really, especially for Mike. On the first record, he was actually brought in first – the first record was originally intended to be a solo record for myself and I brought Mike in. We’ve been friends forever and we’ve talked about working together for a long time. So I brought him in to help me get the whole thing together and eventually when Kevin got involved he started taking the music in a different direction and there was just a lot of general friction in the studio. Some of it good; some of it led to a lot of good things, I think. But Mike was frustrated in the end that he didn’t have as much input as he thought he would. Come time to do the second record he wasn’t really too much interested in doing it because of the whole process on the first record, and then we came to an agreement – I think just because he and I are such good friends – we came to an agreement that he would play on the record and he would understand from the start that he was just coming in as a session musician, just was going to play drums and hopefully that would lessen the frustration for him but he’s so passionate about music it’s hard for him, no matter what we agreed on, it’s hard for him to just come in and play drums and not have an opinion on where the song should go. And again, he just ended up being frustrated and we thought it best at that point that we move on to someone else and remain friends.”
So are there any songs off of Blood that Matheos is particularly fond of?
“Yeah,” Matheos laughs, “It’s not only hard to pick because you’re close to them all but especially when it’s this close to the release of the record and we really haven’t gotten away from it so much. It’s a lot easier for me to listen to something that I did three or four years ago and see what I like and what I don’t like. Having said that, I would say on this record, a song like ‘Terminal’ I’m really happy with. Um, ‘Be The Hero.’ Those are probably my two favorites off the top. I think for me this time around it’s the songs that are furthest away from what I started off with. Again, they’re songs that Kevin took and mangled and took in a different direction than I originally intended so it’s a lot easier for me to listen to them as being fresh and I don’t see myself so much in them. I guess that’s what it is. I don’t think I would do that with just anybody though, it’s not like I’d just let anybody come in and do that and be happy with it. I think it comes down to I like what Kevin does, I’ve been a fan of his work with Chroma Key and Dream Theater, I like everything he does, and when he takes my songs I’m usually happy with it.”
And are there any plans at all for a future O.S.I. tour, or is one even possible at this point in time?
“Unfortunately, I don’t think so. I’m open to it; I’d love to do it. We got close to doing it on the last record. The reality of it is in order to do it the way we would like to do it and present it the way we would want to present it - it would be probably fairly visual with a good light show and all that kind of stuff – it would cost too much money for the kind of fan base that we have right now. It just wouldn’t make sense at this point.”
Are there any plans at all for another Fates Warning record?
“Yeah, we’re talking about it. We’ve been talking and sending some ideas back and forth. Nothing solid yet but I think I can do another one, I’m getting that itch.”
Although there is still contact between Matheos and former Fates Warning drummer, Mark Zonder, it isn’t clear if Zonder would participate in a future Fates Warning album.
“We talk occasionally, but I don’t know. I’m not really sure, we kind of left it that he was going to go his way – he had other ideas he wanted to pursue. We haven’t talked about it since then. I don’t know, but probably not though.”
And what about a solo record seeing how that was the intention but then developed into the O.S.I. project?
“Only if it was something completely different. Originally the idea for what became O.S.I. was really just to do something that was in the direction of Fates Warning but the idea was to bring in a bunch of musicians like Mike and there were a lot of other people I talked to about bringing in, it wasn’t going to be drastically different from what I do with Fates. But now that I have O.S.I. and Fates I don’t think that there’s too much need for me to do anything heavy or progressive as a side project. I do have some interest in doing some more acoustic albums, maybe, somewhere down the line if time permits.”
Aside from the current O.S.I. project, and the possibility of a new Fates Warning record, what else is Matheos working on these days?
“I’m writing. I always write. Even if there’s nothing on the horizon I’m trying to keep ideas so I always have a backlog of songs, be that be for Fates or ideas for O.S.I. I think right now the thing will be Fates but we’re not certain about it. I’m just starting to get a catalog of songs together for that. It’s fun to have as many things as you can although it can be a little frustrating at the same time too. You have so many things you have to do in order to really make a living as a musician really. It would be nice if you just had one project and you’re always busy with that, but things are such that now at least in my career I’ve got to keep as busy as possible and try to do as many different things as possible. So yeah, it’s liberating, it’s fun to try different styles and work with different people but it can be a little tiring at the same time. Not only the economy but how the music business is in particular.”
Are there any newer bands that Matheos listens to these days?
“That’s tough to say. I don’t really listen to much progressive music these days. Just some heavy stuff – still a huge Opeth fan. I love Porcupine Tree. I don’t know, I always get flat-footed when people ask me this question,” Matheos chuckled, “I don’t really know off the top of my head. I listen to a lot of music - it could be anything from old-school 70’s metal or prog-metal or traditional progressive rock to classical to blue-grass. I mean I really do listen to a lot of different things I just really can’t think of anyone off the top of my head that’s blown me away recently that I would consider an influence.”
In what way or direction do you see the whole prog-metal genre ‘progressing’ or changing at all?
“That’s a good question, I would like to see it progress actually. Progressive metal for me unfortunately - from what I know of it, I don’t listen to a lot of it - but the stuff that I’m exposed to just seems really derivative and tired to me – I don’t hear anything exciting at all. We’ll see, I think someone needs to come to the forefront and try a different approach and just bring some fresh blood and new sounds into the whole thing, it’s just getting a little tired. There are a lot of people who think that progressive metal has to be really long songs played really fast and if it’s not that then it’s not progressive, and I think by the very nature of putting those kind of limits on something that’s called progressive it’s a bit limiting.”
When work ensured on the writing process for Blood, did it vary at all from the work on O.S.I’s 2006 release Free?
“It really wasn’t a whole lot different, we’ve kind of settled into a really comfortable relationship the way we do things, Kevin and I, we tend to both like to work alone. With ‘Free’ I believe there was a short period where Kevin was here at my house in my studio and we did some things together. This time around we did everything apart except for the mix; we get together and mix it together. But other than that it was pretty much the same, you know, I start off here with writing some songs and demos and I send them to him and he kind of goes through them and picks ideas that he’d like to work on. He does his thing and then sends them back to me; it’s really a long process of back and forth of us sending ideas back and forth to each other so we get somewhere where we both agree it’s a song, then we move on.”
What is it about working independently that appeals to Matheos?
“For me, I like to work alone because I like to let ideas sit for awhile, maybe overnight, maybe even longer, and listen to it with a fresh ear in a couple days. And I think maybe when I’m around other people I get a little bit inhibited, I don’t try as many things as I would when I’m alone so I can fall flat on my face by myself. And the other thing too, I guess sometimes when I have done it before, when I put something down on the fly and there’re people around I’ve been happy with it, but overall I like to put stuff down and give it a couple days. That’s why it’s such a slow process with us, I mean we can sometimes go back and forth on one song for months at a time.”
Matheos, half of the creative force of O.S.I., and his counterpart, Kevin Moore, are musicians with vastly different musical tastes. Is that meeting at the crossroads kind of process something that is frustrating to Matheos, inspiring, or both?
“Yeah, probably a little bit of both. It doesn’t really come into play as much though as far as our influences, I think that the end result is more of what we like sound-wise. I guess what I listen to maybe influences what I write and what he listens to maybe influences what he writes, but as far as an overall concept we don’t really talk about it like I want to go this direction, he wants to go this direction, it’s really just what each of us does individually. I think more less our approach to music overall is the same – how we like things to sound, how we like to work; the influences are more just on an individual basis.”
Have Matheos and Moore run into any situations yet where one of them wanted a song or part to go a certain way, but the other had opposing views?
“Yeah, we’ve had those situations. More so I would think – well, the first record was really difficult because it was the first time we were working this way. Up to that point I had never really dealt with someone taking my songs. When I bring a demo in it’s pretty much done, it’s got drums, bass, everything in it, and when Kevin first got involved he would really tear them apart and reconstruct them so that they weren’t even recognizable anymore,” Matheos chuckles slightly, “So it was really rough for me on the first record, but I found that after I got away from it for awhile that I really enjoyed actually listening to my ideas being deconstructed and taken in a totally different direction. It really opened me up to a lot of things. The second record was a little bit easier; I think we had probably more disagreements at that point when we were mixing as far as what we wanted the record to sound like. And this time around it was relatively trouble free. I mean, we run into those situations where we both hear something different but we’ve learned to keep at it until we come up with a comfortable compromise and hopefully we don’t have to do that too much.”
For Blood, Porcupine Tree and King Crimson’s Gavin Harrison filled the role of drummer after the departure of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. How did working with Harrison differ from Portnoy?
“Well the biggest difference is when we did the first two records with Mike – number one: the songs weren’t complete when Mike put his drums to them. Remember I told you before I would come up with demos and send them to Kevin, well on the first two records for the most part the songs weren’t Kevin-ized, shall we say, when Mike started working on the drums – that was done after the fact. Especially on the first record. On this one we pretty much got the songs done – 90, 95 percent – including a lot of the vocals and things before, and you know we just used programmed drums for our own purposes. And then when they were done they went to Gavin. So he had a lot more to work with. He heard a lot more vocal melody lines – which he was insistent on hearing to write his drum parts around those so that they would compliment the vocals. And the other thing too is that he did them at his home studio in London so we weren’t even there, whereas when we did the first two records we were, all three of us, in the studio.”
Modern technology has opened that window of opportunity where musicians don’t have to be in the same room, the same city, or even the same country anymore to work on a joint project.
“It’s amazing. Yeah, I was here, Kevin was in Florida for the most part, Gavin’s in London, we had a guest vocal, Mikael Akerfeldt, in Stockholm, and it all came together in hours of working with each other.”
The act of having a guest musician play on a record has become quite trendy as of late.
“Yeah, I think it’s kind of what we were just saying too about the accessibility of home studios and being able to get somebody to put down a solo or whatever at their home studio and email it to you, it’s not like it was before where you had to fly somebody into the studio and pay the studio time, so it’s a lot easier, a lot more accessible for people to use all kinds of different musicians. If you’ve got a couple hours of a hole in your schedule you can get it done and mail it off rather than penciling out three or four days.”
And how did the idea of bring Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt on board come about?
“Well, it was Kevin’s idea – I think he suggested to me early on that he wanted to know what I thought about using a guest vocalist again this time because we used one on the first record but we didn’t on the second one. And I pretty much leave that up to him, he’s the vocalist, if he wants to add another voice in for some different atmosphere that’s fine with me. But he asked me what I thought and if I had any suggestions, and I suggested Mikael actually. I’m a big fan of his and his work with Opeth. And it was great. Again, it was kind of like with Gavin though, we weren’t really in touch on an eye-to-eye basis when he was working on the stuff. A lot of email back and forth, but we gave him a choice of – I think – three songs, two or three songs, we sent him demos of and let him listen to them and let him pick which one he wanted to work with.”
When Mike Portnoy was working with Matheos and Moore he’d expressed some dissatisfaction with how O.S.I. turned out. Portnoy, who’s known as being the creative force behind Dream Theater, found it difficult to not have as much say with O.S.I.
“Yeah, I think that was one of the big frustrations for all of us, really, especially for Mike. On the first record, he was actually brought in first – the first record was originally intended to be a solo record for myself and I brought Mike in. We’ve been friends forever and we’ve talked about working together for a long time. So I brought him in to help me get the whole thing together and eventually when Kevin got involved he started taking the music in a different direction and there was just a lot of general friction in the studio. Some of it good; some of it led to a lot of good things, I think. But Mike was frustrated in the end that he didn’t have as much input as he thought he would. Come time to do the second record he wasn’t really too much interested in doing it because of the whole process on the first record, and then we came to an agreement – I think just because he and I are such good friends – we came to an agreement that he would play on the record and he would understand from the start that he was just coming in as a session musician, just was going to play drums and hopefully that would lessen the frustration for him but he’s so passionate about music it’s hard for him, no matter what we agreed on, it’s hard for him to just come in and play drums and not have an opinion on where the song should go. And again, he just ended up being frustrated and we thought it best at that point that we move on to someone else and remain friends.”
So are there any songs off of Blood that Matheos is particularly fond of?
“Yeah,” Matheos laughs, “It’s not only hard to pick because you’re close to them all but especially when it’s this close to the release of the record and we really haven’t gotten away from it so much. It’s a lot easier for me to listen to something that I did three or four years ago and see what I like and what I don’t like. Having said that, I would say on this record, a song like ‘Terminal’ I’m really happy with. Um, ‘Be The Hero.’ Those are probably my two favorites off the top. I think for me this time around it’s the songs that are furthest away from what I started off with. Again, they’re songs that Kevin took and mangled and took in a different direction than I originally intended so it’s a lot easier for me to listen to them as being fresh and I don’t see myself so much in them. I guess that’s what it is. I don’t think I would do that with just anybody though, it’s not like I’d just let anybody come in and do that and be happy with it. I think it comes down to I like what Kevin does, I’ve been a fan of his work with Chroma Key and Dream Theater, I like everything he does, and when he takes my songs I’m usually happy with it.”
And are there any plans at all for a future O.S.I. tour, or is one even possible at this point in time?
“Unfortunately, I don’t think so. I’m open to it; I’d love to do it. We got close to doing it on the last record. The reality of it is in order to do it the way we would like to do it and present it the way we would want to present it - it would be probably fairly visual with a good light show and all that kind of stuff – it would cost too much money for the kind of fan base that we have right now. It just wouldn’t make sense at this point.”
Are there any plans at all for another Fates Warning record?
“Yeah, we’re talking about it. We’ve been talking and sending some ideas back and forth. Nothing solid yet but I think I can do another one, I’m getting that itch.”
Although there is still contact between Matheos and former Fates Warning drummer, Mark Zonder, it isn’t clear if Zonder would participate in a future Fates Warning album.
“We talk occasionally, but I don’t know. I’m not really sure, we kind of left it that he was going to go his way – he had other ideas he wanted to pursue. We haven’t talked about it since then. I don’t know, but probably not though.”
And what about a solo record seeing how that was the intention but then developed into the O.S.I. project?
“Only if it was something completely different. Originally the idea for what became O.S.I. was really just to do something that was in the direction of Fates Warning but the idea was to bring in a bunch of musicians like Mike and there were a lot of other people I talked to about bringing in, it wasn’t going to be drastically different from what I do with Fates. But now that I have O.S.I. and Fates I don’t think that there’s too much need for me to do anything heavy or progressive as a side project. I do have some interest in doing some more acoustic albums, maybe, somewhere down the line if time permits.”
Aside from the current O.S.I. project, and the possibility of a new Fates Warning record, what else is Matheos working on these days?
“I’m writing. I always write. Even if there’s nothing on the horizon I’m trying to keep ideas so I always have a backlog of songs, be that be for Fates or ideas for O.S.I. I think right now the thing will be Fates but we’re not certain about it. I’m just starting to get a catalog of songs together for that. It’s fun to have as many things as you can although it can be a little frustrating at the same time too. You have so many things you have to do in order to really make a living as a musician really. It would be nice if you just had one project and you’re always busy with that, but things are such that now at least in my career I’ve got to keep as busy as possible and try to do as many different things as possible. So yeah, it’s liberating, it’s fun to try different styles and work with different people but it can be a little tiring at the same time. Not only the economy but how the music business is in particular.”
Are there any newer bands that Matheos listens to these days?
“That’s tough to say. I don’t really listen to much progressive music these days. Just some heavy stuff – still a huge Opeth fan. I love Porcupine Tree. I don’t know, I always get flat-footed when people ask me this question,” Matheos chuckled, “I don’t really know off the top of my head. I listen to a lot of music - it could be anything from old-school 70’s metal or prog-metal or traditional progressive rock to classical to blue-grass. I mean I really do listen to a lot of different things I just really can’t think of anyone off the top of my head that’s blown me away recently that I would consider an influence.”
In what way or direction do you see the whole prog-metal genre ‘progressing’ or changing at all?
“That’s a good question, I would like to see it progress actually. Progressive metal for me unfortunately - from what I know of it, I don’t listen to a lot of it - but the stuff that I’m exposed to just seems really derivative and tired to me – I don’t hear anything exciting at all. We’ll see, I think someone needs to come to the forefront and try a different approach and just bring some fresh blood and new sounds into the whole thing, it’s just getting a little tired. There are a lot of people who think that progressive metal has to be really long songs played really fast and if it’s not that then it’s not progressive, and I think by the very nature of putting those kind of limits on something that’s called progressive it’s a bit limiting.”
