Transcript of an interview I recorded with PAUL LIERMAN of THE WISE MAN’S FEAR - 20200601. Full article here. MAL-
Chatting to Paul Lierman from THE WISE MAN'S FEAR. Paul, thanks for joining me. ALEX- Thanks for having me. I'm excited. MAL- It's good to have you on. Let's backtrack if you can, give us a brief history of the band. ALEX- Sure. So we first started getting together and writing music back in 2014, end of 2013 somewhere around there, and really just sort of met through mutual acquaintances. Our harsh vocalist Joe and I were sort of the two people that started it. And from there, we found a guitarist on Craigslist, which was kind of funny, but he wound up being a perfect fit. Then my college roommate, Nathan joined us on guitar. And Joe's friend from high school Tyler to clean vocals and Thomas plays bass. So yeah, sort of way back when. MAL- First couple of albums were independently released. Is that correct? ALEX- Yes, sir. MAL- What was the degree of difficulty doing that independently? ALEX- Really hard and not as hard respectively. So the first one 'Castle In The Clouds', we wrote that record and released in 2015. And that was the first foray that we any of us had ever really done into releasing music. And so there's a really steep learning curve for us. So we had to figure out, you know, digital distribution, merch, doing fulfilment for all of our merch sales and stuff like that. And it honestly it got received better than we were expecting, it was a little bit of a slow burn. It wasn't anything like an overnight hit or anything by any stretch of the imagination, but yet a lot of people definitely it resonated with them. And that's, that was really exciting for us to see. So second time around it was you know, add some years of experience and a little more digital marketing know how and it was a little bit more smooth and natural, but it's still pretty time consuming. So that's part of the reason that we're super excited to sign with Sharptone for this one. We're all pretty hectic guys, day to day we, you know, a lot of us either have our own businesses or you know, everybody's working jobs and what not so it's it's great to have those guys handling the release and just being absolute pros and it takes you know a lot off our shoulders to sleep easy at night. MAL- Right let's get on to the new album 'Valley Of Kings' just been released. Tell us about the the writing of that. There's a story? Is there a story to it? And what is the story? Tell us about that. ALEX- Yes, sir. Yes, we just released 'Valley Of Kings' two days ago now, and the writing for that record was super exciting, super fun. And basically, we wrote it in about a year. And then it just took a long time to, for us to put it out just because of video complications. But the storyline essentially is kind of like if you envision 'Fellowship of the Ring' crossed with 'Journey To The Centre Of The Earth'. So it's a group of warriors and they have to destroy these five evil relics, but the only place that can be done is in the Valley Of Kings, which is like this legendary location deep below the Earth. Say it's just chronicling their their whole journey down there and it's kind of a metaphorical commentary on some philosophy as well. So each of the five characters represents a worldview and the record sort of pits them against each other and cross examines how they each handle different situations. MAL- Does this new album relate in a way to the earlier two albums? Continuation of a story? ALEX- Yeah, it takes place in the same made up universe that we've called Numa. And it happens 1000 years after the events of the prior two records. So first record, we did 'Castle In The Clouds' was started as a standalone story and then the second record was a prequel to that. And then this is the final instalment of the trilogy. And this is, you know, way down in the future dealing sort of with ramifications from those first two records. MAL- Tell us about the vocal dynamic you have going with Tyler and Joseph. Does Tyler do exclusively clean and Joseph exclusively harsh or do they cross over? They've got a real good mix thing going there. ALEX- Yeah, they definitely play off each other super well. As of now, they they're pretty much exclusively harsh and clean respectively. But Tyler there's I think there's one or two songs where Tyler has a harsh line. And then Joe has sort of ventured into some of its like pitch yells where there's a little bit of a note behind it, but it's still definitely a harsh vocal. So that's for him. That's like sort of the next frontier as a vocalist. That's like a really tough one to master. MAL- The band has a real, what I call a light and shade factor, which I really like. Very well done. ALEX- Thank you, appreciate that. MAL- With all that's going on in the world at the moment, how much has that delayed recording in any way or release? Or were you sort of pretty much wound up before this thing hit? ALEX- Yeah, we were fortunate to have everything buttoned up beforehand. The way that Sharptone handles their releases is they'll have all the deliverables so your masters, music videos, digital assets, all that stuff they collect before we even establish the date for release and then begin rollout. So, you know, it's a really bizarre time to release music. Just with the scope of the virus and everything but yeah, we, this record we started working on in 2017. And you know, just now finally gotten around to getting it out. partially due to as I sort of alluded to some difficulties with the music videos, we had two different directors that had surprise surgeries that knocked them out of the game for a while, had to pivot away from a director and choose a new guy sort of last minute and then had a formatting issue. So had to like reshoot all the story shots from one of the videos, which was done up in Detroit. So that was a whole excursion that we had to then send actors onto and, yeah, just every obstacle that you could hit from a music video perspective sort of delayed it, but the virus ironically has not really changed much about the release schedule. MAL- With what you said about what Sharptone were doing there, sounds like they're ahead of the game actually. Have tours has been delayed or were you pretty much just off the road, waiting for this to come out anyway? ALEX- Yeah, we just been off the road focusing completely on this record. And actually, you know, we hadn't even had anything lined up yet, by the time the virus hit. So we've been fortunate in that we didn't sink a bunch of money into something or have a cancellation. So, you know, we definitely want a tour to support this record as soon as possible. But it almost doesn't make sense for us to try to make plans right now, just because of how volatile everything is. MAL- Yeah, you must be itching to get out and play this stuff live. ALEX- Oh, absolutely. We've been, you know, playing from that the last two records for three years now. So it's, you know, we're super excited to go support these songs live. MAL- The album's been out just a couple of days, but a number of people would have heard it, including people like myself. Now you got a good reaction from me. What's the reaction been like generally? Must have been good. ALEX- It has been, yeah, it's been overwhelmingly positive. And especially, you know, from our sort of longtime listeners that we there are a lot of Easter eggs in this record that sort of point fingers back to our first and second one. So a lot of people have just expressed that it's been a cool experience for them to go through and, you know, hear those allusions and then at the very end of the record, the final track sort of fades out and bleeds into the first track of our first record, so it gets a little the trilogy feel to it, create little infinite time loop MAL- Who's done the album artwork? Excellent artwork on all your albums actually. ALEX- Thank you, man. That's something that we've always been really proud of and happy with is the guy who makes our album art is, we just know his first name is Alex and he lives in St. Petersburg in Russia. But he goes by Mayhem Project Design on his Facebook page, so we found him basically saw the cover of a band called SHOKRAN, and they're are Russian prog metal band, really, really liked the artwork, did some digging, found him. We love his work. MAL- Something a bit off to the side here. What's the funniest band related memory you've got? It could be something that's happened on tour, or rehearsal. I always get some pretty funny stories here. What's yours? ALEX- I think the one that at least jumps to my mind immediately is we played the Indianapolis date of Warped Tour in 2015, which was a huge moment for our band, you know, especially with that being our first record. We were super excited and Joe our harsh vocalist was nervously just chugging bottles of water beforehand just like subconsciously wasn't aware he was really doing it. It was just blazing hot like 95 humid Indiana summer just absolutely miserable and everybody's gotta look cool so we're wearing you know, black jeans and black shirts and whatnot, and start playing in our very first song you know, he's just jumping around as much energy as possible you know, really want to make the show count and just shakes up all the water in his stomach and pukes all over the stage monitors straight into the grill and got it all over the stage too and our clean vocalist, Tyler didn't realise, moving around in it and getting the mic cable dragged through it and disgusting but yeah, at the end of that song Joe is just kind of like, 'Who likes vomit?'. And then a bunch of people just cheered. And he just sort of, he played it off well. MAL- And what's the best band you've worked with or toured with, whatever.. ALEX- I'd have to say, probably there's a group called IN DYING ARMS. That's a deathcore group from Baltimore, Maryland. And they took us out on tour a couple summers ago now, and they are just the nicest dudes in the world, despite having some of the meanest sounding material out there. They just really took us under their wing and, you know, they've been touring for what, like 10 years or something crazy. They're veterans for sure. So they, you know, they were super, super cool, super humble. And you know, we still talk to him to this day. We haven't seen him in years but awesome dudes. MAL- Hey, Paul, from THE WISE MAN'S FEAR. great talking to you. Best of luck with the 'Valley Of Kings'. Great album, really like it. All the very best with it. Hope you get out on the road sometime soon. ALEX- Thank you so much, we do too, man. Hopefully this all settles down sooner than later but I appreciate the kind words man. It's been a blast talking. Comments are closed.
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AuthorMetalhead who hates bad parking. |