Transcript of an interview I recorded with Bill Hudson of NORTHTALE - 10/07/19. Full article here. MAL-
On the line, Bill Hudson, he's going to be talking about many things, and we'll be chatting about the NORTHTALE album coming out very soon, Bill. Thanks for joining me. BILL- Hey, thank you very much for having me. Thank you for the opportunity. MAL- It's great to have you here with us today. Now, tell us about your previous work before we get into the NORTHTALE album, tell us about what you've been doing up until now. BILL- Oh, man, I've been doing a lot. Lately I've been involved mainly with a I AM MORBID, which is David Vincent from MORBID ANGEL. That's his new band. We play MORBID ANGEL music from the first four albums. We tour extensively with that we just finished a big European tour and are about to do a South American one. I also play well off and on, I'm not 100% in her band, but I've done quite a bit with her with DORO PESCH, the German Queen of metal. I've done her US tour recently. And I done Prog Power. And I'm about to do another tour with her as well. Of course, UDO DIRKSCHNEIDER. I am not in that band anymore. I left last year. But I did tour with him for a year and a half. And then I have a whole whole slew of experience that's related to the band SAVATAGE and the TRANS SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA. SAVATAGE has had two singers in their history. Jon Oliva and Zach Stevens. They both have their own solo bands, which is CIRCLE TO CIRCLE and JON OLIVA'S PAIN, I play for both of those bands. And I also I work with the TRANS SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA. Although I've only done the Wacken show in 2015 and one tour in I've been in but the sort of like backup band since which is you know I still do rehearsals and all but but I don't tour. So I keep pretty busy. But mostly, you know, always playing other people's music as opposed to my own so NORTHTALE came to try and change that. MAL- Right. So let's get on to that. When was this idea hatched? And how did you go about it? BILL- Well, there were three there were basically three specific things that that converged. First, I was trying to release an instrumental album, right. And I was going to do something like you know, 10 songs, maybe two with vocals and eight instrumentals or 10, instrumentals or whatever. And, but I only wrote the vocal songs, you know, I had some of the other demos or whatever, but the only songs that were done are the vocals one. And I really want a Christian Erickson from TWILIGHT FORCE to sing those songs. And I invited him to and he initially told me no, because he was too busy with his band, TWILIGHT FORCE, but we stayed in touch. And he was you know, he was a, he was interested in the music, he gave me some feedback. And you know, but nothing really happened, you know, on my end I was super busy with Udo at a time with DIRKSCHNEIDER. And I really had not much time to think of a side project. But as I started to grow unhappy with the situation with Udo I started thinking more about starting my own band, because, you know, I wanted to be a professional musician. I wanted to play with my heroes and all that. But at the end of the day, I was just playing cover songs, you know that I'm playing someone else's music. That's the truth. You know. Yeah, it's cool to tour. It's cool to play for big crowds, but they're just there to hear me play someone else's stuff. And I wanted to, you know, I wanted to see what would happen if I put my own stuff out at this. So that was his thing number two, and then number three, which is when Christian actually left TWILIGHT FORCE. And I'm like, Oh my god, that guy's available, you know, so I'm gonna go after him. And I sent him an email like 'Christian, you know, whenever you ready? Let me know, let's start a band'. And oddly enough, there's some serendipity there, my drummer, our drummer, Patrick, contacted him at the same time, also wanting to start a band. So it was like, it was too perfect. You know, I'm like, 'Oh my god, let's just start this band, the three of us', you know, and me and Patrick already had some prior relationship as well. We talked about doing something together, we just never did it. And, and this bell is it you know, Christian recorded the two solo songs or whatever. The and then we started writing music, you know, the Christian brought in some of his songs, some of his own songs, the the title track is his and, and, you know, it just felt like, 'Oh my god, I found my partner' you know that, because I always felt that every band needs like a guitarist, singer, Phil Anselmo and Dimebag, you know, Axl and Slash, it's a thing that I always wanted to find a singer and in Christian was the right guy. So basically, that was it. You know, we're like, okay, we're a band. Now. Fuck the solo album, we would just write songs as a band, and put them out as a band. MAL- Where's everybody in the band based? Was this a logistical problem getting together? BILL- It still is. Honestly we'll do a lot more stuff if we if we didn't live so far apart. Christian and Mikael Planefeldt our bass player, they're both in Sweden. Michael is in Gothenburg and Christian is in Stockholm. Patrick, our drummer is also Swedish, but he lives here in Florida. He lives about three hours away from me last actually tour two hours away from me. So we rehearse pretty well quite kind of often, you know, like every week, so that adds to the organic side of the thing is not all done.... I mean, the drummer jam, you know, and then our keyboard player Jimmy Pitts, even though he's here in America, that's the one that lives in the hardest place to reach. He lives in like, Springfield, Missouri or something, you know, like, like, deep deep in the Midwest. And so but yeah, we it's all done online. You know, we chat online every day we exchange text messages, we, we basically wrote the record via WhatsApp. So it is it is a logistical nightmare. But, you know, we all know how to use a home studio. We all know how to use an iPhone. So you know, we that's, we do what we can. MAL- Was the album recorded together as a band? Or were you you know, like you were hinting at swapping ideas over the internet? BILL- Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it wasn't recorded as a band. I mean, again, me and the drummer, I went and I basically directed him. And I, and I did my guitars here in Florida as well. And but yeah, no, it was all done in different places in the world. Me, I recorded half the album here in Florida with the engineer, Jared Pritchard. He's a death metal guy from here from GRUESOME, 1349 he's amazing front of the house, great producer. And the other half I recorded in Los Angeles Damien, a French producer who's currently doing the DRAGONFORCE album, but his credits include FEAR FACTORY, BABY METAL, quite a bit of stuff. And, you know, and the guys recorded at their places, I mean, we were producing each other, you know, hey, maybe try this here. You know, this is why, like on the on the album, he says, produced by NORTHTALE, because all of us acted as producers in this album, you know? So hey, like that guitar thing that you did? But how about trying this? Oh, how about that vocal thing? And that's the biggest logistical nightmare, in my opinion, because any little small change that you want to make takes fucking three days, you know? Whereas if you're sitting in the room, it just say, hey, play like this? MAL- Yeah. Put that part there. BILL- Yeah, exactly. You know, put that part there takes three days when you try to do this online. But I also think that there's a certain ? that can be achieved better like that, when you're not in a loud room with everybody coming up with stuff, you know, when you're actually sitting the comfort of your home and listening to the music and all that. MAL- Okay, so when did the label come on board? BILL- Yeah, the label came up. We started talking to them last year, about a year ago. Butjust talking just, you know, telling them about what we were going to do because Christian, Christian was on the label with TWILIGHT FORCE, right. And so he already knew them. I knew our a&r guy, from just just from festivals and stuff, you know, we had we had a pretty good friendship. So but I mean, a label won't, it's very hard to sign to get signed to a label these days. So we weren't planning on having a label we were planning on on just releasing the album. That's why like, the album was done in two parts, you know, we were planning on releasing an EP, a six song EP, just released on our own, you know, but we posted it online, we made a band page. And then we started getting a bunch of interest, you know, a bunch of people talking to us, hey, when is the album coming out? Blah, blah, blah. Then we started getting little labels, getting a hold of us, you know, Greek labels, Italian labels. Some of them would even send us it's like a standard contract without listening to any music. I'm like, What the hell is going on? You know, Why are people so interested in this? And I was like, if all these people are interested in this, maybe the bigger labels will be too, you know, and I literally emailed nuclear blast. I'm like, hey, yeah, you know, you want to listen to the stuff I did, like, yeah, send it to me in that was it, you know, we submitted. And they liked it. And we we, it took us maybe two or three months to negotiate the contract. And then we signed. MAL- So the album's coming out August 2, what's in the pipeline, then for NORTHTALE? BILL- We have our first show on August 15. In Sweden, Sabaton Open Air. And it's going to be pretty nerve wracking because we never played in front of anybody, you know, and most bands actually will do a warm up show or something we've done nothing we're just gonna go for it. But we're going to do a lot of rehearsing beforehand Of course. So that's the first thing we have. And then about nine days later, we go to Japan for a Evoken Fest which is another festival and we have two shows there. And I'll be doing a guitar clinic as well. And we're looking at tour offers right now we're trying to decide on a booking agent we've been getting we've been getting a lot of interest from them but we haven't been able to nail down a deal with anyone yet, and you know so right now that's all we have. There's a very possible tour for January with a bigger band but because that's not confirmed I'd rather not say. But that's what, yeah, that's what we that's what we got. MAL- Bill from NORTHTALE, thanks so much for talking to me today. Best of luck with the new album, 'Welcome To Paradise' out August 2. Really good luck with that. And thanks again for taking the time. BILL- Thank you Mal I can't wait to go to Australia and play this music for you guys. MAL- Thanks Bill, you have a great day. BILL- Take care, man. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorMetalhead who hates bad parking. |