INTERVIEW:MACHINE HEAD

Q: I almost feel like doing any press around Locust is irrelevant if you took the time to buy the Machine Head Metal Hammer Ultimate Fan Edition online. (I’m holding the magazine in my hand as Phil looks at it).

Phil: Oh yeah, right? It’s pretty all-inclusive.

Q: It's like an encyclopedia on Machine Head. If I was in a band – ANY genre of band, and the opportunity to put something like this out was made available… why wouldn’t you do it? A 132 page magazine on Machine Head; the whole album with bonus tracks, some Machine Head Swag - buying this was a no-brainer!

Phil: It’s pretty awesome, right?

Q: How does a publication like this even come about?

Phil: In the UK, this is how the album was released the first month, so it didn’t come out in the stores in the UK until after the first month bundled in with that Metal Hammer edition.

Q: No way? That’s an interesting way to release an album.

Phil: They approached us about doing it and we all thought it was a great idea. The guy that wrote it, Dom (Dom Lawson) is a good friend of the band – and a big fan, as you can tell assuming you read it.

Q: Oh, yeah. I loved digging into this thing.

Phil: It’s a pretty cool way to get to know what’s been going on with us.

Q: Sometimes I forget that Machine Head is an American band. You get so much coverage in the UK magazines that I enjoy…

(Phil laughs)

Phil: They love us there. It’s our biggest market.

Q: Cool. Was that from the very beginning?

Phil: Yeah, it started pretty early. The band was pretty huge right from the beginning in the UK. The States has been whatever, you know? They just don’t get us like they do overseas. Germany is really big for us, too. Hey, we’re big in Europe, right? Whatever!

(Laughter)

We are big somewhere. That’s all that matters.

Q: How much advance work went into putting this Metal Hammer edition together? You must have known well in advance? It feels like Dom was with you through the recording of the album based on the articles and pictures in here.

Phil: Yeah, Dom came out and heard some of the recording. He traveled with us a little bit on the Mayhem Tour last year and stayed out with us. He’s known the band forever. He’s very familiar with the history of Machine Head; he knows the ins and outs. We trust him with some of our vaulted information. He knows what he can use and what he can’t, but he also has an inner perspective on us as people. So he knows he’s not writing from a skewed view. He’s writing from as close to the source as someone possibly can.

Q: Ummm

Phil: (claps his hands) Interview over? Sweet!

(Laughter)

Q: You’re pushing the ten year mark with Machine Head, correct?

Phil: I am.

Q: It feels weird to think of you as ‘the new guy’ in this band.

(Phil laughs)

Q:But you kind of ARE that guy. You will always be the newest guy in Machine Head unless there’s a line-up change.

Phil: I’ll ALWAYS be the new guy because we’re not losing a member. Nobody is splitting or anything, so I am always going to be the new guy.

Q: So, how are you feeling ten years in, Phil?

Phil: Wow! Um, I feel that I’ve run through the full gamut of emotions with this band. I’ve seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. I’ve experienced a lot things with Machine Head. I feel truly vested in Machine Head and I don’t feel like the new guy. I feel like I’ve been a part of the band as a whole for so long now – it’s twenty years for the band, seventeen with a recording history, and I’ve been with the band for almost ten of those years now. I feel like a major contributor.

Q: I’m going to pander to that statement just a little bit here and say that The Blackening is one of the best metal albums of the past decade.

Phil: Awesome. Thank you, man.

Q: I love that album, and I have to say that I was a little worried about hearing Locust, knowing the pillar that I personally had put The Blackening on. You must have felt some trepidation following up that album. The Blackening went down well with your fans and you certainly toured it heavily.

Phil: (Lets out a weighty exhale) I don’t know if it was trepidation… I don’t feel like there was any stress or anxiety about it. We knew that we wrote a good record and all that, but shit, it was five years later. We were five years PAST writing that record and here we wound up, after going through everything we did on that touring cycle, and that was a looong tour cycle, and a lot of shit happened to us, you know? We dealt with loss – every one of us dealt with a significant loss in our respective families. Just dealing with each other on a silver tube for three YEARS man (laughs) playing over 300 shows. That’s closer to 400 shows honestly. I was going through some personal stuff at home and Dave and Robb had gotten together to start writing the record and I was excited to get back into the writing process at that point. I wanted to be a part of that and start to put The Blackening behind us.

I mean, we could have still gone out and toured; we had Metallica shows that we were offered, but we had to cut this thing off, you know? It was time to put The Blackening behind us, or that album was going to become our whole history, right? We needed to shut it down, and that was exciting. We were doing some different things. The first song Robb wrote was ‘This is The End’ and it’s this tremolo picked fast-as-shit song, you know? We were all kind of going, “Ok, you’re setting the bar this high, are you? Ok, let’s go from there”. He was taking classical lessons and taking voice lessons and just wanted to write a very melodic record but still hold onto those core Machine Head sounds, and we weren’t worried about topping The Blackening. I don’t think any one of us was worried about any of these new songs being good enough to stand up to that album or anything. We were just so stoked about what we were coming up with, which is how we wrote The Blackening after Ashes. Ashes was a huge comeback record for the band, so it was the same type of deal this time around, you know?

Q: Do you get to hear stories about how your audience first encounters Machine Head? Here’s the thing; I look at The Blackening and Locust, where you’re starting your albums off with an eight to a ten minute long song. In this current ADD disposable music culture we live in, asking a new fan to start off their Machine Head experience by sucking down an eight to ten minute long song… well, that’s kind of radical.

Phil: It is. It’s not traditional. It’s not conventional. We like to start our albums with a really relentless song, and ‘Clenching’ and ‘I Am Hell’ are not conventional songs. We throw all of those ‘expectations’ you alluded to out the door. I think the band had tried that before and it just wasn’t who they were and it didn’t feel like it was being 100% genuine like Locust is. So we’re staying true to ourselves and also hoping people get that. If that doesn’t happen... well, we’re being true to ourselves and we genuinely enjoy it.

Q: For me, the first time I heard The Blackening, I didn’t completely get it. i knew it was good. I was intrigued. I needed a bit of time to really get behind what was happening on that record. I think it took me about a month…

(Phil laughs)

But when I actually got it, I was all in. And I feel like Locust went down a little easier somehow. My first impressions of Locust were that it was good. The more I played it, the more I could find some of the real intricacies that the seven songs on the album hold… but I liked Locust immediately.

Phil: I think The Blackening could have been a primer for Locust. It certainly would get fans used to the longer arrangements. I think the thing about Locust is that the melodies are there and the hooks are there. One thing I did with the solos on this record, Robb and I both; was to try and slow them down a little bit. Go to the school of Randy Rhoads and Kirk Hammett a little bit and try writing a composition within other compositions. I want people humming my solos, you know? I go to a Metallica concert and I’m humming the solos from ‘One’ for days afterwards, you know? The whole crowd gets into it, and you remember shit like that. I want to achieve that. There are a thousand shredders out there, you know? And I’m not the quickest guy, but I feel like I am finding the right notes to put together now that people will retain and reflect on.

Q: How would you describe Metallica as a band to open for? I’ve been in the crowd at Metallic shows. Metallica fans cross their arms and…

(Phil laughs)

And they watch the two bands opening with a stoic stance and don’t really give the opening bands ANYTHING. It’s a bit freakish. So I am assuming it must be cool to actually get the gig, but there is a whole other mindset you need to achieve to actually do the tours.

Phil: It’s a hard gig. It is. You have to bring it every night. You’re working; working hard! Headlining is still work, but it’s more of the enjoyment and the energy of reciprocation. With a Metallica show, it’s not being reciprocated. (Laughs) You’re pounding it one way until you get somebody and you shake them up, and that’s what we did. We would pick out where to go. Robb can work a crowd like nobody’s business, but we were in the round on that tour, right? So he’s looking over the crowd in one direction and we were often looking off in another direction, and you have this whole quarter of the arena to deal with yourself, you know? It took some work. I think for the most part we did a pretty good job. We heard a lot of reviews along the lines of: “It’s not easy to get through the opening bands, but those guys were entertaining”. We played the ‘Hallowed be thy Name’ cover, so that helped us along a bit.

Q: True enough, yeah.

Phil: You've got to do what you gotta do to win them over.

Q: And anyone willing to do a bit of digging on Machine Head after a Metallica show will find that you have an awesome cover of ‘Battery’ out there waiting to impress them.

Phil: That’s right.

Q: And that cover, along with ‘Hallowed Be thy Name’, were done around the same recording time at The Blackening, correct?

Phil: A little bit after, actually. We got approached by Kerrang! to do the tribute to Metallica.

Q: It stands to reason that people may look over your history down the road and look to The Blackening as your Master of Puppets.

Phil: (Laughs) Bah! You know, there is only one Master of Puppets. Nothing is going to be on that magnitude for a metal band for a long time – if ever. I have a hard time with any comparisons to what Metallica went through. They just trail-blazed everything, you know? It’s their own trip and nobody is going to do that again.

Q: When I look at some of the material that Machine Head has put out over the past little while - songs like ‘Clenching’, ‘Aesthetics’ and ‘Halo’ and ‘Locust’; there are some very cool modern tracks in your catalogue with some really diversified guitar licks. There are metal bands and hard rock bands that really adhere to the four minute song formula and don’t really break out of that box a whole lot. All they’re really doing is switching up the lyrics. I don’t hear that with Machine Head. There’s shit going on with your material and has been for a while now. It’s good to hear as a fan, and it’s going to be great to hear in this very room in a few hours when you play live.

Phil: Good. Thanks for acknowledging that. It’s important to us to mix it up and not have things sound like the norm. We stay away from certain key changes that are similar and structures that are similar and even our words. Robb and I worked a lot on the lyrics on this one together and we would flag words that we had used on past albums and try to find different and better ways to express our material. We are pretty cognizant of keeping things fresh and different.

Q: You mentioned earlier that Machine Head’s tour cycle for The Blackening was a long and arduous one. Have you all openly discussed what touring Locust might look like?

Phil: Well, we’ve talked about what this year will look like for us. We’re going to Australia after this in a couple of weeks to do the Soundwave festival. It’s like a festival tour. It’s pretty big. We’ve never done that before, so I’m stoked about that. We get to see Steel Panther every night, man. That’s going to be awesome.

Q: Balls Out. That’s awesome. I saw Steel Panther play this venue two years ago Phil. Fun band.

(Laughter)

Phil: And then we’d like to do another run of the States. We’re trying to put that together. We’d like to do some B markets and come up through Western Canada. And the summer is going to be festivals all through Europe, and that will take us through to August. Those are the markets that we can play, so if there is a support slot that comes around or something, we’ll do it. We can’t really do Europe again; we just did it last winter. We don’t know 100% yet. That was the beauty of The Blackening; everything just kind of lined up. We did one headlining run on that album and that was a co-headliner with Arch Enemy. This is our first headlining run in about four years or so.

Q: Will you contribute to any other compilations, Phil? Other cool covers that might see release for European magazines?

Phil: Yeah, it depends. Kerrang! came to us for those. We did one for Metal Hammer, too. We did 'Fucking Hostile' for a Metal Hammer Pantera tribute. We got approached to do some other ones, but we feel like we didn’t want to get pigeonholed into the tribute band covers go-to band. We kind of pick and choose. We’ve passed on a few lately. When the timing is right or the opportunity is right, then we’ll do it. Robb is really good about perception and how we’re going to look from outside the band. It’s why we don’t throw our songs into shitty TV shows or movies. For that stuff, it has to be quality and make us look good.

Q: When it comes time to get serious about making new Machine Head material, do you feel you guys all have a kind of a shorthand together now?

Phil: Yeah, for sure. If I have something I absolutely submit it. Most of the time I’ll have a riff or a couple of idea fragments. The guys will take them and see if they can do anything with them. That was the case with ‘Be Still And Know’ – I wrote just about every riff in that song and Robb kind of put it all together. But there is a song like ‘Pearls Before the Swine’ where I’d present the first half of the whole song, you know? I did that with ‘Slanderous’ and ‘Beautiful Mourning’. The first of those tunes were pretty much all there. Most of Locust was pretty much putting riffs in here and there throughout the album. I wrote a lot of music for the record, but I also wrote a lot of lyrics for the record as well. I’m more proud of that fact, actually.

Q: Now that you have played Locust live for a little while, many artists on tour will say that the songs don’t really become their own until they’ve toured them and worked out the live presentations of the new material. Do you feel like any of the songs have changed in some way, now that you have been mastering them in a live environment?

Phil: Hmm. For recording in the studio we found out on The Blackening that it’s better if Robb records all of the rhythm parts. I wasn’t there for a lot of the recordings of the rhythms. Robb and Dave hashed that all out and got the drum tracks down. I came in to do my little ambient stuff and the solos – stuff like that. We are playing six of the seven tunes live right now. I think they’re pretty true to the recordings; a lot of the changes are in the vocals. There are parts that need singing in a live environment that have to be shared out just to keep the integrity of the songs; a third voice or a harmony or a shouty voice. Adam and Robb sing so well together I’m always that wild card to throw into the mix – the gruff voice over there or the harmony over here. I’ll do the vocal that is not quite as important in a live environment.

Q: I have one last one for you. In your opinion, what makes a credible musician or band?

Phil: I think honesty - being genuine, having integrity and being honest with your music is what makes you credible. I don’t think that how many people like you or how many radio stations you are on should matter. There has to be a quality factor in there as well, but I think if you involve those three elements in your material, that makes you credible.