MISHA MANSOOR & MARK HOLCOMB: Subverting Black Metal, The Riff Graveyard, Creative Burnout

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, and now your host, Eyal Levi. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we are now on our seventh year. Don't ask me how that all just flew by, but it did. Man, time moves fast and it's only because of you, the listeners, if you'd like us to stick around another seven years and there's a few simple things you can do that would really, really help us out, I would endlessly appreciate if you would, number one, share our episodes with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me at al Levi URM audio and at URM Academy and of course our guest. And number three, leave us reviews and five star reviews wherever you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, thank you for all the years and years of loyalty.

(00:01:01):

I just want you to know that we will never charge you for this podcast, and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way. All we ask in return is a share a post and tag us. Oh, and one last thing. Do you have a question you would like me to answer on an episode? I don't mean for a guest. I mean for me, it can be about anything. Email it to [email protected]. That's EYAL at m dot A-C-D-E-M-Y. There's no.com on that. It's exactly the way I spelled it. And use the subject line Answer me Eyal. Alright, let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM Podcast. My guests today are two of my favorite guests, Mr. Mark Holcomb and Misha Mansoor of Periphery and Haunted Shores. Let's just get into this. This is going to be a great episode. Misha and Mark, welcome to the URM podcast. Thanks for

Speaker 2 (00:02:00):

Having us.

Speaker 1 (00:02:01):

It's a pleasure. I'm happy to have you here. And just so you know, I had never really heard Haunted Shores before this week. I knew about it obviously because we've talked about it, but I didn't really know what it was. For some reason I assumed it was like an Iron Maiden kind of thing. I don't know why I had this idea in my head of what it was that is not anything to do with reality. Obviously. I checked it out. I was like, no, now I understand everything that you've told me about how much you love black metal. I hear it in that. So I was very happy. I was happy. I was surprised, but I was mostly happy.

Speaker 2 (00:02:48):

That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's not super well known, but I think we kind of like that. That's very black metal of this rights. It is very black middle of it, and we're true in cult and we're into all that stuff. So

Speaker 3 (00:03:03):

Yeah, I'm kind of bummed you didn't get what you want with your whole Iron made expectations.

Speaker 1 (00:03:08):

No, I'm glad I didn't get that actually. I'm glad I didn't want that. I don't know why I thought I had this. I don't know, sometimes these cool musicians will do these side projects or other bands and then it'll be like this eighties metal or stupid thrash or something like that. And I don't know why it was expecting something different, but this is like, I really liked it and I love how dark it is, and it's cool hearing stuff with a black metal element, I guess delivered with that level of heaviness because usually it's weird, the two don't necessarily go together or

Speaker 2 (00:03:50):

You get a lot of hate if they do. I know it's too produced, too produced. I think what it is is we both well-produced music. We like music that hits hard and we like death metal and we like dark stuff. He's more of the black metal guy. He was the guy who was raised on black metal, and I've kind of gotten it into it through him, and I wouldn't say I was ever super into it, but I like a lot of the aesthetic of it. And then I don't like kind of how ratty a lot of it sounds. I think a lot of that has to probably do with when you were first exposed to it, that's just what it sounded like. But now it's like, well, what more could it be? So it's sort of this mix of all the things that we kind of like. So we'd want it to have a good mix and there's kind of the album opens and closes with kind of a parody of that.

Speaker 1 (00:04:35):

I know I actually liked, it wouldn't have bothered me if it stayed like that the whole way through.

Speaker 2 (00:04:40):

We've gotten a few comments like that where it's like, yeah, I get it. But it's sort of tricking people into thinking that's what the whole mix is going to be like. Which was kind of funny.

Speaker 1 (00:04:50):

I did that on a do record once. There is a moment where it goes into the old school neuroblast with tremble picking minor chords and the whole thing went low-fi on purpose, and it goes like that for a while and then it does what you guys did, which is really fun to do. But then the only thing in my mind was like, why don't we just keep it lo-fi the entire time? It wouldn't have bugged me if you guys had kept it lo-fi,

Speaker 3 (00:05:20):

Misha did a funny thing when it came to the drum programming for those sections for the lo-fi intro and the outro is he quantized the drums, so they sounded messy as shit.

Speaker 2 (00:05:29):

That's

Speaker 1 (00:05:29):

Great.

Speaker 2 (00:05:30):

I put a random mis to the quantization because if you listen to those old black metal recordings, it's not tight at all. And it's like this really pingy snare because they're not using samples or anything like that, so that's the only way for it to cut through is super paint. It sounds like a piccolo that's not being rim shot. And those are all off the blast beats sound terrible, but it's part of the character. So we went the extra mile to try to replicate that. The feels sound real funny.

Speaker 1 (00:06:02):

Yeah, it was my only experience with one of these bands. I did get to record a cult band in the early two thousands. They were American, but they were accepted by the OG European scene, which is really quite a feat, but they were very much about the real deal, the bad sides of it too, which I was unaware of until they showed up at my house and these dudes were like meth head Nazis.

Speaker 2 (00:06:30):

Oh boy.

Speaker 1 (00:06:31):

Yeah. I didn't know going in, but I should have assumed. I should have assumed the singer made me take him to a graveyard so that before we did the vocals, he made me take him to this. There's this big graveyard near my parents' house, which is where my studio was. So we went for a walk for a good hour for him to get the inspiration, and then we got back and he suited up the full armor and corpse paint. He put down tarp in the vocal booth, a lot of tarp and covered the walls with some plastic, and then came in the control room, blew two lines of meth and went in the vocal booth with some razor blades and cut the shit out of himself while just screaming black metal vocals. Geez. I was like, wow, this is a real, this real

Speaker 3 (00:07:24):

How considerate for a method, Nazi black metal killer. I know that's some serious method act. He's like the Daniel Day Lewis of black women. It was

Speaker 1 (00:07:38):

Spent six months just getting into character, lived in a cave with a troll in

(00:07:47):

Man. I don't even know what happened to that guy, but also when recording the rest of the instruments, I remember there were some rules. Some of the rules were like, you can't palm mute anything. All drums have to be one take and you can't use more than two microphones. There are all these rules about if it sounded too good, that was bad. It had to be shitty. But then at the same time, Satan's volcano had just come out and for some, I don't know why they decided that they wanted it to sound as powerful as that, but lo-fi impossible. So it never ended up getting finished, but that was my experience with true black metal. Wow. Nazis that to bleed everywhere and make everything fucking impossible. Oh, and also this really cool part, one of the guitar players couldn't be there. He was running from the feds. Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:08:48):

Wow. Well,

Speaker 2 (00:08:49):

We had a much simpler time recording. It was tricky to get some of the guitar tones, I guess. So it's kind of the same thing

Speaker 1 (00:09:02):

Nowadays. That whole side of it has kind of passed. Now it's just about making stuff sound cool. Do you like the music, yes or no? At the end?

Speaker 2 (00:09:11):

I'm sure there's a contingent of people. I think it's just popular. There's contentions, but it's probably just the more visible part. Now, in any case, that's a style that would be niche anyways within a genre that's a sub-genre of a niche genre. So the true side of that, I'm sure it's out there, but you'd have to really look for it. You won't find it by accident kind of.

Speaker 1 (00:09:33):

No, and it's become super unpalatable because the original stuff was kind of cool, had harmonies and melodies and riffs kind of, even if it was basement sounding, it was still songs because bands that got bigger took that. I think that the people who were making the TRV stuff went even more extreme and now it's like avant-garde noise basically.

Speaker 3 (00:10:02):

Yeah. That's the stuff that I find to be the most impenetrable in the genre. It's very difficult to, and I've tried a lot of black metal guys have sent me links to bands like that, and none really spring to mind, but a lot of it's just, yeah, it's just really intentionally, awfully produced, avant garde, experimental black metal and all the riffs are gone, and that's kind of why I liked and fell in love with a lot of that stuff in the nineties. Yeah, I remember I showed Misha Emperor stuff back in 2006 or something. I remember thinking that that production was cool because it was in relation to, it was the other stuff in the genre, like Equilibrium and Prometheus. I remember thinking, this is so much better than the rest of the stuff in this circle, and then I show it to Misha and he was like, that's cool, but man, I can't get past the production.

Speaker 2 (00:10:58):

The mixes are rough to me. I remember just thinking, this is harsh. This

(00:11:02):

Is challenging to listen to, but at least with the emperor stuff, I was like, man, there's some really cool compositional stuff going on. It seemed like it was a band that was trying to do very progressive stuff and pushing towards that within the constraint of their genre. And even on the production end, I think then you showed me, you're like, you think this is bad? And I was like, okay, yeah, I see why you think that that's a good mix compared to it because things are audible and whatever. It's, that's why I would say it's rough around the edges compared to some of the earlier stuff or some other black metal bands of that era where it's a question of whether it was even intentional. It was like, did they just not have any money or were they actively going for something terrible? Which I think at that point in time having not being exposed to that, that was almost unfathomable. It was like, oh, they must've just had no budget and they just didn't know any better and they recorded themselves or something. Some of these things sound like they literally took a couple microphones and stuck it in the middle of the room and then hit record and it was like, all right.

Speaker 1 (00:12:07):

I think that's what happened. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:12:09):

Your

Speaker 1 (00:12:10):

Reaction to Emperor when Mark was just describing, I've experienced that reaction too with people, and I've always thought that, it reminds me of when an adult lets a kid take a sip of alcohol or something, and they have that reaction, what the fuck is this? And the adults are like, what do you mean? It's great? I just remember, I don't know if you experienced it being allowed to have a tiny sip of whiskey or something as a kid and being horrified by it.

Speaker 2 (00:12:44):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:12:44):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:12:44):

I mean, I guess it's an app comparison because it is a very acquired taste.

Speaker 1 (00:12:49):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (00:12:51):

Most people at least can't just get into that without being sort of primed on death metal or metal in general. That's a bit of a leap in the same way that if you're drinking water, going straight to whiskey without going through beer or a less spirited spirit.

Speaker 1 (00:13:11):

It's weird though. Mark, did you have to go through that? I didn't. When I first heard Emperor and Dissection, I was immediately like, yes,

Speaker 3 (00:13:19):

Which emperor though? That's the question.

Speaker 1 (00:13:20):

Nice side of Cliffs.

Speaker 3 (00:13:21):

Oh wow, okay. I couldn't do that. My gateway was funny enough, and you can rag on this band. I know fucking everybody and their mothers rags on this band Kiss. No, I'm just kidding. Cradle of Filth is Cradle of Filth, cruelty and the Beast. There's

Speaker 1 (00:13:36):

Nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 3 (00:13:37):

Yeah, I mean, people like to make fun of Cradle of Filth, whatever. I fucking, I still love that band and those, that era where Nick Barker played drums in that band at the time, and then he went to Dimmu Borg gear from there, and I didn't know Jack shit about drums, but I remember thinking that something that this drummer was doing was cooler and more innovative than the other bands that were playing that style of music. And then he joined Dimmu and then the record that they put out, I think in 99 or 2000 Puritanical

Speaker 1 (00:14:06):

Puritanical, euphoric roia,

Speaker 3 (00:14:08):

That one where the drums were upfront in the mix almost too loud, and those were my two favorite, and that was how I got into the rest of it. So I kind of went like to the, I guess you would call them at the time, the bands that got a lot of flack from the purists. That's where I started, and then I kind of got into the stuff that was less easy to listen to.

Speaker 1 (00:14:31):

I always felt like dmu on that record, and the one that came after is the pinnacle of what you can do with that style. If you have really good production and really good musicians, it's like you keep the same aesthetic and the same values. I don't mean the political side, I mean the Satanic values and stuff, and the same darkness and all that, but you just do it up, take it to as far as it'll go, at least for that time period. When I heard Dimo back then, I was like, yes, yes, finally. I always, that's what I wanted it to be. But still, when I heard the Early Emperor, I don't know because I heard it on, so there was college radio in Atlanta in the nineties. There was a show called Wreckage, and it came on at midnight on Friday nights and played till six in the morning. And so it was the only way to hear anything metal that wasn't like the CDs you owned. So that's how we would discover new shit, and they'd play all this garbage death metal, and it would just be like, God, how can anyone listen to this shit? And then Emperor would come on and would just be like, this is so cool. It's got harmony, it's got melody. It's dark as shit. I know it sounds like it was recorded underwater, but underwater scary is scary. There's some scary

Speaker 3 (00:16:00):

Shit in the ocean. Yeah, it definitely had mood and ambiance and just an energy to it that is really, really difficult to replicate. And now when they play that stuff live, if you've watched any their videos when they headline vodka or something like that in Europe and they play those old songs from Nightside and Wrath, the Tyrants and stuff like that, it just sounds so fucking powerful. Yeah, it's amazing. With a modern live mix, like holy fuck,

Speaker 1 (00:16:28):

Misha, I'm curious about your level of, not taste, but how you like it now. Because if you came into it and kind of had to acclimate yourself to it and had issues with the production value and the aesthetic and all that, what was it about it that you did latch onto enough to do this?

Speaker 2 (00:16:51):

I think in a way, you mentioned that Demi bgi, I never got into, I've never gotten into any of these bands and I know that they got a lot of black metal guys don't like dmu or it seems that way.

Speaker 1 (00:17:03):

I think it's like Slip Knot, where back in the day, the true Metalheads pretended they hated him, but they still listened to 'em when no one was looking.

Speaker 2 (00:17:10):

So to me that was like, oh, this is great. It has all the aesthetic. But the mix was incredible. The videos were incredible. It was the theatrical

(00:17:22):

Full on 11 out of 10 version of it, but I don't know why. I just think that the dark melodies and over the top, everything's a minor chord and blast beats, and it's just so over the top, there's this aesthetic, which I think is really cool and really powerful in context, but now I think about it, there isn't really a genre of music that focuses as much on that. You might even, and this is maybe why OPEC ended up being the kind of band that it is, hear that in folk music, sometimes darker folk music, but it's very uncommon in any sound music I can think of to have just minor chords and everything's that dark. Even in music, people call sort of depressing or whatever. It's usually more moody than just straight up darkness.

Speaker 4 (00:18:15):

And

Speaker 2 (00:18:15):

Then that with trim picked notes where it was weirdly unrefined in a way, but presented so nicely, and I'd never heard anything like that. I was like, even if I don't necessarily love this style of music, or I am definitely not as much of a fan as Mark is, I was really appreciating the aesthetic of it. And I did listening to it in doses. I was like, there's something here that I want to draw from. I like it. I found ever since Mark showed me that stuff back in the whatever, like 1923 or whatever it was, good year, I found myself injecting a little bit of that, even if subconsciously or just for a section, it might be not in a blackmail song at all, but just some of that aesthetic. I find it really fascinating. It was kind of one of those I never really thought to do that kind of moments.

Speaker 3 (00:19:06):

I remember you being super excited, and this was 2007 or 2008 or something, you being super excited to program blast beats over an evil sounding, really simple riff. That's fun. That's how I could kind of tell that. Yeah, even though you weren't into that style of music that you were having a lot of fun, just like the, I dunno, there's something really primal and pure and just, it's just fucking fun.

Speaker 1 (00:19:32):

Vindicating or something.

Speaker 2 (00:19:33):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:19:34):

Satisfying.

Speaker 2 (00:19:34):

It was very satisfying. It was very fun, and it was also something I'd never really done. So I used to post on forums, I forget what forum it was, but they had a monthly songwriting competition. There would always be a style, and one month it was black metal, and I was like, what is black metal? And this is before I met you, mark. So this was the first time someone I'd ever even, I was like, is it just death metal? And they're like, no, no, no, it's not. They gave examples and I guess I just didn't know what I was listening for. I was like, this just kind of sounds like death metal to me. And they're like, no, but it's just all evil chords, and it's like a lot of tre picking and a lot of blast beats. I ended up submitting a song and I remember they're like, and they're always in forests, and I actually wrote a song and I submitted, it was called In A Forest.

Speaker 3 (00:20:18):

I remember that song.

Speaker 2 (00:20:19):

It's in the Bulb archives and it's totally not black metal. It's like Mellow Death in hindsight, total mellow death and almost technical, way too technical. And I remember people were like, yeah, this is pretty cool, but it's not blackmail at all. I was like, I thought I understood the design brief on this. I totally missed. I totally missed the mark. And in hindsight, I can hear how I completely missed the mark, but I was so confounded at the time and I was kind of frustrated with it, and I think you helped me solve that. And I was like, oh, yeah, blast beats everywhere. No Palm mutes, trem pick everything.

(00:20:55):

And it's supposed to be kind messy, even if you have a good mix and good production, it's not supposed to be that tight, not, there's nothing supposed to be that refined about the performance except for maybe the drummer. And then, yeah, it's like taking that aesthetic. And then I always think it's interesting because black metal is obviously a subversion of a lot of popular tropes in metal and a lot of things that people gravitate towards. Very tight performances, very refined production, a lot of time spent on getting the tones to work together and everything. So it's a complete subversion of that. But what we're doing is almost a complete subversion of black metal in that we're very concerned with those things. Again, everything is packaged very tightly, and there is an aspect of, oh, the tapes don't need to be as tight as say periphery, but they're still pretty tight. Even though they're messy by our standards, we try to leave it as much as we can, but I think our ears are very attuned to things being tight, double tracked. It's a lot more refined. So that in and of itself is a subversion of what I think it's supposed to be in a way that I thought was very satisfying as well.

Speaker 3 (00:22:01):

And there's a lot of intentionality to, I remember we spent a lot of time on those tracks, on those guitar takes, making sure that they didn't sound too clean or too polished. And

(00:22:12):

I think years of doing what we do in periphery, were kind of just programmed to be that way to make things sound a certain way. But I mean, it's funny you mentioned this because I was going through the guitar stems of the tracks the other day because I'm trying to organize tablature and transcriptions for them, and it's crazy. That stuff's pretty sloppy. Zero it out. But the thing is you can't really tell in context because of how wild everything else is. The drums especially, and yeah, there's a lot of care put into getting that sound, very human, loose, not too tight sound.

Speaker 2 (00:22:48):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:22:48):

It's hard to do that, I think because if you are trained to play well, I mean trained as in you have recorded in a certain way to where you have gotten to the point where you know how to get tight sounding guitars, and it takes a long time to be able to really do that well. It's almost how do you unlearn that? And so in some ways, to me, it sounds more difficult to do something where it's tight enough to be up to your standard, but also intentionally not as tight as the, I don't know, the tightest. It just seems more difficult because it's more of a gray area with it.

Speaker 2 (00:23:36):

I think it's also just sort of understanding our own tolerance of it. But you have to understand as well, when we're doing periphery, there's a lot of editing and comping and whatever. So a big part of it, I mean, I think we're pretty tight, but we're not that tight. So to get it to periphery standards, and we've chilled out on this a lot, even with periphery, let it be a bit more organic, but there's still a lot of comping. I think there was an acceptance here of just don't edit as much, just let it be. But then there's also certain parts that need to be really tight for effect. So those we would nitpick, and it's just sort of section by section, but it's just an overall philosophy of just let it go. Don't edit it, don't fix it. And that's probably the hardest part, just on instinct.

(00:24:20):

It's like, okay, we're going to fix that. We need to retake that, and it's a fine line because if you do it too far, that just sounds like shit. So I think Mark and I were on the same page. We're looking for the same thing, so we kind of identified when it needed to be edited and when we should leave it alone and when it's got sort of, I think the most important things, get the character. We want everything to have character. We didn't want it to, because the more you edit stuff and the more everything's perfect, the more sterile it becomes. So it was trying to get everything to be polished in a way, but to where it would retain character and still sound like a live played guitar. I didn't want things to ever really sound edited at any point.

Speaker 1 (00:24:54):

Yeah, totally. Honestly, that just sounds so difficult because I've tried to do stuff like that. It just sounds so difficult to me because when you have decided I'm going to track the tightest guitars ever, that's what we're doing. It's difficult, but it's a very simple goal. The criteria is crystal clear. Again, get them as tight as possible, and so it's super easy to focus in on it. But this other one, there's, with the Haunted Shores approach, it's like a feel, which is a lot harder is because you have to just go with your gut. I think a lot, does this feel cool? Does it feel right?

Speaker 3 (00:25:34):

The goal is definitely more vague, more nebulous than having everything be tight. But yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, what you said, it just goes down to your gut and it just goes back to you kind of knowing what you're going for, and we're looking for a very clear aesthetic with it. We both knew what we wanted. I think if we were on different pages with that, it would be a lot more difficult. But I think we've been doing this so long together, even though shit, we only really have one and a half albums under Haunted Shores, but we've had a lot of time to write this music. The first haunted shore stuff we wrote together was in 2007, 2008. So I think we've been going for a similar thing for a long time. So I think that's what makes it easier. Honestly, it doesn't feel, if anything, it's kind of cool because I remember sometimes we'd be going through a di that I recorded at home, and then we'd plug it in into Misha's setup, and then we'd be listening. Normally with periphery, there'd be no question, now were you doing it? Just because we can always get it tighter. We can always get it tighter, but sometimes we'd hear the di tracks and be like, nah, good enough, black metal.

Speaker 2 (00:26:39):

And more importantly, it had character. It was about the character. Yeah, like Mark said, I wouldn't say, I can see why it would be hard, especially if you're working with someone else and you're not on the same page, but it's kind this thing, and Mark said, it's not really a discussion, it's just like a look. We'll give each other. It's like, is that good or not? We don't really argue about that. I think we're just on the same page. We didn't really argue about much of anything, so it was just kind of a feel thing, and we're both looking for the same feel. I guess we're lucky enough to be on the same page there. So yeah, if Mark did a take at home and it sounds good overall in context, I don't care about the take itself. I care about how it sounds in context.

(00:27:20):

Does it have good character? Fuck yeah, we just save a little bit of time. We're good to go. We don't need to redo it. Maybe we need to fix a couple notes. I remember the certain things, certain things I'm picky with where it's like, oh, that's what you're playing. I didn't even know you were playing that because these couple notes didn't pop through. It was noisy or it wasn't really. So we'd punch in notes that clarity or there would be actual notes that needed to pop through so that you could hear what the riff was playing. That's stuff I'm a bit picky with and that we might edit around, and that's not very black metal, I guess, but aside from that, from things like that where it's like, oh, there's notes missing, or people might not realize it, especially if Marcus has really cool moves. He does, and they don't realize what's actually going there. It's getting jumbled up that will do. But then other than that, it's really just about character more than anything else. I just want everything to have good character.

Speaker 1 (00:28:12):

It's almost like the line is when the idea starts to get obscured, that's the line.

Speaker 2 (00:28:18):

Yeah, just in intricate stuff, let's say, or there's certain things. Mark's right hand technique is phenomenal. It's one of the best I've ever heard. It's got this very percussive quality, and it can match up with kicks very, very well in a way where it has an effect of its own. So this kind of goes against what I'm saying, but the effect and the character was that. So if that was kind of sloppy, it wouldn't have the same effect. In hellfire, there's a fast, fast picking section, and that was a take that you just did at home, and it's like, I didn't even want to touch that because even if we got it technically tighter, it might not sound as good. So the general rule is character, which I know is a bit vague, but it is kind of an instinct and a feeling.

Speaker 1 (00:29:00):

Yeah, it's vague, but you'd know it when you hear it.

Speaker 2 (00:29:02):

Oh, absolutely. And more importantly, it's not, I know it's like we both know. We both look at each other and we're like,

Speaker 1 (00:29:07):

There's

Speaker 3 (00:29:08):

Parts. I remember tracking some of the note or crazier bits that just kind of make sense because I know what's going on, but then I would sort of show you the part on guitar and you'd be like, that's weird. I don't hear those notes at all, but to me, I don't notice that. So we go back in and he'll kind show me what he's talking about, see these notes. I don't even hear those because of whatever it was tracked weird or something like that, or was just maybe a little bit messy. So we'd go back and just doctor that stuff up, one sort litmus

Speaker 2 (00:29:37):

Test. We were amping. It really needs to sound like a played performance. If it starts to sound like a chopped up, edited performance, I mean, you know what that sounds like. Anyone who's sort of recorded and produced knows that there's that level where you could get very sort of note by note with it and it'll have this incredible punch, but it doesn't really sound like a played guitar anymore. I was trying to avoid that. I didn't want that to ever be housed. I wanted it so that if you were soloing a guitar track, it sounded like someone was actually playing through the whole performance.

Speaker 3 (00:30:08):

What you just described me is most of what people think is modern Prague music. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (00:30:14):

I think so too.

Speaker 3 (00:30:15):

I don't want to sit here and speak ill of other players and stuff, but yeah, it's very easy to spot that out when you hear it. Yeah, I mean, you hear it everywhere. You open Instagram or TikTok and you hear a guitar player playing, it looks like they're playing in their bedroom, but what's coming out of their guitar is not like

Speaker 2 (00:30:36):

We know the sound,

Speaker 3 (00:30:37):

But

Speaker 2 (00:30:37):

I've had people who don't play guitar who don't really know. They're like, man, this is incredible. This guitar is incredible. The thing is that fair play to them. A lot of times these are very creative things, so I'll give them 10 out of 10 for creativity, but I'm like, that's not what guitar sounds like. If you heard that in the room, they might be a really good guitar and they'll play it very, very well, but it won't sound like it. What you're hearing is not representative of what a played guitar sounds like, and that's a style of music. It might be for effect. I'm not really making a judgment as to what that is, but what I do know is that I did not want us to have that. I didn't want us to ever be mistaken for that. I wanted it to have that sound where, and ironically, it's not because this is edited and chopped together and stuff, but just done in a way where it sounds as natural as possible where if you were to close your eyes, you could visualize someone actually playing through the part as if it were one take from the beginning of the song to the end of the song.

Speaker 1 (00:31:36):

I think it's important to have parameters or just boundaries to what you're going for. If not, you could get to that aesthetic you didn't want. It's weird. It's not easy to get to it, but it's easy to get to it if you're not being intentional about everything you're doing.

Speaker 2 (00:31:55):

Yeah. Well, even black metal, Nazi meth head had brules, right, so you can have them too.

Speaker 1 (00:32:01):

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it though, is I think boundaries are a good thing when it comes to music, which is weird. I also feel like no boundaries is a good thing, but you can go down bad paths or the wrong path if you're not at least conscious of what you're going for. I think,

Speaker 2 (00:32:19):

Well, if we're getting philosophical about it, I think the way to sort of wrap that up is just it's good to have no boundaries in the scope of what you want to achieve. Someone would be like, you can't mix death metal and black metal and have good production. It's like, yeah, we could do whatever we want. We could have fart noises over the whole thing if we wanted to. People might not like it, but we could do whatever we want, but then we have boundaries. It's like, what kind of farts will we use? There are different types. Yeah, there's many, many different categories. We could get into all those categories now, but no, my point is just the no boundaries thing is just from a holistic point of view, just you could do whatever you want, but what makes it just not everything and nothing all at once are the boundaries that you choose and how you respect them.

(00:33:01):

That's what makes it your sound. That's what makes it yours. That's what makes you feel happy about what you're doing, and these are boundaries that I think often, I mean, it's a chicken or the egg thing, but are dictated or dictate chemistry. It's why Mark and I have always worked well together is I think we really see eye to eye. Like I said, there's never been much conversation about this. It's always been a feeling kind of a nod, are we getting this? Yeah, no, no, this isn't really hitting the mark. Let's table it work on something else. It's oftentimes things that are happening in the abstract, so it's entirely just a reflexive thing to hearing it and being like this. I don't know what, we'll try a few things that's still not working. The last track on the album, for example, is something that we actually wrote originally for the last album for viscera and just could not get it to work, and we both felt like there's something here, something here, arrangement's not working. The riffs are really cool, but it just feels like a riff salad, and this was respecting our boundaries of this is not hitting the mark. We have a vision for this and this is not that. And then we were able to rework it, completely rework it. It's a very different song now and reimagine it, and now it fit within our standards and boundaries for what we had for this album. So much so that we made it the closer

Speaker 1 (00:34:25):

I realized that we're not sitting here with the song open and playing it, but just out of curiosity, what are the types of things that you changed about it? What about it? Okay, so you're saying that it was riff ality before. What did you change?

Speaker 3 (00:34:38):

Before we get into the actual changes that we made, I remember the idea of that song was, it was like a triplet feel, thrashy kind of thing. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. There's two other songs on the record that have that immaterial has that thing going on, and one in Oslo has that going on too. Blast beats with a triplet feel or six, eight or whatever, whatever you want to call it. That was how I looked at the song, and I think that's how Misha looked at it for a long time. We have this song in that feel, and it's kind of thrashy, but then I think the real light bulb moment came when I think it was you who did this mish. You took, I think, the main progression and just put just a groove, like a Blackwater Park kind of groove over it and made that the first real thing that you heard in the song Nocturnal Hours, the last song on the record. But that was when the idea came to us as like, oh, I could be this kind of song if we wanted to. It can evolve into Thrasher sections as opposed to just being a thrash song or starting as a thrash song.

Speaker 2 (00:35:39):

It was like the six eight thrash beats at blast beats the whole time, and it was a lot of really cool riffs, but it was just like cool riff, cool riff, cool riff, cool riff, and it was like, this song isn't saying anything. It doesn't make me me feel anything. It's not going anywhere. I don't know how to start it. I don't know how to end it. And it started with that clean thing, but it either went into a blaby version of that or it went into the section after that and it was like, maybe we should just play off of this. And yeah, it's called Nocturnal Hours, totally a Blackwater Park vibe. That's a lyric from the Drapery falls off of Blackwater Parks. It's like we're wearing that on our sleeve pretty hard on that one. The OPEC vibe and influence on that. I was like, let's let it drag on this first riff the way that OPEC would, they always play their riffs too many times in the best way.

Speaker 3 (00:36:27):

They know when they have a good progression, they know they

Speaker 1 (00:36:29):

Get their money's worth on those riffs.

Speaker 2 (00:36:31):

I don't have the balls to do that, and I always just respect them for doing that. They're like, yep, this is a sixth section. You're going to hear eight times, and then another eight times with

Speaker 3 (00:36:39):

A trend picked reverb guitar reline over

Speaker 2 (00:36:41):

It. But I was like, let's do that. And then that kind of changed the vibe in the context of the song and allowed us to rework the riffs and reworked the field because then all of a sudden having a backbeat made a lot more sense. It wasn't just being thrown to break up thrashy riffs or blast beats, and then when the blast beats would come in, then they had impact, which was what was happening is this problem that I have with, I guess if you're going to do True Black Metal, you can have blast beats the whole way through the song, right? Because that's kind of the sound, right? But with this kind of mix and whatever, if you just do blast Pizza the whole time, it gets very stale and we program drums even more so with everything being kind perfect, even more so having this problem. I was just like, there's too many blast beat sections just too much, and I'm getting tired. If I'm getting fatigued, then everyone else is going to get fatigued too. So it was just kind of taking an honest look, but sometimes, yeah, you have to just pick up a song seven years later and fix it.

Speaker 1 (00:37:41):

It's interesting to me the idea of picking up an old song and fixing it versus the idea of, well, I didn't finish this song for a reason, so fuck it. Do you guys do that in periphery ever?

Speaker 3 (00:37:53):

Oh my God, yeah. I take pride in being this way. My mind always goes to place me. This is like if you have a riff that's on drop in drop C tuning or something like that, and you know what else is in drop C and in seven, this riff from 2011, remember that?

Speaker 4 (00:38:09):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:38:10):

Let's see if these match up. What is it? What BPM 1 25? Oh, this one's like one 20. We should see if we can smash 'em together. I think sometimes there's a lot of riffs and ideas and songs. I'm talking now in the periphery context, since you asked about periphery, there's plenty of ideas that for one reason or another get dropped, or our attention goes elsewhere because of reasons that are not really the song's fault contextually. Maybe they just don't make sense when put up against the rest of the songs on any given record that we're working on. Maybe another song kind of does that thing a little better, or all five members of the band are more excited about another song that kind of has that energy of the song that gets scrapped. But I mean, the list goes on and on and on. It's not necessarily a bad song or a bad idea.

(00:38:54):

I mean, if we were to go back to our band Dropbox, I mean, there's probably hundreds of ideas there that are worthy of being frankensteined all over again, and in fact, every periphery record, there's at least one to three songs that are taken from demos that were scrapped and then sort of reworked. But it's just time and perspective. I think you go 5, 7, 8 years without hearing something and come back to it, you can think something completely different of it. I guess it's like a movie or something like that. Maybe you're not ready to watch something, maybe you're not ready to hear something and then you watch it or hear years later. You approach it a different way based on who you are at that moment.

Speaker 2 (00:39:36):

We call it the riff graveyard, and there's a lot of riffs in that graveyard, and for me personally, I don't know, I have a really bad memory. Remember we opened it up, it was called Song three.

Speaker 1 (00:39:48):

How many song threes do you have?

Speaker 2 (00:39:51):

Let's not count. So I felt like I was almost hearing it. I remember the first riff and I remembered one other riff, and I felt like I was hearing a lot of these riffs for the first time. A lot of riffs that I think I wrote, that I forgot that I wrote, and I assumed that Mark wrote them, and he was like, no, I think that's yours. I don't even remember writing these things. Some of these things are just written on the spot as a reflex. It's not even enough of a conscious thought for me to remember that I wrote it or what I was thinking or what I was going for.

Speaker 4 (00:40:20):

It

Speaker 2 (00:40:20):

Was one of these riffs. I'm still not certain whether it's my riff or you're a riff. The only reason it was a concern is I had to do a play through, and I was like, mark, teach me how to play this thing. He was like, I don't know. That's not, I dunno, that I was like, I'm pretty sure this is your riff. He's like, no, I don't know how to play that one. I think it's yours. I was like, fuck. But it's like that. It's like rediscovering. It's hearing something that you completely forgot about. So then, because there's also some, oh, this sucks. This is trash. Like fuck this. We're never going to use this. I don't know what I was thinking, but this one was one where it was kind of this treasure trove, this discovery. It's like, oh, there's potential. I remember we were like, why did we ditch this?

(00:40:56):

And then by the end of the summer, we're like, oh, I know it. It's kind of fatiguing. But I was like, then we were also, I feel like we could solve it. It's a puzzle. It's like, I feel we could solve this puzzle. We may have the tools, we may have the context, we may have the energy to solve this puzzle and just kind of through different things at it, maybe we have more experience now. It's been a little bit of time. I don't know. Or maybe we just got lucky. But in the end, I was very happy, very, very happy with how the song changed. And if anyone's listening to this and struggles with this kind of stuff and could relate, was looking for songwriting tips. One of the things I've found, and maybe Mark, you can add into this on your end, but I've found that oftentimes what will take me from a fuck no, no way, this song is fucking useless to like, fuck yeah, this is Sick is not that big a change.

(00:41:53):

It's always less drastic a change than I think, and small things go a really long way. I think that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned. It feels almost intuitively like this is so off the mark that, and no pun, sorry, mark, don't mean to trigger you, but it's so off the mark that surely it would require something massive, an overhaul, trash, half the song, these riffs are all terrible. And then you realize that with some changes, substantial but not as substantial as you think, and sometimes even minor changes, not only does the song get better, but then these other parts that you thought kind of sucked kind of come to life a mix, and it all interacts right, and it's all in context. And then genuinely, when I think about some of the songs, I'm like, man, there was a point in time where I thought this song was horrible and it became one of my favorites, or something I'm very proud of is shocking. And when I think about the difference, it's not that different. It's just these little moves. So that's something I'm just putting out there as something I've learned because it's something I've struggled with and something that's been difficult and sometimes has prevented us from putting us on an album for years and years and years. Nocturnal Hours is not the only example of this

Speaker 3 (00:43:11):

And that feeling and that sort of that moment, at least collectively in the studio, whether it's you and I or you, me and Jake with periphery where or when someone in the room has unlocked something that kind of changes the collective approval of it or liking of it, when that happens and the light bulb comes on is the most vindicating triumphant thing, even more so than writing a sick part on the spot, that feeling, because I dunno, it just feels like that's some real magic at work there because of all the things that he said for some reason. Now, the part after it sounds better because we fixed some random thing with the riff that preceded it. It just has this domino effect and it's a really good feeling. I remember that being one of the best feelings in that whole process was finally getting that fucking song to work, right?

Speaker 2 (00:44:00):

It's vindicating because we always felt like there was something there and we just couldn't quite get it because there's ideas where we're like, eh, it's okay, but not really feeling it. And if those end up being worked, it's like, oh, that's surprising, that's cool. Or just fades into the ether and no one ever hears it right. But when it's always a little frustrating when you have one that as you're working on it, I'm like, oh, this is really cool. And there's parts that are really cool, it just never comes together, and you're like, I mean, there's riff graveyard ideas like that that still frustrate me, like Candy, for example, which we'll never get the hang of that one,

Speaker 3 (00:44:36):

But once we do, once

Speaker 2 (00:44:37):

We do. But if we ever do, it will be so satisfying because it'll be like, I knew it. I knew that there was something in this.

Speaker 1 (00:44:44):

Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast and you should know that it's brought to you by URM Academy, URM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration and information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you're a member, you already know how amazing it is. The beginning of the month, nail the mix members, get the raw multi-tracks to a new song by artists like Lama, God Angels and Airwaves. Knock Loose OPEC Shuga, bring me the Horizon. Gaira asking Alexandria Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others over 60 at this point. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song on the album and takes your questions live on air.

(00:45:36):

And these are guys like TLA, will Putney, Jenz Borin, Dan Lancaster to I Madson, Andrew Wade, and many, many more. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, which is our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics as well as Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use in your portfolio. So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those of you who really want to step up their game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhance, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics. Again, staging, mastering, low end and so forth. It's over 500 hours of content. And man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed.

(00:46:30):

Enhanced members also get access to one-on-ones, which are basically office hour sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes and fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step. So if any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills in your audio career, head over to URM Academy to find out more. I like the way you put it about solving the puzzle. I think that that's really what it is. It can be that there's just one piece missing that keeps it from being whole when you know that there's something there. I do think that the context is everything, because I think at certain points in time, we are just not in the right head space to understand what the solution is to the puzzle, something that time or perspective or different contexts could provide.

(00:47:24):

But I think that if you trust your intuition, I think your musical intuition, you're probably right about a song that is not solved, but there's something there. I think that that's a super valuable thing to know because like you said, some of those become your favorite songs, and I think that's valuable because, well, it says a lot. If you're able to hang on an idea for almost a decade and still think it's strong, still think it's worth revisiting. I mean, it says a lot about the strength of the idea, I think because Sure, you have opened up stuff from 10 years ago or something and been like, God, this is embarrassing. Oh

Speaker 2 (00:48:02):

Yeah, mostly. Mostly,

Speaker 1 (00:48:05):

Yeah. But if you open something from 10 years ago and are like, damn, this is pretty fucking cool, but I know why we didn't use it or something. It just meanders or whatever, but we can do something with it and you do something with it. I mean, that is pretty strong. I think it stood the test of time.

Speaker 2 (00:48:23):

Well, I've thought about this before because I've sort of pondered the sentiment that let's say you're working on a brand new album, that it should all be brand new riffs. And we've been on these bands, especially with periphery, we're shifting to periphery for a second where we'll bring back these older songs, these OG bulb songs or riffs or ideas or things that old school fans will appreciate to a lot of people. It's new stuff, but people would be like, oh man, it's just recycling all rifts or whatever. But at the same time, I'm like, man, just because the idea is old or wasn't written in this little period of time, does that make it any less valid an idea? And I think I bought into that at one point where I was like, yeah, this is for this album. It should be fresh. It should be written right now. But then I started to realize, I was like, man, I don't really control when this creativity happens. If I got lucky and stumbled upon this cool idea, it shouldn't really matter. That came out last week or last month or 10 years ago.

Speaker 1 (00:49:23):

I agree. I agree with you. I'm writing stuff right now, and I've been going through the catalog and I mean the catalog dating back to the late nineties, looking at demos and just like shit that maybe got recorded but didn't get released. Maybe the record company cut it or hated it for some weird reason or whatever. But just I've been looking at everything and been like, man, it would be a disservice to this sick idea. Just because it's old doesn't make it not valid. I mean, you're referencing Blackwater Park, right? That's old. Anything that makes it not valid just because old, I mean, the fact that it got released, I don't think makes it more or less valid. So I don't know. I think that just because old doesn't mean that it's invalid.

Speaker 3 (00:50:11):

I would urge anybody out there listening if there's a handful of ideas or if there's one idea that's really frustrating them just to set it aside and keep it in a place like a hard drive or your Dropbox or wherever. Just let it sit there. Let it rot there for however long. And I think another reason this happens so much with periphery and haunted shores too, is I've kind of developed this pattern, and I think I learned this from Misha and even Jake too to an extent, is when something's frustrating you and you can't solve this puzzle to just put it down and do your best to forget about it and move on to the next thing, this kind of next song mentality, and just keep it going because you'll find something you're happy with eventually, whether it's just a demo or just a couple riffs or something like that.

(00:50:57):

And then nothing happens to that old song that didn't work that one time. It just sits there and you can get back to it whenever. And I think the beauty of where we're at now is all that stuff is still untouched. And I mean, like Misha said, a lot of it is not really worthy of it, but some is. Yeah, some is. You'll find the occasional gem in there or idea where it's mostly shit, but there some parts that can be reworked it. It's a beautiful thing to be able to draw from. So I would urge anybody out there who writes prolifically or likes to do it habitually is just keep all that stuff easily accessible. Don't put in a hard drive and put it in your basement. Keep it right on your computer.

Speaker 1 (00:51:35):

Also, something you touched on, the reasons for why you don't use something are interesting. It might not be that it's bad, it might just be that it didn't work. Or if you're working with an external producer, it could be the producer didn't like it or something could be awesome, but just for whatever reason, that record you're making with that producer, it didn't jive for whatever reason. But that doesn't mean that it's bad. There's so many reasons for why an idea could get ditched besides the idea sucking. I mean, some ideas do suck.

Speaker 3 (00:52:08):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:52:08):

It's important to be able to tell the difference,

Speaker 3 (00:52:10):

Being able to laugh about it just like we're doing now is also helpful because there's also the personal side of getting your shit cut and realizing that it sucks is being okay with that. There's some people out there who I'm sure don't really think that any of their stuff sucks and makes them difficult to work with. They usually

Speaker 1 (00:52:27):

Suck. Yeah. Well, I mean, I feel like it's a rule that if you don't kind of think your stuff sucks, you probably suck. Well, except for me, I've never written a bad

Speaker 2 (00:52:35):

Thing in my life.

Speaker 1 (00:52:36):

Well, you're the exception though.

Speaker 2 (00:52:37):

He's the only one. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:52:38):

I'm the

Speaker 2 (00:52:38):

Only one ever, ever. Mozart piece of shit.

Speaker 3 (00:52:43):

Total hack, hack hack. Total hack. TikTok, influencer hack.

Speaker 2 (00:52:48):

First off, that guy hasn't even released an album in forever and everyone acts like he's all amazing. Prolific my ass.

Speaker 1 (00:52:55):

Just had rich parents or something.

Speaker 2 (00:52:57):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:52:57):

Probably

Speaker 2 (00:52:58):

Parents bomb

Speaker 1 (00:52:59):

An orchestra or whatever. Yeah, I mean, overhyped

Speaker 3 (00:53:02):

Overblown. He went from arena to small clubs. He was doing House of Blues Chicago and then he went out to Joliet. I remember, dude, I haven't even

Speaker 2 (00:53:10):

Seen him play in a century, so fuck that guy. Pretty sad. Sad. Out

Speaker 1 (00:53:15):

Of curiosity, do you guys like your own music and I don't mean when you're working on it. Okay. Because when you're working on it, obviously you have to be stoked on it, but once it's done, do you like it? I need space.

Speaker 2 (00:53:29):

I don't listen to it.

Speaker 3 (00:53:31):

I don't listen to any of that stuff. Hear me out here. Maybe you do this too, but I'll go months and months and months without listening to it and then I'll get a vinyl test press or something like that where I have to listen to it

Speaker 2 (00:53:42):

And

Speaker 3 (00:53:42):

I'll be like, oh man, this is pretty awesome. By then, I have enough time and perspective to remove as much emotionality and bias from it as possible.

Speaker 2 (00:53:52):

I usually do one customary listen of every release where I don't have to listen to it, which is the day it comes out and I try to this picture that I'm a fan who's never heard it before and I'm like, I wonder what they would think of this. And then I don't listen to it and it'll probably be a few years. I can't tell you the last time I've listened to a release I've put out in its entirety. Other than that one day, I don't know if I ever have. When

Speaker 3 (00:54:18):

You do that, do you cosplay as a random person

Speaker 2 (00:54:21):

In? I don't cause play as a random person because of that. I mean, that's my ability to talk about my things I'm in too. That's fine. But yeah, it elevates the experience.

Speaker 1 (00:54:32):

Are you able to get into that head space?

Speaker 2 (00:54:34):

Not really, no. It's not about the head. It's more just like a custom. It's just something like, if anything, it signifies the end of it because for me, I really enjoy writing and this has kind of been the way I am with a lot of things in my life. I enjoy the process, I enjoy the chase, I enjoy solving the puzzle. I enjoy building the Lego. I don't really play with it after it's done and then I'll make display it or whatever, but it's the assembling and the building and the writing of the thing that I really enjoy. So once that's done, it's like cool. I build Lego, whatever, I'll play with it for a few minutes. I'm like, cool, put it on display. Let's build the next one. It's kind of the same thing. I'm listening to it once kind of signifies the end of it and I'll probably hear the song the most. I'll hear it, but it's never willing. It's always a utilitarian thing. It's like a practicing for a tour, whatever or trying to learn it for tour and in the case of haunted chores for a play through or something like that, we're getting test presses, so I'm going to have to listen to the album. By the time I've done all the listens that I have to do, I'm kind of good. I am ready to move on to the next thing.

Speaker 3 (00:55:44):

You know what it's like? It's like in an RPG, like a roleplay. I'm about to go full in cell right now. Grinding in A RPG, getting your stats more power. It's so satisfying. You're like building this super insane character and then by the time you over level and you over grind, you can walk on water and one shot dragons and stuff and you're like, this is cool, I think, but this can now

Speaker 2 (00:56:08):

Good. I can move on to the next one. Yeah, yeah, it is kind of weird, but I do like it and I am proud of it, but I've also spent enough time, especially having mixed it, all that stuff, I'm just kind of sick of it by the end now. It's nice. It's been a little while since when I listened to the test press the other day, we need another test press I think because this one was kind of weird, but I'm probably going to have to listen to it again. I won't mind that. But those last few masters, the revisions, it was just like, God, I have to, it's a chore. Listening to that,

Speaker 1 (00:56:38):

It becomes kind of painful once you start to get to that part of the process always. How long is it usually between projects for you to be able to start writing again or is it just a constant sort of thing?

Speaker 2 (00:56:49):

I didn't have much of a choice here. It was a lot of writing. This session was just sort of crammed between periphery sessions. Generally I like to have a little bit of downtime, but life doesn't always afford you that luxury, so it's just as it happens. If I have my way, I like to have a bit of a break, but

Speaker 1 (00:57:05):

I can't believe you guys did two records like that. That just seems insane.

Speaker 2 (00:57:10):

I also had just finished the ball record, so for me it was just like three projects back to back. That's

Speaker 1 (00:57:17):

Fucking insane.

Speaker 3 (00:57:18):

When I flew out to Misha to get this stuff started with him, I remember him being in the midst of that and feeling bad that I was bringing some of this material to him at a time when he was swamped with so many projects. But I remember initially the reason I wanted to do another one was because we just had our tours canceled at the beginning of the pandemic, so on paper it was like, oh, this is a perfect time to revisit a hundred chores. We should do something with this. And it was great for the initial demoing in the very beginning, but that's the thing with the band where so many of us have different projects and interests on the side, it's then managing that and this is I think the trap that we fell into all while trying to manage periphery around it. It wasn't the cleanest process. Do I think the product suffered? No, I think it came out. I think I took a few years off my life, that's

Speaker 2 (00:58:08):

All. But I was effectively writing for five projects. I was writing for periphery, solo, album, haunted Shores, GD and Horizon devices. It was a lot to sort of juggle and manage and I don't think the product suffered because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if it did, but it just meant putting that much more work and stress when I was just absolutely tapped and all I wanted was just a break. So

Speaker 1 (00:58:30):

Where do you find it when you are tapped therapy?

Speaker 2 (00:58:33):

I guess, I don't know. All right. You just suck it up and deal with it. It'll be over. Just sit

Speaker 1 (00:58:37):

Down and make more.

Speaker 2 (00:58:37):

Just deal with it. Just it sucked. It really sucked. I won't probably allow myself to get in that bad a position again. Also knowing that when it's done, I'll feel I'll be very grateful.

Speaker 3 (00:58:47):

But I remember you told me that your New Year's resolution, I think a year or two ago was like, I want to have a productive year because I think we were coming from, I remember I was in the same boat. You coming from a place where I felt a little bit, I could have done more creatively, I could have done more, and what I think happened, I think in your case especially is maybe an overreaction to that was maybe taking on a lot of things.

Speaker 2 (00:59:13):

Oh yeah. I also did Animals as Leaders. That's right. I forgot solo album then haunted chores, then periphery and all while doing this. That's a lot of stuff I felt like that year I was like, man, I didn't write anything. I was like, can I even write anymore? So then I overloaded in your mind, you're like, oh, this will slot in here and that will be there and then this will get done and I should know better. I really should know better. And then of course everything all went wrong and everything got delayed and pushed together. It was difficult, but at the very least I could be proud of having written a lot and not quantity, but stuff that I'm genuinely proud of and stuff that I was very happy with on all ends. I don't feel like any of those projects were compromised in any way creatively. They were kind of what I wanted to do and I got what I wanted out of them. Just the cost of stress and time,

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):

That sentiment of I feel like I could have done more. It's interesting because I have felt that, I mean I always feel that, but when there's certain people in my life over the years where I have vocalized that where their reaction is like, dude, take a break. It's all good. And then other people that are like, yeah, me too. I want to do more. It's just interesting to me because that feeling of I could have done more Whenever I feel that way, I know I'm right. So when someone is like, bro, you should take it easy. You did a lot. I don't let myself believe them. They're wrong. I know that I could have done more. It doesn't matter what they think.

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):

Yeah, I have this just guideline now, money, stress time being the sort of three factors for everything or general three factors and everything sort of this equation of cost. I'm fortunate now to where a lot of these decisions don't have to revolve around money, but it seems I'm very willing to donate inor amounts of stress and time to things that don't always need to have that much stress and time in there. And it's one of these things you're talking about where it's like you could have done more because you could have, oh, maybe I was only at 95% capacity and felt like crap. I could have been a hundred, felt even more like crap. Your friend's like, dude, take a break. I will tell you one result of this is the last six months of last year we're pretty tough with everything so culminating and me feeling absolutely just drained.

(01:01:34):

I remember in September October just looking and it's like until December, I'm not going to have a day off. I'm not going to have a day to breathe. If I did get a day off, it was a day of just pure recuperation. It didn't even feel like a day off. It was like, oh my God, back to it. And I was like, this is crazy. And there's not really any way out of it, certainly not any way out of it without really screwing up some plans or screwing up people I care about or projects I care about. So I'm going to suck it up, but I've always struggled with what you're talking about where I feel like I could do more. I feel like I'm lazy if I'm not hustling or whatever, but now I think that was such a sort of rock bottom moment for me that now this year unknowingly, it's not really a resolution or anything, but it's just being lazy.

(01:02:18):

I'm being a lot more lazy and I'm not allowing myself to get overworked. I'm saying no to a lot more stuff for how long? As long as I can manage, man. I mean it's kind of like more desperation. I'm curious. Me too. I'm going to find out because I don't want to feel that way. Man, that was not fair enough. That was not cool. That was a moment where I was like, this is not sustainable. Maybe I'm getting older or maybe I really just did take on too much, but it was starting to affect a lot of other stuff in a really negative way and it was making me feel horrible. So I'm sort of like the guilt is not enough to stop me from doing it now because the desperation I was feeling then was worse. So I sort of traded that guilt can sort of sit in the back and it'll always just sort of sit there. But now the fear of feeling like that again is the more powerful motivator. So that allows me to take it a bit more easy now. You're right, I don't know how long it'll lasts. I hope it lasts a while, but I feel like I'm doing a better job at it than I've done in the past, so at least it's a bit of progress.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):

The not doing enough thing is such a blessing and a curse at the same time because I feel like if you have lofty goals for your life, feeling like you aren't doing enough or could do more is part of what allows you to fulfill those goals or even come close to them or at least go in that direction. It's at least for me, and I really do think that it's pretty universal, that feeling is part of what creates the momentum. On the other hand, that feeling sucks and it's like eternal torture, so it's a blessing and a curse. I feel like if you don't have that feeling, what are you going to do? Why would you do anything if you didn't feel that way?

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):

I feel bad that you had to go through that last year, but I feel like the only way to find a balance that you walk permanently or to find some kind of compromise that you can sustain is to know what the extremes feel like and now you know what the extremes feel like and as long as you don't forget about it in two years time or something like that, as long as you keep it fresh and this year, this year is looking like it's going to be pretty good. I mean, we have just the periphery record going on and there's not a lot to sort of dilute the water.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):

I've been keeping busy in writing too. I just haven't been overloading myself. So the balance, it's all about the balance, but it's finding that balance and maybe finding that balance for where I'm at in my life. Now, maybe I don't remember exactly what it was like, but maybe in my twenties I would've been able to handle this without any problems, but now it's a little bit more difficult, so just maybe it's a recalibration, but you're right, sometimes you have to find the limit to understand where it is and that was definitely my limit. So

Speaker 1 (01:05:02):

Don't take six projects on at the same time or back to back.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):

Yeah, I mean unless you're Devon Townsend, probably not.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):

I think even he doesn't enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):

I mean

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):

It's a lot and it's the sort of distillation of that feeling of I could be doing more and sort of its ugly side because it is a double-edged sword, and you're right, it's easy to justify it as well when you look at it like you were saying, where oh, I'm at and I have things I'm grateful for and things that I feel lucky about because of this personality trait, and it's easy then to overlook the bad sides and the damage it's doing to your life in favor of all the positives when really you should be looking at. It's just sort of a facet in general that has positive and negative things and doing more of a cost benefit on, okay, so with this application, is this really benefiting it more than it costs? Because with the application last year it wasn't, but now I think I found a better balance where it is is sort of more in line with what I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):

That makes sense. It also sounds incredibly difficult to find, but I do agree that you're only going to know it if you actually test what the boundaries are.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):

Yeah, it's different for everybody and it's something I work on with my therapist as well, and it's also something that you need to take action on. Talk is cheap, and I think these things in a vacuum are very easy to acknowledge and recognize. It's in the moment when you're feeling that guilt and you're like, ah, well I'll just take this one project, it'll be fine. It's just be a couple weeks work. What's a big deal to learn to say no to certain things and be like, no, no, no, no, no. This is how we fall into that trap. This is how it begins.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):

Yeah. Well, I think also, correct me if I'm wrong, but at least for me, I have gotten into a point where I'm more capable of saying no to things because I feel more secure in I guess my position on earth and also in the fact that if I say no to something, that doesn't mean that I'm making a terrible decision and some opportunity is just going to disappear and it's going to fuck everything over, which is how I used to feel, which is why I would not say no to things, but is part of it feeling a little more secure about everything? No, no.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):

I still have that Jewish guilt of am hearing my mom being like, this is why you're going to be homeless or whatever. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):

Oh yeah, my dad telling me you are going to work at a gas station or something.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):

Nothing. And it's irrational. It's purely irrational, but it's kind of just understanding that that instinct isn't necessarily right. There's an intellectual side to this and then there's an emotional side, and the emotional side can sort of completely ignore the intellectual side.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):

Oh, that side's not fixed.

Speaker 4 (01:07:49):

Intellectually

Speaker 1 (01:07:50):

I'm able to talk myself down better because I have evidence I guess, that I didn't have in my twenties. So what I do now when I'm starting to feel crazy is I look at the data around me and I'm like, look, this happened, this happened, this happened. It's cool. You can turn this thing down. The world is not going to implode.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):

I think one of the complications for me, so I'm very good at turning things down from other people, but when we're talking about personal projects, let's say periphery, haunted chores, get good drums, horizon devices, which are my companies, I have a vested interest in them. I have a vested interest in all of these. There's this weird sense of I'm disappointing people. Then saying no becomes all harder because now I'm saying no to people I really care about and to projects I really care about and things that I think that's where it gets a little bit more murky. So what you're talking about, if it's other things and whatever, I have gotten a lot better at that and my therapist told me something or he asked me something really interesting one day he's like, so you said that you own these companies and you own your label and you own everything.

(01:08:53):

He's like, didn't you tell me that you became the boss of these things so that people wouldn't be able to force you to do things? And I was like, well, yeah, yeah, he's so you think it's interesting that you're in a position where you could say no to these things, but you've chosen not to exercise that? I was like, I guess that's true. He is like, why not say no to these things? And I realized it was all about just disappointing people and feeling like I was going to disappoint people and that's the irrational part. That's the part where it's like it doesn't really make sense. Anyways, we're going deep into therapist stuff right now, but that's,

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):

Isn't it different though if you're the one telling yourself to do something versus a boss you don't want?

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):

Exactly. That's the thing. It's fighting against yourself because part of me really wants these projects to exist and they want to be a certain way and I'm like, oh, if I just put another, oh, I could just take this project on. We'll just squeeze it in here. It'll be fine. Plus it'll make Mark happy and he's right. We could get this out and it'll make me happy. It's not just about other people, but it's like when you have a vested interest in these things, of course you want to say yes. That's where I've had to learn.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):

I think there's as far as responsibility of the people in the environment, I remember it hit a boiling point during a periphery session late last year was I could tell that you were in a bad place because of everything you've just described, and I think our responsibility, and this is certainly what I felt is to sort of express almost what your therapist said, it's just like you're not letting anybody down. It's okay to hit the brakes. It's okay for everyone here hit the brakes. You're not disappointing any one of us. Even if it weren't you, if it were Matt or Spencer or Jake, whatever, if they were in a place where they could not continue at this rate, the only thing you could say is nothing bad is going to happen if we shelled things for a month or a couple months or whatever in order to preserve your health. The thing is, and I think you guys were alluding to this before, is that at the end of the day, the psychology of this makes that really not matter because you are so fixated on what you're feeling internally that you just don't hear it, and I think I understand that it's not something you can be convinced of in the moment, and I think it's something you kind of need space from, and I'm glad you've gotten the space since that moment in time to feel like you can find a good balance.

Speaker 2 (01:11:06):

Yeah, I think this is also something that creatives tend to be prone to as well, especially successful creatives, as you said, would've gotten to this point, exercising this and really having that hustler's mentality and benefiting from it, at least visibly benefiting it from it more than quietly not, and it's of course easy to justify it when you're like, well, I'm not sad. I'm not overworked. I mean, look at all I've built. It's very easy to distract yourself from that, which just makes it twice as bad. But yeah, I know we're going on a bit of a mental health tangent here, but I do think it's interesting that I think about this

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):

Stuff all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):

It doesn't matter the field even I've talked to, I like to talk to creatives of all fields because the parallels are really astounding. It seems like it's just the same sentiments and insecurities and issues that you deal with manifest in different sort of mediums, so everyone kind of relates to it. And it's also weird because we don't really get a manual for this stuff. We're kind of all sort of trained for these jobs, which Mark was working one of those jobs. He's seen both sides of it where you work the nine to five and the career and whatever you're being told to be at this time at this place every day, and you report to these people and you're sort of part of this larger thing that you may not have the same sort of vested interest, and it's not really as much a focus on creativity, and that's sort of what I feel we're better prepared for through school and all that kind of stuff.

(01:12:36):

Then once we do this, it's like, yep, you work for yourself. Great. I think that's supposed to be awesome. Everyone says how great it is, and then all the caveats visible and invisible are just sort of thrust at you and you don't even realize they're happening half the time until you start to feel the negative effects of them and you have to figure that out, and there's no guideline, there's no preparation or priming for this. It's just you have to figure it out, and it's interesting to me that as I talk to more and more creative people, how that process even evolves in a very similar way for a lot of people where they sort of make a lot of the same mistakes with mismanaging their time and taking on too much stuff and feeling like they have to say yes to everything, even as things evolve to where they don't have to say yes to everything. They have to learn how to say it's the same. It doesn't matter what your field is.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):

Yeah, I have noticed that as well. The thing though is so someone listening to this who is 25 or something and trying to get their production career or whatever career off the ground, I know that we're talking about how unhealthy it is to be like this, but at the same time, that person probably does need to just say yes to everything and make the unhealthy choices if we're being realistic.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):

Yeah, that's what we did too.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):

Yeah, so that's kind of what sucks about it is that I agree with everything you're saying about finding the balance and getting therapy and doing what you can to quiet that voice to a degree, but I also think about how important it is to, I don't know, you kind of have to put in that level of energy to get to a certain point. I don't think there's a way around it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):

For many years. In the very beginning it had to be that way, and you were describing whoever's listening to this out there in that exact position you described or something similar, that mindset really you have to have. You just don't have a choice. You can't be picky about things, but it's always, and I think this is the thing to draw from this talk, even if you can't relate to it one for one is just to always be aware of how it's affecting you because I think the negative effects can sneak up on you if you don't at least have your finger on the pulse of it. And like Misha was saying, I mean it snuck up on him and it manifested in a way where he recognized at some point that this is not good. It's not healthy, it's not sustainable. I think just to have that as a tool, as a dialogue to be able to consult and just be aware of is healthy. Even if you're in a completely different position, even if you're 18 years old and you just want to produce and mix everybody, if you want to do 10 projects at once, go ahead and do it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):

You probably should.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):

You probably should. And having at least the thought in your mind, is this worth the cost that I'm putting into it from a time level, from a mental health level, from a financial level, to always be able to have this conversation with yourself instead of just pretending like it doesn't exist or not even having the terms in your vernacular to identify what those things are because then it starts to seep into things like your mental health or your sanity and then God knows how it could manifest. So just being able to diagnose these things, and I mean I've dealt with it a shit ton myself too over the years, being able to say no to certain things and my problem has always been like I obsess over what happens if I would've said yes, once I say no, then I spend a week being like, fuck, maybe that would've been really sick if I said yes and then that torments me. But yeah, I think it's all just healthy stuff to be aware of that there's some pressure gauge that's invisible that's in there somewhere, but to know that it's there I feel like is healthy no matter what age you are, no matter what position you are in your career, just know that it's there. That

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):

Gauge has helped me make some of the best decisions I've made when I knew that it was time to no longer pursue my band touring, it was just not going anywhere. I was doing that calculation is the money stress time, health calculation, and when I really sat down and thought about that, how is this affecting you? Is it worth it? Where's this going? All that stuff. It was super clear that I needed to make a move, which is how I got to audio hammer, and then I went through that same calculation before starting URM and so taking stock of those things and now they were affecting me led to making the next move. So even from just a straight up career perspective, I think it's really important to take stock continually. You also got to know if you're moving in the right direction because a lot of people mistake productivity for progress and without a little bit of an analysis is really easy to fall into that.

(01:17:27):

I call it productivity theater where people just work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and they don't question it. They just work their asses off and because they have worked their asses off, they feel like they've done something good and whatever that voice in their head that they need to satisfy is satisfied because of the hours logged and then a few years later or 10 years later or something, they're not where they wanted to be and they don't understand because they worked really, really hard the whole time and then have some sort of a mental crisis about it. And I think you're always going to have mental crises in your life, but not examining and not assessing can have you end up in places that are very far off from what you had intended. From what I've seen.

Speaker 3 (01:18:17):

Couldn't agree more

Speaker 1 (01:18:18):

So the 18-year-old listening when we're saying yes, take the projects. The thing that I hope people don't do is just work, work, work, work, work with no direction. That's the thing. I hope they don't do

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):

Well said.

Speaker 1 (01:18:30):

Do you ever find yourself doing that or at any point in your life just mistaking productivity with progress?

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):

Yeah, I think that's one of those tricky things where there's no real guideline. It's a very personal thing. It's always to do with your goals. I think. I don't want to speak for everyone. I like having dreams and I like dreaming big, and then that can always be sort of your north star in these situations where you can sort of just audit what you're doing and reassess and be like, is this getting me closer to that or am I just sort of going nowhere fast? Because whatever those goals are, whether it's the short-term ones, whether it's the long-term ones, you should be ideally starting to make progress on some of those, and if you're not, then that's sort of a telltale sign of being productive but with no real end goal in sight.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):

So you said you like having lofty goals, which I do as well. Is it a conscious thing?

Speaker 2 (01:19:21):

No, I've always been a vivid dreamer and daydreamer. I've realized that I get a lot of happiness from thinking about things and just imagining what it'd be like to this or that, and I do spend a lot of time always, I think I've always just been like that. I've just always been a bit of a dreamer, so that's come somewhat intuitively, but I think the thing that's happened is I've been able to achieve some of these dreams, so then that causes this sort of positive feedback loop of like, oh, so it actually pays off to have dreams. You may not achieve all of them, and some of them were really lofty at the time. I would love to be in a touring band that seemed impossible, and I was quite happy working a job. I was working at Radio Shack and then Container Store and just doing music in my free time.

(01:20:06):

I was very happy doing that actually. That was fine. The idea of going out on a weekend tour, a short tour and losing money in a van, that was cool. Anything beyond that was like, yeah, but come on, let's be real. I dream about winning the lottery too. That's not going to happen. But then you have a lofty goal like that and it actually does happen and it's like, wow, okay, so let's keep dreaming big then, and it's not an expectation, it's just an aspiration. So if it doesn't happen, I'm not disappointed, but I like dreaming about stuff. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):

Well the thing with lofty goals, there's no reason not to because I feel like it's really easy to say that's unrealistic. Let's not even think about it, but why is it actually unrealistic? Whenever someone tells me that they don't want to think of, they want to keep their goals realistic, my thoughts are like, are you a psychic or something? It's not going to work. Why someone can do it, why not you?

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):

Or you could have both. I have realistic goals and

Speaker 3 (01:21:09):

Unrealistic goals, and it's a spectrum. You know what always drove me, at least in the very beginning, and I'm not sure if you guys can relate, but was always entertaining these ridiculous dreams I had, and like you were saying, it's like I'm completely a foolish dreamer as well. What always drove me was the idea of not trying something because of the mathematics behind it, making it in a band or getting to a level where we could tour even on a small level, the mathematics of that working out were so minuscule that maybe somebody who didn't dream as much as I did, or maybe someone less naive than me would be like, nah, fuck that. Why am I, I'm just going to do something else. To me, the idea of never trying it and even not knowing how I'd far doing it, even if I crashed and burned, the fear of never knowing and almost like the angst it brought me was what drove me to just go all in on it. Even if my goals weren't that ambitious in the very beginning for doing music as a profession. I guess just not being able to live with myself if I didn't try something that I thought maybe could happen if I put in enough work and if I leaving things up to luck, maybe it could happen, which all those things panned out. I don't know. Can you guys relate to that? Does that sound weird? A hundred,

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):

Totally. That's the sort of desperate action that one needs to have because you have to be naive. If you looked at the math, a lot of this stuff just wouldn't make sense. We needed that naive energy and that hope to be in a band. That's why I always say if I had to start a band again, I wouldn't. I know too much. Ignorance is bliss in those cases. And so I was in university studying, so I didn't care about it all and I dropped out. My parents weren't thrilled about that, and they were like, we'll rent you a room in the house, or you're getting a full-time job. This isn't an opportunity for you to be lazy. They're like, as long as you keep that job, we'll rent you a room in the house, but if you don't have a job, we're going to kick you out.

(01:23:08):

You're going to have to figure it out. And I was so much happier doing that because I felt like I was at least trying something. I knew that because they were like, yeah, work full-time job in your free time, you can do whatever you want. You want to do music, do music. And that's what I was doing, and for the first time, I felt like I was giving this thing a shot and I had this conversation with my dad who very responsibly was like, statistically, you have no chance of making it right. Why do you think you're going to make it? I was like, look, I don't, but if I don't try, I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. That fear is way worse than anything else. It's scary to drop out of school and take a risk on this and go for it, but not nearly as scary to me as not knowing of what could have been like, oh my God, I can't even imagine what that was

Speaker 1 (01:23:53):

Like. That's way worse.

Speaker 3 (01:23:54):

I have a friend who got offered an acting gig and he had never acted before, but he got offered a gig to do it. It's like back in the nineties, and he still laments to this day, even 95%.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):

He turned it down.

Speaker 3 (01:24:07):

Yeah, he turned it down. Probably wasn't going to pan out, probably wasn't going to turn into anything, but there's still that 0.0, zero zero 1% that he would've been Brad Pitt or something.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15):

Well, he guaranteed that it didn't work out.

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):

Exactly, exactly. But I feel like you guys were saying it's like that's not near as bad as actually going and sucking it, acting and then just moving. You know what I mean? That's a story. At least you learn something from it. You got exposure to a different kind of world that it didn't work out and hopefully why it didn't work out. But yeah, that's a pain that I've always been afraid of and luckily, I guess when I was little, I always wanted to play baseball or play basketball or be a professional athlete. Luckily, I wasn't given the physical tools to do those things, so I couldn't have done those things even if I felt like I wanted to take that risk, but the music thing was too much for me to not try despite the fact that I knew that it probably wasn't going to go anywhere.

(01:25:07):

And I feel like latching on to that reality too is important for people because I always say this, it brings you back to wanting to do these things for the right reasons, knowing that I wanted to do this, not to get rich or not to get into it for the wrong reasons, but just wanting to do it because I thought I was okay at it. I feel like it all kind of works and drives everything back home to that point. If you get back to the reality of the fact that this is probably not going to go anywhere, get back to doing it for love and because you don't really know how to do anything else as well.

Speaker 1 (01:25:35):

A project falling on its face isn't that bad. No, I'm sure you guys have had projects or things that have just failed.

Speaker 2 (01:25:44):

Everyone in this industry has had way more of those than they've had successes. My

Speaker 3 (01:25:48):

Whole band quit. Haunted Shores quit. Everybody quit. My brother was one of the people who quit, and it was devastating. And then a year later I asked Misha if he could help me write and record some of these songs, and it turned into 14 years to this day of a solid friendship and working relationship that isn't going anywhere. So yeah, I mean, it sucks to have stuff fall on its face, but just God knows

Speaker 1 (01:26:13):

It's not that bad. That's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):

You just learn to cut your losses and move on. Everyone in this band has done it, fucking seen Matt with band Happy and all that stuff, the resilience that he showed, and it's why he's successful, because people who are good at just being like, all right, I accept it. This is no longer worth the time, stress and effort. Cut my losses, mourn it very, very quickly and move on. Move on to the next thing, and then you realize it's not, yeah, you're right. To me, that is not even close to as scary as not trying it in the first place.

Speaker 3 (01:26:48):

What you just mentioned is why every kid I think should be exposed to sports in some way. It's losing the Stanley Cup in Game seven by a goal, and over time look at how a team handles that shit and how they bounce back and what do you do from that? That is such a life lesson, right? There you

Speaker 1 (01:27:04):

Go again.

Speaker 3 (01:27:04):

Just do it again. Run the table again. Let's do it.

Speaker 1 (01:27:07):

I don't know if you guys know about it, but I had a beard oil company for two years from 2016 and 17 Metal Beard Club, and the product was great. The branding was great, the marketing was great, it was great and it was better than any of the other stuff I would buy. It was legitimately awesome, but it just couldn't fucking sell it. It just wasn't working. It felt really good to cut that off. It was disappointing, of course, but it was like it failing and recognizing it and moving on actually felt like a win to me. I didn't feel like I fell on my face or anything,

Speaker 2 (01:27:44):

But I think the fear that that is going to hurt is maybe what stops a lot of people from trying these things out. And then when you actually experience what happens is people who actually experience it are like, oh, that wasn't that bad, and then you become kind of invincible. It's like, all right, then let's try all the things, and then you end up with a whole bunch of projects and companies.

Speaker 1 (01:28:06):

Yeah, well, getting the shit kicked out of you a few times, it really is a character builder. I do think it should happen to everyone at some point.

Speaker 2 (01:28:14):

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I've definitely had that happen in a lot of ways, metaphorically and figuratively and literally rather, but all of those, it's like I can't regret any of the things that have happened to me. Even stuff in a vacuum or at the time I was like, I would've done anything to undo or whatever because it's made me who I am now, and I think those are all extreme character builders. It kind of sucks too, thinking about it. I've got a niece and nephew, I don't want anything ever bad to happen to them ever,

Speaker 4 (01:28:46):

And

Speaker 2 (01:28:47):

Then I am balancing of that. It's like, well, if nothing bad happens to 'em ever, they'll probably turn to really shitty people, but you need a little bit of adversity. I just hope they could get away with the minimum amount to be good people, but minimum, minimum viable dose. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:29:03):

That is the parent's dilemma. Thank God I'm not a parent. I have that same thought all the time. All the time, and at the end of the day it's like, well, I guess I will let you run around with scissors. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:29:15):

That's fuck that. That seems terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:29:18):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):

Because

Speaker 1 (01:29:20):

How are they going to learn?

Speaker 3 (01:29:21):

No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 2 (01:29:22):

No, my sister and my brother-in-law, the first kid, they were neurotic over everything. Second kid's like, how else is she going to learn? Wow, one kid is all it takes to just become nonchalant.

Speaker 1 (01:29:33):

But it's true though. How else are they going to learn? No, it's

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):

A hundred percent true and it's the right attitude.

Speaker 1 (01:29:38):

It's real hard to learn from other people's mistakes. I know that if it wasn't difficult then kids, friends asking for advice, whoever advice would actually work, but that just doesn't work. Not for stubborn people like us. It has to be really extreme for me to learn from somebody else's mistakes. They dropped a nuke on themselves or something. That

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):

Dude threw himself into a wood chipper.

Speaker 1 (01:30:02):

Yeah, something like

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):

That. It could be fun. It might be different for me. I'm just saying maybe I should try it for myself.

Speaker 1 (01:30:10):

Well, okay, so the thing is I feel like the reason at least that I don't learn well from other people's mistakes is because I naively sometimes think the outcome will be different for me. They did something wrong, so I'm going to try it and sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:30:27):

It's like that arrested development quote where Tobias is explaining about open marriages and how these couples just delude themselves into thinking it's going to work, but it always ends in disaster, but it just might work for us.

Speaker 1 (01:30:42):

That's perfect. That's

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):

Exactly that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):

Alright, well dudes, I think this is a good place to end the episode. I want to thank you very much for hanging out as always. It's a pleasure and I actually did listen to the record and I actually do think it rules.

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):

Oh, thanks man. Thank you, man. That means a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:30:57):

Yeah, like I said, just to round it all off, I was expecting something completely different and I'm really happy that it's not what I was expecting. Can I ask you, what made

Speaker 3 (01:31:08):

You think you were going to get Iron Maiden?

Speaker 1 (01:31:12):

I don't know, because I'm familiar with you guys as musicians and I've never heard you do anything stupid or cheesy. Everything I've ever heard has been good. I don't know why. It had nothing to do with you guys. It was like, it's just that usually people's other projects suck. That's a great quote. It wasn't you guys. Is

Speaker 2 (01:31:35):

That Lyndon b Johnson? There usually other people's projects. Yeah. It's interesting because what you're saying, it's like we should market periphery five. It's going to be just like cheesy eighties rock, so when it comes out, people will be like, oh, this is a lot better than it would be.

Speaker 3 (01:31:54):

Yeah, the album cover be like palm trees and stuff like that,

Speaker 2 (01:31:59):

Right? Yeah. Just completely airbrushed. Yeah, it'd be the great misdirection as it were.

Speaker 1 (01:32:06):

Yeah. Well look, you guys gave me no indication that it would sound the way I thought it was going to sound, so that was a hundred percent my own weird invention.

Speaker 2 (01:32:14):

Well, I'm glad that happened. That's

Speaker 1 (01:32:16):

Of

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):

The styles that you would assume it would be. That's probably one of the better ones for them when you hear it, which is great. I would've thought the artwork might have clue you in, but it did.

Speaker 1 (01:32:26):

Once I saw the artwork, I was like, I don't think, and I saw the song titles. I was like, wait a second, wait

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):

A minute. That album art first song was called Fire. That was an interesting eighties glam rock you got here.

Speaker 1 (01:32:39):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kind of knew what I was getting myself into when I saw the song titles, but then I was like, yeah, okay, cool. Thank God.

Speaker 3 (01:32:48):

We'll try and deliver more Standing back to back hair blowing in the wind guitar harmonies. Next time

Speaker 2 (01:32:54):

You got the hair down, don't we? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:32:56):

Exactly. That's what we're building up to. He's got the

Speaker 2 (01:32:57):

Hair. Jake's growing his hair out, by the way. Oh really?

Speaker 3 (01:32:59):

No.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):

Did you know this? Did you know this? Yes, he is. He's growing his hair out. But

Speaker 3 (01:33:04):

He said that so many times in the past.

Speaker 2 (01:33:06):

No, no, no. He's actually growing. It's longer than I've ever seen it. I don't believe it. I won't believe it until his head hair is longer than his beard hair currently. I don't believe it, dude. He's growing it out. He's wearing beanies and everything.

Speaker 3 (01:33:17):

Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:33:17):

Yep. He says that he wants, and sorry, I know this is nothing to do with anything. I'm just updating Mark hair that by the time we start touring again, we have three longhaired fucks on stage, man.

Speaker 3 (01:33:27):

Oh man. We're going to look like cannibal court. We got to get Spencer to look like grow his neck all thick too.

Speaker 2 (01:33:31):

Yeah, and just do windmills. I got to learn how to do windmills now that look fucking cool. All look like a bunch of F1 drivers. It's fucking windmilling. Big old necks look like thumbs luck with, good luck with the hair growth strategies. Hey, mine's getting there. Mine's getting there. No. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:33:47):

He's just looking good.

Speaker 2 (01:33:48):

Jake's got, when I met Jake, he had longer hair than both of us down to his butt. Oh

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):

Really?

Speaker 2 (01:33:54):

Yeah, he looked like a grunge guy. Like he would've

Speaker 3 (01:33:56):

Said mud honey or something, but I

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):

Don't know why that name

Speaker 3 (01:34:00):

Came

Speaker 2 (01:34:00):

To mind before. Did they have long hair down to their butt? Because that's what he looked like. Yeah, and then he cut it short because eventually every time, this is my second time having hair this long, you get really annoyed. I've almost cut it just from being annoyed and the plan was, I thought we'd be touring by now, so I was like, oh, my hair will be long. By the time we start touring again off by at least a year, I'm like, man, I got to live with this mop for a year. That sucks. But the girls seem to like it, which is weird. I always thought they would tell me to cut it off. They're like, no, don't cut it. So then I'm going to keep it for now, Jake's going to grow his hair out and if Jake's doing it, then I will not cut mine in solidarity. If he cuts his hair, then I'm going to cut my hair, so that's my thread.

Speaker 3 (01:34:41):

No, don't do that. He is going to cut it

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):

Then we'll cut yours

Speaker 3 (01:34:44):

If you sleeve.

Speaker 2 (01:34:47):

This

Speaker 3 (01:34:47):

Sucks.

Speaker 2 (01:34:49):

Yeah. Alright. Alright. Anyway, sorry to sidetrack. That was a very important conversation I need to have with Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:34:58):

Well thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):

Yeah, thanks for having us. Sorry. Yeah, thanks for having us dude.

Speaker 1 (01:35:02):

Alright then another URM podcast episode in the bag. Please remember to share our episodes with your friends as well as post some of your Facebook and Instagram or any social media you use. Please tag me at al Levi URM audio at URM Academy and of course tag our guests as well. I mean, they really do appreciate it. In addition, do you have any questions for me about anything? Email them to [email protected]. That's Eyal. At urm AC aca. DEMY. And use the subject line Answer me Eyal. Alright then. Till next time, happy mixing. You've been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact, visit URM Academy and press the podcast link today.