Moon Healer, the new album from Job For A Cowboy is a remarkable progression for the band (and you can read our full review here). From their beginnings as an impressive deathcore band, JFAC have slowly incorporated more and more elements from across a range of genres into their sound, culminating in Sun Eater and Moon Healer. Yet, while these records represent the band’s growth, the pressures of life mean that they emerged an astonishing ten years apart – a lifetime in a fickle music industry that seems to have become dominated by those who can churn out material in order to sate a streaming public’s unending appetite for content.
With SonicAbuse noting the band’s remarkable musicianship in general, and the astonishing, jazz-infused bass work of Nick Schendzielos in particular, we were privileged to spend almost two hours chatting to Nick about the band, his love of the bass, and the state of the music industry in general. Intense and driven musically, in interview Nick is friendly and generous with his time, and we hope you enjoy this detailed look behind the scenes of one of the year’s most interesting and impressive albums.
Thank you so much for making time to speak to me.
Of course, no worries, man. It’s been a heck of a six months. A heck of a five years. A heck of a life dude!
I’m particularly pleased to speak with you because, on the album I was really blown away by the bass playing – it’s really jazzy, fluid, and kind of unique, so having the opportunity to speak to you about that is really cool.
Thanks man, yeah dude, you know, I really spent a long time… like if you start your own band, it’s a lot easier to do it that way – presenting a bass sound like that, and having it be that up in the mix.
I did start a band where that was the case, it’s called AinMatter, right, and it was two basses, drums, and vocals – no regular guitars. And the idea was to put forward bass as a prominent instrument, and just show that bass can provide the melodic timbre of the song and just be the central motif. But, when you’re up there, up high on the neck like that, you can miss the low end. So, you have to either compensate for that, by how you’re writing the lines – putting whole notes, or low notes in there, or you can have another bassist and that’s what we did with AinMatter.
And that’s how I got into Cephalic Carnage, and they liked the kind of busier bass work that I was doing. And, from that, you slowly get your name made, but I couldn’t quite get to where I wanted to be, bass-wise, with Cephalic Carnage – except for the songs I wrote. So, when Job picked me up, I was kind of slowly making my name as far as “ah, this guy does more than just backing up the guitar lines”.
Even in Job, it took a couple of records – Gloom and then Demonocracy. It wasn’t until Sun Eater that I was able to say, like, “I don’t want distortion on my bass”. I mean, if we’re going to spend all this time writing all this crazy stuff on the bass, it should be audible, you know, because otherwise I might as well just play whole notes.
I guess it’s a challenge, because there’s an established sound in heavy and death metal – you’ve got that heavy bottom end. So, when you have something so different and high up the neck, the challenge is to get it to cut through – because, when you’re mixing an album, you’re so used to pushing the frequencies down that way. So, again, I guess you’re vying for attention with the guitars as well.
Of course, yeah. That’s the interesting thing. I was just talking with Michael Keene from The Faceless about this. And he’s one of the only guitarist / producer guys that has got that (or, at least, I’ve heard it out of their mouths). People always say that, when you add that distortion on to a bass, whether its Sansamp or Darkglass, or whatever it is, you’re doing it, so it blends in better with the music. Really, what it does, is it makes it into like a soup with the guitars. It’s like a guitar-bass soup. Because you’re literally taking the bass, and all the dynamic range that bass has, and you’re pushing it into the exact same frequency range that the guitar lives in. To me, it’s a way to hide the bass guitar if you can’t figure out a way to get the bass guitar to sit right, or if it’s not being written in an interesting way – that’s the reason why you don’t hear bass very loud in a lot of mixes.
But clean bass does stick out, you know. It’s literally very noticeable. And I think that can be detrimental if the parts aren’t written that way, or the performance isn’t very good – to most mix engineers it just doesn’t sound good being up that loud.
Also, I think a big part of that could be attributed to the basses themselves – the wood you’re using as a manufacturer, and the pickups and pick up configuration. But primarily, what I’ve found is that using highly compressed woods, like Bubinga (on the Warwick Thumb), or ovangkol from a Dolphin or Wenge fingerboard gets the tones you want. That’s why, when I had my bass built… I mean, they hadn’t used that ovangkol wood in like 30 or 40 years, but they were like “yeah, we could make a bass out of that” and it’s quite a bit more easily sourced than Bubinga. So, yeah, it’s just getting those woods. They’re heavy as hell, which sucks for your back, but they’re sort of naturally compressed, and they have this growl in the midrange that makes them even more present than any other clean bass sound would be. So, yeah, that’s a big part of it – the bass itself just sounds really cool. And so, it made it easier to put it up in the mix.
When you’re writing your parts… listening to the album, it feels like you almost have that lead guitarist thing where you need to come up when it serves the song; but you also have to know when to get out of the way of the vocals. It’s very dynamic and almost rhythmic – the delivery of the vocals.
Yeah! Yes!
So, you have to try to get out of the way of that sometimes, right?
That’s brilliant, you know – it’s kind of really what… I think we did that really well on Sun Eater. And I miss when there’s more going on. I think there are more ideas present in this record. I mean, if we were to count the number of riffs and the changes and all that kind of stuff, as opposed to Sun Eater.
Sun Eater was a drastic reduction on purpose in reaction to Demonocracy. Demonocracy has so many ideas, it’s crazy, but it’s too dense of a steak for me to eat very often. So, specifically with Sun Eater, we wanted to pull back on the number of ideas and just do a lot more repetition and present things that way.
So, Moon Healer has a few more ideas than Sun Eater and I think we had to be more cognisant of that fact. You can’t all be going [sings] lalalalalala at the same time because it’s fucking annoying, you know! And the idea is that each person’s overall contribution to the conversation is accentuated and given space to flourish.
I think that’s something that just comes with maturity, I think, as musicians. It’s like, OK, this shred-tech stuff, we’ll play a million notes a minute, but we’ll pass the ball around to do that – which is kind of like a good basketball team or something. You know, you can’t all have the ball at the same time. And, if you are cognisant of the fact that it’s the vocals’ time to shine, then we’re doing rhythmic stuff – we can pull back on what we’re doing, and go in a more whole-note way. Just simple stuff taking up less of the sonic register.
And it’s also Johnny being really brilliant and knowing where to put his stuff. We didn’t… I mean, besides the fact that we knew certain parts were choruses or outros, for the most part, the music was all written first, and so, a lot of that is just Johnny being really cognisant of where there are spaces – like “here’s a cool rhythmic pattern and I can fit on top of that as a counterpoint”, you know.
That’s really interesting that the music was written first because, as I understand it, there’s a conceptual thrust to the lyrics, and I had wondered if it played a part in the music. Were you aware of the concept in any way before you started writing?
Oh yeah, 100%! That is kind of interesting. The concept was there before the music was, but the lyrics didn’t come until… I didn’t see the lyrics until the very last 10% of this 8-year process. Johnny was tossing ideas around a lot, especially because, you know, the topics are near and dear to our hearts, and they’re interesting to us and intriguing, and we’re always talking about that stuff anyways.
And I mentioned before, in the videos that I directed alongside Kyle Lamar from Digital Mile, and Johnny also pretty much co-directed with us for a while, although from a chair far away in Arizona from where we were actually doing the filming. But I acted in the first two videos as well, and the character in the beginning is this insane Howard Hughes character – losing my mind into this research type of obsession. And all those books around the character are all my books. There were a couple that we bought from Amazon, that we knew specifically – the Tibetan Book of The Dead I hadn’t had, and shit like that. But the rest of those books were mine and I slowly gathered them over, you know, 25 years or so.
So, I think it was one of those things where we knew we were going to make a sequel to Sun Eater and we really wanted to push that concept as far as we could. And, Johnny, I think he thought that maybe when he started to do the actual lyric writing, he’d figure out how to do it, from the perspective that yes, this is a sequel, or a continuation… but it’s also a shift in perspective. It’s the same character, but it’s shifted form – what was a third person perspective on Sun Eater; I mean, even though the lyrics are first person – you know, there’s a lot of “I” in the lyrics, so you could tell it’s written from a first-person perspective, as far as the actual grammar of it; the overall perspective is third person, witnessing this character go through this crazy life trajectory, experimenting with all this stuff.
But then, I think, when he started to write the actual lyrics for Moon Healer, he found that it was more first person. He was really trying to get inside the head of this character, and where he’d go, and what path he’d take, and what would happen. So, knowing that was kind of cool, because even not having the actual lyrics decided on, the feel was established – like how we wanted to make the listener feel on this tripped-out, psychedelic journey.
And another thing that was really cool was that, because we knew the concept first, we had the artwork already done. Tony Cole did the art, and he does not get enough credit out there in the world – the guy is an incredible artist. And these artists always feel like they’re getting the shaft as far as getting credit in the industry, so I try to talk about him any time I talk about the record… Anyways, he’d finished the artwork, and we had it done long before, I think, even the lyrics were written. We had that art as we were writing the music. So, whereas most times, like 99 times out of 100, bands are like “we’re waiting on art” (after everything else is turned in) “and that’s why the record can’t come out this month”, we had it all done.
So, it was interesting because I felt that having that artwork done, and being able to look at it while were in the studio tracking, that artwork influenced the sound. Because we were like “does this sound like that?” You know? I think it was really cool that it was inverse that way, and I hope… I don’t know if he’s watched any of these interviews that I’ve done where I’ve talked about that – I should tell him that – it was super influential to the music, you know?
That’s really interesting – I always ask about art because I’m such a geek for physical music, and it’s always great when you get an album that looks like it sounds. But it’s interesting that you had that in place, kind of there inspiring the music, because that’s the opposite to how it normally happens.
Yeah, sometimes you can be… I think that when the music’s done, and it’s all wrapped up and mastered and turned in, and you’re waiting for artwork to come back, and then it’s not quite matching, it can be really difficult. I mean, a lot of times, there’s a lot of artists who’ll do X number of revisions, because people will come back and just “dude, it doesn’t quite fit…” And I think we solved a lot of that, Tony just nailed it, pretty much on the first take. I don’t know, maybe Johnny had a couple of suggestions – like a couple of eyelids or something. Small things. But, after that, that was fucking it. And I will credit Johnny a lot for that as well, because he was very fucking thorough in his description of what he wanted, along with samples and examples of Tony’s previous work, like “hey, we loved the eyeballs from this piece, the character placement in this one” and so on.
So, Johnny was super descriptive and that made it, I think, probably a lot easier for Tony to start, other than just [adopts Bill & Ted style voice] “uh, we want something ethereal and spacey”, you know. So, yeah, it was a cool process man. And it really opens you up to, I guess, that the physical part still matters a lot. Like, this record probably wouldn’t have come out exactly the way that it did if the artwork wasn’t what the artwork was.
And that ties into the whole thing Mid-Journey AI art discussion. Which is like, you can’t… [sighs] I don’t know, I guess you could do that. But it’s such a more involved process to be working with an artist who’s putting their spin and human emptions into it. I guess, if were to have put that detailed of a description, including examples, into MidJourney, probably we’d get something pretty similar. But maybe it wouldn’t have the soul. Maybe that exists, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. It’s just cool to work with human artists still, I think.
I totally agree – it’s a difficult discussion and I know it’s one that a lot of bands will work their way through. But there’s a big difference between placing prompts in front of something versus having a unique interpretation of your ideas and music, and there’s still something very magical about that.
True, and I guess it’s like… The whole copyright aspect of it. If you tell AI: “I want something Picasso-esque, blended with a fucking Geiger…” it’s taking examples of all those people’s art into account. So, is that… I don’t know if that’s plagiarism. It’s going to be interesting law. If somebody trains an AI model of your voice, do they have rights to use it? Are we going to be able to copyright our voices and our likeness? That Black Mirror Episode – that first episode of season 6 – wow! Will we even need actors and musicians anymore? We’ll just be signing a piece of paper so they can copyright our likenesses, and we’ll get a retainer, and they’ll make whatever the fuck they want to make with it, and we’ll get paid. Are we headed to that? That show’s been pretty frighteningly accurate. So that could be it [laughs] Like, “yeah man, have you heard the new Michael Jackson record? It’s fucking awesome!”
It’s not a good place, I worked in a university, and we were just getting to the point where students were submitting wholly-produced-by-AI kind of work, and even in academic circles there’s a big argument about that.
I know man. The crazy part is that I don’t think the genie can be put back in that bottle. And… maybe we could. Maybe there could be some kind of advocacy that fights so hard against it, that they’re able to do that. Like, yeah, they’re able to put some kind of thousand-layer deep QR code embedded into your visual and audio likeness. But it’s going to be so hard to do. So, I’m kind of at the point where I understand businesses that are fighting it, but maybe it’ a case of adapt and use it yourself or get left behind. It’s not a pleasant thing. I think if we could put the genie back into the bottle and learn to control it a lot better, so we don’t lose a lot of our humanity, that would be awesome. But I don’t know if it’s doable at this point.
Every other week I’m seeing some major report saying, “if we don’t slow this down, it’s Skynet”. I mean China literally has a software programme that amalgamates all of the 700 million CCTV cameras – that programme’s called Skynet [laughs]
It seems like it’s asking for trouble!
OK, I get it. Is that a goof? Like it’s funny to those guys? Like hahaha and then the robots kill us all?! [Laughs]
One of the other things you mentioned is the videos that you did, and I really love making music videos – but know some bands have a love/hate relationship with it; but a really good music video can become integral to the song and how people perceive it – like Tool videos, you really can’t listen to those songs without getting that visual landscape; and that’s kind of what I got from your clips. How did you get into creating the videos for your band?
That’s awesome man, thank you and yeah, I totally agree. I didn’t really think about that, but once you make it out there… how old are you?
43
OK cool, I’ll be 42 this year. So, for us, growing up in that MTV / VH1 era, I think that that… there’s no way I can extricate Stinkfist, you know, or November Rain. When you hear the song, the video plays in your head. I don’t know if it’s the same for younger generations – it’s hard to put yourself in their shoes, but I imagine maybe so though, because all the numbers are showing that they want something to watch. Their streaming numbers are going down, and these younger kids just don’t do music as its own thing, like listening to a record as something to do. But, coming from that era, so much of my musical landscape was explored and founded by Beavis and Butthead and then watching videos and finding Crowbar and fucking Type O Negative… and the stuff that sucks too [laughs].
So, I’ve always loved that concept of things. Even in high school, like mass media class, I loved doing the fake news casts that we made. Ours was freaking awesome and I wish that I could find it; but so, I started making YouTube videos, like bass playthroughs, and I found it was really boring – just playing bass. So, I started incorporating humour into it, and then green screen, and then I started helping others, and I had just to dive in so deep into all aspects of the production. So, my buddy Kyle from Digital Mile really took me under his wing and taught me a lot of stuff about the actual filming side of things. A lot of editing stuff as well, and he really pushed. As we were making other videos – I did a video for the band Kyng that I’m playing with, called Haunted Visions. I did a video for Soften the Glare – Ryan Martinie’s prog-fusion thing. And so, Kyle kept saying he wanted to a job for Job for A cowboy, and I was like “dude, this record’s taking like 100 years to finish!” So, once it was finalised and it was coming out, we agreed to do the video.
So, Johnny and I were super involved, like talking every day for hours about the concepts and how to represent them, and how to pull it off with not a giant budget at all. Comparatively, those videos should have cost, probably 4 to 5 times what they did. So, we were able to pull off a lot of stuff by just gorilla film making – like use what you’ve got. I mean, I don’t have 5 grand for the special FX or the make-up stuff, so what to do? OK, learn how to make fucking goop – learn how to do all the shit, and it was really fun learning to do all that. I really love it and I see it as something I’d like to continue.
You know, Job… is not going to be what it was. We’re not going to be able to go out and tour it, the guys are too entrenched in regular adult life. I would do it in a heartbeat, but I can’t go out, put four backing tracks on and just play along to the record! So, I think that doing videos are going to be a way to keep the project and Moon healer going, because I was real hopeful that we’d be able to get out and do a handful of shows, but the video thing is fun man, maybe it’s the way to go.
It’s really hard, as you hit your 30s and into the 40s, it does become increasingly difficult, and having 4 people means you’re multiplying the families and the jobs – it’s a nightmare.
Yep. And the distances too Tony’s in Ireland, Johnny’s in Arizona, I’m in Colorado, Al’s in New Hampshire, and then Navene is in Nashville. So, I mean, you could be further apart if one of us was in fucking Fiji or something, but for all intents and purposes, there’s no getting together and doing some filming. The logistics behind it would double the cost of the video, which is why we can’t have performances in the video. But also, I’m kind of tired of that stuff too. I like the older Tool videos where you never saw them. I didn’t even know what those guys looked like for like ten years, until I went and saw them live – you know. So, yeah man.
Trying to make videos, I always find the most exciting part of any creative endeavour is when you’re trying to do something that you don’t know how to do, or you don’t have quite the right equipment to do – it forces you to be at your most creative. It sounds to me like you’re kind of the same.
Yeah, 100% If I want to do something, I’ll find a way to see if I’m resourceful enough of a person to get the higher budget shit without having the money. I try to be like this is what I need, and it costs this much so, can I make it myself? Or do I know someone who’s maybe a fan who can do it?
I try to get that higher level because I always want the best of the best. And I think having that resourcefulness, it’s a major form of creativity. What turns on the creativity circuits in the brain are those constraints, and that’s something I’ve really gotten into over the last three years, with my writing, specifically with my bassline writing, with music writing, with the video stuff.
I mean, you have everything in front of you now – you have every plug in, and every type of effect and you can write anything you want, or you can make everything you want visually now – especially with the AI stuff – it’s limitless. That doesn’t help. In fact, I feel like it’s a major hindrance towards turning on the creativity circuits in your brain. There are just too many options. I think even getting the AI prompts to be right when you’re doing a record or coming up with artwork or whatever, that’s the key part – giving it constraints. Operating within a specific set of rules. And they can be broken, of course. But having those rules in the first place allows creativity to flourish at a much higher level. And I think a lot of the time it can be budgetary constraints that force creativity. Like, “we don’t have the money to do that, what else can we do?” And that’s when you come up with original ideas.
In terms of Covid, did you find that the kind of focus that it placed on communicating over distances galvanised the band towards Moon Healer?
Well, I think if anything it increased the refinement, you know, it allowed us to put things through another four or five layers of refinement. Because Navene went in and tracked drums in 2020. He was originally going to go, I think, maybe around March, so we had planned to have that done anyway. The only thing it really changed was that, instead of Tony coming out and tracking guitars… you know, like you’d normally do a record – guitars get tracked, or drums get tracked, then rhythm guitars, then leads, then bass, then vocals. But, I think, because of the pandemic, Tony couldn’t come over – the time he’d need to do the recording, we could have gotten that done, I think, but he couldn’t add in the time needed for the ten-day quarantine that he would have been required to do, on top of the time needed for the record. So, he couldn’t go to Jason’s to record. So, as a result, he had to record everything himself. He was a full-time med-school student at the time (he’s graduated now), so he had to kind of do it when he had time after study – at the weekends, really. So, I think that just made it a long, slow process.
So, it allowed us to continue and really refine stuff. So, there’s shit that would have sounded a certain way, even slightly unfinished sounding, had he just recorded guitar immediately after the drums had been recorded. But we had two years with the finalised drums done, where we could change stuff. Then, it was that kind of creative constraint thing because the drums were the drums. You could make little changes, like here and there, but Suecof didn’t want to do any of that “hey, can this part go twice as long” stuff. Because, getting drums – if you copy / paste a drum part so you can do it again, or even chop a part out, the cymbal wash – it’s real tough to get right. So, it made it “OK, this is what the drums are”. So, we had to write according to that. So, we had this cool process. And anyway, I always wait until all the drums, rhythm and guitar is done. Like, with leads, it’s always good to know at least what he’s planning to use harmonically so, that way, I don’t limit what he’s able to play.
The recording process is something I really enjoy, but at the same time, I remember speaking to people about the danger of having too much time. It’s probably quite good that you couldn’t touch the drums, because it’s easier to start tinkering with arrangements if you have the time to do it.
100%! This record was that – we had unlimited time to write it, essentially. Because we weren’t in a label deal. We weren’t going to be on that every-two-year album cycle, with tours to support. None of that was there. So, not having that pressure, I think it partially allowed it to become a ten-year gap. I don’t think that, without a final pressure… Basically, there did end up being some pressure – after we were halfway into the studio recording thing – because the label had spent the money for it to be recorded and they wanted to know when it would come out. So, we finally ended up getting a deadline, and that final thing was a call to us that we had to get it done. Otherwise, I think it’s possible, we’d still be working on it [laughs].
It’s that thing. You never finish a record, it’s just turned in. I read this other quote about that – art is never finished, it just escapes! And yeah, that’s pretty spot on – you could just keep refining forever. There’s a lot of stuff on the record that we would have changed. We would have mixed differently, or parts we would have gone back over. Now, we’re at a point where I can look at it and see that it’s done, and I’m glad that it is, and I’m glad that everything came out the way that it did. But, in that process, as you’re finishing it, there’ll still be little things that you’re like “ah man, I really wish I would have done this”, you know.
I think you become hypersensitive, and I’ll guess you probably listened to it a thousand times with mix revisions and mastering, getting that right – I guess it’s stepping back and trying to figure out what you can hear vs what the listener will hear?
Right, yeah! I was in this place called Studio 606, it’s the famous Neve console from Sound City, that Dave Grohl bought. And we were lucky enough to go there with King, to track some stuff there with our buddy Jim Rota, from Fireball Ministry, but he’s one of the engineers over there. So, we were in there and recording, and it was cool like talking to him and him being like… they have a saying at the studio which is: “won’t affect sales”. So, when you’re making a decision about this or that… like “this take is great, but there’s a little bit of noise in the pickup, but the take is great – the energy, the emotion, it’s there and it’s good to go” but you’re worried about this tiny noise… that’s when you use “won’t affect sales” – it’s kind of cool, you know, to try to incorporate that, or at least be exposed to it, because we could spend so much time on the most minute details, that just won’t matter to the listener – they won’t be able to hear it. Even the most fine-tooth comb audiophile, hi fi listener guy… maybe that guy will hear it… but he might think it’s on purpose. So, yeah. It was fun to keep that in mind. Especially with the video stuff I do. I’ll focus on the tiniest little shit, spend hours and hours on it, and somebody will be like “ah, I wouldn’t even have noticed that!”
Obviously, when you’re writing an album, one of the things that’s important is to get the sequence right – when you came to sequence this record, were all the lyrics done, or were you focused more on musical continuity?
Yeah, we definitely sequenced it after. Some of the stuff we knew where it was going to be, pretty much from the get-go. For sure, we knew that The Forever Rot was going to be the closer. Then, I think I put together the first submission for what the flow should be. I mean, Johnny and I spent so much time listening to it that I think maybe there’s a little bit of demo-itis can happen where, just randomly, in your collection of songs as you’re getting them from your engineer to listen back to for critical mixing and mastering and stuff, you notice that certain tracks should be together. So, you know, when one ends, it flows into the next one.
So, there may have been some of that subconsciously in there, but yeah – it’s still super important, I think, to figure that out. As a matter of fact, there was a thing that didn’t make it onto the record. It was my favourite piece of music out of this whole writing process, and I was super-bummed that it didn’t make it onto the record, but we did just run out of time to get it done. That’s OK, it’ll be on the next record, but it would have started the record. Either started the record or been right in the middle. Actually, it would have had to have gone in the middle, because I wrote that whole intro for Beyond the Chemical Doorway, so the record starts with this sort of TNT / Blast Off kind of a thing. Well, Tony wrote the guitar part for it, and I put the other stuff behind it. So, we knew that was a really great way to open the record. This other thing we had would have been a really cool way to open the record, but without that, for sure we knew Chemical Doorwaywould open the record with that intro thing on it, it wouldn’t make sense to have this other piece at the start of the record and then this other long intro thingy. So, it would have had to go in the middle, and it would have been great. It would have been a really cool thing, but it’s all good, it’ll go on the next one.
You probably had the same thing I did, growing up – I grew up with vinyl and there’s a very distinct sequencing process to vinyl, with the big opening number, then winding down to close the side; and then opening side B with a big bang. But that all changed, as CDs took over, they had different flows and were longer. But, as vinyl has come back, I’ve noticed bands are sequencing more in that way?
I’ve never thought about that – that’s brilliant. There’s a really cool book that’s called How Music Works, by David Byrne. Brilliant man. That reminds me of that book, where he talks about the external effects – the external ramifications of psycho acoustics, or something. Something that’s going to affect how people listen to something, it influences the music. So, for example, death metal – it’s just not going to sound that good in an arena. It’s very difficult to make such complex, dense music all the time sound good in a stadium, where the psycho acoustic properties are just tons and tons of reverb. Arena rock fits that, because the acoustic property of the venue dictates what sounds good in that venue.
So, it’s interesting to think about that – the medium that people consume affects the way you arrange the music. Because, if you know that you put on side A, and you know there’s going to be a literal break in the music where you have to flip the side over… yeah, I never thought about that before, but it’s a similar idea to what he talks about in the book. That’s brilliant. Yeah. I never thought about it. We thought about it more as a continuous flow.
A lot of CDs I grew up listening to… I’d like to hear how Dark Side of The Moon does that if you were to listen to it on vinyl. I love how the album – each song flows into the next. There are no breaks. You know, it’s like a movie – it doesn’t go Scene 1 – break – scene 2, you know? That’s kind of what happens on record a lot of times. I’ve always loved records that are continuous and just flow, so that’s kind of how we thought about it – listening as a whole. I think this one is a little denser of a meal to sit through compared to, say, Sun Eater. I thought Sun Eater had fewer calories, you know, but I hope we did a good enough job (no pun intended) to make things kind of be cohesive enough that you can listen to it in one sitting without feeling like you need a break.
When I put on Demonocracy, I can’t really get through that whole record in one sitting, you know. I haven’t tried it in a really long time, but it’s just like this barrage – a torrent of fucking riffs downloading into your head. But Signature of Starving Power is one of my favourite JFAC songs – the last song on that record – so…
I think on the new album, there’s a lot of space. It is really heavy, but it’s not totally full on – it’s very dynamic, and that’s what makes any heavy stuff kind of work. Even if you think about bands like Slayer, they throw in those slow songs from time to time – it’s just enough to back it off to not feel like you’re being battered.
Yeah, for me, dynamics are easily the most important part of music. If I had to categorise one element of music that is more important to me than all others, it would be dynamics. I need the variety – it’s part of the human condition, or basic needs: certainty, which is always first. It’s like the most hard-wired need programmed into us – certainty, safety, security, consistency. And that’s kind of what we get from a lot of music. So, I think a lot more often, people are looking for uncertainty or variety. And to me, in food or in music, or film, or whatever, if it’s the same thing over and over, we get tired of it and that’s why dynamics are so important to me. I want music to take me on a ride. I want to feel a range of emotions, not just this one emotion for the entire time. I think that’s probably a direction we’ll continue to explore with JFAC, as we write the new record. There’s already one track – well, two, if I include that other piece of music – and it’s out there. Following down that path, that moody, atmospheric kind of ride. Just trying to evoke different things. The heavy shit and the gutturals will always be there. You don’t have to worry about that showing up. [Laughs] It’s more about what else do you do, what else can you bring to the table that defines you. That’s why Sun Eater and Moon Healer are the epitome of what Job for A Cowboy is now. On this long path of self-discovery from deathcore / death metal to progressive tech metal. Those records really define what the band is, and then open the door towards where we can continue to grow, because it’s not like “OK, that’s your sound, just make Sun Eater 3!” We need to do something different and push ourselves in different ways.
Absolutely, and I get the impression from your playing and from what you’ve said that you have a very eclectic taste sitting underneath what you do, which is really important for an artist…
Yeah, totally. I mean, look behind you [referring to the stacks of records behind where I’m sitting] I’m sure that’s not one genre.
If it was, I’d be slightly mad, I think. There’s a lot of Pink Floyd up there, though. You can probably see Pulsepulsing away
Yeah! I was wondering what that was! That’s so funny! My cousin Brian had that record and had that… I remember back, it must have been fourth grade, or third grade, and it was like “what is this?” I didn’t really get into Floyd until high school, but man! Floyd’s the stuff for me. If I’m trying to measure where my life is at and how I’ve grown as a person, I put Floyd on. It’s like, it’s always the same and I’m the one who’s changed relative to it. I put Dark Side on, and yeah, you can just lose yourself to it. I feel like if I have one more record to listen to before I die, it might be that record. It’s not the greatest musical record in the world, I mean, I don’t know – but for me, it was sort of like a guidepost, or like mile marker, or some kind of a rock – Stonehenge or something. It’s like I’ll come back to it to see how it’s changed.
Ah, I’m a huge Floyd fan, and there’s definitely a lot scattered throughout this somewhat ridiculous collection.
Well, you know, if the internet goes out, we’ll all be coming to your house to listen to music! You think you own something in the digital world, and all it takes is an EMP and then, you don’t own any music, you don’t have any music anymore. My closet’s full of CDs and DVDs and stuff and I can’t bring myself to get rid of them, because yeah – I still love music that much that I’ll get a solar panel, battery charger, and discman from 1993 and I’ll be there in the post-apocalyptic world, holding the charger up and jamming along to something!
You do default to your teenage years, I think. And when I was growing up it was people coming to mine to listen to records, and that’s still the case.
Right?! It’s sort of taken for granted. The whole digital thing in general is kind of taking over. I mean, without YouTube, who knows how to fix anything? How many handymen are out there that can actually fix something that needs to be fixed when you don’t have access to the internet? It’s become a crutch, you know, and maybe we’re on the path where it’s never ever going away and we’re eventually going to merge our consciousness with it and be this singular, multi-consciousness that exists in conjunction with each other… or not.
But it’s interesting to think about. Like you go on a long drive, and now you can download your playlist, but we used to drive through long sections of the country where there wasn’t service, you know, and shit for radio stations, like driving through Nebraska. And, if you forget to download something, you’re not listening to anything. That’s why we used to have books of CDs and, I don’t know, it’s interesting to see how the technology is changing us, and our tastes, and changing art.
It’s interesting to think that we look back at this golden age where people were buying CDs left right and centre, but there was a much longer period where people were just listening to the radio, with just a few people buying albums, and that was their pride and joy – and I wonder if we’re splitting back along those lines, where true fans collect the music of the bands they follow, and everyone else simply streams.
Yeah, that’s true. When I grew up, it sounds like the exact same time you did, that was… from fifth grade to post-high school, you know, pretty much to streaming – music is what I spent my money on. You’d ride your bike to the used CD store, pick up an album – and used, they were maybe $8. New CDs were up to $17.99 at Tower. Adjusting for inflation, those were like 30 fucking dollars. We’d buy two or three – spend $150 a month on music and I loved it. It was pride. You’d take the CD cover out and open the booklet up and listen along and embed it into your DNA. And now, it’s just like “oh, did you save the new whatever record on fucking Spotify?”
There’s this major shift in our connection to the music. I think there are still people that do make that strong connection, but it is being relegated to a passive event for a lot of people. Music is something you put on in your car when you’re driving some place. Or when you’re at the gym, or as background. It’s not an event. It’s not like “hey – I got the new whatever record, come over, let’s listen to it.” That’s very few and far between and I think that that sucks.
It should be enough. It should be a thing. My mom would be like “we’ve got Led Zeppelin IV!” And everyone would come over, because somebody bought it and that Friday night, everyone would come around and you’d sit and listen. It was an event, music without a visual or anything. It was enough. It was an event, it was awesome. Yeah, it’s a different time man. It kind of makes you think that music is changing enough that it might be dying in some respects. Or weakening. Victor Wooten talks about that in his book, called the Spirit of Music. It’s the second book. His first book is called The Music Lesson, and music incarnates as a person and comes to his house and takes him on his adventures. It’s really cool, because basically, it explains his philosophies on life and music and existence. But, because it’s a fiction, you can’t say “that’s wrong!” You know. I thought it was a brilliant way of doing that. And then, in the second book, he’s kind of taking about how this music incarnate is telling him that it’s dying, you know.
So, in the foreword, he talks about how we started out with music as something that you had to play or listen to somebody else play. That was how music was. That’s what it was. And you got 100% of the emotions being put into it. 100% of the psycho acoustic properties. There was nothing lost. You got every single frequency. And then, with recording – with radio, you’re getting recorded music – so, it’s not as good as in person, the number of frequencies, but it still did a damn good job. And then vinyl was like 12” of music. Right. Then CD comes out, and the wave form, and it shrinks the amount of actual music, because it’s starting to compress it more and more, so you’re getting this much music now. Then the MP3 came out, 128k, and all this compression – you’re losing music, man!
Then we’re taking it and quantising the drums, and sound replacing the drums and the kick and the snare. And we’re overdubbing all over the place and tuning the vocalists so the flutter, the human flutter that used to be there, with like Kurt Cobain or whoever, it’s all gone. So, we’re literally not getting a fraction of the music that we used to get. So, many people are, and especially the younger generation, are experiencing music that is super-diluted. But maybe that’s going to lead to a craving for authenticity and a craving for live music. Because live is still live (depending on how many backing tracks you use). [laughs]
You know, music is a very human fucking thing. Forever. And now it’s becoming literally robotic and shit. It’s a crazy time. I hope people push back against it. There’s talk of kids in high school rejecting smart phones and asking for flip phones. Maybe the pendulum has swung so far that people are craving authenticity. I think you can see it. I did this release for a virtual bass instrument where I recorded my bass down in Australia. Like EZ Drummer. It’s all real bass, it’s all notes I played but, when we were putting it out, the A&R guy was really brilliant with his understanding of social media and stuff, and they kind of were starting to see that people are less drawn to anything that looks like an ad and, specifically, anything over-produced. The algorithm opens up more easily for single camera, one shot, no cuts, raw, right off the phone.
So, maybe we’re seeing a shift back towards that. We know everyone can be perfect with filters and all these plug ins and other shit. But we’re craving authenticity, so maybe things will continue down that path.
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