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Different people will take different things from the album, but it’s deeply personal for both of you. Cammie, how much does it take out of you performing the songs live? Cammie – “It takes a lot, yeah. Writing it was difficult, and it was like getting a tumour removed. I didn’t think about it then what it would be like performing them, until it was time to tour, and then I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is going to be hard!’ Certain moments get me more than others, ‘No Color, No Light’ is definitely a hard one.” You’ve only had a few shows since the album came out, yeah? Dobber – “We had a few album release shows before this tour where we played most of the album, minus ‘The Banished Heart’, because that’s hard to play. We have the set up to do it, but we don’t do backing tracks. We considered using them, but that’s against our credo. We tried them in rehearsal once, and everyone was just like… fuck this! The album is a living breathing entity, so we get on stage and sometimes it will be different… Cammie will be different, we’re going to be different, and I don’t want to take that magic from that. Of course, I love seeing a band that are shithole tight… click tracks, backing tracks, and they sound awesome. If it works for them then great, but it’s not for us. For me, it takes away the spirit of the music.” Cammie – “I like to feel it vibrating, I like to hear it, I like the noise of the stage and the different noises from each venue. If it’s digital, then it is controlled, so I like the risk from playing it live.” Dobber – “I don’t like saying it, but you need to be a better musician if you do it the old way. We use click tracks in the studio, but that’s more for syncing and editing.” Dobber, you produced the album. Does that put extra pressure on you, being so hands on? Dobber – “Nah…I love it! I love the whole process. Even with this record, I knew exactly what each song would sound like by the end of it. I was lucky to identify and hear in my head the finished product months before we had done any of it. I was able to incubate the band side of it. I do the arrangements, and we all write the music. Sean will have a lot of riffs, and he’ll go through what he’s got and work on it. It will either fall in line beautifully, or take a few days. With this, we had finished the musical demos and then sent them to Cammie. She and I have been seeing each other since November 2016 after a super messy separation from my wife, which was really hard. Someone I had been with for 20 years, and was like the wrong person to be with for 20 years. Not bad mouthing her, but we were just bad for each other.” So Cammie, you handle the songwriting duties then? Cammie – “Yeah. It was difficult to begin with, but once I got the hang of it, it was a lot easier. I write a lot, have a lot of journals, so I’d start from there, unless maybe right away I had heard something when they were mixing the music… words that came to me. I generated a pool of words from my journals, and that went into what I wrote, which kept it a lot more cohesive. I had to go off by myself, and it boggles my mind that these quiet crazed moments turned into this thing that has been shared all over the world. Maybe writing that I had never even planned to share, things about how I was feeling at that time.” Was it quite therapeutic for you? Cammie – “Yes and no. It’s the release and getting it all out, but it’s also reliving it. The more it’s out there, the more I feel that people take a piece. Here I had this big boulder there, and for the album I kind of shattered it, and the more pieces people take I’m like ‘Is there a problem now?’” Cammie, I have to ask: ‘Howl Of The Rougarou’… how many takes did it take for the stripped back vocals during the intro? Cammie – “Oh!” Dobber – “Oh… let me see if I can find the original recording on my phone. I think I have it somewhere. Cammie had messaged me late one night…” Cammie – “That’s really interesting, I had gone to my Mother’s house one night. My Dad passed away at home. We had set up the living room for hospice care, and now the piano is set up in that room. It’s like a music room, guitars set up. I was sad, just missing him, feeling terrible, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to write something’. I had the guitar, had some writing that I had been doing, and came up with the intro, so I sent it to Dobber. When it came to recording the album, he sent them a sample of the phone recording and we just kept it in. It’s recorded on my iPhone, and that’s what we used on the album.” So that recording on your phone is the same one we hear on the album? Dobber – “Yeah, the very same one. She sang it, played the guitar, and when she sent it to me, I thought it was gorgeous. The rest of the song is like a mix of the Norwegian band Arcturus and some Handsome Family. We meant it to be very, very fucking New Orleans. The approach to that song was all Arcturus. I’m a huge fan, so I wanted like a quirky black metal Mr Bungle type of thing, but it couldn’t be goofy as it had to fit the vibe.” Cammie – “It was a great surprise when I found out that they were going to use it! That was my magic spot in the house, before we lived together. The echoes in that room are incredible, so it means a lot to me that it made it onto the album. I was nervous sending it to him as I thought it had to be perfect!” Some of the lyrics are heartbreaking. Cammie – “When I do it live, sometimes I’ll be feeling okay, then there will be a switch and an emotional gate opens. When I see other people feeling it the way that I felt it, then it’s more release, and it comes out more, but then I feel better, and rather than try and stop it, I just let it out. [With grief] people assume a timeline, people process grief, heartache and hurt in so many different ways. Sometimes it will come on super strong. It could be the day that you lost them, or ten years later. The songs that we make are meant as a service. You will revisit the loss, and hopefully the songs help.” Today, we are constantly told that people have short attention spans, so a song has to grab them within thirty seconds or they click on something else, but with ‘The Banished Heart’, there are so many expansive tracks. The opening one, ‘The Decay Of Disregard’, is nine minutes long… Dobber – “I didn’t see any issues with the running length. We had a rough mix of the album, and I was excited for the label to hear it, so I let them hear it… and they just didn’t respond to it. After about a month, still no response and I was wanting feedback, any kind of feedback, even if it was ‘The songs are too long!’, then it would still be feedback. I had cc’d Cammie in on the emails, so she was also getting aggravated. Finally, we got a reply to say that there was going to be a conference call to talk about everything. So we talked, and they were like, ‘We don’t get it’. I let them have their say then I said, “you guys are fucking crazy! I know this record is good, I’m not being biased, I know it’s special.’ So they approved the rest of our budget, we finished the rest of the album, and here we are. I’m already disheartened. Hell, the rest of the band guys weren’t getting it, so I was like, well if it goes out and does terribly, then everyone will look at me like it’s my fault.” Cammie – “There are so many layers to it that it takes sitting with it before you get it. It’s not superficial.” Dobber – “I had the demos for everything, the vocal demos and I knew that we were good. The guys didn’t really have an opportunity to hear the finished product, and didn’t know what Cammie was doing, so when we got the finished product and we sent it out, then everyone was like ‘Okay, we get it now!” Cammie – “This one has more crossover appeal. It’s more accessible.” Dobber – “We played it to the label, and our main guy at the time was like ‘It sounds darker, but this is like 100% Oceans Of Slumber and I commend you guys for sticking to your guns.’, but he was basically saying “I hope that you have not destroyed yourself business-wise, and you have to move labels!’… when we get to Tilburg, we’re going to meet up with the label, so we get to hang out, but the industry at the minute is a band killer.” When ‘The Watcher’ finished, I felt that it was the end of side one and the signal to get up and turn it over, like the old days! Dobber – “Haha! Well ‘The Banished Heart’ and ‘The Watcher’ were supposed to be the one piece. ‘The Banished Heart’ has a lot of significance in a lot of different ways, and ‘The Watcher’ is kind of a continuation of that. The vinyl is four sides. I think it’s maybe two tracks per side? Even the label tried to give us advice on the layout, and I’m like, ‘No!” What was it about ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ that made you cover it? I’ve heard many different versions, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris… Johnny Cash, obviously. Dobber – “There is a better version than all of those; Eric Bibb’s version is fucking amazing. I sent the record to Tom from Evergrey. He sent us their last record, I said to him to listen to it in one shot, away from everyone. Just take it in. When he got done, he was giving me a play-by-play of different tracks. The title track overwhelmed him. He got to ‘No Color, No Light’ and it crushed him, then he listened to ‘Wayfaring’ and I didn’t hear back from him. He messaged me the next day that it was gorgeous. He asked me what the label had said about the album, so I gave him the feedback, and he went off on one! Emails coming through all in caps! FUCK THEM! He said that he felt that there was a heavy ‘True Detective’ TV show soundtrack vibe running through it. Now, I love everything from Agnes Obel right through to Nick Cave and some other shit, that boudoir style… Southern bluesy vibe. So, to get back to ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, the Eric Bibb version popped up as it had been on a few shows. I heard it and I got some ideas for it, showed it to Cammie, and said that I wanted to use it at the end of the album. To me the album is about a return; a return from exile, a return to life, so ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ was perfect to signify the return, coming home.” Tom Englund also sings on ‘No Color, No Light’. Will you get the chance to perform it live with him? Dobber – “Yeah. We do Prog Power Festival later this year. It’s very prestigious for us, and Tom will be there. It will probably be the only time that we do the song with both vocalists. It will be special.” The new album looks amazing on vinyl. My copy is still sealed and staying that way! Dobber – “Haha! Well it’s art, but what you are missing by not opening it, is the other piece of art inside, it’s gorgeous. I had wanted to do a piece for the cover, like a discovery type thing. If you listen to the record, then that image could be savage or contemplative or historic. We did a raw edit, which is on the inside of the album, and it’s fucking beautiful man.” Part two of our Oceans Of Slumber interview can be found here. Interview: Dave Live images: Rob Wilkins ]]>
