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Burying Your Demons With TRAVIS EVERETT From WITCHGRINDER · HEAVY Music Interviews

• 0:27
  This is Travis Ebett from Witch Grander. I'm speaking to you today because we
• 0:32
  are releasing our new album tomorrow, Nothing Stays Buried the yeutiful Travis. Thanks
• 0:38
  for joining us today, No hours man. So before we start, before
• 0:43
  we get to the album, mate, like your first released the music video
• 0:48
  for the song Queen of Sin, which is absolutely cracker of a video.
• 0:51
  So instead of me trying to explain it but I don't know too much about
• 0:54
  it, you tell us a bit about the video and the idea behind it.
• 0:59
  Okay, So that was the second single off the album. The idea
• 1:03
  behind that the original When we wrote the song, the riff was very rocky
• 1:12
  and had like a good, nice groove to it reminded me of a lot
• 1:17
  of like a lot of dancing going on that you know, guys and women
• 1:23
  or whoever could just really get into and dance. So we folk and I
• 1:27
  had a bunch of name, like a heap of titles for song names.
• 1:32
  That's that's kind of how I start with the writing. So Queen of Sin
• 1:34
  was one that popped up straight away. It just it just seemed to fit
• 1:41
  it perfect, and it just ended up being one of those really more alternative
• 1:48
  than our other songs, like it would branch out to a bigger audience.
• 1:53
  Thought, so we thought we'd use that for our second single. And then
• 1:57
  I spoke to one of my friends who who's just absolutely amazing, like director
• 2:04
  and he writes all the film clips and all that. I explained to him
• 2:08
  what the song was about, which is about just like an empowered woman,
• 2:14
  you know, a queen of sin, that kind of you gets to choose
• 2:19
  her men or whoever she chooses to fall through. Just just a mega powerful
• 2:23
  woman, and explained, gave him the song lyrics and a little bit more,
• 2:29
  and we started riffing with some ideas back and forward to work out an
• 2:36
  idea for a clip, and then it just got to what you're able to
• 2:38
  see now today, which I was stoked, but when it turned out a
• 2:46
  lot of hard work, but we got there. You can see the hard
• 2:50
  work in it made, which makes it all worth it. Done it yep,
• 2:53
  Now you're released, Like you say, you released that as your second
• 2:55
  single, but only the video this week? So was there it behind that
• 3:00
  or is it just like was there a specific reason or just the other way
• 3:05
  not there is, there's no real reason behind it. Sometimes it's just depending
• 3:13
  Spotify likes to get a lot of your music push from there when you release
• 3:17
  something, and then we wanted to give our YouTuber boost, so like releasing
• 3:24
  things at a different time because one was you know, just for listening,
• 3:30
  the other one's visual to get people pushed to both those sites instead of just
• 3:35
  choosing the one. Yeah, I think that's why we kind of went with
• 3:38
  that, that idea. That's not really my end of Yeah, I don't
• 3:43
  know too much about it either. It does make sense because if you put
• 3:46
  just the song out in one hit, with the song and the video,
• 3:49
  like if it's such a good video like you've got there, you'll find people
• 3:52
  are focusing on that not so much song. So this way they get to
• 3:55
  like the song or know the song first and then appreciate the videos. It's
• 4:00
  too effectively that that's it. And with this video you've seen it obviously.
• 4:10
  The film we decided for less less band. Like all the film clips that
• 4:15
  we've done up to day, like we've had three albums out now, well
• 4:18
  this will be the third, sorry, and every film clip that we've always
• 4:23
  done, we've always had the band is the feature, you know, or
• 4:26
  and and some other things come in, but this time, we really wanted
• 4:29
  to focus on the on the queen and and the other ladies in the room
• 4:34
  and the story more than the band. So as you can see, the
• 4:39
  shots only really go to the band a few times. It's not I was
• 4:44
  focused on us. So with that, yeah, it was nice to put
• 4:47
  the music out probably first for people to get idea of the music and then
• 4:53
  not be so distracted, you know, like they've already known the song,
• 4:56
  because they were going to be very distracted when they watch that film clip.
• 4:59
  The a lot going on at visually amazing, like the women are great,
• 5:05
  the guys are the actors in there who get like killed by the queen or
• 5:11
  whatever you want to say. Yeah, they like, you know, there's
• 5:16
  so much going on in it. It's just a great film clip, Like
• 5:18
  you can you watch it over and over again, and I keep picking up
• 5:21
  little things like that. I didn't even know that the director had thrown in
• 5:27
  there. So bonus. And as you say, the song is taken from
• 5:32
  your third album, Nothing Stays Buried, which's out now, So tell us
• 5:35
  a bit about the album overall from a musical point of view and what you're
• 5:39
  going for with it. This album took a while to write. Actually the
• 5:47
  writing didn't take so long. What it was is there was a there was
• 5:51
  a large gap in between from the last album just due to lineup changes and
• 5:58
  COVID pretty much which grind of was had a nice touring lineup and stuff,
• 6:09
  but nothing put together where I felt comfortable writing, like getting back in and
• 6:15
  doing a third album. Of course I had a lot of stuff put away,
• 6:19
  just riffs over the years and all that, but it never started structuring
• 6:23
  anything together. With this album, I looked at what the previous two done
• 6:33
  and what I had time to talk to a lot of people who had known
• 6:39
  which like, listened to which got over the years, a lot of new
• 6:42
  fans, a lot of old ones, and worked out what they liked best
• 6:46
  from the first album and the second album, what songs were their favorite and
• 6:50
  what weren't. So I really with this album, we really sat especially me
• 6:57
  and the guitarist Scott, we sat down and we really spoke about what we
• 7:02
  wanted, what style of song we wanted, you know, one to be
• 7:08
  like if we wanted it kind of kind of like we'd picked like one of
• 7:11
  the old ones off an album and say we kind of wanted a bit like
• 7:14
  this we want this one more rockier, we want this one more more thrash
• 7:18
  metal. We want this but we still wanted to keep the Witch Guy on
• 7:21
  a sound of course. So we we did put it all together over about
• 7:27
  six months and wrote it about in six months. We spent a long time
• 7:30
  in the studio, but that wasn't necessarily because it was every day. It
• 7:35
  was very split up. So we went in, we recorded a little bit,
• 7:41
  we came out, had a break that was just because of peap just
• 7:46
  where people were at at the moment. Like you know, life just gets
• 7:48
  in the way and it gets busy. But we did have the set date
• 7:51
  and we managed to to hit it. So it's all finally, like I
• 7:58
  did. I just feels it feels good to just be to finally get this
• 8:03
  album out because it was a lot of work. But you know, I'm
• 8:07
  proud of this album, and to be honest, I'm ready to start writing
• 8:11
  right in the next month. This one's settling in a bit first, mate,
• 8:16
  Yeah, I am, I am, I'm it's sinking a bit.
• 8:20
  I mean, we've still got the tour next month, so we have we'll
• 8:22
  get to that a little later on, but before we do, we don't
• 8:24
  normally do this, but there's only eight songs on this album, and like
• 8:28
  you say, it's it's a well put together album, mate, So we'll
• 8:31
  take the chop. We'll go through each song individually. Just tell us a
• 8:33
  bit more about it so the fans can sort of know where you're coming from.
• 8:37
  So it starts with My Exorcist. Yes, so My Exorcist was one
• 8:43
  of the I think it was one of the I think it was about third
• 8:48
  last we wrote this, if that makes sense. We wanted a punchy song
• 8:56
  that reminded me of which kind of stuff that we take from like Ramstein,
• 9:03
  like with the big dumping you know, thumping drums, just stomping along like
• 9:09
  that and just a massive riff come together really fast. It was. It
• 9:16
  was a really really easy song for us to write. When I say that,
• 9:22
  it's still not easy, but that's it was an easier song to put
• 9:26
  together. The lyrics, like I said, was just another one of those
• 9:33
  where I went to my list and looked through the song titles that I wrote
• 9:37
  down and what I could hear, like I will then listen to the demo
• 9:41
  of the song and when I hear and one of the titles just kind of
• 9:48
  line up interesting that that's how I kind of that's where the name comes from.
• 9:54
  And then once with the titles, I've already got a you know,
• 10:00
  a story of where I want to take the lyrics if we use it.
• 10:05
  So that was pretty pretty easy done because that was really just based on the
• 10:13
  Exorcist move the old Exorcist movie. A lot of most of these songs on
• 10:16
  this album, like are based from eighties horror movie. You can find it
• 10:22
  as we go down the list like that. You'll get it looking down the
• 10:24
  songs now, and then you can sort of tell which one to say.
• 10:28
  We've got dead by the door next, which is it obvious, evil dead,
• 10:31
  very obvious, big nod to the Evil Dead too. Growing up with
• 10:37
  that as a as a kid and loving it so much, I always knew
• 10:43
  that I wanted to write a song about the evil Dead, but I never
• 10:48
  really knew what song. When this is the I feel Dead by Dawn as
• 10:54
  the most witch grinder song on the album. That's is which hundred as you
• 11:00
  can get. And when I wrote that, I thought, well, it
• 11:03
  needs a really good like what what are we about? And I was like,
• 11:05
  well, we sing about our favorite horror movies and things like that,
• 11:09
  and that's what people kind of you know, not only do we have our
• 11:13
  music fans, we've got like, you know, fans of horror movies that
• 11:18
  that just kind of pick up and listen to our music because of the lyrics
• 11:22
  and our art and all that. So, yeah, that that was.
• 11:28
  That was I think that was about midway we wrote that, And when I
• 11:33
  heard that, I was I was really happy that. That's why we started
• 11:35
  off that with as our first single, Queen have send it next. But
• 11:41
  we've run through that one, so we'll move on to the next. Upon
• 11:46
  cursed grounds, Upon yes, cursed grounds, that's what Scotty calls it.
• 11:50
  I call it upon curse grounds, but I wasn't sure when I was writing
• 11:54
  down with the cursed or cursed, but I'm a cursed. Yeah, that's
• 11:56
  all right. Well you're the same as Scotty. Don't put me in that
• 12:00
  category. Don't put me in his category. Jesus. Yeah. So Podcast
• 12:07
  Grants has just been a bit about stuck on like a yeah, like Sacred
• 12:13
  Land. It doesn't really come from any specific movie that one. I think
• 12:20
  that's more of just stories that I've heard over the years, things like that.
• 12:26
  The song that one was. I think that was second last that we
• 12:31
  wrote. That took a while. That's probably it's the longest song on the
• 12:35
  album. I'm pretty sure, as far as I know. The structure of
• 12:41
  that was so weird. I'd never put a song together like that, and
• 12:48
  I don't know why we did it that way, but it did. It
• 12:52
  did come out. It just it just sounded. It just kind of rolled
• 12:54
  out how how it came to. At the start, it was a bit
• 12:58
  weird about it. But after a few listeners that grew on me that way
• 13:03
  that we laid it out, and especially when Scotty put over his like his
• 13:09
  leads. He's got some really cool harmonics and things going on on there where
• 13:15
  I duwel guitar with him the bass, Like once Jake picked up the bass,
• 13:20
  it started like throwing his stuff in like it was just adding and the
• 13:24
  samples were adding up the keys, and since then it just turned out to
• 13:28
  be a really cool song, one of my favorites. How about Inject the
• 13:33
  Venom. For some reason, Jack, I'm singing something in my head when
• 13:37
  I read that titel. I just don't know what song it is. I
• 13:39
  think there was clam rocky for the song I think there was actually an ac
• 13:46
  DC had a song called I just called a clam rock. How bad am
• 13:50
  I? You got the right? They're not very pretty those for us not
• 14:00
  in the slap now, yeah, which I didn't. I didn't realize that
• 14:07
  until after the song was written. That was the first song that I did
• 14:11
  write for the album, though before before I hadn't titled it at this stage,
• 14:18
  but that was, yeah, the first song I wrote. So I
• 14:22
  can't remember where how long ago that was? Now? What if I said
• 14:24
  how long did it take? We'll just say it was a year A long
• 14:30
  time ago. Yeah, it was a long time ago. Yeah. Injector
• 14:35
  Venoms about it was based a little bit on Reanimator okay, yeah, which
• 14:43
  is one of my favorite movies. Ah, it was based on that,
• 14:48
  but it went a little bit of a different direction. It was more of
• 14:56
  and and injected kind of just a horror a story that it was kind of
• 15:03
  a couple of horror stories that I joined together. But it's mostly of just
• 15:07
  someone being like injected with this this serum that will make them bring out like
• 15:16
  more of a monster. So it's even got to kind of like Jecky and
• 15:18
  hide little thing in there it's got it's got a lot of nods to a
• 15:24
  lot of a lot of those movies. But Reanimator kept popping back into my
• 15:28
  mind as I was as I was writing it. The movie that popped into
• 15:33
  my mind for the next one is going to be completely wrong. But I've
• 15:35
  got teenage mutant Left for the Rats. I keep looking over here because I'm
• 15:43
  looking at the track listing or whatever. I don't know why. It's just
• 15:50
  but I know it's not. It could be a horror movie. It was
• 15:54
  a horror movie. You guessed that, right. I wrote it about the
• 16:00
  turtles. No, this this song is about actually someone getting taken hostage and
• 16:14
  locked in a in a basement or just a small dark area and having to
• 16:18
  fight to get out. And in other words, it was you know,
• 16:23
  they were left for the Rats. Yeah, So the song title got played
• 16:30
  around with a lot the song lyrics though, once I worked out what that
• 16:37
  song sounded to me, like, as I said, it just kind of
• 16:41
  when I'm listening to the song, it just keeps going. And then when
• 16:45
  I've seen Left for the Rats, you know it's still it still didn't click
• 16:52
  straight away until I can't remember what I was doing, But I was sitting
• 16:56
  up and then all of a sudden, I went, that's it, Like
• 16:59
  that's someone in a basement and they need to they need to really fight,
• 17:03
  like they've got to get out of this. So I kind of speak from
• 17:06
  the person's view in that and like as in, yeah, I have to
• 17:11
  Yeah, it's coming from like yeah, I tried to, you know,
• 17:15
  create that space when I was singing it, imagining, like I remember turning
• 17:18
  all the lights off in the studio and you know, really kind of getting
• 17:22
  into it. I feel I feel that it reminds me of the story I
• 17:26
  heard when when Slipknot did their debut album they got some Purity on there,
• 17:30
  which is about a girl getting kidnapped and apparently sorry like Locke put himself under
• 17:37
  his bed with the lights out. I wrote that song, so is this
• 17:40
  is complete darkness? They put himself in that position. It's really cool.
• 17:42
  Yeah, well there you go. Well that's kind of the same. But
• 17:45
  I didn't know that story. I just thought it would be cool, and
• 17:52
  it does. Like the space around it doesn't matter when you're in when you're
• 17:55
  in the studio, you want to do it right, you know, live
• 18:00
  wing it and it happens whatever happens in the room the energy works. Yeah,
• 18:04
  but you know, you do want to capture something when if you're going
• 18:07
  to put it down on a record. That emotion is to try and put
• 18:11
  yourself in that situation. Yeah, especially that I was coming from that from
• 18:18
  that point of view with the lyrics super cool man brob. The next one
• 18:22
  is you bury your own So I hope you didn't put yourself in any position
• 18:25
  while you're writing that. I did not. But this one is based on
• 18:30
  my probably my favorite horror movie of all time, which is Pet Cemetery.
• 18:37
  Yeah. I don't like there's so many horror movies so I can't choose one,
• 18:45
  but I do. Every time someone does ask me the question, I
• 18:49
  always say, look, I think Pet Cemetery is up there with the top
• 18:52
  just because it had a bit of like this is the eighties the reason one.
• 18:56
  Yeah, Yeah, it just had so much in it. When I
• 19:02
  was a kid, it's scared scared the hell out of me. You know.
• 19:07
  There's there's like things coming back from the dead. There's a cat comes
• 19:11
  right from the dead. There's a scene with the child in the truck.
• 19:15
  Yeah. I don't want to do any spoilers, but you've had forty years
• 19:18
  to watch. It's pretty harrowing. Actually, it's it's pretty it's yeah,
• 19:22
  it's still it's still hits. Yeah. So I'd always wanted to write a
• 19:33
  song about this. I never thought there was a song good enough because I
• 19:38
  hide all that movie in such side regard. But the lyrics that I'd scrap
• 19:48
  down just fit. When I was just this was not the case of looking
• 19:53
  at the song and looking for the title. I had some lyrics there and
• 19:59
  I I remember just we were jamming out the song and I just started singing
• 20:03
  those lyrics and I thought, oh, this it's perfect. So this is
• 20:07
  going to have to be it cool now before we move on to the next
• 20:10
  one, I've actually just had an idea to ask you. You've just made
• 20:12
  me think of the horror movies on there's so many remakes going on these days.
• 20:17
  We ever thought about like a dual album, like watching the original and
• 20:19
  being inspired writer song on the original and then write one based on the remake.
• 20:23
  That'd be pretty cool. I haven't even thought of that, but that
• 20:26
  is a kind of cool idea double concept album with different Well, I'll leave
• 20:32
  that one to digest with you. We've definitely gone over the idea of an
• 20:38
  concept album, yeah, where the every song does take on to a new
• 20:44
  story and we would actually have someone narrow narrow rate it's been a very big
• 20:55
  day, so yeah, with someone to tell the story between the songs and
• 21:00
  then it gets into the next one to explains to the next part of the
• 21:03
  song. That that ideas come up a lot. That would be good.
• 21:07
  Maybe maybe maybe that's the next DP or something like that. We could do
• 21:11
  it for I'm not sure, but let us know. Bo from Fat Piece
• 21:15
  is a good friend of mine. He'd make a great narrator. Yeah,
• 21:19
  how he forgets see how can he be cool? Yeah? It would be
• 21:25
  let us know if he gets off the ground, all right, Okay.
• 21:29
  The final song for the album is nothing but Fire Yep. This title was
• 21:37
  originally for a black metal project I was working on with a friend from Poland.
• 21:48
  It just to be honest, I don't know why it never fully took
• 21:53
  off the ground. I don't think I was ready at the time. But
• 21:59
  less to get into that, I mean, I hope, you know,
• 22:02
  I might actually come back to that, so I won't speak too much about
• 22:06
  that project. But yeah, Nothing but I was originally just a title for
• 22:10
  a song I had on this Black Metal album. This song was last written
• 22:18
  for the album. This was a lot of Scotty, a lot of Scotty's
• 22:25
  writing. Pretty pretty much wrote the song and he wrote it really really fast.
• 22:30
  I said, we need a thrash album for the end of the album.
• 22:36
  That's kind of influenced a little bit by a Metallica in a way,
• 22:38
  because Metallica would the earliest stuff. They'd always end with a really fast song.
• 22:45
  So that was kind of in our heads a little nod to them,
• 22:48
  like we've already done which one has already released a Metallica cover before, so
• 22:56
  every everyone knows that we're huge fans, especially me and Scotty, and you
• 23:00
  know, so we thought we'd do something a bit thrashier for the end,
• 23:03
  and nothing but fire. Just again the title suited suited it. And it's
• 23:11
  just about every horror movie that I of h that I can really think of.
• 23:18
  I mean, not every horror movie. Most horror movies will finish with
• 23:22
  fire. You've got to burn, burn a beast, or the house is
• 23:26
  burning down, or someone's got to escape a fire, and they're all like
• 23:29
  cuddling at the end, and you know, you can feel a smoke,
• 23:32
  and so it was just suited to end the album with that, like because
• 23:41
  like as as as I said that, you know, it was all based
• 23:42
  on these eighties horror movies, the cover art, everything horror horror movie style.
• 23:51
  We just went for that comic horror horror style that nothing but fire,
• 23:56
  ending with flat like in a burst of flames, you know, or or
• 24:00
  whatever. So