A: 'Fraid not. The B.G.O tends to lean towards the lighter side of things. Now before you go and curse my good name, lighter does not mean New Age, nor does it mean that me and John Mayer are going to be bros anytime soon (And Mr. Mayer......if you're reading this........I WILL DESTROY YOU!) The B.G.O is old school styles like jazz and blues, all done up like only the Boogie Man knows how. Simple, raw, and from the hip. And even though I'm paying homage to the original musical blueprint, You will not find lyrics about songbirds or sunsets. Most cats tend to forget that the world of jazz and blues was a dark, perverted place before the industry started getting involved. Check out tunes like Ella Fitzgeralds "Bewitched, Bothered, & Bewildered" and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" to catch my drift. "The Fuzzy Jank" will of course, eature songs about women.....but the women in my tunes aren't of your standard musical fare. 'Nuff said, right?
Q: So, where did The Bastard Groove Orchestra come from?
A: The B.G.O was born out of old age and frustration more than anything. I had recently turned 25 (archaic, I know) and was feeling regretful. I had been writing music for almost an entire decade by that point, and while I had cassettes of riffs and a hard drive full of fully-developed ideas, The world hadn't heard a note of it.
The reason? I'm a damned perfectionist. When I create, it's done the way I want to hear it, or it's not done at all. I don't do "demos." The problem is, when you're writing music that's based in metal or rock, you tend to need some damn good equipment to capture that raw intensity. Which leads me to my other problem: I'm cheap. I just can't see spending hundreds of dollars on name brand guitars, amps, and keyboards. Having expensive stuff means having to take care of it.............and that's a skill I just don't have. So, cheap but decent equipment, combined with an obsessive personality on getting it right meant a lot of frustration, and a lot of unfinished ideas.
After that birthday I was totally burned out. I wasn't even sure I wanted to make music anymore. Then one night, I came up with a simple bass riff and drum groove that was so goddamn funky, It actually got me to sit down and flesh out the entire song structure within an hour. The end result had no redeeming rock qualities whatsoever. It had an arabic feel with a Motown beat. And the cheap gear, which was a constant hinderance for metal, sounded cool and quirky in that tune. It spawned an idea: What if I wrote a bunch of songs that were simple jazzy tunes and wrote up some goofy lyrics for them? I could have a body of work to show the world what I was about, and I could go to sleep at night not feeling like I'd been wasting my life away. That idea became the music that would make "The Fuzzy Jank."
Q: So will you ever do a hard rock album, Mr "Metal Up Your Ass?"
A: Honestly I don't know. I'm having such a blast churning out material for the B.G.O that it's hard to imagine sitting down to seriously writing heavy stuff again. Here's something I learned while writing "The Fuzzy Jank." You can do a lot of hiding behind heavy guitar distortion and rock beats, even without realizing it. When you hit a power chord on a guitar, you can just ride all that growl and sustain, and sound cool doing it. Sometimes, you can sound so cool, you end up sounding like somebody else. With this project, I had to set up some base rules that limited how I played and what was used. And in limiting myself, I actually learned a bit more about structuring songs and creating a bit of space for four instruments to play in, and sound totally synced.
So, will I rock again? I would say that the days of me sitting in the Belly of the Beast, cranking out the heavy tunes are over. I just don't have the skill to create that kind of material, and be happy with it. However, I haven't given up on the possibility of playing with a rock group again. If I were to find a couple of talented and commited individuals, I might be pulling my hair out of the ponytail again.
Q: Is the Bastard Groove Orchestra going to be filled with those social and politcal topics you've been throwing around lately?
A: Aside from one song "The Fuzzy Jank" really doesn't cover those topics, and I'm honestly not sure if any future songs from this project will either. And it's not because these topics are something I don't feel strongly about, or am ashamed to talk about. It's just that...........well.................I can't write when I'm angry. If I'm frustrated or pissed off about the world, I just can't write anything that's worth keeping around. I need to be in my mellow state of Zen to whip up the good stuff. Each of these songs was born with it's own story to tell and trying to stuff a message into songs that weren't made for messages makes the music sound very forced. Not a good thing.
Unfortunately, since I'm always pissed off about something in the world, it can take a while to feel creative. I can write many more songs after listening to something inspring that I ever could after 5 minutes of VH-1.
