Scott Hedrick of Skeletonwitch
Interviewed by Brian Sweeney on 7/2/2008
Transcribed by Brian Sweeney
As far as workhorse metal bands go, Skeletonwitch are quickly establishing themselves as trusty members of the fold. They've been on tour practically nonstop since the release of their major label debut, Beyond the Permafrost back in chilly October of last year. Calling the likes of Arsis, Hate Eternal, Cephalic Carnage and Soilent Green among their billing partners, it would seem that the Elder Council of Metal (the ECM, of course) has given these Ohioans the nod. They've even recently joined the Blackest of the Black tour with Danzig, among others. Their brand of blackened thrash is fast, harmonious and at least as black as the Blackest of the Black. There's something about Skeletonwitch, and it ain't their good looks. Metal Review spoke with guitarist Scott Hendrick after the band returned victorious from their first European tour.
Metal Review: I read that you went to school at Ohio University for journalism, is that right?
Scott Hendrick: Yep, I graduated from Ohio University in Athens where I am now.
MR: How is it as a metal journalist among non-metal people? Did people call you "the metal guy," or anything like that?
SH: Not really. While I was still studying I wrote for university publications and research publications, really boring academic stuff. As soon as I graduated we started touring our asses off, so there isn't too much I've done with it. I do know a fair amount about public relations, so I use that for the band to get us exposure and I can talk to journalists maybe on a different level than the other guys in the band because I spent four damn years studying it. I do write things here or there, like a band review for a tour diary for Revolver magazine, but mostly I have been using it in the eway of talking to journalists and doing PR work for the band.
MR: Yeah, how did you get hooked up with Revolver and Pitchfork and some of the other outlets where I've seen your writing? Do you contact them or is the other way around?
SH: A little from each. But I can't sell short the label because they do a lot of in-house PR. They have a very small staff and they do a fair amount of bands so they do a good job. But a lot of this stuff has just come out of the blue. They'll sometimes ask me to do some kind of little feature or whatever it may be but I would say it's about 50/50.
MR: Skeletonwitch has a reputation for being an out-of-control, fun, whatever - a great live band. Unfortunately I haven't had the pleasure. What am I missing? What do you guys do that's different from everybody else?
SH: That's a great question. I think that a lot of bands worry so much about technicality... Not to say that we don't, because we absolutely do. We're not trying to fuck around on stage. We're absolutely serious about our musicianship and our music. When I was 15 and my brother took me to see Slayer for my birthday - it was one of the first real concerts I had ever seen - it blew me away. It was larger-than-life. I was just so stoked to be there. It was evil but it was still fun. I was like "I love this! I'm into this! This is what I want to do! This is fuckin' great!" And the same thing with a lot of other bands I've seen.
They really get all into it, being their performance, headbanging, running around the stage, just getting crazy. They really make it a show. It's so entertaining and so fun and energetic. We try to recreate what we loved about metal when we were growing up and what we still love about it.
Most of our taste lies in older metal, and there are still a lot of great metal records coming out. But a lot of the stuff that is coming out doesn't get us as excited as it did back in the day when we were really into it. And I see these overly technical bands you see playing just standing there almost motionless because their eyes are glued to their fret boards. They're playing a million sweep arpeggios per second and they're overly analyzing it.
There's still a of rock and roll spirit to metal. Like Mercyful Fate, for example, has a rock and roll vibe to it even though it's metal and we try to bring that energy into it. We would rather have an ass-kicking show with everybody headbanging and chugging beers and having a great time and getting all crazy. And maybe, you know, the drummer drops a stick or somebody flubs a note on the solo rather than everything being played absolutely perfectly - rather than having everything completely sterile and just standing there.
MR: You just got back from your European tour with Cephalic Carnage and Hate Eternal. How did it go?
SH: It was great on a lot of levels. It was awesome just to be there, to see the cities and to meet all the metal fans in all the countries we went to there in Europe. It was our first time over there, so it was just such a cool experience as a whole.
Meeting up with Cephalic Carnage and Hate Eternal was also really awesome. We had toured with Cephalic Carnage before, and also Hate Eternal in the states right before the European tour with them. So we all got along really well. We all rode on the bus together and we had all known each other, so the camaraderie was there. We were all excited just to be there for the first time in Europe - 14 countries, I believe we did - and then the response was also really good. Just like any tour there were ups and downs.
Some of the more out-of-the-way places, like in Slovenia for example, we didn't go over as well as Hate Eternal or Cephalic Carnage because I think the crowd wanted just extreme brutal death metal and we're playing Iron Maiden-style harmonies and different black metal-type stuff. There were a few times that we had to work really hard to win them over because they were coming to see Hate Eternal and Cephalic Carnage, and we were basically an unknown band, but it was really cool to get in the trenches and really work. A lot of people would ask "are you guys a local band or something?" I mean, we were completely unheard of. But it was really cool in a way because it made you really just want to get after it and prove a point.
MR: I could see that, I mean I get the impression that you're a supremely American metal band in that this is your first time touring in Europe and your music is sort of a melting pot of European metal.
SH: I did go to London for three weeks when I was in college, but this is our first time touring in Europe. I studied art history while I was there, but I can see what you're saying. We are from Ohio and we are very American, but not in the sense that we're uber-redneck or that type of thing, but we definitely like America and where we're from, but then again everybody has their problems with where they're from.
Going over there was really cool because it defined a lot of things that we like and don't like about America, and put a lot of things in perspective. It's an experience, doing 30 shows in 14 different countries - every other day you're in a different country and everything is completely different.
We have a lot of influence from European metal bands, especially black metal and some melodic death and different things that lend us a European sound. A lot of people comment at shows, like, "You guys listen to Kreator, don't you?" The fans over there are really intense and they listen really hard, and they're so much more honest than American fans. Unlike American fans, who will say "Oh, I really like that song," but you can tell they didn't really like it, whereas Europeans will say "No, I thought that sucked." They'll just tell you to your face.
One guy said "I really like your band. I think your t-shirts fucking suck so I will not buy one. But I want one." So we're like "Oh...OK, thanks." But I guess we appreciate the honesty.
MR: Would you outline the past and future of Skeletonwitch touring?
Well, touring is definitely going to be happening. We tour as much as we possibly can. That's what we live for. We situate our lives in such a way that we can be on the road, now we're probably going to average eight months out of the year out on tour. In the past, we went on tour with Job For A Cowboy and The Red Chord, Arsis and A Life Once Lost, Hate Eternal and Soilent Green and Toxic Holocaust, which is awesome.
Then we did the European tour with Hate Eternal and Cephalic Carnage. We toured with Cephalic Carnage and Dying Fetus as well. So we've been on the road quite a bit. This last year's been great, you know, we got our first album out for Prosthetic [Records] and that's a larger label; larger meaning that we self-released everything else. "An actual label," I should say, with distribution and stuff like that.
We just really want to keep the momentum going and stay on the road as much as possible, then when we're home, we'll work on new material. Right now we have a little time off. We've been working on some new songs, but on July 25th we're going to be going out on tour with Valient Thorr and Early Man. And then we recently found out that we're going to be on tour with Danzig, Dimmu [Borgir], Moonspell and Winds of Plague for the Blackest of the Black tour. I'm really excited about that. It's going to be one of the biggest tours we've done.
What the future really holds is just us doing what we've always done, which is just busting our ass, working really hard and staying on the road as much as we can. We're very poor [laughs] because music is our main focus. When we're home our singer works at a tattoo shop, I work at a record store, our drummer does artwork for other bands. We have little things that we do that enable us, while we're home, to make a tiny bit of money. But our main focus is on the band. Some people have to juggle a full-time job and take vacation time to tour, and we have it set up that absolutely, 100 percent our main priority is the band.
MR: "Go big or go home," right? It doesn't get much more metal than that, I guess.
SH: [Laughs] For some reason we just love being smelly and living in a van.
MR: Yep, you're barbarians.
SH: I love it!
MR: How are the songs you are writing coming together? Do you have any idea when you might get into the studio or finish writing songs or anything of that nature?
SH: As far as the writing goes, mostly we have song parts, riffs, different things - we don't all sit down together as a band and write everything. We kind of do things differently. We kind of individually write different stuff and then record it on crappy four-tracks and trade it around, talk about it, add new parts to it and discuss what we are going to do with it.
So we don't sit down and heavily write together. We literally use tapes from a four-track. Right now we have a song that's completely done, and a bunch of huge portions of songs. The songs aren't that long anyway, at least on the first record. We may have longer ones on this one, we don't know yet. It's a bunch of half-finished songs, parts of songs and then one's pretty much done.
It's coming along well, I'm really happy with how it's sounding, but I don't know when we'll actually get into the studio. I mean it's probably going to be quite a while because we're already booked with Danzig through November and then in December we may go back to Europe, so there's still a lot of stuff on our plate.
MR: That's interesting to learn. Does everybody contribute to songwriting equally then, or is there a ringleader?
SH: It isn't equal, I have to be honest. Our other guitar player, Nate, he's the main songwriter. When he first started a long time ago, he and I kind of started it. He played in a different metal band years ago in Athens, Ohio, where I'm at now and where we live. They broke up and he was looking for new people. I came along and heard a demo tape he had recorded of new material he was working on. So I said "I really want to do this," and he said "Well, we'll see." And I brought over a guitar and a case of beer and we became really good buddies and started working at it.
Initially, we kind of wrote together, but he's definitely the main songwriter. He lays down the foundation. Sometimes he'll show up to a practice with a tape of an entire song, which may or may not be finished, meaning we'll tweak it, but he forms the skeleton. Nate's kind of the cook and we all throw our stuff in the pot.
MR: You've put out two self-released albums, right?
SH: Yeah, At One With the Shadows was a full-length that we self-released and Worship the Witch was an EP that we self-released. We took a couple songs off each of those and re-recorded them for Beyond the Permafrost. That was because we only pressed 1,000 copies of those, so they weren't very widely circulated. We really liked some of the material on those two releases - some of it we feel more strongly about than others. Since we decided to do a proper release with Prosthetic Records we re-recorded the stuff that we really liked with better production to get it out there.
MR: Yeah, that's what came to mind is that the production values were probably a factor.
SH: Yeah, we didn't just take the old versions. We re-recorded them.
MR: Did you lose any freedom in the recording process switching from self-releases to Prosthetic?
SH: We had every say in where we wanted to record, within our means. Of course, we couldn't get some hot-shot producer because we were on an extremely limited budget. But they let us record where we wanted to record, get who we wanted to do the artwork, lay it out how we wanted to lay it out. Every step of the way we do have complete creative control. So I guess if you like it, that's all us but if you hate it, well that's still us [laughs].
MR: What else do you listen to when you're listening to non-metal?
SH: Anything, really. Some of the guys don't stray nearly as far from metal, but some do. Our bass player is the biggest Thin Lizzy fan you'll ever meet. He has a Thin Lizzy tattoo and when we were in Ireland he called Phil Lynott's mom when we were in Ireland and talked to her. He's a freak about Thin Lizzy and UFO and bands like that. I'm a pretty big fan of rock and roll, like Iggy and the Stooges. It could be anything from jazz to hip hop to whatever. When we're on tour you're hearing all kinds of music just by default. I can appreciate various things besides metal. For example I really like this band called The Hellacopters, which is a Swedish rock band. It could be anything, even pop music. It doesn't really matter. There's good music in all genres. If you're only blasting your skull with death metal or thrash metal constantly, you need to take a break from that.
MR: This may be a weird question, but when I was making the transition from all the more known bands like the Slayers and the Testaments to the really underground stuff it was hard to find out about those bands. What would you recommend for someone at that juncture?
SH: I would just say, all the time, listen to Judas Priest, 24/7. There's a lot to learn from that stuff. Start with the older stuff like Priest and Maiden and that type of stuff. Definitely Sabbath, and then maybe go to Witchery, which is a more modern band that's pretty bad-ass or Nifelheim, which is crazy black metal. There are so many ways you can make that leap.