Ten Questions With NatureDevil

 

What can you tell me about your first NatureDevil album “Better Living Through Denial” set for release this summer?

This album is almost eight years in the making. After playing over a hundred shows, sifting through dozens of songs and playing with a ton of musicians, it is about time I got an official album released.

The album is very dark, with few exceptions. There is a lot of anger, a lot of regret and a lot of hopelessness being expressed amongst truth and hypocrisy. Even the happier tones tend to have a dark painful backing to them. My roots started around the time grunge made a short lived appearance in the music scene, but there is a wonderful blend of alternative punk rock mixed with today's style of emotion rock music minus the whiny attitude and nasally vocals that seem to plague a lot of the current music trends.

The songs have titles like “I Think I Was Born Depressed,” “What You Leave Behind” and “Unhappiest Man in the World” so that should give you an idea of what to expect from it, lyrically. Also, many of the songs go back a few years, and I feel I have grown a lot in my writing abilities since then. You can hear it on the record. And the songs are very diverse, it is almost hard to tell just what kind of band you are listening to sometimes. For fifteen tracks, the album takes you on kind of a rollercoaster ride through the last decade of my life, with lots of ups and downs, but that's life.

As for production value, I wanted my first contribution to the music world to have a very live feel to it. I was able to do a lot of things on this record that I couldn't do live, and that was fun to do, but I kept the production level close to a live sounding rock band. Maybe on the next record I'll bring in strings and piano, but for this record – with the exception of me playing clarinet – it is mostly guitars.

What do you consider your greatest strength as a performer?

My ability to ignore everything around me and put on a good show regardless of the situation is my greatest strength. Running a band means a lot of things. I am the singer and I am also the one playing the main guitar riffs and chords, which means I have two main responsibilities to pay attention to.

At the same time, I have a band of musicians behind me who follow my lead, as if I were a conductor. I have a soundman I need to communicate with, and an audience with whom I need to always be connected with.

My ability for me to connect with an audience may be my strongest quality. Even when I play bass in other projects I still try to keep my own personal connection with a crowd as much as I can from first note to last. We are having a conversation involving notes and scales and tempo, and I am doing everything I can to keep you interested in the conversation.


We've heard some well-established bands change their sound in their latest releases to the more popular styles. Do you think it is better to ape the mainstream (popular) sound or run counter to it?

This question has several sides to it, and the overall answer is both yes and no. It is always good to have your own style but that is because you eventually want it to become the mainstream. If you choose to go the route of writing pop music in an effort to imitate it and profit from it, you can clearly pick up that tone from the music, and unless you are marketing to a Disney crowd, you will not make it far. If you choose to stick with your own personal traits, it may be admirable, but unless you are strong enough to make a splash, you may end up alone, looking ridiculous, or looking outdated.

A two-parter; if Curt Cobain were alive today, do you think he'd still be making music and if so, would you be listening to it?

Yes and yes. He would still be making music because it is what he knew how to do and what he loved to do. He may not have been doing it with Nirvana anymore, but he would have definitely stayed active in the music scene and he would have began experimenting with different kinds of music, even that which is drastically different from Nirvana.

I would listen to it if I liked it, obviously, even if there was a drastic change in what he originally created, I wouldn't see any problem with it. His first record “Bleach” was phenomenal musically and lyrically, and “Nevermind” was so drastically different from it while still holding a grunge foundation to its much more pop structure. And yet “In Utero” managed to go back to those roots and kind of recoil from “Nevermind” to return to a harder, dirtier grunge sound reminiscent of “Bleach.” It would have to be really terrible for me to not like it, but since I was grown accustomed to his style I don't think I could.

Whether or not he would have continued that streak of grunge rock is a mystery.


You not only front NatureDevil but you also play bass for Jason Kluss and John Michaels as one of his Invisible Dogs. Jason not only fronts his band but plays lead in yours. How do you manage yourself between the three bands?

Actually, it is the other way around! Playing with both Jason Kluss and John Michaels helps me manage myself and NatureDevil.

Fronting a band is hard work, as anyone who has done it knows. I write all the music myself, I produce everything, I structure the band, I book the shows, I promote the material, I work with the labels, the booking agencies, the promotion companies, the radio stations, I schedule the rehearsals, and then when we are on stage, I have to sing and play guitar while keeping the band in line. It is very stressful and time consuming and takes a lot out of a person.

By playing bass, all of that is now on someone else. Although I may help with every other aspect, it is not all on me. All I have to worry about is what I play on the bass guitar. I actually feel that I write better bass parts for Jay and John than I do for NatureDevil, simply because I can step away and look at the material from a completely different perspective. Although I play all the bass and 90% of the guitar on my first record, I do hope to have others play them more on the next project. Jay does an excellent job for me live and in the studio.

We all work together very well, and that is good because being a good musician also means being a good businessman, and knowing when to be personal and professional. It is the difference between having the time of your life onstage and knowing when to let someone go who is holding you back.

What do you think is the most important part of a musician's job?

Their responsibility to the group they are playing in. If you are a soloist, the only person who will let you down is yourself. In a band, whether you are the leader or the keyboard player, you have a responsibility to the other people in that band who are putting their time and effort into making the project work to do so yourself.

That means knowing your music theory well enough, being on time for rehearsals and shows, owning professional gear, taking care of your gear, knowing and understanding the material, being able to work with others who know and understand the material, and finally making other contributions that could range from booking a show to hanging up a flyer.

Unfortunately, a musician can't just have one job. Playing your bass extremely well means nothing if you can't show up on time to a gig or you whine incessantly about your situations. You need to be the total package.

 

What are some things bands do while performing that you find infuriating?

Oh, wow, I could go on and on about this. There are a lot of thing that many inexperienced bands do onstage that is terrible and I make it a priority that we do not do any of those things on stage when we perform. It is part of the rehearsal and part of our routine.

Other things include telling unfunny jokes, joking with the other guys onstage as if the crowd isn't there, joking to your friends or family members in the crowd completely ostracizing everyone else… anything that makes it look as though you are still in your parents basement or garage.

Shoe-gazers are not allowed in NatureDevil. No one wants to see three guys standing around staring at the floor wobbling from left to right looking bored or asleep when they are onstage.

Another thing, no one wants to hear a guitarist tuning onstage. Get a pedal that shuts off your guitar so you can tune it quietly and discreetly. What I like to do is make an announcement “Jay, I have to tune, distract the crowd for me” and then Jay sings some techno song or gangster rap song for about 30 seconds till I am done. It works out great and has become one of the staples of a NatureDevil show that people look forward to.

 

 

As you have stated before, being a good musician also means being a good businessman. What does that mean? How do you handle the business aspect of everything while still remaining an artist and a performer?

  The business angle is the glue that holds the whole music project together. The difference between a bunch of goofballs making noise in their parents' garage and a band taking the stage for a four hour set starts with a business mentality.

Someone needs to market that sound. Someone has to deal with club owners or booking agents. At the same time, someone needs to look at a band and say, “we need some cover songs, or a new sound, or a new member” or whatever is required to make the band more appealing to a buyer.

It may sound like you lose a bit of the artist angle of it, but that is the way it is. The beauty is mixing it together so well that neither you nor anyone else can tell. I will never perform “Freebird” on stage as long as I live, but I love playing a bunch of noisy Nirvana songs that people today can easily sing along to.

It can be done without having the stigma of ‘selling out' at all, but if you want to succeed as a professional musician, you need to be able to pull in a certain amount of money, and that can allow you to be more creative and more of an artist down the road while helping prolong your career. Anyone who would call a musician a ‘sell out' for being a working musician making money is probably in high school, has super rich parents or is an idiot.

Jay is always seen playing an acoustic. Does he ever play electric? Will we ever see him play electric?

Good question. I love the idea of having a guy playing an acoustic in a band where I am always going back and forth from my clean to heavy distortion. The beauty of it is that both of us do rhythm as well as leads and it makes for a really interesting contrast to almost anything else out there. It sounds great live and great in the studio.

On the record, there is actually one track where Jay plays an electric lead throughout a song and it sounds great. It is officially the first time Jason Kluss has ever been recorded in a studio playing electric guitar.

 
Besides a copy of your album of course, what is the one thing you would like to see someone who has seen your show for the first time walk away with? As in, what kind of first impression do you want to leave with someone?

I want someone for the first time to see NatureDevil on stage and think that this guy actually has something to say. I want them to be entertained and surprised and to be drawn into the show and to remember it afterwards. I want them to realize that their intelligence is not being insulted, and to be able to look at NatureDevil without dismissing it as “another one of those bands…”

People who see NatureDevil should feel as if they are having fun and still feeling emotion, as opposed to just getting drunk while watching some guys make noise.

I think I have managed to succeed at it for a long time.