Interviews

Flotsam And Jetsam Interview

Hi, I’m Zsuzsanna Muszka! Welcome to Kronos Mortus metal magazine! How are you today?

Hello, I’m fine, thanks! And you?

Fine, thank you! Can we start the interview?

Yes, of course!

Okay, fine! Flotsam & Jetsam is a standing star of the metal scene for more than thirty years now. What’s the secret of this constant dash?

I don’t know, maybe like consistency I think, which is kinda keep putting out, you know, we’re trying to keep putting out quality and material for every album.

Congratulations for the new album called ’The End Of Chaos’ which came out already twelve days ago. Please, tell me a bit about it! What were the first receptions of this new treasure so far?

The receptions for the record have been great! We’ve charted in Germany and you know, it’s been higher on the charts than we ever have before! So, we’re pretty pleased with the fan’s reactions to the record, they are seem to be very pleased about it which makes us happy!

The list of your published albums is quite long already and you guys are well-known faces in the metal-world. How does the band has a go at working on a new material in general? How does the writing process start at Flotsam&Jetsam?

The way we generally do the writing, me and Mike Gilbert start on demo songs on our own, in our home studios. And so we send finished demos to AK and we just send him a lot of demos and he sings on them. And we go back it was in terms seems really which songs ended up being the best. So you know that’s we kinda write individually.

I see. You have a new drummer, Ken Mary who’s been doing his debut on this new album. Why did you choose right him? How was the recording with him? Did everything went smooth?

Ken has a studio and I work with him a lot at his studio, doing session work and engineering stuff. So I played on a lot of stuff with Ken in the past. And he lived in Phoenix and I knew how great of our drummer he was when he was our ’good guy’, so he told me one day when we were working on a session, he was like „Man, I really love your guys, new record!” and you know, we were just kinda talking and he’s like „You know, I’d love a funny gig like to play a lot of drums!” and his past bands he wasn’t quite playing as much as stuff as you can hear on record, you know (laughs). So I think a lot of people did know he could do that and I did so. And I said, „Well, that’s fun! You should ask, you should say that be care for adjust!” and the opportunity came when we’re gonna be looking for a new drummer”. So I said „Won’t you get interested you know, in a coming down an do it?”, and he said and he was interested so. And it worked out great!

If I know correctly, you wrote a huge amount of songs for the album but you finally chose the best twelve ones. What are your plans with the left-over songs? Do you want to release them, one fine day?

Well, yeah. You never know what can happen, I mean there is a lot of songs written that actually, probably written since our record’s finished. So I write constantly. Mike just send me a song last night. So we stay, we’re in a kind of gotten, we were worst thing really busy with the writing process and trying the right all the time so that we have the next one ready-we-go when the time is right for that. So we wanna just come and do it now instead of waiting two years from now and go on „Okay, well, I think we should write the record now!” Just better we keep start working now.

In your opinion, what are the main characteristics of „The End Of Chaos”?

I think that the playing in this record is a lot more maybe ’over the top’ than the last records. So, vocally I think the record went a more melodic direction in some cases. So I just think it was a natural progression from the last records.

The next is a tricky question: You’re in the metal scene for decades now so if you could choose, in which era would you rather like to live: in the eighties or now?

(laughs) Wow! Well, I mean I got to be honest, when I grew up in the eighties obviously I think that the music scene might’ve been in some places, I don’t know how about in Europe? Europe has a pretty amazing music scene, it’s my favourite place to tour in the world. We just don’t have those kind of festivals and things like that, happening in America. So Europe kinda has a go on harmony even the metal scene, there’s nothing like that in the States. But, you know the eighties run exciting time for all of those who grew up. We discovered some of our favourite bands and they were very influential on our lives, so you know, the eighties definitely had an interesting feel to. But I’m happy to be still doing it now and doing as well as we are at this point.

We’re really looking forward to the Killfest tour this year, especially because you’re going to play also in our capital city, Budapest with names like Overkill or Destruction. What will we expect from Flotsam&Jetsam on Killfest?

Well, we’re gonna play a lot of the new record on this tour coming up. We’ve been come to Europe for a long time, playing a lot of our older songs, so I think we’re definitely gonna try to update a setlist a little bit and play some newer stuff.

Do you have you any message for Flotsam&Jetsam’s Hungarian fans?

Just that we care waiting to come see you again and hope to see you at the show we’ll play along turn the place up!

Thank you for the nice conversation! I wish you many more successful years in your career further! My friendly greetings for the whole band!

Thank you very much!

Thank you! Bye!

Bye-bye!

WEBhttp://www.flotsam-and-jetsam.com/

The interview was taken with  Steve Conley on 30.01.2019.


Contributed by: Zsuzsanna Muszka

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