I wanted to start with discussing the band's background. "Quest for Oblivion" is your first album and it shows a maturity and confidence rarely seen in a debut release, so I take it Sun Crow is not your first musical experience. Tell us a bit about your prior experiences and how Sun Crow started out?
That's a compliment, thanks. Well we've been around a few lifetimes, you'd say we are all old mossbacks. Keith (drums) and I have played together for many, many years. We were in a band in Seattle back in the day called Rawhead. Very different kind of stuff, but with similar dark spirits. That's something we have always shared together.
There was a fire. Our friend Gary had a rehearsal facility and a recording studio that burned down, he lost everything. I had my gear there, it all went up too. Keith and I thought it would be fun to knock around and play Sabbath in a few local taverns once I got gear back together. We met up with Brian and Charles and got down together for some fun.
People kept asking what our real band sounded like, beyond Sabbath covers. We took the cue and that became Sun Crow and resulted in Quest for Oblivion. Our friend Gary ended up recording and mixing the album, a real twist of fortune.
Coming from Seattle, the birthplace of the grunge scene that introduce us to such amazing bands as Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Tad and Mudhoney among many others, I want to ask how much an influence grunge had on your musical upbringing and what bands you could say have been continuous influences for Sun Crow?
Every one of those bands you mentioned are an influence on us. It's pretty hard to get away from all that the Northwest imprints on us. It's in the water and the light.... the land and the weather, the industry and economy, they all work together with the musical legacy of the place. We can go all the way back to the Sonics in the early 1960s and find there's just something a little wild, dark, and loud in Northwest music. Grunge was kind of a marketing term that was invented as short hand for the loud freakout that's just kind of natural to a lot of Northwest musicians. Whether your listening to the Melvins or Nevermore or Burning Witch or Mark Lanegan there seems to always be a bit of something that gets tapped into out here.
Honestly we are as influenced by younger bands starting out as we are icons like Hendrix or Soundgarden. There are so many creative musicians working the craft out here, the landscape is truly as dense and thick as the forests are.
I think it goes without saying, each of us have had a Sabbath revelation early in life that lead to heavier preoccupations. The early albums of Priest, the beginnings of NWOBHM, and the thrash scenes of the 80s are foundational. We are all into tapping into the source of it all with the blues players like Muddy Waters, Hooker, & the Wolf. They were really heavy in their time.
"Grunge was kind of a marketing term that was invented as short hand for the loud freakout that's just kind of natural to a lot of Northwest musicians."
What can you tell us about the new album? Did you face any particular difficulties or challenges when writing or recording "Quest for Oblivion"?
Where to start? We think our sleep capsules malfunctioned, so our concepts of time were altered before we started. That's a challenge. There were some injuries at the outset and we had to move the session schedule a couple times to accommodate some physical therapy and healing. This ultimately gave us more time to meditate on the nature and purpose of the projection. So we made an obstruction work for us instead of against us, which is something we try to practice as a band and individuals.
There was a lot of intoxication in writing, which is normal for this kind of music. When we saw some of that had carried over into tracking, we had to modulate our methods and practices. Kind of the same principle there is applied dealing with nonlinear challenges in the physical realm. Our vocalist disappeared during mix. That was pretty weird. One minute he was there, the next minute he was gone. We had no idea where he went or that he even knew how to do that kind of thing.
If you could only play someone one track from "Quest for Oblivion" to hook them on the whole record, which would it be and why?
Hypersonic. I have no explanation for this. That's the first that came to mind.
These are strange times, but what do you think the future holds for the band? What are your immediate plans and what would you ultimately like to achieve with Sun Crow?
We are talking to some very cool people about releasing Quest for Oblivion on vinyl as a double LP. So you can look for that coming from us through some very capable and experienced hands.
We've been working on new material for a while with a new member on vocals. Todd has just been awesome to work with. We have about 50-60 minutes of new tracks in development. We are really psyched to get them fully realized. There's a longer story unfolding as these sounds reveal themselves to us. We're excited about getting that down together.
Getting together during the COVID Pandemic has been challenging for a lot of reasons. That's led to us stockpiling ideas and riffs while we hunker down. Recording what we've written and pulling together what is still embryonic will occupy our energy well into the rebalancing after the pandemic normalizes.
We are looking forward to playing live again someday. All of this music was made by turning up very loud in very small rooms and standing very close together. We are kind of wildly assuming that we'll be allowed to do that again. Right now that is existing in another dimension with rules that govern a reality different from our present. We have to wait for our time to fold back over across that place again to find some solid ground there.
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