Skeletonwitch interview with Scott Hedrick

by Adam Warner – 2008

 

So how’s the transition of bringing Evan [Linger] into the band?
That’s a good question, no one’s asked us that on the tour yet. Fantastic, honestly, its easy.

Well you guys have known him for a while haven’t you?
Yes. We’re based out of Athens, OH, but for a year we lived in Cleveland and he played in a band called Insurrect. He played guitar and he was a crazy fucking shredder, like a total shred machine dude and we’re like ‘we don’t need that shit’. Nate and I are more varied than doing technical stuff. But Evan’s a really good friend of ours and is a sick guitar player and is, I mean, a real shred machine. They’re band broke up and we ended up kicking out, honestly, kicking out our old bass player. We called up Evan and were all like ‘it’s a bummer that your band broke up, I know you wanna pursue music like that’s your whole goal, and you worked your ass off in this band and they just broke up and all your focus there” and he’s basically a guy who is a great friend, a really nice guy and all he wanted to do was tour and make music full time and we’re like “man, if you wanna do it, we’re gonna have to have you play bass” and he’s all “let’s do it”. He was totally down and he learned the songs in no time. He played four shows with us in Ohio, you know, two, three hundred people, small bars, then after those four shows was our first time with Danzig in front of 1100 people and I was like “get ready buddy, here we go! [laughs]” and he jumped in just like awesome. And honestly ya know, one of the main reasons we don’t have our old bass player, we had a lot of personal problems with everyone… and him. He’s a great bass player and we wish him the best and no ill will, but it was, er, ya know, oh man…

… just clashing
oh yah, there were some problems and just continual problems that happened with just him. We’d have to deal with again and again. We didn’t know if he could go to Europe because of shit he had done, criminal record. He couldn’t tour with certain bands because of shit he had done. Like, and I don’t mean to drag him through the mud, he’s an aright guy, but it was a personal level and I mean he’s a great bass player and we’ve talked about this before and you haven’t changed it, so we brought in Evan and got a weight lifted off our shoulders. We’re a band, hanging out, riding around, doing the shit we have to do instead of being our old bass players personal assistant trying to do all this shit trying to cover his tracks. It’s so much better.

Great, obviously the words “skeleton” and “witch” are common, but what made you put the two together to make the band’s name?
There’s not a great answer to that, it’s very unexciting. We just threw around a bunch of names actually… we have a friend of ours who actually came up with the name and he had been floating around these fucking ridiculous names. Ya know, he was like ‘call your band Hard Shocker and speak with a German accent’, like you’re a fucking idiot dude, smoke some more weed. He came up with a bunch of different shit and then said Skeletonwitch and we just laughed, but then we thought about it… that’s not… TOO bad because we do have a lot of new wave British heavy metal stylings and thrash metal and stuff, that might actually work. We didn’t have a name when we played our first show and so we went with that. After the show, Nate, our old guitar player and I, we talked about what we should name the band permanently and figured it out, we walked around town and people started yelling at us ‘yo, its Skeletonwitch’, just screaming at us and stuff, so that’s really it, not a great story or anything. It was just something that we thought sounded pretty cool at the time and aesthetically it worked for what we did, it doesn’t date your band, it’s not extremely modern ya know, like Megatron Prime Machine 2000 or anything fucking digital grind metal bullshit. And it’s also not TOO ridiculous, so just went with it.

As far as Prosthetic [Records] goes, did you guys apply to get into them or did they actually scout and find you?
We applied to get in, we sent out demos to a lot of labels, everyone we could think of. We just busted our ass and called them and emailed them and everything we could do, ya know, and then a few people started calling us back, uhm, Prosthetic and then other labels I won’t mention…

Sure…
…well, it doesn’t really matter, and Prosthetic seemed like a really good fit, they were funny and easy to get along with, Prosthetic may not say this now and I probably shouldn’t say this, but I don’t care… Hey Chad! That’s our drummer. Take a look at their roster, we’re like a very thrash based band with a lot of death metal, black metal and British heavy metal influences, and if you look at the Prosthetic roster, there aren’t many bands doing that. Wolf is killer, fucking power metal or just like real heavy metal, a Dio kind of sound which is rad, and a few other bands on there and stuff, but Prosthetic is a newer label and all the bands have a newer sound. When they called, they were like ‘look dude, hey, we’re really interested in you guys, we really liked the demo you sent out, the press kit and all that shit, we’re sure you could make a name for yourself on your own, but we’d love to have you guys on the label and I want you to not concentrate too much on what’s ON the label, but on what we can do for you guys and what you can do for us and we work together and don’t worry about what else is on there…’, and I’m not trying to disparage anyone out there by any means, but he literally pitches me ‘yeah, you’re probably not going to like a lot of the stuff that’s on our label’ and I’m like well, I don’t necessarily dislike it, but a lot of stuff on there is not our particular taste, I mean black thrash death metal and you know, there’s a lot of newer  metal type stuff on there. It was really funny and he’ll probably get pissed when he hears this, but that’s what he said ya know, he’s like ‘yeah, I don’t expect you guys to like a lot of stuff but don’t worry about it, concentrate on what we can do for you and we hope you’re interested in doing this with us’. And it’s been, ah, a little while now since we’ve been with them, a couple years now, and we regret is ZERO, we absolutely do not regret signing with Prosthetic. We’ve had other labels talk to us man, ‘oh, how long is your contract with Prosthetic’ and like they’re kinda creeping around the corner a little bit, and we don’t regret signing with Prosthetic, they are great, great people. It’s a very small staff, you call the office and any mother fucker you want to, well there’s only like 6 of them, you can talk to the owner, you can talk to the PR guy, the guy that handles distribution, anybody, they’re all there every day and you get right to them. If we were Skeletonwitch and we signed to Metal Blade, I couldn’t call Brian Slagle every fucking day of the week if I wanted to, I mean he’s a rad dude and I met him a couple times and he’s really cool, but I wouldn’t be able to call him and be like ‘Hey Brian, what’s going on with Joe?’, ya know he wouldn’t answer, he’s too busy and has too much shit going on. They’re all very hands on and really care about what’s going on with the band.

What is your typical song writing process?
There’s actually, ah, we don’t sit around together right, it’s kinda weird. A lot of bands do that, we don’t. I have to say that Nate [Garnett], our guitar player, is the main song writer. We all contribute, you know, a healthy amount but we really like to say that Nate throws in a lot of ingredients. Meaning he will show up to a practice with a recording from a 4-track cassette tape, he’ll program a drum machine and write two guitar parts and maybe even a bass line, and sometimes he’ll have an entire song and be like ‘here’s what I have, there’s not a lot of leads to it’ and maybe rather than have the guitar play the same part, I’ll match and re-write a riff, flush out what he did… but a lot of times he has basically the entire foundation. What I do also is I record a lot of riffs on my 4-track or song parts, maybe a minute of music here, 30 second there, and I’ll send it and he’ll incorporate that. He’ll come back to me and say ‘hey, I got 32 riffs over the course of a few months’ and he’ll come back and have 8 of my riffs or 2 of my riffs or whatever it may be, 1 of ‘em, and he’ll use it in a totally different context, really weird that I didn’t see coming. Nate’s the main mother fucker and he’s really a good guy and we have ideas and cool shit and stuff, but he’s the principal song writer and he really pulls it all together. We all write really crazy parts and riffs and he’ll be like ‘that don’t make fucking sense, that’s weird, what time signature is that?’ and he’ll bring it back with a totally different time signature, with a different harmony and throw it together, so he and I go back and forth, and once we have all the guitar parts basically done with the permanent drums, we give it to everyone else and our drummer will kinda, not really follow what we have but kinda change up a few drum parts and give his feel to it. The bass player will write bass lines to it, but we usually just record it as a group so Nate gets the feel for it. Once it’s all basically done, then Chance will write the lyrics to it and title of the song, he writes all the lyrics and all the song titles.

Cool, so how’s the tour kinda going? Has it been treating ya real well?
Oh fucking awesome. I mean obviously this is the biggest tour we’ve been on, we’re a young band. When we got to be a part of this tour we were so happy and it’s killer. We play early, and there are still a hell of a lot of people every night, more than we would normally play for. All the bands are fucking cool, we get along great with Winds of Plauge and Dimmu as well, and Danzig, that is one of the coolest mother fuckers ever! Ya know he tends to take a of flack from people, and he always gets in the press you read, everyone knows it, common knowledge, it’s not true though, he really cares a fucking lot about his band and the sound and what he’s doing. If anyone gets in the way of that, he’s like ‘fuck you, this is my shit and it’s what I’m doing’ and that’s how he is and that’s great. I mean he’s fucking dedicated and really is but just as a person, fucking great! He’s funny and goofs around and hangs out and he’s really nice, he’s awesome. Some people just think of him the wrong way, ya know ‘I’m trying to do this and your fucking me up and I’m gonna do what I need to do, to do my shit’. And we’ve witnessed that day after day on the tour where, uhm, he’s just a really nice and cool guy. He’s gonna do what he wants and that’s why he is where he is today.  (pause) That’s my rant about him… he’s really fucking cool, when we met he shook my hand and said how much he liked us and what’s we’ve done and he actually told us which we heard from his management before the tour that ‘yeah, Glenn really wanted you guys on the tour’, yeah, and his manager Steve was like… he just kept fuckin telling me that Glenn would say ‘well what the fuck, did you invite them [Skeletonwitch] yet or what?’ and Steve, his manager, would say ‘I got so fucking sick of hearing Glenn mention it and it pissed me off’ and we’re like aww, if that’s really true than that’s fucking cool. On the second day he busts into our green room and was like ‘what the fuck are you guys laughing about?’ cuz we were all being goofballs and we were all like ‘oh shit’ and he’s like ‘aw, I’m just fucking with you guys, what’s up!’ and introduced himself ‘what’s up, I’m Glenn’… well, of course your fucking Glenn. He’s like ‘I just wanted to welcome you guys to the tour, have fun, have a great time, party your asses off, enjoy yourselves ya know, if anything’s fucked up, let me know, I want you guys to enjoy it’ and he actually told us too, which concerned what Steve had told us, he said ‘when I was putting together the Blackest of the Black tour for this year, management or whoever the fuck it was, said go out and get 4 bands’ and he was like ‘fuck that, I want 5 bands cuz I want Skeletonwitch to be on it. I think you guys deserve to play in front of more people and I think your records really great and I listen to your music, I like your guys and I want to give you the shot to play in front of more people and be on a bigger tour’. And that’s fucking cool cuz not everyone does that. He’s been around a long time and can do what he wants, he wants to listen to new bands and really hand pick to comes on the tour.

Is there a lot of fighting on the road?
There’s the occasional brotherly fighting, for the most part it’s cool cuz we’re all really good friends. Me and the guys are all brothers and best friends, and ah, there’s not too much of a dynamic, the occasional brotherly fight but my brother actually manages us too, so there’s more brotherly bullshit and fighting go on there too where he and I argue like crazy. He does a great job. It’s like a close knit family, cuz when all the band and maybe my brother, our manager, are hanging out, we’re like a bunch of drunken metalhead idiots. There’s nothing too fancy about it, we love metal and we love fucking writing riffs and we love playing for people and we love touring as much as we can and ah, we’re all just really good friends. It worked out, there’s nothing too crazy about it, there are little extra fights cuz they’re brothers, maybe the same way I am with my brother about stuff, we all have our brotherly fights for sure, ya know.

Are there any cities on the tour so far that kinda stood out as far as crowd participation?
On this tour? Ah, we have some favorite cities we like to tour in general, no matter who we’re with. Whether we’re headlining or whether we’re supporting somebody, Andover is actually really fucking cool, that was a great show. New York City was great, uhm, those two were really killer. Wilmington, NC, we love Wilmington, NC. Of course Chicago is great. Savannah, Georgia, where some bands that are good friends of ours are from, Savannah is always great. All through Texas is awesome.

When you guys go back home to Ohio, are you the Athens local celebrities or are you just ‘eh, Scott and everyone are back home’?
It’s more like ah, I mean there are a few people who are like, maybe play that up, but not very much. They are more like ‘hey, the guys are back, lets drink a bunch of beer and party it up’. [Athens] is a small college town, I would hope that with it being a small college town, that all the fucking college girls there would, ya know, I wish they think that I was fucking so cool and say to me ‘I wanna have sex with you’. But a hot young college girl, yah, no way. It’s mostly just friends of ours, punk & metalheads, people being dragged out “that’s cool, when ya coming back and hang out”, ya know, it’s not like we’re celebrities. Friends, family and the people we like hanging out with ya know. I do realize that the travel part is really cool especially our first European tour, ya know Chance mentioned, oh where were we playing… we do really well in Athens of course, that’s where we started. But we were playing a show, I don’t remember exactly what he said but we were about to do our first European tour and he said something about something that made me real happy, something like “We’re fucking Skeletonwitch from Athens, Ohio and in a couple of weeks when we’re in Europe, we’re going to be Skeletonwitch from the United States and no matter where the fuck we go, we’ll always be Skeletonwitch from Athens, Ohio.” It meant a lot to us and shit because without Athens, we really wouldn’t have much of anything.

Hopefully someday Skeletonwitch will be up there some day and you will be Athens celebrities.
Sure, ya know, whatever, we always hope for the best and expect the worst. Beyond that we’re just enjoying what we’re doing. It sounds fucking morbid, but if we get in a terrible car wreck tomorrow, we’ll be fucking happy with what we’ve done so far. Ya know, we’re not expecting money, we’re not expecting anything. We’re just working as hard we can and enjoying it. We’re gonna bust our ass as much as possible and expect nothing, just enjoy whatever comes our way. We’re playing heavy metal and we love it.

Aright Scott, I thank you very much for your time. Get back to partying and we’ll see you later.
Right on, thanks a lot!