Interview with Nevermore questions answered by Jeff Loomis interview conducted by Dean Gehrmann

To say I was nervous when I was asked to do the Nevermore interview was pretty much a vast understatement. Having listened to first Sanctuary, and later on Nevermore, ever since early-on in high school and having the utmost respect for Warrel Dane and company, I was afraid of sounding too much like an awestruck fan. It didn’t help matters that when the time arrived for Warrel to give me a call, the agreed upon time came and went without hearing a thing. A couple of hours later after a call from my editor, Mike, I learned that Warrel had some health problems and was in the hospital. Obviously, that was a pretty damn good excuse.  Instead, it was arranged that I would interview the ever cool and highly underrated guitarist, Jeff Loomis. Why this guy isn’t hailed in guitar circles baffles my mind.  Now I was forced to rethink all my questions as most of my planned questions revolved around the bitterly poetic lyrics of Mr. Dane. This time the call was exactly on time and after shooting the shit awhile with Jeff since he is also from southern Wisconsin, we got down to business. This interview was done right before the Gigantour with Megadeth kicked off so Jeff was busy getting ready for the tour.

Adrenalin- Well, to get started, if you wouldn’t mind, going track by track, just give me a rundown of maybe some cool things that happened while writing or recording “The Godless Endeavors”?

Jeff-  Well, to make a long story short, we recorded in Derbyshire, England this time around, which was kind of different.

Adrenalin- With Andy Sneap, right?

Jeff- Yeah, normally we’ve done most of our albums in Texas and this was kind of the same deal, though. When we were making it, we were basically stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Andy’s place is in the middle of farming country. It’s just the kind of place where we could totally concentrate on recording the album with no outside interference. It was a really cool experience and of course, working with Andy again was incredibly awesome because it’s gotten to the point where I call him the sixth member of Nevermore because he gets the best tone for us and everything. The guy is a perfectionist and a guitar player.

Adrenalin- Well, he definitely kicked ass as a guitarist in Sabbat.

Jeff- Yeah, definitely. He’s an awesome dude and hopefully we can work together again in the future. The whole recording of this record was where we kind of went back to the old school way of doing it. Instead of just having Warrel write everything as he did on the last two records, everybody was kind of a contributing factor as to the song writing process. I composed about six songs, Steve Smyth our other permanent member and guitar player wrote three songs, and Jim actually wrote one song. I think it actually makes for a more diverse record since there’s a lot going on.

Adrenalin- There’s a couple of riffs that almost have a Testament feel to them.

Jeff- Yeah.

Adrenalin- Kind of that chug that Testament has always been really good at.

Jeff- Yeah, he brought kind of that thrash vibe to the band and we’re just really happy to have him as the fifth and final member of Nevermore. We’ve gone through so many guitar players in the past.

Adrenalin- It was kind of funny watching him jump from one of my favorite bands to another of my favorite bands.

Jeff- That’s cool. He’s rockin’. We are really fortunate to have him in the band.

Adrenalin- Very cool.  Well, moving on I wanted to comment and congratulate you on the difference that Andy Sneap made on the remastered version of “Enemies of Reality”.

Jeff- Yeah, it was pretty much a night and day thing. Basically, what happened with that whole thing was it was our last record for Century Media and we were going to negotiate a new contract with them but they didn’t know initially that we were going to resign with them so they didn’t give us a lot of money for that record. We only had around $20,000 for that record and rather than be able to have Andy Sneap do it for us since we didn’t have enough money we had to find someone in the Seattle area to do it. So we ended up using Kelly Grey and about three fourths of the way through the recording we just noticed that he wasn’t doing that good of a job on it. He wasn’t getting a lot of the separation and a lot of the tone that we were looking for. But it ended up getting released and we started getting a lot of bad feedback from a lot of the fans so we got the masters back from Kelly and handed them over to Mr. Sneap and he did the deed of basically taking the whole blanket off of the entire mix and basically ended up redoing the entire thing and now it sounds proper.

Adrenalin- Well the results were really mind blowing, it turned a good album into a great one.

Jeff- Yeah, I can go to bed now knowing that the thing finally sounds good now (laughs)

Adrenalin- Everyone seemed pretty shocked when you guys went and resigned to Century Media after hearing about all the things that went on in the end.

Jeff- Exactly, there were about four other labels looking at us at the time and they were very interested, but in the eleventh hour Century Media came back with this huge offer that we basically couldn’t refuse. Of course with the dollar signs and a three-record deal, it was perfect for us.

Adrenalin- Well, it seems like they’re doing a good job now, you’re busy as hell, you have the remastered version of Enemies.

Jeff- Exactly, we have a good working relationship with them again. We didn’t exactly want to go to another label because we had already worked with Century for six or seven years.

Adrenalin- Not to mention, they keep getting bigger and bigger and are starting to have some real clout within the industry.

Jeff- Yeah, you’re right about that.

Adrenalin- Especially since they hooked up with Nuclear Blast.

Jeff- Yeah

Adrenalin- Well, I got a couple more questions that don’t exactly relate to the new album but are still pretty relevant lately. Where do you stand on the whole downloading thing?

Jeff- Well, you know, that was one of the reasons that we had the voiceovers on the promotional discs. I think that helped the whole pirating thing a little bit. A lot of bands are starting to do things like that now. But you know it’s cool if a kid goes and downloads a couple of songs to hear what the album sounds like but I swear to God in 2000 right when “Dead Heart in a Dead World” came out, when we handed the masters over to Century Media, not even two days later the entire record was on the internet. The bands work hard, you know what I’m saying?

Adrenalin- Yeah.

Jeff- It’s going to ruin the entire record industry.

Adrenalin- Well I don’t know about fans of other kinds of music but metal fans are collectors who want the whole package-they want the artwork and the lyrics, and not just on the computer screen. They download the album because they can’t get it yet or haven’t been able to find it but when they get the chance they purchase the disc.

Jeff- Yeah, they get overly anxious and want to hear it which I can understand. And I do think that most of the true fans will go out and buy the record because like you said they want the whole package.

Adrenalin- Most metalheads I know, even the ones that do a lot of downloading, we all own hundreds if not thousands of CDs. I do a lot of downloading but my CD collection reaches into the thousands. (this goes into a huge conversation of collecting CDs that Jeff also happens to get into so for the sake of our readers we’ll spare you all the details-but anyone who has any old Jason Becker bootlegs send them Jeff’s way. Hehehehe) Like I said before a lot of my questions had to do with Warrel’s lyrics.

Jeff- Yeah, well he is definitely the one to talk about that because his lyrics are very personal to him and he is the only one to really talk to about that.

Adrenalin- Well in my opinion, he has to be one of the best lyricists out there today.

Jeff- Yeah, I agree. He’s a genuine poet man. That’s for sure.

Adrenalin- Well, he seems to really care about what he’s doing and now days that’s rare. No one seems to really give a shit.

Jeff- No they don’t. There’s not enough originality and not enough identity. In a lot of the interviews I’ve done I’ve always told people that if you were to go back to the mid 80’s or the late 80’s and put ten bands on a tape, you could identify every single one of them. If you did that today, there are too many damn bands that sound exactly the same now days.

Adrenalin- Yeah, I for one have a huge problem with all these bands that don’t play any guitar solos and are way more concentrated on what kind of noise they can get their guitar to make.

Jeff- Exactly-people rip on guys that do solos and these are the guys that don’t know how to do it in the first place.

Adrenalin- It’s like they don’t have any interest in getting better at their craft.

Jeff- Exactly

Adrenalin- So with that being said are there any new bands that you do get into?

Jeff- Well, I listen to a lot of the Swedish metal right now such as Meshuggah. I get into those guys a lot. And the non Swedish Strapping Young Lad. Also Soilwork. The Haunted, Machine Head. Bands like that. I try not to put limits on what I listen to. My CD collection is pretty much limitless.

Adrenalin- Yeah-I can relate to that-definitely. Well, it’s time to wrap things up because it sounds like you’re pretty busy but I want to thank you and I’ll definitely keep in touch.

Jeff- Thanks man. Take care.


 

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