Interview:	MARC HUDSON
Title:	Through space and time

For 12 years, he has been confidently vocalizing the songs of the English Power Metal band DragonForce. Now the throat artist is releasing his first solo album: „Starbound Stories“.

Fans of his oral flights of fancy will be doubly pleased, because the vocal cord jack-of-all-trades also offers a full program stylistically - enormously multi-faceted Power Metal with influences from Japanese music and video game soundtracks as well as anime, implemented with a variety of interesting guests.


The master doesn't make a big fuss about what preceded the album:

„It just came together from myself and Shaz D messing around with some songs in 2020. We’d been working on one of my songs and one of his, and realized it was good enough to consider making into an album!“

Please tell about the guest musicians, how the respective contact came about and how the individual cooperation went! 


„There’s a lot of guests on the album, most of them are guitar players who played solos. The guitar players were Stevie T, Galen Stapley, Syu & Jacky Vincent. Aside from that we had Mia Asano playing the violin solo on ‘Stars’ and Adrienne Cowan and Ryoji Shinomoto did some screaming on ‘Dracula X’ and ‘Freedom Heart’ respectively. Ryoji also played some traditional Japanese instruments on the opening track! I met most of the guest musicians from being on tour. I reached out to Syu from Galneryus because I’ve been a fan of him for years, so he’s the only one who I asked out of the blue! In terms of how the recording happened, it was a simple case of just sending files to eachother! Some of the guests wrote their own solos and some played solos that Shaz D wrote, or followed guides that I wrote.“

Anime - what exactly connects you with it, what do you like most about it? 


„I actually don’t watch much anime at all, but I really like the music. Aside from Studio Ghibli movies, Dragonball & cowboy bepob, I haven’t watched too much! I have recently started watching a bit of Chainsaw man though.“

Video game soundtracks - what are your favourite games and soundtracks? When did you start playing them? 


„My favorite game series is Final Fantasy, but I also love Shadow Of The Colossus, Fallout New Vegas and Persona 4 & 5. At the moment I’m playing Hunt: Showdown. Some personal favourites soundtracks are 'Tifa's theme' from FF7, 'Balamb garden' from FF8, 'To Zanarkand' from FFX, 'City Of Tears' from Hollow Knight and all of the Skyrim OST. I started playing as a kid around the launch of the SNES.“ 


How do you feel about Japanese music in general and what are your favorites from it? 


„I love a lot of Japanese music. I have a hard drive full of stuff that the old DragonForce bassist, Fred, copied for me. None of the titles are in English, so I couldn’t tell you who half of the bands are! Some of the well known ones I’m listening to now would be X Japan and Cassiopeia.“ 


How do you feel about pop music in general and what are your favorites from it? 


„I don’t really care for western pop but Shaz D likes the Jpop group ‚Perfume’.“ 


The new material is extremely lively, „Astralive“ f.e. - seems you've had an highly inspired songwriting? 


„Yes indeed!“

Are there any (Power Metal) bands that could have influenced you during the songwriting for the new longplayer? 


„All the old favourites, Stravovarius, Symphony X etc!“

How was the selection of the songs for the new album made? And: were some songs sorted out or did you rather polish a fixed tracklist longer? 


„There were around 5 other songs that didn’t make it to the album. These songs were all great too, but in the end the 10 songs that were picked were the ultimate combination to deliver a varied and well-paced album!“ 


What is the one song with the most meaning for you on the new album and why? 


„When it comes to the meaning, probably 'Swansong'. The song is about loss and we were hashing out the lyrics around the time that one of my best friends passed away, so when I hear this song I think of him.“

© Markus Eck, 04.08.2023

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