Interview mit Cammie Beverly von Oceans Of Slumber

What was the creative process like for that album? Who does what in OCEANS OF SLUMBER when creating an album?
It all really starts with Dobber (-Beverly, Drummer and Songwriter in OCEANS OF SLUMBER), he writes pretty much all of the music. And I guess before anything is necessarily created, we are inspired by movies that we’re watching or poems that we’ve read, like what we’re experiencing, what we’re doing. We talk a lot, back and forth, about what we’re creating and I guess the aesthetic standpoint. We’re kind of creating this mental visual board. A lot of times I feel like it’ll start with smaller elements, that work their way into a bigger storyline. So with this album it was definitely a very cinematic take on what we wanted to do and it came as more of a movie in mind. I’m trying to think back to the very beginning of “Where Gods Fear To Speak”. I feel like a lot of it revolved around where we wanted to record, at least for me, that’s what I was thinking about a lot. The songs sort of each were isolated in their moment. But it takes maybe like over a year in the making.

So you had a big label change recently, you changed from Century Media to Season of Mist. How do you think that that has affected the new album?
I don’t think it’s affected anything, the creation process was the same. I think that we feel more supported and understood, with this album. We definitely have a team that’s responsive, and they’re fans of the band, they understand the vision of the videos, and just the vibe of what we want to do. It feels really good to be understood, to feel supported, and to feel like a priority. I would say that’s the biggest aspect of it. We don’t have to hunt people down to get information, we’re a team. And that’s something that we feel now, whereas we kind of felt like a product before. Now it’s something we’re all in together and that we’re working on. That’s a very different feeling for us.

This is your sixth album as a band, and you still managed to try new things. What made you want to try new singing techniques? You tried growling for the first time- how did that go?
That was really exciting. I’ve always done them, I would do the demos or do the parts to lay out for the guys because I’ve always written both parts, and it kind of it finally came up. A lot of my peers in the industry growl and there was really no reason for me not to. It’s been something that I’ve always wanted to try, I just never felt quite as confident, to do it publicly. I took some lessons, I practiced, and the technique of how to do it clicked. I don’t want there to be anything that anyone says I can’t do vocally. I wanted to have the full range. The more I learned about doing growls, the more intricacies I found. It was kind of exciting, because now I want to combine these elements or shift from clean to growling. It gave me a new challenge and that’s something I’m trying to do with every album, I want to get better vocally, one way or another. This just seemed the right time to add that element of a new challenge to go in that direction.

You’ve been with OCEANS OF SLUMBER for 10 years now. Looking back, how do you think your background and gospel and blues music has helped you find your way in metal?
I don’t know that it has. Definitely not having a vocal metal background, it was more of finding similarities that were footstones to bridge the gap. Doom and gospel go hand in hand. A lot of gospel songs, if you just change the background music, would lay over doom metal perfectly. I would say I had to prod my own way through metal with the vocal background that I have. I’ve had to create my own spot and find similarities to cling to and to help people bridge the idea of what I’ve done and what we’re doing. But I can’t say that it’s been easy. It hasn’t come just intuitively. We’re a literal marriage of sound between Dobber and I. His grindcore-, death metal-, black metal-background to my blues, gospel and soul. At the same time, he knows those genres and we both love country music and so I feel like what we do sonically, is as is as organic as it gets; just putting things together that, while some might think they contrast, they complement. I can’t say it’s necessarily helped me find my way in metal, but I’ve made a comfortable place in metal.

You recorded the new album together with Joel Hamilton in Colombia. Why did you decide to go to Colombia, for recording?
We really wanted to go somewhere that inspired and excited us. In a day and age where everybody thinks “well, I could just do it at home, I can just do it in bedroom, I can just do it with these plugins” there’s something magic to going somewhere that’s raw and real, and using real instrumentation and local musicians, and being somewhere that’s fully out of your own comfort zone, to challenge and expand for yourself and who you are as an artist. For us, that meant going to Bogota. It’s an incredibly beautiful city with incredibly vibrant feelings and depth and people. We liked to be somewhere that invoked in us this contrast, this challenge that we were seeing in ourselves and in our own lives. To take a place that has such a turbulent history, but has thrived to be such a beautiful place, places like that have stories, and they have an essence that infuses with you, when you go there with an open creative heart. So we needed to get out of our heads and out of our own region and be somewhere to inspire. We didn’t want to just make another studio album. Joel has worked with that studio several times. It’s almost like a sister studio to Studio G in Brooklyn, and he’s a wonderful producer and element to everything that we do, and a great friend. So we were just really excited to go somewhere that felt like a second home to him, because Brooklyn had become a second home to us. It was a new experience for that relationship as a whole and for the band as a whole. So it’s really exciting.

Do you have a cool anecdote or something you’d like to share from the recording process in Colombia?
I think that everything out there was like a dream. We had friends- well, they became friends, they were people that worked at the studio, and they would take us to this marketplace every day to get lunch. And you buy bread, there’s so many different kinds of bread. And then we went on these explorations for coffee. It’s where people go to buy the supplies for their restaurants, but there’s also restaurants above the supply stores like the butcher or the seafood people, or we walk through the market, and they have all their fresh fruit. And so they’ll translate and then the ladies give us a bunch of samples. There’s this beautiful culinary side of everything, and there’s this, it wouldn’t say glamorous, but there’s a fancy sort of uptown aesthetic to everything. At the same time, there’s just soul crushing poverty and it’s literally across the street, where you have families, from women with babies on their backs to little old men digging through the trash for scraps that they can turn in for money. And it’s literally across the street. You’ll have this beautiful, elegant restaurant, and then you drive two seconds and there’s outrageous poverty. It was this contrast that spoke to my heart about the climate and the condition that is human life. I would say that elements are definitely infused in the album. In our experience there you can’t take anything for granted. You are very lucky if you’re born in circumstances that allow you to have comfort and have resources. They’re not promised, it’s a luck of the draw of where you’re born. I feel like there’s something special that we could only gain in Bogota, that comes out in my voice, that comes out in how we play, that comes out in the feelings and everything that we captured there. It was all a storybook in and of itself.

Next to Joel, you had legends like Mikael Stanne and Fernando Ribeiro work with you on the album. What was that like? How did it come about? And how did it go?
Oh, it’s very exciting. I’m so pleased with the duets that this album has. We went on tour with Moonspell and we talked with Fernando at the time about collaborating, me doing something with Moonspell him doing something with us and he was game. We became friends between Dobber and the band and him. He was very excited and very gracious to help us out and be on the song. That song got the opportunity to be written with him in mind. And so I feel like that makes it special and it makes it work as well as it does. He was already an idea for bringing that to life and I think it captures the spectrum of his vocal prowess so well. I love that song. I think it’s such a great merging of Moonspell’s style with OCEANS OF SLUMBER. With Michael, we’ve been fans of his for a long time, Dark Tranquillity, and then him of us. We’ve gotten to cross paths a few times and again, everybody hit it off, we’ve been buddies. So when we approached him, we were very excited, because he doesn’t do a lot of guest vocal appearances. For him to say yes to us, and for such a massive song like “Prayer”- I mean, he really went all out and it’s such an ominous, wonderfully dark voice that he adds to that song. So yeah, it’s been incredibly exciting and I can’t wait for people to hear those songs and get that take on them. I’m super happy with those songs.

Yeah, I bet! “Starlight and Ash” is obviously a lot softer and quieter in comparison to this new album, what brought along that change again, towards a more heavy sound?
For us, it depends on that we describe the elements of heaviness differently. For me, I feel like “Starlight and Ash” was, while sonically maybe not as aggressive, still a very heavy album but in different ways. Emotionally, I think it definitely had more doom and southern elements to it. For this we wanted to show a more aggressive side, we wanted to make sure that there were no doubts about us being a metal band and the spectrum of what we could do. Everything is more aggressive, everything is faster pace, and everything has more impact. Part of being a band is that you create and you do what you want to do, but you also have to listen carefully to things. It definitely took on elements that we always had there, but it’s just a different conversation in a different time. “Starlight and Ash” was written during the pandemic and we were going through a lot of different feelings and circumstances. We’re shut in, we’re going through old music that we used to listen to or spending more time with family and that’s a conversation that we had then and that’s what “Starlight and Ash” came to be. And now, with “Where Gods Fear to Speak”, the world has opened back up, there’s so much more conflict, there’s so much more turmoil, there’s so much more turbulence and we’re having a different conversation now. We’re a band that responds to our lives. We don’t just have a singular sound and then we make the same album every time with just different words. We’re very sensitive beings and what we take in, we interpret in these different ways musically, and it’s just where we’ve landed. With “Where Gods Fear to Speak” the conversation calls for more aggression, and it calls for more impact, so that’s what we decided to do.

You decided to close the album with “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaac. It’s a song that’s been covered by loads of rock and metal bands already. What made you want to cover the song? And why did you end the album with it?
We’ve been deliberating what cover we’re going to do quite a bit. We were going to do a completely different song. Last minute, I had a small emotional breakdown and we decided to switch songs. It’s one that’s been on the list of covers that we were going to do for a while, but Dobber was inspired when we went out to eat and there was a terrible coffeehouse version of the song playing and he was very mad about it. It was just at a restaurant we were eating at and it was very neutered, sort of DJ version. That’s when it struck him that we should redo and that we should cover that song. It was the final hour of our time in the studio and we decided to record it live. We got together, pulling the piano and everybody into the big room to figure it out. And we hashed it out right there. To finish the album with it- The album as a whole is meant to be like a soundtrack to a movie, this big cinematic experience. And “Wicked Game” comes at the end where the credits roll, you’re back in your seat, and you’re digesting everything you just saw. And you’re coming back into like your own reality in your own world. It’s that hint of familiar that a good cover gives you but also with our touch on it. It’s an experience with us, it’s something new. It’s meant to kind of be that moment when you’re like “Wow, what a crazy journey, what an incredible movie that was. And now I’m back at my seat gathering my stuff.” It has that haunting, echoing love story to it that I think just encapsulates a wonderful finishing touch on “Where Gods Fear to Speak”.

Do you have any fun, exciting plans to follow the album release, a tour, for example?
Right now, nothing that we can announce. But we have a show coming up next month in Brooklyn, we’re doing a reimagining of some of our songs at Studio G, it’s going to be a live recording. And that’s going to be pretty special, pretty incredible, very limited, small, intimate crowd for that, but hopefully some other things will come up before the end of the year that we can announce, we’ll see.

Exciting! At Metal1.info we have this little tradition of ending our interviews with a little hot seat situation. So essentially, I’m going to say words and then you say whatever comes to your mind first.
Houston Texas: Oh, man. Humid.
God: Treacherous (laughs)
US elections: (Laughs) Disaster (Dobber pitches in: “Circus”) Or circus, either one of those.
Favourite movie: I don’t want to say the first one that came to mind, it’s so funny. It’s “The Jungle Book”. I don’t know why that popped into my head but “The Jungle Book”. Especially with Mowgli and Baghira and the bear- because that one song has been in my head. The one where he’s riding on his belly down the river- “The Bear Necessities”! I don’t know why it’s in my head but that’s what I got.
Black metal: Southern. And I say that because of Dobbers black metal band, Necrofier. I love the aesthetic that they have. It’s backwood, dark, demonic, with folk kind of feel to it. I think black metal from your region is kind of to me meant represent your folk-style.

So do you have any last words you’d like to share with our readers and your fans, anything to add?
I’m just super excited for everything that “Where Gods Fear to Speak” holds. I think it’s gonna have a lot of exciting elements. Even with the singles that we’re putting out, there’s still so much more to be discovered about the album. So I hope everyone enjoys.

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Publiziert am 16. September 2024 von Helen Lindenmann