Fresh on the heels of a brief tour of Australia and gearing up for the second leg of the tour of the United States, Wednesday 13 took some time out of his busy schedule to speak with Metal Wani contributor Dawn Brown.
Below are some of the excerpts:
When asked about playing shows in Australia:
“It’s amazing there. I mean, it’s such a privilege to be able to go there, so far away, and play and have that many fans that know your songs. It really is looking out into the audience, it’s like Halloween. People come to our shows and it’s like an event. But, it really is a whirlwind of a tour.”
The US tour starts in late May in support of headliners, Combichrist. When asked about the upcoming tour:
“We’re getting ready for that. It’s going to be a cool thing. Like, we normally go out and headline and do our own tours. It’s cool to be a support band for once and go out in front of a different audience and turn some new heads and see what happens.”
On working with an outside producer and if it was a good experience:
“Well, yeah. I mean, it’s always good to have, at least for me, I like to have someone there to tell me something’s good or something’s bad because I can sometimes be my worst critic and let something slip by…it was a cool thing, having a producer, someone like Zeuss to go, hey, try this or do this or maybe that part isn’t as good as you think it is, you can make this better. Just to have someone with an outside ear that isn’t in the band to hear something and say, hey, change that. For me, that was something I always wanted. It wasn’t in the past that I didn’t use producers because I was some egomaniac wanting to control everything. We just didn’t have the money to afford to hire a producer. It literally was just come up with the money to get the recording cost and get it mixed and mastered and a producer wasn’t even in the question. When it came time to do Condolences, I knew it was time to change things up and I wanted to change the game up and I wanted to take us up a level and I wanted to work with a producer and Zeuss was the only producer I had worked with before with Murderdolls. We hit it off and luckily he had time to do it and we made it work out. We got signed to Nuclear Blast after that. Here we are a year later and we’re about to embark on the second half of the Condolences tour and we’re excited.”
On Wednesday 13’s main musical influences:
“The horror imagery and sound and all that has just been something that I’ve done for I don’t even know how many years now. When I first started playing music back in 1991, my imagery, making a flyer for our first show, had Vincent Price on it or Frankenstein or something like that. I’ve just always had that imagery. Then when I heard Alice Cooper, I could hear you could really do something shock rock or horror. Kiss was shock rock but it didn’t really go into the horror thing. God of Thunder was more of an evil kind of thing but Alice Cooper brought the aspect of horror that I really had never seen before.”
On potential of a new Murderdolls record:
“I really just haven’t spoken with Joey (Jordison, ex-Slipknot) really at all this year. We had got in touch about a year ago and just kind of established contact again and mentioned the idea of doing something in the future, not a time on it or anything. Just the idea of would you be into it and we both said yes. Then I got busy doing my stuff, he was touring and putting a record out and that’s the last I really heard of it. So, that’s kind of where it is.”
On a new album and future for Wednesday 13:
“This next record, I want to completely top what we did with Condolences, soundwise, everything. I want to step the show up and really take the band to this new visual level that I have mapped out in my head. So, we’re just trying to keep moving on up like the Jeffersons.”
“There’s nothing on the books or plans other than doing Wednesday 13 and completing the new record by the end of the year and having a new record out or at least be talking about it next year for it to be coming out for the summer.”