Week of October 1, 2009, Issue #728
MUSIC
Brendon Small
The joke about Jamaica: Brendon Small likes his death metal sans reggae
Eden Munro / eden@vueweekly.com
Brendon Small has been walking the line between music and comedy for years now. A guitarist first, he attended the Berklee College of Music in the mid '90s, but then detoured into television when he co-created the animated Home Movies in 1999, writing all the music for the show. When Home Movies ended its run in 2004, Small went on to create Metalocalypse, a show that features often scathing and hilarious commentary on the topic of celebrity, using the members of a massively successful death-metal band as the central characters. The show has spawned two albums of music—all written and performed by Small, save for the drums, for which Small enlisted Gene Hoglan from Death, Strapping Young Lad and other groups—and Small is now taking Dethklok out on the road. Given Small's background as a musician, it's not surprising that he's interested in making the Dethklok show a real concert experience, taking Hoglan, guitarist Mike Keneally and bassist Bryan Beller out to perform the music with him. The band will then take the stage, performing in the shadow of a giant screen playing animation of the show's characters. Small spoke to Vue Weekly recently about the differences between working in animation and creating music. Here are some of the highlights of the conversation.
VUE WEEKLY: When you're working on an album, is it tapping into a different creative place than the show?
BRENDON SMALL: I can write a script with the TV show and I can giggle to myself and think it's funny and stuff and then read it to other people and they may not get where I'm coming from, they may not think it's funny. But when I do music by myself it's a pretty lonely process—not that I feel lonely, but I do it by myself—and I feel like I have much more objectivity as to where the song goes and where it should go and where it makes sense. And music you just experience different than comedy—I can listen to a song five times in a row and not get sick of it, but I don't want to watch the same episode of Mr. Show five times in a row. I just watched it. You just experience it differently. There's a similar creative process that happens, coming up with an idea and getting it in shape, but I think the music idea, even if it's me playing sloppy guitar to a click track I still understand what the energy of that song is going to be and how it's going to feel when I finish it.
VW: Is it hard to work out the timing between the show, the album and the tour?
BS: I don't get any time off and I think it's ridiculous what I'm doing and it doesn't make sense. Luckily it's fun, but the timing of this year in particular has been pretty crazy and difficult and non-stop. Both me and the whole Dethklok team have been staying in on weekends and just working non-stop to make the TV show, to make the videos for the new tour and to do the artwork for the album. It's all the same group of like four people doing everything. It's not easy. It's going to make sense marketing wise and that's kind of why everything came together, but in the future I'd like to take a little more time doing everything, even though I'm happy with it. Luckily, we're cursed with caring about the show and I'm cursed with caring about the music, so we really want it to be good. We definitely stay in, we don't take vacations, we stay up to three and work as hard as we can just to make it good.
VW: Did you know when you first came up with the idea for Metalocalypse that you wanted to go out and play it live?
BS: Yeah, it was very simple logic: I want to do a show that could have a big music component so it could exist outside of the TV show in case the TV show gets cancelled. So I wanted to make music a big part of Dethklok and I wanted to put enough music in it so that at the end of the season I'd have enough music to put a record together, and if that record sold there should be a way to tour, and if you tour how do you tour an animated show? Well, the Gorillaz seemed to do it, so that's the starting-off point, and I imagined everything in my head and it was kind of my job as the executive producer and ultimately the salesman to get all this stuff happening and get people sold on it and have them see how this could be not only fun and cool but also not lose money.
VW: In some ways it's a very different show, with the musicians in shadows in front of the giant screen, but at the same time it's sort of an indication of the way at least some bands have gone with the live experience. Pink Floyd did The Wall way back, and people like Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC have been using animated intros for years.
BS: Yeah, we're not doing anything new here. This started in the '60s with the Archies. I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything, this has been going on forever. It started with the Archies and ultimately it was a smart move because [the TV producers] lost control of the Monkees back in the day and they said, "OK, if we can't control these humans, lets make a cartoon that we can control and make records for," and that was the Archies and we're doing the exact same thing. And you can create a fake band, it happened with Kiss—I mean, they're a real band but they have these alter egos and all that stuff. It's a scene in rock 'n' roll. No on wants to see regular people, they want to see gods, even if they're animated.
VW: With all the effort you put into recording the music and taking it on tour, it's pretty obvious that you care about the music. It's not the kind of thing that would work if someone was writing the music just to make fun of the genre.
BS: That was the whole thing. Again it's a very selfish project because I don't think I'm going to get any other landscape to experiment with music like this. I don't think anybody would have hired me as a guy who just gets to do whatever he wants, so I had to create an atmosphere where I could do that. And I don't care about joke music very much, either. I like Frank Zappa, but I'm not into parody. I like satire, but there's a big difference between the two of them, and I wanted to satirize a bunch of genres of music and throw them into the world of metal and that's where some of the comedy comes from.
VW: If you didn't enjoy it, you'd be living a pretty painful life.
BS: That would be the worst life imaginable. I mean, I think if I did a joke about a reggae band and all I had to do was play reggae for the rest of my life, I'd probably kill myself. But I like metal, and I like guitars—I've been playing for 20 years—so it makes it easy and fun. Well, not easy. It makes it fun. V
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