Intervista Obituary (Donald Tardy)
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Hi Donald, how are you doing?
Very good man, end of the tour.
Yeah, how did it go?
Oh, it’s amazing.
Twenty-one shows already, so only three or four more; it’s been a long tour, but the shows have been unbelievable.
Your latest album, “Obituary”, is considered by many your best album in years, and perhaps at the same level of your classics. Do you agree with this statement?
Yeah, I’m really, really proud of the new album, the whole band is.
You know, bands are always excited about the new albums, sometimes it’s just not the right timing, and though you think you wrote a great record sometimes it just gets looked past, it doesn’t reach everybody the way it should.
But this one seems like it has great writing, great songs, great timing and the record label did a great job promoting it and pushing it and making sure it was out there, and creatively really helping us push it.
Do you think the band’s latest line-up helped you find the stability necessary to allow you to reach such a high-quality level for the songwriting?
Yeah, I mean, there’s no question that having Terry and Ken in the band…they are the final pieces to the puzzle and we’re really solid now.
Super good friends, everyone’s on the same page where we are all professionals, we take it serious when it comes to the band and the touring, but we don’t take it too serious because it’s just entertainment.
We know that when people come to a show it’s usually after work and they’re ready to enjoy themselves, so we are not those guys, and everybody knows, we are not those guys that have to wear leather jacket, leather pants, leather boots or paint their faces, we are not that kind of band, we just let the music do the talking and we’re extremely happy with the new songs, and this line-up is extremely solid right now.
This is your second album with Terry [Butler] and Kenny [Andrews] in the band, do think you worked better as a band recording this new album, after a few years together, or was it the same as with your last album?
Yeah, I think there’s a learning process with the band and everyone, you know, with “Inked in Blood” it was the first time with Ken and Terry, so the development of musicianship together, the studio time together, the performance together, it was still a learning process and now with the new album we definitely had a good time in the studio, we made sure that we were relaxed and in a good mood, ‘cause I don’t know if many people are aware of it, but a musician’s attitude and his vibe and in his head when he’s in the studio is almost as important as how much you have practiced the record.
You can have practiced the album for a year, but if you enter the studio that day with the wrong things on your mind, or in a bad mood, you’ll probably not gonna perform the way you want to and instead we recognize this a veteran band, I’ve been doing it for a long time so I made sure Ken before his solos and his stuff was aware of that like, literally man, just realise how lucky you are, how much fucking fun this is, and he really understood that, so we really had a good time recording it and part of it has to do with just friendship and just really going for it.
One of the first things that can be noticed about the album is the title and the cover, very simplistic, especially compared to the very explicit, gore ones from your past. Why did you make those choices?
You know, it wasn’t a hard a decision, it wasn’t like we were waiting for 30 years and 10 albums to make a self-titled one.
We knew we wanted something classic, so when we saw the artwork we knew it wasn’t that important to study John’s lyrics and find the perfect title for an album, we didn’t really make a big deal about it, we just kinda said, “You know what? The songs are awesome, the artwork is just killer, it’s so classic, it’s so simplistic”, so we looked at each other and said, “You know what? Why a title? Why something with…five words that has to be a long, meaningful title”.
Obituary has been around for a long fucking time, and we just kinda said, “You know what? Most bands do it on their first album, a self-titled record…why not this one? Why not the tenth one?”, and we said, “Fuck it! It doesn’t need a title”.
It didn’t need one and we all felt the same way.
Your previous album, “Inked in Blood” was crowdfunded through Kickstarter and only distributed by Relapse Records; was it the same for this album?
No, “Inked in Blood” and the crowdfunding was something that…it was new, 4-5 years ago I didn’t know what Kickstarter was, crowdfunding was very new to the, to the world I think, maybe some people studied it but it was definitely new to us, so we did our homework, we figured out what it is and we set a realistic approach of what we think we can do with the fans, and that’s exactly what we did.
A lot of people that didn’t study what we did with it got confused and said, “You begged for money, but then you went with a record label”, but in reality everybody that was a part of the Kickstarter got something, they got a cool poster, if that’s what they wanted, if they wanted the t-shirt they got the t-shirt, if they wanted the signed drumstick they got that, so everybody received something and our main goal was to raise money to see, “Do we really need a record label? Can we put an album out on our own?”.
But then when you start looking at the legwork of distribution companies and that whole engine to get albums out to the whole world successfully, efficiently, we knew right off the bat, this is enough to pay for the album cover, pay for the recording, pay for the mastering, pay for the printing of the album, and then we had to bring in Relapse to distribute it and get it to the record stores.
So, it was a fun process, it was an absolute nightmare for the band when it comes to physically…we had 908 people, I think, and in the end we were like, “Oh, it was amazing! It was amazing!” and we looked at it and said, “Oh my god! We have to put 900 packages together!”.
And it wasn’t just an easy, like, CD, sticker [whistle], CD, sticker [whistle], it was, “Ok, Bob from Texas wants a medium shirt, and a signed poster, and a drumstick”, you got to make sure that was proper, so it was legitimately a nightmare for us, but a cool experience, we worked our asses off and I think the fans that were a part of it enjoyed seeing the process and getting the product that we offered to them.
The new album, we just knew that Relapse does an amazing job with what they do, they are a small label but they get along really well with us, and they’re super-creative and efficient.
We really hit hard just knowing that they’re gonna do the right work getting it out there and we just wanted to write a great album.
Through the years Obituary had the same songwriting core, the three of you [John for the lyrics, Donald and Trevor for the music]; do you have a standard, stable creative process at this point, or does it change depending on the situation?
We are really simple people, like we don’t have to make sure the time is right and we…we start writing music at midnight when the moon is full, you know, we are not those kinds of guys.
Me and Trevor are just, you know, we are just those kind of dudes, if we feel like it we are gonna get together, we are gonna crack a couple of cold beers and within 15-20 minutes of that day we know if something is gonna happen, almost immediately, almost in the first 5-10 minutes we already have a riff, or something happens with a drum pattern that I show Trevor, or something that he brought to me yesterday, but we are not those guys like, “We spent 6 hours in the studio writing one song” [laughs], you know, if it doesn’t happen within about an hour and a half, when it comes to the writing, if it’s not happening within an hour we know, we are not rocket scientists, we are not doing open heart surgery, we are writing Heavy Metal riffs.
It usually comes to us immediately when it comes to writing, we are simple, we don’t put pressure on ourselves, if it doesn’t happen today, tomorrow will always be here for us to write a riff.
Your approach to Death Metal is very traditional and genuine compared to many newer bands which are very technical, but maybe also a bit cold. What do you think of today’s Death scene? Do you feel part of it or do you feel like it’s something foreign to you?
Yeah, it’s a little bit weird.
I don’t know how to describe it, and I don’t want to come off like a guy who doesn’t like it, I appreciate what bands are doing, I understand that the wheel has already been invented and there’s no reinventing the wheel, there’s already been one million and one riffs and rhythms and songs written in the history of Heavy Metal and Rock N’ Roll, so I understand that, you know, you can’t keep repeating everything always, and keeping it simple, so I know every band is not gonna be a simple…minded, simple songwriting band, so I appreciate when bands are going for it and it’s crazy, and it’s fucking million miles per hour blast-beats, you know, it’s definitely something that I think it’s needed, exploring what the hell is next, it’s important.
But, just speaking for myself and for Obituary, we’ll let the other bands on this planet to do the crazy technical Metal stuff, and we’ll stick to the “cave-man” writing [laughs], we are totally okay with writing the AC/DC kind of riffs of Death Metal.
Talking about Metal in general, you are considered among the fathers of Death Metal; after Death Metal other genres were born, Black Metal, Power Metal, Post-Metal…do you think is still possible to innovate in this genre, will there someone be able to create a completely new genre of Metal, or is this the end of the line?
I don’t think it’s the end of the line, maybe sometimes you should hope that it’s the end of the line, but, I don’t know, I think people are crazy enough, musicians are weird enough and the talent gets better and better, and the ability like, 10 years ago if you’d have thought that drummers would be playing at the tempo they are now we would laugh about it, but it’s always being pushed, the envelope is always being pushed, the challenges are always there, so there’s gonna be some kind of new genre that it’s gonna pop up.
Is it a good thing?
Who knows, I guess we’ll see, again, you know what? I appreciate it, I think it’s cool, it’s interesting, sometimes not great, but at least people are trying new stuff, different stuff, and, again, we are comfortable, Obituary is comfortable in our skin, we’re totally okay with the music that we create and the style that we have, and we know our fans love that, there is no reason for us to try to do anything completely out of the box, ‘cause there’s many, many other bands doing that kind of stuff as it is already, so, we’re okay with what’s going on in our world.
This might be a tricky question, but from an outsider it sometimes seems incredible how so many talented and influential bands come from a relatively small place, whether it’s the Bay Area for Thrash Metal, here in Scandinavia for Black Metal, and in your case Tampa for Death Metal.
From your point of view, as you are part of it, how could you explain that?
You can imagine how many times I’ve been asked this question and there’s no answer to it, like, I hate saying it but it almost seems like it was just a coincidence that, you know, most of it was just a coincidence that Obituary, Deicide, Death, Morbid Angel, all at the same time we were developing our skills and our styles and we were, I guess, at a higher level than other band on the planet, but it’s not like it was in the water [laughs], it’s not stuff that we were eating or smoking [laughs], you know, maybe part of it was because when Death was creating the songs that they were at such an early time, and they were so good, maybe that put the fire underneath our asses a little bit and you either realise that you’re gonna make a name for yourself and you’re gonna get better and you need to be better, or you’re gonna get left in the dust.
You know, maybe the competition was there and we realised how good Deicide was and how sick Chuck’s songwriting was in Death, and Obituary was those kind of dudes, again, we don’t worry too much about what’s going on around us, we don’t care about what other genres other bands are doing, we just knew what we loved and we just kinda kept doing what we were doing and we were pretty good at it.
So, I don’t know, a lot of it I think is just pure coincidence that it happened to be in the Tampa Bay Area that those bands made a name for themselves, and those are still albums that hold their own weight in this world of Metal.
Next year it will be the 30th anniversary of your debut, “Slowly we Rot”, are you planning something special to celebrate it? Will you play it in full?
Well, I don’t know, the band hasn’t really discussed that yet, we’re having such a good time right now and we are so busy, which is a good thing, and there is such a demand for Obituary is still here, and our desire to create new music and to play shows and to do this for a living, it’s still so much there that we haven’t even discussed that it’s about to be the 30th anniversary of “Slowly we Rot” and there’s gonna be plenty of time in the future to do, like you suggested, which would be playing the album in its entirety.
It’s not that we aren’t going to, but we just haven’t even discussed that really, as a band, yet.
In our minds, I’m sure, individually we think about it and it would be cool for the fans, making a cool night knowing what they’re about to experience, but we are just having so damn much fun right now, we love the new album, we love some of the new material and it would be a shame to play shows without expressing ourselves and these new songs.
That was it, thank you so much for your time, I’ll leave you the last word.
Music is invisible, but it touches us more than most other things in this planet.
Obituary would still be playing music together because we are good friends that love music, but without our fans we wouldn’t be where we are today, we wouldn’t get to see 25 countries every year, and we are very lucky as people and we are very fortunate as a band to have the following that we do and we don’t take that lightly, and we push harder every day as a professional band to make sure our fans realise that when we come to their town and play for them, we make sure they are having almost as a good time as we do, ‘cause we love to have a good time on stage, and I hope that they see that when we perform, and we appreciate them and we thank them for it.
Davide Sciaky