June 15th saw the release of first new Lizzy Borden offering in 11 years and this time it’s very much a solo offering with Lizzy working up the songs with only drummer and long-time collaborator Joey Scott by his side, not only hitting the skins but also co-producing. We caught up with Lizzy to find out all about what he got up to in those midnight hours…
Mark: Hi, Lizzy, its Mark from The Rockpit, how are you?
Lizzy: I’m doing good thanks.
Mark: Well, a fantastic album, “My Midnight Things”, I’ve really enjoyed listening to it over the last few weeks; it’s been a long time coming though!
Lizzy: Yeah, it definitely has! But, thank you so much, we’ve been getting some amazing reviews on this album so far, so I’m pretty excited by the response.
Mark: Can you tell us a little bit about the process? I know you started writing some time ago, and I guess its 35 years this year of all things Lizzy Borden, so it’s a wonderful way to mark that anniversary. The album sounds like it’s a bit of a comment on the creation process, where you talk about being alone in the studio in the dark hours.
Lizzy: Yeah, that was a piece of what I’m talking about with “My Midnight Things”, I mean there’s so many other elements, but that was one of the elements that I really wanted to come across in my voice when I was singing. I wanted those dark, isolated moments to be real, and I didn’t want just to try and make that happen in the studio, I actually wanted it to be a real situation. There would be times when I wouldn’t see anyone for a week, so I really wanted that isolation to come across in my voice, so I made sure I isolated myself, so you could hear it in the songs.
Mark: You certainly can. How did it all come about? What made you want to release a new album? There are a lot of artists out there saying that rock music is dead, and there’s no point recording new stuff because no one wants to buy it, where do you stand on that whole issue?
Lizzy: Well, it is unfortunately true, because most people don’t know that if you buy the album in your area, if everyone buys the album, that’s where the tour goes, so the tour goes to where the people buy the record. So, if you just stream it or download it, it’s hard to figure that out. But I did want to make this record, I have an old record deal from the 1980’s, and then when the music industry collapsed, it made absolutely no sense to make records based on the way that they used to do business, because there’s no marketing, none of the things that were in place before are not there anymore, and certainly not the money. In the eighties, they just threw money at it, and it worked, but that whole industry collapsed and it made no sense, but Brian Slagel from Metal Blade Records came to me and said, look Metal Blades has figured out a way to continue through this collapse, and they’ve actually prospered, they’ve been able to do it in a different way and change the whole system, and this system the they use doesn’t even resemble the old 80’s model. So, then I signed a record deal based on those new parameters, and it made sense to make new records again, so I’m happy I did because I really missed being a recording artist, because all I was doing was touring, and I love touring, but I like the process of making an album and going off and promoting that album on tour, and so I’m back to doing it that way and I love it!
Mark: That’s great, and it’s a multi album deal, I hear?
Lizzy: Yes it is, and I’ve already started the skeleton of the next record, I’ve been throwing ideas around, I’m going to tour first, but I am definitely excited to be a recording artist again, I’ve got so many ideas “bubbling” because it’s been so long since I’ve been in that recording/touring cycle. At one point in my career we released 4 releases in fourteen months, that’s how much I was so in to it!
Mark: That’s cool, the last time I saw you, and there’s been a few times over the years, was in 2010, at Rock in America, in Oklahoma City, great days!!
Lizzy: Yeah some of those things you remember forever, and we played a lot, and I remember elements of each one, you know you’re making magic with whatever little time you have, and it’s pretty amazing.
Mark: It is. It’s very much a solo effort, but then again I guess all Lizzy Borden albums have just been you there with Joey, who’s been there since the beginning, what sort of input does he give you?
Lizzy: He’s the glue that holds it all together really, because I’m the mad scientist!! He keeps it all together and keeps me going down where I want to go, plus we grew up with the same music, so we are basically on the same page. We’ve had so many different line-ups, and sometimes if I bring different musicians in, they bring their baggage and their influences in, and with this record I wanted to keep it pure, keep it pure with my influences, and Joey was right on board with that, he plays old school drums, so his input was essential to make this record happen.
Mark: Would it be fair to say that this is your most diverse record to date?
Lizzy: I think so because like I said, I think it’s the most pure one. I’ve always brought musicians in, even if I’ve played guitar, I’ve had other guitarists play on the same album and so it waters it down with other people’s influences, and sometimes it’s really amazing and really good, but other times it veers away from the way I originally wrote the song. So, this one all the songs I worked on I wanted to stay pure but I also wanted them to be diverse from each other, so you weren’t going to hear the same song twice you were going to hear a whole different song but under the same umbrella, under the same flavourings, and you knew it was the same band. And so far the reviews we’ve been getting, I’ve never got ten out of ten or five out of five, I’ve never had that in my life!! It’s blowing my mind and so I’m glad I stuck to my guns on this one!
Mark: Yeah, it is fantastic and works really well, there are some great tracks and the video, “Long May They Haunt Us” is a fabulous song, but the one I can’t stop playing is “Obsessed With You”, can you tell us a little bit about that song, it has some great lyrics.
Lizzy: Yeah, that’s the next video; we’re actually starting to write the script for that right now, it’s being released as the next video! I’m with you; I think it’s the best single on the record, some of the elements of that song have been around for a while, I wrote it a few years ago, but for this album I rewrote the whole thing, but I kept pieces of it here and there. It came together so well, I have a folder that I call the junkyard where I have demos, riffs and ideas, so whenever I’m looking for something that might fit a record I’m working on, I go to the junkyard and pick through the pile! I picked through the pile for this song and got the best stuff out for it, and it came together so organically, even though I had a piece of it, the rest of it fell together so amazingly. The whole album I kind of wrote about love, I wanted to write different angles about love, not just the same old thing you hear about from a lot of other bands. Of course, “Obsessed With You” is a whole different kind of love, and I wanted to explore that, I didn’t want it to be what you think it’s going to be, I wanted it to be up in the air, where this person is obsessed with this person, and seemingly you don’t know if they know each other, or they have a relationship and I kind of wanted to open that up, so when you listen to it, you don’t know if it’s a delusion or its reality. So that’s why I worked hard on the lyrics to try and make sure there was no distinction between that, the listener has to figure that out for themselves. That’s how I took to that; I didn’t want to make it so obvious.
Mark: It works great, and there are plenty of other great songs on there, “Scar Across my Heart “ has got a huge chorus, it’s probably one of the most addictive songs on there I think, but the closer, “We Belong to the Shadows”, sounds absolutely huge too!
Lizzy: Yeah, “Scar Across my Heart” is due to be released on video after obsessed!! And like you said, the last song is getting just so much response! I didn’t know what kind of response we would get for that one because it’s an unusual song for me to write, I had so many lyrics for that song, I had so much going on in that song and then when I was recording it I realised it was just too much! So, I just started singing, and based on some of the lyrics that I had, and again it came together organically even though I wrote so much for that song, by the end I used very little of what I wrote, it came together so well and I was really happy with that song.
Mark: You mentioned earlier that this was going to be the Lizzy Borden “love” album, and I guess a lot of your earlier albums have a theme running through them. Does that theme come to you as you write or do you have it in mind before you start the creative process?
Lizzy: I usually have a theme in mind to control it, I know where I want to go, and when I look through my junkyard of songs, I usually try and write all new songs but when I’m about three quarters of the way through I go through my junkyard to see if I can find anything that would work for that album. I usually have an idea of where I want to go, but for this album I actually didn’t. I had too many songs, about thirty or forty songs that I was working on, and then once I had signed the record deal, I had to start thinking about how to cut this down and figure out what this album had to say and what I want to write about. The songs that were gelling together were the ones that were under the umbrella of “love”, so I realised, ok, I did “Deal with the Devil” about religion, I did “Appointment with Death” about death, so I wanted to do something a little different, and because the songs that I was writing kind of fit in that mould, it helped me figure out where I was going and it all fell in to place. But, usually I do have an idea, but with this one I didn’t get to where I was going until I was mostly through the record and realised oh, that’s what this record is!
Mark: Can you take it all the way back for us, to when you either picked up an instrument, or realised that music was going to be your life? Was it a gradual realization for you, or did something happen to tip you in to a life of music?
Lizzy: For some reason, my parents had music going on in the house all the time, this was before cable, so no one even turned on the TV, and so it was just music all the time. My dad loved R&B, and my mum loved Tom Jones and Elvis, and so I had that playing constantly and the radio was always on, and for some reason I always wanted to play guitar. My grandfather bought me my first guitar I think when I was around six or seven, and I kind of wandered through it, I had no direction, that whole thing was bubbling and starting to happen in the seventies, so once I started to listen to different kinds of music, and the radio at that time was playing so many different kinds of music from Punk, to Pop to Metal, there was no guideline on the radio, so I got influenced by so many different types of things, there was a “poppy” kind of song followed by Black Sabbath or a Led Zeppelin song, then it would go on to another pop song, or country song, so they didn’t have different radio stations playing different kinds of songs back then. It was amazing to have all that, and then the first concert I ever went to when I was fifteen, I went to Kiss! And that’s when I said, I want to do that!!
Mark: That’s fantastic! You’ve always been known for your stage shows, and the drama and the performance you put in to them as well, and a few bands seem to have really mastered that, and I guess in the early years that’s what made you stand out. Does the magic of performing change over the years?
Lizzy: Yeah, it evolved based on the audience. In the early days the audiences were so young, and so frenzied, and so even though I created the show I knew how the show was going to go over, even before we performed in front of an audience. The audience reacted exactly the way I wanted them to, and then when the audience gets older, they would act a little differently, and so then you have to change the show based on that evolution. Now, we’re back playing around the world, and the audience has got younger again, and they’re having that same thing that was happening in 1987, they’re singing along with every song now, and so that is also another evolution of where I take the show, the audience dictates where I go. On the last tour they were singing every chorus, which was just amazing, so that helps me select which songs I’m going to play live from the back catalogue, and even influenced how I wrote this last album. The songs they were singing to and reacting to were closer to the songs on this album than they were to some of the other songs in the back catalogue. That evolution is really what guides me.
Mark: So, talking of touring, where are you going first? Presumably the US, but are you going to be taking the album overseas as well?
Lizzy: Yeah, this has been a restart, a reboot, because there was no record, and the last tour we did was the” Adversity Tour”, and so I decided I needed to reboot, I decided to get a whole new line up, put together the album and get a whole show together that I can actually take on the road, because sometimes when you fly in, it’s kind of a rip off not only for me, but also for the fans because we don’t have a production, so I want to make sure I have a production wherever I go. I’m working on that right now, but the first thing I wanted was this album to come out, because I knew I was going to build the whole show around “My Midnight Things” theme and I wanted the production to look at everything, because I’m going to play those songs, we’ll play some back catalogue songs, but it’s mainly going to be about this album. So, as soon as the album comes out and everyone gets used to it, we’ll start booking, we’re going to be playing everywhere all around the world, the Asian Markets, South American markets. We’ve never been to Australia, but I’ve always wanted to go, we’ve been close a couple of times, we had promoters over there, and were so close to a deal, but it never worked out. I would love to take the show there and of course we’re going to Europe and everywhere else!
Mark: We would love to see you over here, and a mention that the album is released here on June 15th. Just a couple of quick questions left to finish on, ones we ask everyone traditionally. If you could have been a fly on the wall for the making of any album, just to see how the magic happened, what album would that be for you?
Lizzy: Of course, I would love to see how Sgt Pepper was made, detail by detail, by The Beatles, but I would have also loved to have been there for the making of “Destroyer” by Kiss, and “Billion Dollar Babies” by Alice Cooper. Those albums were produced by Bob Ezrin and they’re so unique, not only to the bands but to the whole genre, they can’t even duplicate those records; they were on some other wave length when they recorded those albums, and everything was amazing as regards vocals and everything else!
Mark: Two killer albums there! Our final easy question, what is the meaning of life?
Lizzy: Happiness, I’ve seen so many people go through life with a cloud over their head and it’s no way to waste what precious little time we have on this planet, and so it’s happiness.
Mark: Wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today, Lizzy, all the best with the new album, and hope to see you here in Australia one day. Take care.
Lizzy: it was great talking to you, and yes, I hope people buy the record over there and we get to bring the show over, it would be amazing! Bye.
Mark Rockpit spoke to Lizzy Borden in June 2018
My Midnight Things was mixed by Greg Fidelman (Metallica, Black Sabbath, Adele, U2) and mastered by Tom Baker (David Bowie, Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Tom Petty)
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