It’s been over 10 years since Heathen last released an album with “The Evolution of Chaos” celebrating it’s 10th anniversary last year. It’s not often a band gets to do that but there is a story behind the big gap as we find out in our interview with vocalist David White where we go into the details of the new album “Empire Of The Blind” which comes out on September 18th, plus we go back in history to the very beginnings of Heathen.
Andrew: I know everyone has been affected by this pandemic thing so how has everything been on your end?
David: Well my end, I’m originally from California from the Bay Area but my wife’s from the east coast and her parents are here in Florida. So when we were in the shelter in place order we spent about a month back in the Bay Area and we thought if this is going to keep going like this, we might as well go and make sure your parents are ok. We drove across country and came to Florida, we’ve been here ever since. We’re close to the beach so it’s actually been ok, we’re still keeping our distance from crowds and all that kind of stuff but we’re able to enjoy the nice weather and the beach and all that. So it hasn’t been so bad, it’s just a little frustrating not to be able to get out and promote this record that’s about to come out.
Andrew: Yeah that’s right, it comes out in September – “Empire Of The Blind”. I had a chance to listen to it yesterday and it’s fantastic, it seems like obviously 10 years since the last album came out so it must be a relief to have this finally come out after such a long time.
David: Yeah which makes it that much more frustrating. The album was actually slated to come out in June and we would of been in Europe right now, close to finishing up the second leg of our European tour. But as far as the time frame, we toured about 3 years on “The Evolution of Chaos” and then as we were writing stuff for the new record, Gary Holt was filling in for Jeff Hanneman in Slayer which took him away from the Exodus schedule and Kragen (Lum, guitars) had filled in for him and then when Jeff passed away, Gary became much busier and the Exodus train wanted to keep rolling so they enlisted my second guitar player and he then had to take a pause for a little bit there and that was frustrating but it is what it is.
Andrew: Yeah but finally it’s coming out and exciting for the Heathen fans out there. What’s the anticipation like from your end? I know it’s been such a long time and a lot of fans have been waiting but was there a particular thing that you wanted to achieve with this album because of the fact that it had been such a long time from the last one or was it just the next Heathen album so to speak?
David: Yeah it’s a little bit of everything. I think for the most part it’s just to stay relevant and keep on track, even though it’s been a bit of time we wanted to make sure we get out there with a strong record and just keep building on what we’ve achieved so far.
Andrew: So when did you start writing this album and what were some of the inspirations behind it?
David: Well the writing started probably not long after “The Evolution Of Chaos” was finished. Kragen had started writing right away, Lee (Altus, guitars) had a lot of riffs in his tool box which he still has. I mean some of the riffs actually went to Exodus that could of been Heathen riffs but it’s been a process over the years and Kragen, as he was building on the writing for the record, on his end it started to turn into a monster where he was building upon songs and then starting to write lyrics and started having more of a vision for the record. It was kind of conceptual in terms but he definitely had a clear vision and Kragen Lum actually wrote this entire new Heathen record from top to bottom.
Andrew: Well like I said it sounds fantastic and really glad to see a new Heathen album come out. You mentioned how there was sort of a conceptual thing behind it, what was some of the ideas with that?
David: Well you know, “Empire Of The Blind”, we’re living in a world where there’s a lot of information coming from all angles and a lot of political unrest and still even with our country, we’re embodied in war. We’re busy in the Middle East trying to do whatever their trying to do and it’s just a huge mess and I think society is getting lost in social media and so I think that we’ve always tried to tap on current events. It’s exciting in one aspect and it’s also pretty insane in the other aspect of things so there’s a plethora of things to write about at this point.
Andrew: Yeah it’s certainly an interesting time and Heathen has been around for such a long time which has had the ability to make social commentaries and stuff like that on the world around us. What do you think just based on your own personal experiences and how it sort of relates to the band, how do you think the world has changed outside of social media and technology, how do you think people relate to each other now? Do you think it’s changed or do you think it’s pretty much the same?
David: Oh it’s definitely changed, absolutely it’s changed. I think with all the different types of communication devices it’s opened up the world, just like now I’m talking to you and you’re in Australia and I have friends over there and I have friends all over Europe and playing in a heavy metal band has given me the licence to travel and meet people from everywhere all over the world and that in itself is amazing. But then on the other hand, with the different types of social media and things like that where there is different avenues that have created lots of weird type of peer pressures and it’s really affecting the young kids, I think they’re getting on the internet and different social media platforms that maybe they’re not ready as far as maturity, I don’t think they’re ready for it yet. I think there’s too much pressure and a lot of friction with that and it drives me crazy, Facebook in the beginning was pretty cool, people get in touch with each other and finding friends you haven’t talked to for a long time and you’re able to find them and I think that was such a positive thing. Now it’s full of political banter and political news that’s not necessarily truthful and people tend to think that some of it is real, easily manipulated and there you have Empire Of The Blind, the blind leading the blind, we’ve lost our way in a major way.
Andrew: It can be frustrating at the same time because you kind of think there’s a lot of ignorance played around because social media tends to be an instigator, at least from my perspective. I don’t know if you are much of a social media person yourself, does the band and yourself get into that kind of stuff?
David: I try to stay away when there’s political stuff that’s shared on my page, I tend to get rid of it because I’m somewhere in the middle with things and I think it’s important for people to think for themselves and not be influenced by propaganda. But it’s the nice medium, we have a fanclub that we put together on Facebook, Victims Of Chaos, and we have a bunch of fans that have chimed in and signed up for the fanclub on that level and we try to stay in touch with them. We have a few words back and forth, bringing up if they have questions or whatever and I think it’s cool because they’re talking to us and then we can talk to them and so that one day when we come to their country or come to their town they can go, ‘Yeah I’m Danny from Berlin’ or whatever and we talked about this and it’s like you can meet the person in-person and you’ve already developed some type of friendship or whatever. I think it’s amazing on that aspect, that you can reach out to people from all over the globe. So in that sense I think it’s amazing.
READ REVIEW OF EMPIRE OF THE BLIND
Andrew: Yeah I agree, I think with everything there’s always a balance, there’s negatives and positives to a lot of stuff. So I do want to ask you before we run out of time, I’ve been a Heathen fan myself for a long time and I was always interested in the background of the band and how you got started in music as there’s always an interesting story with everyone. How did you actually personally get into music and why thrash metal?
David: Haha well I don’t know why thrash metal. As a little kid I was always drawn to music like most kids are, little children they hear music, they kind of move around. But I had a cousin that was a drummer, he was older, he was a jazz drummer and I would go visit the family that drum set would be sitting down stairs in the studio and I was immediately drawn to it and he was great, he’d be ‘Oh go ahead’ and show me a few things and let me kind of play on it and believe me, I was 3 years old at my oldest memory of that so I thought I was playing great! But as I got a little older, I have an older sister and that was the 60’s for me so she was playing music like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and it was just me and her and I would sing to her with the hair brush to the records that she would play. The Beatles had a cartoon when I was a kid on Saturday morning and of course I watched The Monkees, and even The Monkees they had cool songs and I remember trying to play those songs with my cousin. I had a little drum set, he had a little guitar, we were just yelling and banging on stuff but we were trying to make music. The Monkees oddly enough as a kid, that’s where I learned or was exposed to Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa was was a guest on their show, he was dressed up as Mike Nesmith and Mike Nesmith was dressed up as Frank Zappa and Mike was supposed to be interviewing Frank Zappa but they reversed roles and as I grew up I saw it again and was like, ‘Who is this Frank Zappa guy?’ So of course I’m looking for Frank Zappa records and then as not quite a teenager, I had a friend whose cousin who turned us on to Cheech and Chong and on one of their records they’re talking about Black Sabbath so I’m like, ‘What’s Black Sabbath!’
So that’s where I got turned on to metal but I always wanted to play drums, I was playing a little bit of drums and then as a kid in school we had a little bit of a music program and it didn’t have drums so I took up the trumpet, anything I could do to play music. So I started doing that all the way through high school but I also in the 6th grade my music teacher brought in a snare drum and started teaching me how to read music for the snare in drums, then I got a drum set and junior high was concert band and high school was jazz band and that kind of stuff so I was primarily a drummer back then. Then there was a big party up in the Oakland hills, everyone was jamming together, I played drums that day and then everybody was like, ‘Hey does anybody know the lyrics to Iron Man?’ I was obviously a huge Black Sabbath fan at that time, I was 16 years old and I was like, ‘I know that song!’, and I grabbed the mic and I sang Iron Man with this huge band, like 2 drummers, 4 guitars, bass and to 200 hundred people and it went over pretty good and at that moment I was like, ‘I could do this’.
So I was playing a party one night and I was playing drums and my friend Marc Biedermann who was the guitar player for Blind Illusion, who we actually started our first band together – I was playing drums and I had left the band and then later on we became friends again – and we were jamming at a party and after the party was over we were all hanging out and listening to music and I was singing along to something, I think it was Boston, and Marc was like, ‘Hey man you sound pretty good’. And I had been drinking a lot that night and I was like, ‘Yeah I’ll sing for your band’, and he was like, ‘Really?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah why not?’ He was like, ‘Yeah’ and the next day he called me and said, ‘Were you serious about singing for the band?’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ [laughs]. He was like, ‘You know, we were talking last night’, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah I think so’.
So I started doing it and that’s when it took off and I sang with Blind Illusion and I had to learn how to sing and learn how to use my voice and all that stuff and then after years of doing that with them, things got a little bit dicey and I had to take a pause and I got out of there and then later on came in to check out the band Heathen that were looking for a singer and that’s where it began with me with Heathen. And actually Blind Illusion was more more of a progressive band that sort of was going more into the metal zone but Blind Illusion at the time that I was with the group was more Rush meets Black Sabbath meets The Who/Led Zeppelin kind of thing, it was progressive. Then once I hooked up with the Heathen guys that’s when it became more metal for sure.
Andrew: That’s interesting because I know some of the early albums initially you guys were labelled as straight up thrash metal but then you switched up and added progressive elements in your music. Even the last album “The Evolution Of Chaos” was largely to me a very progressive thrash metal album so you guys have always had that element of prog I believe.
David: Yeah and I don’t think that’s intentional, the band has always been very musical and Lee, the way he writes. It’s interesting because it reminds me more of classical music when you really listen to like “Hypnotize”, the intro to “Hypnotize” is very classical, it’s just done with distortion, electric guitars and that kind of thing and there’s elements of that in all our records. But “The Evolution Of Chaos” was a long time in the making and so we had all grown as musicians and as song writers and we had a lot to prove on that record, we put everything we had into that record because we just had no idea what was going to happen and whether we were going to be prevalent or not.
Andrew: Well congratulations on the new album “Empire Of The Blind”, as I said it’s fantastic and I think fans are ready to sink their teeth into new Heathen music. I gotta thank you for your time, really appreciated and hopefully one day at some point if all this pandemic stuff clears out we might be able to see you guys down in Australia.
David: Well we would really love to come down, it’s an area that we haven’t visited yet and I know there’s a lot of metal fans down there.
Andrew: Yeah definitely, we’re waiting for ya!
David: All we can do really at this point is hope that things get better and next year can be just a whole new world again.
PRE-ORDER EMPIRE OF THE BLIND HERE
