Jeremy Edge may be best known for his work in such bands as Backstreet Law and Candlelight Red but now he returns in a new solo project which sees the guitarist pair up with some of his musician friends including members of Crobot and Dark New Day for a new album that oozes rock n’ roll with a bit of blues. Jeremy also hails from a small town called Williamsport in Pennsylvania which this interviewer here is familiar with, having spent a bit of time living there many years ago which sparked our conversation, not before which we touch on the now obligitory Covid-19 conversation…
Andrew: Thanks for your time, really appreciate it! So hows things at your end at the moment?
Jeremy: Oh really appreciate you guys! Doing great, it’s 9am on my side of the world here and getting ready to do a show here later today actually, first one in a long time actually.
Andrew: Yeah I was just seeing that, you’re playing in Lock Haven right?
Jeremy: Yeah we’re doing this thing by the water, this kind of little amphitheater that’s built right by a dam. It’s kind of cool, I’ve been down there before, it’s really wide open space so they are going to allow us to have some people out there as long as everybody is nice and spread out we’ll have a nice little outdoor show.
Andrew: Yeah everyone that I have talked to over the last couple of months obviously the main topic that we initially get into is the whole covid thing. So how has that been impacting you and everyone in your area at the moment?
Jeremy: It’s put the live aspect of playing to a huge halt because everything that we do is kind of built around social gatherings and people being able to gather in large groups. But it looks like slowly but surely we’re starting to see that open up a little bit, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to fill a stadium anytime soon [laughs]. Not that many of us could anyways but having a few folks here or there in certain situations, it looks like it’s opening up a little bit. I guess it’s about achieving a balance, you want to keep everyone safe but at some point everyone is going to go crazy and want to go out and do something to have a good time.
Andrew: Sure, definitely. Well one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you today was because you are from or live in a town that I am very familiar with because I once lived there myself many years ago.
Jeremy: Oh really? Wow!
Andrew: Yeah so Williamsport, Pennsylvania, are you originally from there or born there or do you just live there?
Jeremy: I just live here, I actually moved to Pennsylvania when I was in my 20’s and I was born and raised in Greenfield, South Carolina. So it may not sound like it but I was born and raised in the south but I lived all over.
Andrew: So what made you move to Williamsport then?
Jeremy: So I picked up and left and started touring with bands when I was, I don’t think old enough to drink [laughs] and all of a sudden I’m touring over Michigan and New York and Virginia and playing places and I hooked up with a band out of Pennsylvania called Backstreet Law, ended up living in where they’re from which is Wellsboro for a little while but eventually ended up moving to Williamsport which is not a big city but compared to Wellsboro it’s a little bigger. More than one grocery store [laughs], that kind of thing.
Andrew: Yeah I was there in the early 2000’s working and living there, out of college basically and I picked Williamsport because I knew a few people living there. I had been to the US before that but it was my intention to really see the country for what it really was and not just LA and New York, I wanted to see the real part of the country and it was really interesting, loved the people there, they were really friendly. I am interested though before we get into your music and stuff, what that town has been like over the last 15 years or so?
Jeremy: It hasn’t changed much, I mean still the thing that people know Williamsport is of course Little League World Series which is actually cancelled for the first time which is probably a good idea as it’s probably not good to have people fly from all over the world to see that this year. But yeah other than that it hasn’t changed a lot, kinda a real small town basically.
Andrew: Well I really enjoyed it there and I was surprised to hear you were from there because your previous band was from there and so I wasn’t aware at the time of a music scene or if there was one or not.
Jeremy: Yeah definitely we had Candlelight Red, I mean basically last band I was in Candlelight Red we were kind of from all over Pennsylvania. We would converge when it was time to play and time to go tour. We did a lot of touring with that band, we did 48 states over and over again. We never got to play overseas, we wanted to but we did the country multiple times over.
Andrew: So that band is not happening anymore now?
Jeremy: We’re just not doing anything, I mean a couple of the guys are local and we see each other often. The singer was going to come out today and sit in with us but he had some things come up. With band stuff people kinda don’t realize that when you’re not on tour you’re dealing with regular life and a lot of times the band changes, personnel changes happen not always because of some VH1 Behind The Music squabble, it’s just life gets in the way. ‘I can’t juggle this and I can’t do everything’. So we still stay in touch very often, I don’t know if we will do anything in the future. That band took a kind of team of people to keep that thing rolling, it’s a very fun project but I’m having a little more fun doing what I’m doing now. It’s kind of more towards what I kind of got into the guitar for whereas Candlelight was a bit more of a heavier kind of thing. I’m into all kinds of rock but that’s probably just one aspect of the stuff that I like to do.
Andrew: Well I had the opportunity to listen to the album that your publicist sent me and I gotta say that we at The Rockpit are big fans of blues music and especially blues rock and everything that you had on this album just ticks all the right boxes, it’s fantastic! How did the whole project come about? How did you get this whole thing started?
Jeremy: Thank you! Yeah I’ve been working with this bass player John Delowery for a while, he’s really good. Actually he answered an ad of mine looking for a bass player 3 years ago and I said I’m looking for a bass player for this project and what are your influences, and he said, ‘Well you know, Tommy Shannon and John Paul Jones and Geezer Butler and Mel from Grand Funk Railroad’ and I was just like, ‘Well you’re probably hired’ [laughs]. We’ve been working together with several different lineups and we were getting this project together in a studio, we had a little band called Black Star Sunrise that we’re doing a few things here and there kind of on the side and it got to the point where some of the other members were kind of like, ‘I’m not going to have time to finish all this’. This is like what we discussed earlier where life gets in the way and everyone stopped. So it kind of morphed into a thing of like, ‘Let’s just bring in some friends’, so we had our friend Dave [ Shaffer] on drums who is super mega talented and then I brought in a keyboard player for a couple of tracks and then I brought in a few friends who did some singing ’cause I have friends who do some really good singing. I consider myself to be a novice singer myself so when I bring them in I had them do some tunes, so I called Brett [Hestla, Dark New Day] and Brandon [Yeagley, Crobot] and that’s kind of how that shaped up.
Andrew: Yeah very cool and I noticed Brandon from Crobot who we are also big fans of as well was a nice little surprise to see on there. Did you know Brandon a long time before this?
Jeremy: Yeah I’ve known Brandon from way back in the Backstreet Law days when his band would open up for us and he’s at least a decade younger than me so when his band opened for me he was something like 16 and people kind of came and got me and said, ‘Hey you gotta hear this kid sing’. He was playing guitar at the time too and we were all just kind of ‘Wow this guy is something spectacular’ and then fast forward a few years later I’ve known him and Chris Bishop known a long time, played in a lot of the bars and stayed friends in bands and stuff and Eddie Collins that plays bass for them now, Eddie I’ve played acoustic shows with his brother. Eddie for a while was doing monitors and stage tech for Candlelight Red and was with us from back in 2011 so I’ve known these guys from way back, they are super talented and very proud to see a Pennsylvania band that are doing really good and so Brandon is definitely one of the most talented musicians right now.
Andrew: Yeah they are a great band and he did a great job on this album as well. I think every song ticks the right boxes for us but there were two in particular for me that really stood out which were “Firedance” and “Lies” and for completely different reasons. “Lies” has that really smoky blues kind of sound and “Firedance” is a Zeppelin rock kind of thing so there seems to be a diverse mix of different songs which I guess is what you wanted to achieve with these songs?
Jeremy: Well yeah I think if we ended up having one vocalist for the whole record it might not have had as much variance but I think to me it’s refreshing of, it tends to be nowadays people want every band and every record to have this definite “this”. Every song has to have some sort of sound that is congruent from track to track and it becomes recycled and I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t start the project with a label in mind so it was kind of I can just do whatever I want. So I have a diverse palette of influences to pull from, it’s not really a blues record, it’s more of a rock record but it has all these blues elements and all these early 70’s / late 60’s elements but it also has elements of straight ahead rock and alternative and a little bit of middle eastern music in there and all kinds of little stuff. I think “Holding In” is more of nod to the Deep Purple “Perfect Strangers” era and Black Sabbath “Heaven and Hell” era but it’s that kind of thing. I wanted to touch on some of those things that people don’t hear often, I didn’t want to just say let’s make it a totally blues record with a bunch of 3 chord tunes.
Andrew: Yeah as I said it sounds fantastic and I really hope this goes well for you because I think sometimes this music can be relegated to maybe something that was once held with certain joys in the past but this music is timeless really. It’s why we are such big fans of it because no matter what era you hear some of these songs, the 70’s, 80’s to now, it’s something tangible that we just can’t seem to get enough of.
Jeremy: Yeah I think people are coming back to it and I think this is good timing, as well as it’s a catch 22 like, ‘Oh wow everybody is kinda doing this right now’ and then they go [monotone voice], ‘Oh wow everybody is kind of doing this’ [laughs]. But yeah I’ve been playing this stuff for years and years and I actually had the idea of doing a project like this all the way back to 2004-2005 and it’s refreshing to see people like Marcus King getting in Rolling Stone and all these new artists that are very influenced by a different era of music and I think it becomes this thing where you dig through some of this stuff and it’s cool to listen to new music but there’s so much of a treasure trove of sounds and music from that era that it’s almost never ending. So it can always be somewhat fresh, at least to my ears. For me just playing rock stuff which is most of my friends and people who are in local bands just say, ‘Well hey we want to do that radio rock stuff, we want to do the power chord stuff”. After a while it just becomes a little too simplistic and a lot of pro-tools and a lot of copy and paste and it’s like, hey it would be nice to have some music where you get to improvise, play all sorts of things and have it nod to music which started it all which was blues, blues started rock n’ roll.
Andrew: Yeah exactly. So talking about some of your influences and stuff, who were some of your early ones when you first started getting into guitar? What inspired you to play music?
Jeremy: I grew up with two older sisters, I was kind of the baby and they had this record collection – they let me have their record collection which was cool. All the 70’s stuff, you name it and the two bands that I was drawn to even though I didn’t know how big they were, I was just a kid in my room, “Oh I like these”, was the Zeppelin and Sabbath records. I remember my sister took me to see Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio, that was my first concert and I can still kind of remember Tony Iommi walking out with his SG and at the time it was a triple Marshall stack and I was like, ‘Yeah that’s what I want to do’ [laughs]. That was it, I was like, I’m ready!’ And then a few days later I went with my Dad and my brother in law and my guitar teacher and we went and saw Stevie Ray Vaughan and Lonnie Mack and I was probably 25 feet from them and I was 12 or 13 years old I think at the time and my Mom had given me a guitar for Christmas and it was a Fender and we went home and they let me stay up in my room until 3am just practicing trying to emulate all the things I saw them do. I would say those two, Iommi and Stevie Ray, that’s kind of what started the whole [thing] I guess you could say.
Andrew: Those two guitarists are obviously hugely influential, especially Iommi who probably influenced and reached a bigger audience than maybe what Stevie Ray Vaughan did just in so many aspects with the metal side, the rock side and even the blues side. I assume then you are more of a Dio era fan than the Ozzy stuff?
Jeremy: Actually I had never heard of the Dio era, I only had the old records and we showed and looked at the program guide which I think I still have and it showed the singer Ronnie James Dio. I remember looking from the album covers like, this is not the same guy but I remember it being very good [laughs]. But I got into Dio later which is cool. One of the projects I played in recently like last year we got to open for Last In Line which was in a theater which was really cool, we’re standing on stage from sound checking and they break into “Straight Through The Heart” and it was just like, ‘Wow that’s it, that’s the sound!’ Vinny [Appice, drummer] is like Bonham, he just plays that one beat and that’s it, it doesn’t matter how many crazy licks you can play, you can just play that one little beat and that pattern and you instantly know it’s that guy and that huge drum sound.
Andrew: Yeah that’s it, sometimes that simple beat or whatever is the way to go. Sometimes simplicity is the best way to approach it.
Jeremy: Oh yeah. I like both [laughs], I went through a Yngwie Malmsteen phase like everyone else did.
Andrew: [laughs]. So you mentioned the upcoming show later tonight in Lock Haven but beyond that, and it may be a little difficult to answer, do you have plans for more shows or do you just don’t know yet?
Jeremy: Absolutely, actually we have another show in Addison, New York in July and it’s going to be very similar. I got a couple of friends sitting in with me today, all these shows that we kind of label under the Jeremy Edge Project I like the idea of bringing in friends to sit in and do a thing. Not your kind of bar room sit in type thing like, ‘Hey do you know this song’, but actually pre-planned stuff. If you’ve ever seen a Jeff Beck show, they usually bring in some bodies like, ‘Hey we’re going to bring in this person to sing these 3 songs’ and we kind of like that and we’re going to keep doing that. I also have a bunch of shows rescheduled for the Fall for one of my other projects, we actually do an Ozzy tribute band which is super fun and challenging and it keeps my chops up and keeps my playing up to speed. Actually the singer Greg is going to sit in with a few songs today, we’re going to some covers. We’re going to do some Creedence Clearwater and some ZZ Top and I think he’s going to do “Man On A Silver Mountain” from Rainbow with us too.
Andrew: Oh cool so sounds like things are going pretty well and looks like getting back to some kind of normalcy I guess which is something we’ve all been waiting for quite a while.
Jeremy: Yeah I mean we had to reschedule for some things and there is still a possibility of course of things that were rescheduled to be pushed back but if that ever happens it’s for everyone’s safety and eventually we will be doing those shows but we just don’t know what the schedule and what the situation is going to kind of give us.
Andrew: Well as I said this album is fantastic and we are really looking forward to sinking our teeth into it and we will get out a review happening as well because I think at least for that kind of music it’s been one of the best albums we’ve heard this year so congratulations.
Jeremy: Thank you.
More info can be found at
Jeremyedge.com and facebook.com/jeremyedgemusic
