INTERVIEW // HORSEBACK
approach to painting, and he is a painter. He’s not a record cover illustrator. In many respects I feel lucky to have worked with him on records because it’s not his primary pursuit, it’s not necessarily how he’s trying to get his work out there. His process is fascinating. His creative process involves trances, like mine often does, and he describes himself as a symbolist painter, so he works with a lot of mythology and folklore, which is also what I’m interested in. We had a lot in common in terms of interests and approach. He’s a fantastic artist and I feel he deserves every bit of attention he gets. He should be one of the most famous artists in the world at this point. Maybe one day. He is one of the few artists I’ve worked with who wanted to be involved on that
level, where we were discussing the thematic elements and how it was going to relate to the mythology. We were talking about that stuff at the earliest stage of the work, especially with Half Blood. He contributed a lot to the ideas at the heart of that record and the cover image he created was one key that allows you access into the thematic elements of the record. Most illustrators and painters will take your idea and run with it, but he wanted to be very active in developing the ideas themselves. I liked that. It was challenging and very rewarding. Is there anything else you have coming up apart from the Horseback album? There’s a Rose Cross record that came out last month on Three Lobed
that’s called Blues From WHAT. That’s still out there, trying to find listeners. I’ve been working really hard these past couple years trying to get a number of records finished and one of those was the Mount Moriah record that came out at the beginning of this year. Another was the Rose Cross record and the third was the Horseback record, so this is going to be the last one in a very busy recent release schedule for me. Beyond that, I’ve been working on another Rose Cross thing, Mount Moriah’s been writing songs and with Horseback, the writing process is often very abstract and not something I sit on specifically to do. It’s often very hard to judge progress with that band.
DEAD RINGERS ARRIVES ON AUGUST 12 ON RELAPSE RECORDS
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