Nate Newton is a busy man. Besides playing bass in Converge and being a guitarist in Old Man Gloom he also fronts his own band, called Doomriders. Ghost Cult caught up with him to discuss Grand Blood (Deathwish), the new Doomriders album. He was also keen to tell more about the personal nature of some of the songs, working with producer Kurt Ballou and the upcoming tour schedule.
Darkness Come Alive (released in 2010) received lots of accolades. Was it hard to come up with a suitable successor?
Did it? I honestly don’t pay attention but that’s nice to hear. I think coming up with any album is hard, regardless of it’s predecessor. Writing a good album is difficult and writing one that I myself am happy with is near impossible. Ultimately I’m very happy with Grand Blood. We wanted to challenge ourselves and I feel like we did.
Grand Blood is also a lot rougher around the edges compared to its predecessor. How come?
I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s certainly noisier in places and has some harsher tones in the instrumentation but I feel like the songwriting is much more cohesive than “Darkness..” and that was the point. To write catchy cohesive songs but present them in an almost unpolished way. I feel like this record is more focused than the last one.
The new album is loosely about getting older and taking responsibilities. What does this mean to you personally?
Alot of the lyrics deal with death. Not in a cartoony death metal way but in an every day life kind of way. In my mind that’s what the entire record is about (save a few things here and there). It’s about coping with death and trying moving forward positively. It’s about coming to terms with your own mortality and rethinking how you’ve lived your life and the “legacy” you leave behind.
You’re also involved with Converge and Old Man Gloom. How does his involvement with those two other bands influence the music of Doomriders?
Directly….It doesn’t really. The music I write with each of my bands is the direct sum of it’s parts. The music I write with Converge happens because I’m in the room with those particular people, and the same is true for Old Man Gloom and Doomriders. I think indirectly there has been some influence in that dealing with different people in any creative venture forces you to learn how to work with those people so you can all get to a common goal. So from working with different people in different bands I think it’s helped the process just because I’ve learned from all of these people to communicate a little better.
The new album also features a new drummer who goes by the name of Q. What did he bring to the table and how did he become involved with Doomriders?
Q played drums in a band called Clouds who Doomriders played a lot of shows with. The second I saw him play I knew I wanted to be in a band with him and when JR left Doomriders in my mind there was only one clear choice. It was Q or it was nobody. He’s the perfect fit for this band….very energetic, very steady, but not like a human metronome. Not too polished, not too precise. He plays behind the beat alot which i think brings alot more swagger to the music. He helped quite a bit in the songwriting process because he has a somewhat different frame of reference and pallet of influences than the rest of us do. He breathed new life into the band.
Grand Blood is produced by Kurt Ballou. What did he add to the overall result?
Kurt has really become an amazing engineer and producer. He has a knack for hearing songs and understanding their energy and vibe and then knowing how to make that vibe come across sonically. He tuned right into what we were doing on this record and made everything sound amazing. It’s a very dense recording but everything is still very audible.
‘Dead Friends’ is a very emotional song. Can you tell what is it about and what does it mean to you personally?
It’s pretty self explanatory so it’s difficult for me to really go much further with it. It’s about saying goodbye to people you love. Mat Arluck of Sweet Cobra, Henrik Frykman of Disfear, Tim Morris, and Rich Cunningham…They were all friends who had an effect on my life in some way. I didn’t want to write a weepy song…I wanted to be matter of fact as if I was just having a conversation about my friends. It’s a song about reaching the point in your life where people you love are beginning to die….regularly. It’s about coming to terms with it, and realizing that as you get older it’s going to keep happening and that ultimately dying isn’t negative. It happens to everyone and what matters is how you live….not how you die.
The album is released on Deathwish, which is a very reputable punk and hardcore label, but not much known as a label that releases heavy rock/metal records like Grand Blood. Why did you decide to go with them nonetheless?
They’ve done all of our albums. There is the obvious connection with Jake and myself playing in Converge together, but Deathwish is also a label that has figured out how to flourish while other labels are crumbling. They are certainly known as a punk/hc label but if you go through their entire catalog they’ve taken a lot of “chances”. They are open to just about anything and thats what i like about them.
Vinyl is becoming more and more popular. What do you think of this development?
I don’t really think of it. So long as people want to buy music and make sure the artists are being fairly compensated for their work then the format isn’t really that important to me.
What touring plans do you have in support of the new album?
We’ll be touring the states in November with High On Fire and Kvelertak and are currently planning some European dates for next year.
Raymond Westland