JOB FOR A COWBOY Guitarist: 'We Wanted To Grow As A Band And Be More Mature'

Aaron Willschick of PureGrainAudio.com recently conducted an interview with JOB FOR A COWBOY guitarist Bobby Thompson. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

PureGrainAudio.com: One major difference evident on "Genesis" in comparison to your EP releases is that the vocals have stepped away from what people have called pig squeal type vocals. Why did you decide to step away from this style and do you think it's a step in the right direction for the band?

Bobby: Yeah, Johnny did not want to do that whole pig squeal thing just because we wanted to grow as a band and be more mature. We thought the best thing to do was become a more mature band and that's one thing that we strayed away from is the whole pig squeal and stuff like that, we just wanted him to be a straight death metal vocalist and that's what he felt like too. And on top of that, we wanted everything to be more fast paced and more aggressive except for we have like a doom song too and we just wanted to be a more mature JOB FOR A COWBOY rather than the old, spastic, all over the place, not really having any idea what's going on in the song JOB FOR A COWBOY.

PureGrainAudio.com: What was the writing and recording process like for "Genesis"? When did you start writing, how long did you write for and how much time did you spend in the studio?

Bobby: We got home from the U.K. in mid-August and like we had September to late December to get this thing done so we pretty much had three months. And at that time, we were finding a new drummer as well so like I was stressing out, man, I was getting grey hairs and like losing my hair. And then it was a three months process of just writing material and then after we got in the studio, it was about three weeks, we started in the studio in mid-December and then it went until the first week of January so we had about three weeks. We did it with our friend Cory Spotts, he mixed it and then it was just like a pretty slow process, we would just go in there for twelve hours a day, just hammer stuff out, we did the drums first for like a week and then three of us in the band, the bass player, second guitar player and myself would go in there and just do a song a day and yeah it was a great feeling man, it came out the way I wanted it to so I'm pretty stoked about it.

PureGrainAudio.com: Not too long ago, you guys signed a record deal with the very prominent metal record label Metal Blade Records. What attracted you to signing with Metal Blade over other labels?

Bobby: Well, they flew out to Phoenix just to meet with us and they bought us dinner and they just tried their hardest just to get to sign us. Then we went down to the Metal Blade headquarters in California and we spoke with them there too and we just felt like it was a more homier environment, like they took care of us and they pretty much wanted to make us a big priority and that's what we cared about too. And they wanted us to express ourselves musically the way we wanted to, they didn't want to change us and that's what I liked. Because we had a few labels that wanted to change our sound and we were like that's not for us, this is what we want to do, this is how we want to do it.

Read the entire interview at PureGrainAudio.com.