Metal Monday: 3 Inches of Blood Q&A
posted in: Exclusive Interviews • Rock
Who doesn’t like a big, thick slab of good ol’ heavy metal? Well, you can be assured that 3 Inches of Blood are quite the connoisseurs of their musical style”from big and boisterous riffs to falsetto wails and thunderous drums. Fresh out of the studio from working on their followup to 2009’s Here Awaits Thy Doom, Cam Pipes took a break from channeling his inner Rob Halford and drinking microbrew beer to chat about the upcoming record, tour, and some other stuff.
OS: First things first, Cam, your name is perfect for a vocalist. Does it ever get old trying to convince people that it is indeed your real name?
CP: Not really. It only happens occasionally where people actually question it. It’s usually just the odd fan here and there, but it doesn’t happen as often as you might think. But, if I’m actually in person with someone and they’re like “Is that your real name?!?” I’ll pull out my ID or something so I can go back to the source and say “Yep, this is the original, this is what I was born with.”
OS: How long have you been singing? When did you start doing “extreme” vocals?
CP: Hmmm¦ let’s see. Well, with this band it’s been about, more than ten years now, but I’ve [sung] in other bands…I’ve done death metal, pretty much anything you can think of”punk, hardcore, metal, death metal…I was in like high school or junior high school when I really got into playing extreme music in general. I play bass too, but I kinda fell into the vocal thing just ’cause people I played with were like “Well you should just sing” just ’cause I had less to focus on with Byron being the bassist.
OS: And you’ve never had any classical or formal training, have you?
CP: None whatsoever. It was just an accidental kind of [thing]… It wasn’t until I met my eventual bandmates that it kind of worked out.
OS: The 3 Inches of Blood lineup has changed drastically over the years, how does that affect the songwriting in the band from album to album?
CP: It definitely affected it…Intricacies are gonna change here and there, and influences have pretty much been a constant…Anyone that’s come into the fold and/or left, they have always shared the same desires and opinions about heavy metal, same as anyone who’s ever been in the band. While their playing may be different or their influences may vary here and there, there are a lot of shared influences as well.
OS: So, for writing the upcoming record, was it similar to previous releases where the same people were the primary songwriters for the material?
CP: Yeah, it’s been the same for the past two records now. Since, well, Fire Up the Blades came out.
OS: Can you give us an idea about what the new one will be like? Anything like “Lords of Change“?
CP: You might hear some of that. But those EP songs, we wrote those like a year ago and we did a fair bit of touring before we wrote this new record that we’re about to put out quite a bit after. It seems like we did the seven inch then we toured a whole bunch, then when we were done touring for the year we did a new batch of songwriting so I bet the feel was a bit different. You might hear some carryover in sound, I don’t know. It’s really hard to say, I haven’t really put it into perspective, listening to what we just recorded versus the 7″ songs. I think people will notice a difference in the same way that every record is kind of its own thing, but nothing’s really a huge departure. And, I’ll probably use this every record, but it’s a progression from what we’ve already been doing.
OS: How did you arrive at the decision to record at Vogville/Profile with Terry Sho Murray?
CP: Well, we did the 7″ with Terry, and he’s a guy we’ve worked with before and we’ve known for quite a long time. A lot of mutual friends in the music scene out here, and he’s a good guy to work with. I think we all liked the idea of being at home, keeping it simple and being somewhere where we [don’t] really have to worry so much about having a deadline in our heads…I think we’re a mature enough band at this point where we can go in there and work with a great engineer that we know and co-produce it with him. We feel like we’ve got our own sound already, we don’t need anyone to produce the record for us and create our sound. Maybe when we were younger or less experienced we needed that kind of help, but I think we’ve established ourselves. I took the reigns a little bit more, but worked with someone who’s got likeminded ideas and really understands us and is someone we know really well.
OS: You guys also sort of helped produce Here Awaits Thy Doom didn’t you?
CP: I guess you could say that, although on paper Jack was the producer. Nothing really changed from when we wrote the songs from when we actually went in and recorded. We did all the arrangements ourselves.
OS: To support the new album you’re going out with the metal alliance tour in March. What’s it going to be like sharing the bill with such a huge lineup of bands?
CP: It should be pretty insane. Even with all those bands, I think we’re going to stand out yet again, like on pretty much every tour we’ve done. We don’t see that as a bad thing. Ever. We always like the fact that we stand out and it makes[it] more memorable in that way. I think it’s gonna be a really good tour. There’s a lot of really well established bands with great fanbases. Just mixing them all together should be really interesting.
OS: Have you guys ever done a tour with this many bands who have had this much of a following already?
CP: Well, other than Ozzfest and Mayhem, we’ve never really done a tour with this many bands. Except this one time in Europe we did a seven band tour with The Black Dahlia Murder and Necrophobic and a bunch of others. Other than that, nothing we’ve done stateside as a club tour was anything like this.
OS: The amount of beard per musician in 3 Inches of Blood is pretty intense. Do you feel like it helps you channel the metal when you perform?
CP: Never really thought of it that way. It’s just one of those things. Some of us have just had it for a long time, before we even started doing this. For me, I just kinda felt like it one day and it just stuck. It’s never really been a requirement, and we’ve never said “Hey, you should do this.” Like our drummer Ash, he didn’t have one when he joined the band, but after a couple years he all of a sudden decided to grow one. We never even told him.
OS: Another bit of a silly question, if you had to compare your new album to a specific alcoholic beverage, which would it be and why?
CP: Well, my first thought it to just say “beer””but not just any beer, some microbrew, small batch stuff, good stuff; mostly because a lot of that was consumed when writing and recording this record. It’s hard to put an aesthetic quality on the alcohol and compare that to our music. If we hadn’t been drinking all that microbrew beer, I wouldn’t have known what to say!