Dan Watson
Hexx
Hello, the honor is all mine. Thank you for the interview! I have been doing well, all things considered. Thanks for asking!
Like most recording artists and live performers, we are dead in the water at the moment. Luckily for us, we managed to write and record our new album before the Covid-19 Pandemic hit. Releasing an album amidst a worldwide pandemic is new territory for us, and everybody else too. For Hexx it has been next to impossible to tour and do the occasional festival under the best of conditions so I'm fairly certain that it will be unlikely that we will be able to perform anywhere to support the new release. That really sucks because we are getting older and we wanted to get out there and perform as much as we can before one of us becomes too old, sick, or dead to continue.
Yes, ever since we reformed to perform at the KIT festival it has been our goal to return to our early US Power metal roots. Hexx has always been an underdog band. Coming out of the San Francisco bay area in the early-mid 1980s the competition was fierce. You know how it is, there is only so much room at the top.
There is an anti-religious sentiment that makes itself clear throughout this album. Several of the songs deal with the hypocrisy of religion and their followers. I grew up as the son of a religious cult leader in the 1960s and 1970s. I saw at a very young age first hand how religion and religious leaders manipulate and control their weak-minded followers. How they use their followers' lack of intellect and critical thinking skills against them to serve their own purposes.
With this album art, I wanted to engage the viewer and make them think. To expose the hypocrisy and evil that not only Catholicism and Christianity have perpetrated on humanity for thousands of years but also other mainstream faith-based religious doctrines like Islam. As an atheist and free thinking metal musician, I feel it's my job to piss off religious people by exposing their ignorance and hypocrisy.
Yeah, the term 'blind faith' is redundant. When it comes to religious faith, faith by definition is belief without evidence and reason. Coincidentally that is also the definition of delusion. Unfortunately, faith relies on hope and ignorance. Only education and critical thinking can allow us the means to correct our mistakes. Religious people become prisoners of their beliefs and unfortunately 'belief ' is not reliable criteria for reality so we find most of these people spend their entire lives in an auto deceptive self-delusion.
Faith in one's belief produces a barrier to further investigation. Religious groups that differ in beliefs from other societies cannot see past their own barriers. When hate enters into the prison of their beliefs, the seeds for violence to act out against other societies come to full bloom. History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death, suffering, and misery than the word of somebody's god.
With this new album, we took the lessons we learned from recording "Wrath of the Reaper" to heart and made the necessary improvements. The material from its inception was designed to be easy and fun to play live yet still deliver a powerful and dramatic experience whether you are listening to the recording or watching us perform live.
I think it is still yet to be seen what difference or impact this album will have if any. If there are any key features I would say that the performances by the guys in the band are the main key features. Everybody played their ass off on this record. The songwriting is probably the next best feature.
I like to think that I am constantly evolving and improving as a songwriter. The material on "Entangled in Sin" is more focused and refined. A direct result of the things we thought needed improving on the "Wrath of the Reaper" release.
I really love the way this album sounds. It has that raw energy I wanted to capture from the group. We made a conscious effort to recapture that sound from that period of the late 1980s.
I think if we tried to polish and clean it up too much we would lose our identity. We are what we are. We do what we do. Besides, we have never had the recording budget to get to fancy with the production. Probably a good thing.
them?
Oh yeah, Eddy just crushed everything on this album and he did an exceptionally great job on the re-recordings of "Night of Pain" and "Terror". He just fucking killed it! I am so proud of him. He really stepped up and delivered the goods on this recording. He did a fantastic job on "Wrath of the Reaper" as well but he really took his vocal contribution to the next level on this one.
It was our manager, Bart Gabriel who suggested it might be a good time to re-record a couple of the most memorable songs from our debut release "No Escape".
The thinking here was that it would be great to re-record those two songs because the production on our first album was not that great and we thought we could do a better job of it now with the new line up and with the advantages of current recording technologies. Back when we recorded that first album we were still recording on two-inch master tape. If we needed to make an edit sometimes you actually had to cut the tape and splice it back together Fred Flintstone-Frankenstein style!
The idea was to have our original bass player Bill Peterson record bass on both of these tracks but unfortunately, he passed away a week before his studio session so it was hard to deal with at the time.
Signal 30 is an old California Highway Patrol radio code used in the 1950s and 1960s for a highway fatality. I-5 is short for Interstate 5 that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles and runs up California and through the states of Oregon and Washington. In the United States, they also made a driver's education film of the same name. It was aimed at new drivers as a means to stress the dangers and responsibilities of driving a motor vehicle. They showed actual footage filmed at the scenes of fatal auto accidents. Very bloody and gory.
Years ago I bought a DVD called "Hell's Highways" it contained most of the early drivers training films including Signal-30. The video also contained a lot of unedited color footage from the 1950s of fatal auto accidents in California. This was back before seatbelts were mandatory and the cars Detroit was churning out were made of much thicker steel. Even the dashboards were made of steel and safety glass was not yet common.
About ten years ago I was driving back to the bay area on I-5 from Los Angeles with the bass player from the Hellbillys after spending the weekend mixing the new Hellbillys album "Blood Trilogy Vol. 2" when we came upon a grizzly auto accident. A car had tried to pass other vehicles on the four-lane highway and clipped the cement base of an overpass.
The vehicle had spun out of control and collided with several other motorists resulting in multiple fatalities. Bodies were scattered all over the interstate. Mostly families returning to the bay area from the long holiday weekend. It was horrific. I had never seen men, women, and children's bodies severed and ripped apart like that up close. Most were killed on impact but some were still clinging to life. I will never forget the look in one little girl's eyes as we drove slowly by the scene. She had been torn in half from the waist and she was still alive. There was nothing anyone could do. It made a lasting impression on me. I am now a much more cautious driver.
I wrote the song Signal 30 I-5 not only to remember those who were unfortunate enough to lose their lives in an auto accident but also as a reminder that life is very fragile and may be taken away at any moment.
All I know is that 'mid 80s toughness and directness as you put it, is what I like and respond to. I love to hear well-polished metal music as well but for me, I consider myself a songwriter and storyteller first and foremost so no matter how polished and clean a metal track is, if I don't hear the story or can't get a grasp of what the message of the song is after a minute or two I lose interest. If the message is clear but is a well-worn subject or metal trope it will bore me so I make a conscious effort not to make those, what I consider to be mistakes during the songwriting process.
That's a good question. I don't have an answer for that at this time. I'm reminded when the Beatles recorded their immortal classic album "Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band". They were sick of touring and live performances because the crowd was so loud they couldn't hear themselves well enough to play. They couldn't evolve as musicians and songwriters. The idea was that the record would go on tour, not the band. If you can't see your favorite artists in a live setting like today the next best thing is to blast the record and lay on your bed reading the lyrics and liner notes like the good old days. Sometimes it's the simple pleasures in life that matter most.
I don't know. I'm a little worried that the world may never go back to the way it was or at least it may take several years to get this pandemic under control and contained enough for things to back to normal. I'm afraid we are in the new normal now and that's the way it's going to stay. At least here in the states until we have competent leadership in our government. I'm not going to hold my breath for that though.
I don't know. We have fulfilled our contractual obligation to High Roller Records so maybe if this release stirs up enough interest in the band we might get offered an opportunity to make another one. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Dan, it has been awesome, you guys really made it happen with "Entangled In Sin"
and I cannot wait for you to unleash another 80s driven power metal album. Cheers sir.
Thank you, for your kind words, all your thoughtful questions, and this interview. Best regards, Dan Watson
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