STACK #146 Dec 2016

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MUSIC NEWS

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fluttering sound towards the end of Your Mom Is Right that kind of reminds me of a butterfly hitting the sides of a jar. Is this song about escaping something? Good ear – nobody has yet mentioned that. Jeremy Ylvisaker put that track on at the end on one of our last sessions... it totally reminds me of a bug inside of a jar as well. I think the song is about wanting to, but not being able to, escape. It takes on the same message as Hometown (“Hometown goes wherever you go”), but from a different perspective. It echoes of family dysfunction and one's inability to escape that in youth. Q3/ Can you tell us a little bit about the Called You Queen video? It’s adorable. My sister Torey wrote and directed that. She is an amazing visual artist, and has done many of my costumes for my other band Gramma's Boyfriend.

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HALEY BONAR

Q1/ Nagging thoughts seems to permeate this record – do you think those kinds of aches lose their nagging power when you sing about them, or do they just take a form that’s handleable? Impossible Dream , a bittersweet collection of reflective, sometimes ascetic tunes. Prolific indie folk artist Haley Bonar has just released her latest album

She and I have been collaborating our entire lives, and so it was really fun to see her take on a new medium using my music. My other sister Sydney stars as the lead in this and the Kismet Kill video - she's so good on screen, so uniquely captivating and beautiful. I had recently re-watched The Wizard of Oz and was deeply inspired to create something that was a modern-ish version of it... Torey's ideas and mine swirled around and the end product was this video. I love the light-heartedness of it, the child’s

perspective; the need for salvation and adoration, gluttony and self-love.

I'm not sure if they were ever 'nagging' per se, but more like ruminating, spinning around my atmosphere until I find a way to write it out. They take on a new form of power, probably more so, by becoming something poetic in a song.

Q4/ Are you singing “piss in your ice-cream” at the end of Jealous Girls ? Yes. The line is "You wonder when you'll wake up from this long-distance daydream of playing while girls scream/ Alone in a hotel, like piss in your ice cream.” All of my lyrics are available in a "library" on my website. :)

Impossible

Dream by Haley Bonar is out now via Thirty Tigers/ Cooking Vinyl.

Q2/ There’s a really tiny ticking,

FACTOID: SIXX:AM enjoy mining the annals of classic rock and pop when looking for ideas – Nikki Sixx cites Queen, David Bowie and Elton John as inspirations for the band's hard rock.

INTERVIEW

NIKKI SIXX SIXX:AM

of SIXX:AM coming from distinguished musical backgrounds, Sixx attests that not only is he a fan of his compadres, there’s never been any resting on individual laurels. “James had a lot of weight as the producer on his shoulders,” he says. (Michael has produced albums for Papa Roach, Alanis Morrisette, Meat Loaf and many others.) “DJ was extremely diligent about pushing himself as a guitar player. The lyrics were very important. There’s no filler.” The live arena is where the trio come into their theatrical own, and Sixx is adamant that commitment and effort are paramount. “It’s a challenge, it’s exciting, it takes your breath away,” he says. “Rock crowds are not easy to win over. If you suck you’re going to get your ass handed to you, and you know that. It doesn’t matter if I was in Mötley Crüe or DJ [Ashba, guitarist] played with Axl [Rose] for a while. If you don’t f-cking bring it, you’re going to get your ass kicked. We take that really seriously.”

for a cause is something people have done across the ages. That wasn’t deliberate. “It’s fantastic when people hear stuff, [and] we go, ‘That actually makes perfect sense,’” says Sixx. “As soon as it’s recorded and done, it’s like giving birth. We hand it off and everybody gets to have their own interpretation. I remember reading an interview with David Bowie and he said, ‘I really didn’t know what some of my songs were about until 10 years after I recorded them.’ I love it.” With all three members

S plitting the 22 songs which together make up SIXX:AM’s two most recent albums, Prayers For The Damned and Prayers For The Blessed , was a job bassist Nikki Sixx specifically prepared for. After a NewYears Eve show with previous band Mötley Crüe, the musician had a few hours sleep and then flew to New Mexico with his wife, with the express purpose of sifting through the material. “I had all the songs in my phone and I just laid there on the beach for a week, listening to them and just making notes,” he says. “We were sending them back and forth. There were a lot of songs, and we had to figure out how they lived together.” The second volume in the pair, Prayers for the Blessed , has just been released. Like its mate (released six months ago), it’s a remarkably compelling call-to-arms without specific disparagement or commendation for a definitive

thing. It’s about the action. “The albums are not political – we are not a political band,” Sixx says. “But it would be shallow of us to not be a mirror of what’s going on around us.” The lyrics in killer single Rise (from Damned ) seem particularly fortuitous, but the best part of the track is the breakdown, in which classical strings accompany singer James Michael’s delicate falsetto, invoking a completely different era. It inspires the feeling that fighting

DECEMBER 2016

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