Sons Of Perdition
Interview by Ashlee Elfman

I am currently listening to The Kingdom Is On Fire, The Sons Of Perdition's soon to be released first album. The Sons are masters of loneliness, despair and they carry with them a most unearthly fear of God. Aside from the lyrics that manage to creep their way into the cavernous depths of your psyche that either make you want to feverishly repent your sins or keep committing them, one can't help but pay attention to the masterful musicianship that calls to mind the wind's whistle through a lonesome valley and down through the swamplands. To add to this amalgam of dark and glorious music is Zebulon Whatley's melancholy and foreboding vocals. I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with Zeb about his new album...

Zeb, what were you listening to and/or reading while you were writing the songs for The Kingdom Is On Fire? I think I may have a good idea what you might have been reading...

Well the songs were written over a three-year period, so I can't remember everything I was reading at the time, but there are a few things that stick out as really informing the song writing. Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian", Nick Cave's "And The Ass Saw The Angel", some Karen Armstrong books about The Good Book that my brother gave me, lots of Norse mythology, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Milton's "Paradise Lost", books on cryptozoology, H.P. Lovecraft etc. I was listening to stuff like Howling Wolf, Hank Williams, Birthday Party, and lots of other junk.

How would you best describe your song writing process? Is much moonshine involved in such matters?

I'm regrettably more sober than most, and the births of most of the songs are really pretty mundane. A lot of times I'll just get a line stuck in my head; it festers and infects until a few months later it bursts forth like Athena sprouting fully-formed from Zeus' ruined skull. I usually write songs in reverse, from the end to the beginning. And the music is almost invariably an afterthought. I may come up with a chord progression, but everything else is made up during the recording process.

On your Myspace page it says that the rest of your band were shot to death by some vicious lawdogs, and that you yourself shot Crawford, your banjo and lead guitar player for telling the law on your posse. Are you currently looking for talented musicians to work with so you can go on tour?

Much like your friendly neighborhood sex predator, we're always on the prowl for new blood. Preferably folks that are a bit more resistant to lead and not quite as flakey as that damnable Judas Crawford's greasy scalp.

I'm surprised to hear that your shack in the middle of nowhere actually has internet access. Have you gotten any bizarre letters from fans who have heard your songs on your page?

Oh yeah, I may live in the brackish backwaters of the world, but I'm not entirely oblivious to the twentieth century and all its technical doohickyness. It's pretty easy for me to get email and whatnot. I just carve my message into an unnecessarily heavy log which is handed off to my deaf-mute hunchback of a second cousin who wades through the swamps for the scant thirty miles or so into town. He hands it off to my moonshine distributor who has a lobster-handed sister that's dating a carnie who occasionally travels through a town with an internet cafe, where he promptly enters the message into that internet thing. I had to cease my preferred method of sending communiqués, that being smoke signals, after they got outta hand and burned down the outhouse. We've received a shamefully small amount of genuinely odd letters from folks. We've had plenty of nice ones, but none that really made the hair on my back stand on end.

You are signed to Gravewax Records, a wonderful record company. Are there certain bands that are signed to Gravewax that you'd like to tour with?

Honestly, I'd feel honored to tour with any of the bands on GraveWax. As I lay awake into the wee hours of dawn on my soggy cot, I roll around the idea of touring with Those Poor Bastards and Rainer Hass. That Hass fellow is regrettably very dead, so the foeter alone might drive all the hipsters out of the club, but I think the whole ordeal would go swimmingly.

I know you have a song called "I Wanna Go To Heaven", but I can't help but feel that Hell is always looming (okay, more like lumbering) in the background of your songs. Can you explain this tortured paradox?

Sure; Hell is always there but it's something to be feared. Some of the best sermons I've been witness to have been really bloody hellfire and brimstone rants. To ignore the threat of Hell is vain. At the same time, to completely ignore the opposite end of the spiritual spectrum is missing out on the whole human experience. It can't all be about rainbows and unicorn farts. There's a very real infernal menace, and to ignore his ebony claws is a deadly fallacy.

Do you have a favorite song on the album? I personally love to listen to the album the entire way through, which I always see as a sign of master songwriting. However, I assume, being the artist that created the album, there must a track that has a particular place in your heart.

Nope, not really. Pardon the glib response, but after writing, recording, listening, mixing, listening, ad nauseum, I become more than a bit detached. Every few months I go back and listen to the songs I've previously recorded and some always jump out. At the same time, others that I had high hopes for strike me as embarrassingly awful and are promptly buried in the ground like the dead and rotting things that they are.

Can you give me a bit of your background? What led you to create The Sons Of Perdition and all of these wonderfully haunting songs?

I'm an art school dropout that always had a penchant for the melancholy and a taste for weird tales. This, coupled with my musical taste, resulted in the band which is a culmination of my likes. It's about as true of a representation of my aesthetic leanings as I figure there ever has been.

What might the listening public be looking forward to in the future from The Sons Of Perdition?

Oh, another album to be sure. I've written about five songs. While I can't entirely shake off my eschatological obsessions, it's gonna focus more on regional Texan legends. And it's gonna be mean as Hell. I also hope to play a lot of live shows damn soon.

When might we expect to be able to purchase The Kingdom Is On Fire, and where can we expect to purchase it from?

You'll be able to buy it at any number of online sites as well as order it from your local record store of choice, but why do this when you can further line my pockets by buying it directly from GraveWax Records? As far as a timeline goes, every time I set a release date for something, Satan sticks in his interfering claws and makes me look like a real bastard. The recording is done; the only thing lacking is about 20% of the artwork, then mastering the songs and pressing the things. So lemme just say soon. Damn soon. So keep those milky little eyeballs peeled.

 

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