With the October 15, 2020 release of its third full-length album In Your Arms, Nashville, Tennessee based Oblivion Myth have established itself as veterans within the current hard music scene. The group got its start trending traditional to power metal territory on 2008 debut Shadow And Light and follow up effort Inside The Mirror from 2016, but on In Your Arms branches out into European influenced power, progressive and symphonic metal territory while still derivative of similar musical themes. Angelic Warlord had the recent opportunity to talk with vocalist Tim McDonald, who offers his thoughts in regards to In Your Arms, his favorite vocalists that have inspired him and what it is like to be an independent artist.
Oblivion Myth just released its third album In Your Arms. What has the band been up to the past four years since putting out its sophomore album Inside The Mirror in 2016? Also, what challenges did Oblivion Myth face during the In Your Arms writing and recording process?
(drummer) Bob Schultz has quite a story to tell - he was literally caught in a fireball in a freak accident and spent 12 days in a burn unit and months of rehab. The significance of the song “Slow Burn” about the unquenchable fires of hell suddenly became a very important song on this disc, because for about two seconds Bob got a very clear vision of what it would be like to burn in Hell, and he’ll be the first one to tell you that you do not want to experience it. He emerged from the flames full of the fire of the Holy Spirit, and it is a remarkable change in him. Everyone knows Bob as a cheerful, genial, happy, friendly guy, quick to smile, but now he is quick with scripture, quick to quote, quick to remind, quick to gently even rebuke his brothers. We are seeing an Anointing in him and it’s amazing.
It is funny that we always seem to lose men overboard (haha) when we enter the studio. This last time we had some good guys who essentially just weren’t sharing the vision, and we had to reluctantly bid them farewell. They’re still our friends and we still talk to them. I met Ryan Mark while doing 6 demos that would become finished songs for In Your Arms, he was a quick study, obviously an ace bass player, and I discovered he was far more. A music teacher who knows theory cold. A multi-instrumentalist. A classical composer. He’s really added a lot with his bass lines, but, he also composed our symphonic intro “Diadem”. Chris Selby was one of the original members of the band and his return is a very triumphant homecoming. I will let him tell his own story, but he needed some time in the wilderness, and the prodigal son has returned. And I can’t tell you what a difference it makes - he’s the perfect cog in this machine. His rapport and experience and understanding of how to play alongside Keith is remarkable. I think my jaw dropped the first time he rehearsed with us (again) and I heard the songs from the first OM album played… correctly! Wow, that still kind of amazes me what a difference it makes to have Chris in the band. He’s really creative and a very solid player, he really anchors the sound and adds a lot of technical precision to make the music tighter.
Please go into detail about the musical direction to In Your Arms. How does it compare to Inside The Mirror?
The truth is that we have a backlog of songs, so we’re just pulling tunes from our catalogs and making them finally real recordings. ITM was a lot of backlog from Keith, and IYA is backlog from me. But there are always new songs that appear right during the production - “Battle Angels” was a brand new song that came out of nowhere during the ITM production, and “Thousand Years” was the new one that came out of nowhere this time. It amuses me that they’re both very triumphant Scandinavian power metal kind of musical melodies, this is definitely a kind of music I enjoy, and writing songs in that genre seems to be something I must do or probably explode.
There is a desire to “write as a band” on the next disc, as it seems obvious that Ryan and Chris have a lot of ideas and a lot of things to say and contribute. Keith and I will almost certainly continue to write on our own and contribute some things, but on the next album you’ll definitely get some “ensemble”, group-written material. Ryan and Chris seem to have some great skills towards making a more ambient, prog, atmospheric kind of album, and that’s going to be fun. We decided to skip the “interludes” and make In Your Arms a more straightforward work, but the next one, we want to get a bit more complex, prog, concept. Ryan’s skills in composing orchestrations, symphonies, even choral works is really game-changing.
What are your feelings about In Your Arms? Are you happy with the way it turned out?
In the words of George Lucas, you never “finish” your work… you simply abandon it. I’m pleased with the final result – in a way you always kind of wake up from the dream and realize it was the hard work of a group of people that accomplished it - but at the same time I think there will always be regrets and little winces about things that we hear, yeah, probably should have fixed that, etc. etc. I’m most pleased with the fact that it’s simply, finally, truly done and published. This one took a while to birth.
What is the meaning behind the In Your Arms title?
The original concept I had planned was a cover that would show a sort of two-panel picture, on a Madonna, i.e. mother Mary holding baby Jesus, and mirroring that with a Pieta, i.e. an image of mother Mary holding the dead body of Jesus, crucified, down from the cross.
In her arms at birth, and at death.
I still think this is an artistically great vision, and we even had a sample mock-up of it created by famous album artist Hugh Syme (he did almost every Rush album, for example). Hugh’s vision took it a step further where it depicted Mary holding baby Jesus, but baby Jesus had wounds on his hands and feet and a crown of thorns. Just my opinion? This is great art. This is what I wanted for the next album. Unfortunately, a great debate occurred over whether having Mary on the cover was right for the band.
This was a point of some contention and I am sorry to say it is probably the only serious wedge the band has ever had to deal with. I try to be a very easygoing, generous, polite, nice guy most of the time, but in the studio I am more of a bulldog, and when I feel very strong about an artistic vision, it is difficult to budge me from it. It’s probably accurate to say it was the band against me in the opinion of this album cover Hugh created for us (which speaks to what a nice guy he really is - the famous Hugh Syme actually did a proof for us just because he likes the band!) We all knew we were in a dangerous spot for the future of the band.
Our wives got together and prayed for us, which I think is amazing. Finally... my daughter Xena went on a weekend trip to the beach with my wife Melinda, and while there, she had some kind of powerful feeling that if she could come up with an album cover, it would break this kind of impasse we were having over the album art. She sketched a design and it did that very thing, a proud papa talking here, and once approved she went into Adobe Illustrator to make it a commercial vector graphic, suitable for printing. So, although I regret the chance to have Hugh Syme do our album cover, yes, that’s one of my extra pride points here – my daughter did the album cover!
Several of my favorite tracks off In Your Arms include “Thousand Years”, “The Veil” and “Heirs To The Throne”. Which songs on the album are your favorites and why?
“Thousand Years” is one that I really enjoy because I’m a huge European symphonic/operatic metal fan, and this is my stab at making some music like that. Having guest singers (especially legit opera soprano Carmen Sanders) really helped us create that choir, chorus, and sense of opera. Keith played probably the greatest solo he’s done yet, which I think is very evocative of Ritchie Blackmore in how it sounds and what he plays. Keith’s evolution as a lead guitarist took a giant step forward on this album, but it’s also just that he’s 4 years better!
“Another Life” pleases me a lot because it’s so much more ‘pop’ than the usual Oblivion Myth material - and I’m not joking - we spent more time in the studio on this one probably than any other song, it amazed me how the simplicity of it actually caused this situation where every single note had to be in its proper place. We make stuff that most musicians would say has some challenge to it, but it’s funny how the simplest song was the hardest to make and took the most effort to get just right.
“Love Child” is the song that I probably had the highest hopes for - I think it’s one of the best choruses I’ve ever written - but I am not entirely satisfied with the final result. It simply doesn’t quite match what I hear in my head, and that is very frustrating when I love the song so much. It sounds better live to me - the gallop is tighter and has more energy. That's one of the problems of studio recordings - how do you capture energy? How do you capture a performance?
“Second Skin” is an older song that I'd written a few years ago but always dreamed of having it properly recorded. I loved the contributions the ladies made in backup vocals, on most of the songs, and then each has a featured song, e.g. Carmen's featured song is "Thousand Years", Vicki Reid's featured song is "Second Skin" - she meticulously doubled my vocals on the verses and choruses - it's almost always both of us singing in unison. Cat Fritchman returns to blow my head off and show me up with her fabulous blues-rock voice on "The Price" - her answering lines at the end of the song make me sound lame in comparison - LOL. The ladies are very professional and great to work with, they are my friends. I am proud of the middle breakdown part on this track, it is all my voice, singing in 3 different octaves. I really like the lead break and think it's one of Keith's best.
Co-writes are something I always enjoy. “Another Life” is a co-write with a Nashville guitarist named Troy Roberson. “The Veil” is a co-write with a Nashville drummer named Robb Sullivan and a guitarist named Robert McNair. “Love Child” is a co-write with a Nashville guitarist named Ralph Rizzuto. They're all great people and musicians and I'm so grateful they were cool with me recording these tracks for real and publishing them.
Keith has this goal of writing a 20-minute song. He keeps creeping towards that goal, haha. HEIRS is his big magnum opus on this album (he wrote every bit of it) and we are definitely expecting the people who like harder music are going to enjoy that track the most, it is certainly the heaviest song on the album, and seemed the perfect track to end the disc, and we also end the set live with that song, it's a great closer.
Oblivion Myth recorded videos to two songs off In Your Arms, “Thousand Years” and “In Your Arms”. How did the video shoot for both go?
It was a marathon, 10-hour shoot. We did it at the historic Capitol Theatre in Lebanon, TN, about 30 miles outside of Nashville. It’s a really lovely theater - not cinema - actual plays, dinner theater, etc. So we made full use of the deep stage, the wonderful huge velvet curtain, and had 3 “stained glass window” props made to give it more of an impression of being in a church or cathedral. Very long, sweaty day, shot on August 30, 2020. We were incredibly blessed by circumstances… Nashville is a huge entertainment capital and there aren’t many bands on tour this year. So there are some stone-cold pros hanging out ready for work and we were able to hire Joey Herro, who has worked with the absolute cream of the country music industry, to do the 4K shoot and videography. Director Don Carr is part of Iron Maiden’s tour/production crew, so he’s seen it at the highest levels. The video crew we had, shot a video for Bon Jovi just the week before! I think when you see the sheer technical quality of the videos it is loud and clear that our crew were total pros. The Lord smiled on us in this phase, as these A-team pros were available, friendly, and gave us a lot of care and extra effort to make the best product. We’re so grateful.
Oblivion Myth did an outstanding job on production to In Your Arms. How did you achieve such a good sound?
Engineer Curtis Erdek is where it all begins. He’s got a lovely little studio just outside Nashville in La Vergne, TN called AudioTopiA. We call it the barnyard or the goat farm jokingly because – yeah - there are like barnyard animals there as you go inside. Goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, even a miniature horse. Also a scrappy little dog named Gator that will absolutely have a field day with your shoelaces, haha. But I’ve known Curtis for many years and was even briefly in a band with him back in 2005. He’s a killer guitar player for starters. He knows his software cold, and he uses pro gear top to bottom.
A detail: the microphone I sang into on In Your Arms album is the exact same model Michael Jackson used on “thriller” – pro stuff.
Some of the guitar tracks are actual audio recordings, but quite a lot of it is through a Kemper. Those things are amazing and you truly don’t have to lug around a huge Marshall stack anymore to the studio to get a great guitar sound. So it starts with Curtis. Great musician, great engineer, great coach, great at saying “nope this is good, leave it be” or “nope, this isn’t good, you have to do it again.” So Curtis ensures that what we send to Andy is as good as it can be for the budget and time allowed.
Andy Freeman is the original OM vocalist, on the first album, now living in Florida and doing a lot of production work - he produced/mixed/mastered Inside The Mirror, so it made perfect sense to work with both of these guys again. Andy’s really killer skill seems to be final mastering. He turns out a product that sounds pro, and stands up against recordings from all your favorite bands when you listen to it - I tried quizzing him once about how he gets such a good final master - he sort of mumbled and mentioned 4 different programs he uses - so, there is alchemy there, a skill, a talent, and yes, Andy is a big part of that final sound. This time we spent significantly more time in the studio and had 3 backup vocalists making the choirs much richer – this time Andy had less to do, I think, as we sent him a far more complete work than on Inside The Mirror, which was honestly bare-bones, as sent to Andy.
Oblivion Myth has released each of its three albums independently. What are the advantages and disadvantages to being an independent artist?
That’s really the debate we find ourselves in. What are the advantages? Control. Ownership.
What are the disadvantages? Publicity, marketing. Having to work harder.
Making the music is something any band can do by themselves. You don’t need a label for that. Curtis’ fee is amazingly affordable for studio time, and if he is booked, well, this is Nashville. We’ve got literally hundreds of other studios you can work at, at every price point you can imagine too. Seeing that we can book the time, work with a great engineer, do all our tracking affordably, then we also have a really talented producer to do the final mix and master, then after that is done, we can work with local firms to manufacture CDs (unit cost even for a very deluxe package isn’t more than say, two bucks), we can get on every streaming site through services like Tunecore, sell merch from CD Baby or others, honestly, what CAN a record company do for a band like Oblivion Myth? Well, maybe get us on a tour or a festival. And isn’t that really the job of a booking agent?
We talked to several labels of course. Although it doesn’t mean much to me, the guys would have been pleased if OM had been picked up by a label, and being “signed” is, let’s face it, maybe kind of a career milestone. But since I wrote most of the songs on this album, and I’m not giving up even a sand-grain sized amount of ownership or control over it, the deals we were offered very simply didn’t give us enough for the amount of control they would have acquired. Most smaller labels are darn near bankrupt in 2020 - one laughably offered to give us 100 CDs as our payment - they would make only 500 - and they’d control our physical merch distribution and decide when (“if warranted”) any more would get manufactured. Forever. I mentioned our unit cost - so they offered us the equivalent of about $200 to completely control our physical CD manufacture and distribution of the album, forever. We politely declined. We then manufactured 1000 CDs of highest quality in packaging for only about $1800 using a local company. Out of pocket, yes. But 100% ours - YES.
I would like to know your favorite vocalists and why? And in what ways have they inspired you?
My first singing hero was the crooner Frankie Laine. My family, growing up, really wore out this fantastic album by him, a 1962 collection of cowboy songs called HELL BENT FOR LEATHER. How amusing to me that I’d end up a huge Judas Priest fan and my favorite album by them is also titled Hell Bent for Leather? (Hears ‘the circle of life’ melody in my head from The Lion King…) haha. But that Frankie Laine album was great, and a little nobody named Johnny Williams is the orchestra director. Yeah. THAT John Williams. The greatest classical composer of the 20th century. Lovely album, very high fidelity for its day, and Frankie had such a big, warm, masculine, not-quite-operatic baritone voice A BIG voice. Such control. So this is what made me approach singing with a louder, more vigorous, (as I learned to call it in voice classes) “chest voice”. A more operatic approach. So singing loudly at the top of my lungs was kind of a tribute to the power of Frankie Laine’s voice.
As I got more and more into music as a teen I immediately latched on to Heart - I would say that Ann Wilson is the greatest rock singer of the 20th century, man or woman. A thunderbolt - and almost better live - or at least as good - I prize consistency very much in a vocalist. Loving the song “Barracuda” (Love child? Smile) pushed me into harder music. Like most singers I really admire the tone and sound of Freddie Mercury’s voice – it’s so unique and special- I’m a huge Queen fan and have literally all their albums. Sometime in my early teens I was handed a copy of Hell Bent for Leather (again? Seriously?) but this one was by a band many of my friends were getting into at the time called Judas Priest. I can still remember my jaw dropping hearing his voice rip out the “all across the lannnd” high note on the opening track, “Delivering the Goods”, and just sitting there in awe, thinking to myself – now THIS is a REAL singer – holy cow – this guy Rob Halford is supernatural. That put me firmly down the metal road. Most people will tell you that vocally I most resemble Rob Halford in his earlier years and I’m actually in a very excellent Judas Priest tribute band here in town called SAD WINGS.
After that… I went through a phase where I hadn’t really found much inspiration. Then I discovered the amazing symphonic/operatic scene coming out of Europe and was instantly exposed to some great, great singers. Roy Khan from Conception and Kamelot is so high on my list – he’s very simply one of the greatest rock tenors who’s ever lived. Daniel Heiman from Lost Horizon and several other bands is like the Next Generation of Halford-esque singers – Daniel’s voice is phenomenal and his high range is unmatched, unrivalled. Newly, a guy named Yannis Papadopoulos may be the current best male singer in heavy metal. Then in 2011 out of Finland, this awesome new “true metal” band called BATTLE BEAST came on the scene, and I’m a huge fan. Their original singer, Nitte Valo, sounded like the daughter of Dio. Great, soulful metal voice. Her replacement, Noora Louhimo, sounds like the daughter of Halford. Ripping, glass-sharp. I love those 2 ladies. They are remarkable, terrific vocalists. How both sang in the same band amazes me. I guess they grow them on trees in Finland (and I need to visit!)
What do you think about the state of the music industry today? Also, what is your point of view on the metal and hard rock scene?
I think it’s suffered a mortal blow in some respects. Nobody is touring, almost nobody can play out at a club in 2020, etc. It will rebound, but it may never be the same. It’s weird when I reflect that 2019 might have been a high water mark in our culture, in our history. The mid-tier labels we talked to about our new album are all in desperate straits financially and have very little they can offer us.
As a European metal fan I would say that scene was, is, and will likely to continue to be utterly fantastic. Just in the last week there’s this amazing work by a band called MAJESTICA, a song and video about the “Ghost of Christmas past” where the singer and guitarist tells this amazing story using traditional Christmas-song melodies like “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”. Check it out if you haven’t seen it - to me this epitomizes good art - and a great sign of things to come. I have a sense that really glam, flamboyant Opera Metal may have run its course and there is a swing back to more traditional metal sounds, but, the symphonic/operatic metal legacy of the 2000’s decade will forever have made its mark.
What does the future hold for Oblivion Myth? Does the group plan to record a fourth album?
Yes, and I really want this one to happen a lot sooner, and be completed a lot faster. My goal is to get back in the studio at the start of 2021 and start cranking out demos and creating projects that will lead to the 4th album. I think I have one more in me…
I would like to close by thanking you for honoring Angelic Warlord with this interview. Do you have any last words you would like to offer our readers?
God is real. Jesus died to pay the high price we have earned through Sin. The wages of Sin are death, so the only atonement we can make for our own personal sin is through our own death, the shedding of our own blood. But “it is not His will that any should perish”, and the Good News is that God gave His only begotten son to pay this Price for us – His blood was shed, not ours – so that we might live. It’s the greatest mystery and miracle of all time, of all creation, and it means we are loved by Him more than we could possibly imagine.
And thank YOU, Angelic Warlord, for your coverage of our music and all the good work you are doing for the Christian metal scene. I know so many bands owe you a great deal of thanks for your time and effort you spend on this wonderful musical web site you’ve developed over the years.
OBLIVION MYTH online: https://oblivionmyth.com & www.facebook.com/OblivionMythFanpage
