Before their show in the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale on May 18, 2011, Metal Matriarch caught up with Powerglove bassist Nick Avila and drummer Bassil Silver. They give us the details on how they choose TV and video game themes and the ones that haven’t worked, their stage prop dreams, their plans to break out and compose original video game music and more.
Metal Matriarch (MM): So, we all want to get to know you better. Can you tell us a little about how you guys met and you got together? You guys met up in Boston, right?
Bassil (Powerglove): Yeah, we did. We’ve actually known each other for years. We’ve been playing together with different bands since high school and started playing Powerglove as a side project. And then our main band at the time melted away, and Powerglove just sort of stuck.
MM: Was it all four of you guys in the main band as well?
Bassil: Yeah. I wouldn’t really call it the “main” band, but we used to play in a melodic death metal band back in the day. We had lineup changes every 30 seconds, and all of us were in and out of it at different times.
Nick (Powerglove): Yeah, I was the screamer.
MM: You were the screamer?
Nick: The screamer and bassist. And Chris, our guitarist, was trying, I guess, to sing melodic. He had his little falsetto and all that stuff. Tried it. [He laughs.]
MM: What was the first TV show, or videogame song, or what was your first theme that you guys decided to say, “Hey, let’s cover this!” that caused it to become a side project?
Bassil: Well, that was years ago. Alex did a guitar cover of “Take Up the Cross” from Tales of Phantasia, and sent it over to me, and I got really excited. I was like, “Oh, this is awesome. We’ve totally got to do some full recordings.” So, he came over and we did our first recording ever. It was in early 2003 with Dr. Wily’s Theme from Mega Man 2.
We just put up a little website and put it online and stuff like that. After that it was Storm Eagle and then Power Rangers. At that point, we were really just recording songs and throwing them up online. Just get a little community going and just giving away everything we were doing because it was just really for fun.
Once we finally solidified the lineup as us four, that’s when we really started to say, “OK, maybe this could actually be like a real thing.” Maybe we could go out and play this live and do something with it.
MM: With so much to choose from, what are your criteria for choosing songs?
Nick: It’s kind of weird. We all grew up on the same stuff, so when someone mentions a song, we all know what it is, so we always know what needs to be covered. Bringing back things from our childhood. When thinking about Mega Man, or Mortal Kombat, we’re like, of course we’re going to try these.
We also do some polls from our fans to see generally what people want the most. We always check out those songs, and if we hear something we really like, then we’ll go for it.
Bassil: In our writing process, we actually write out all of our songs into MIDIs before we go recording them and everything. Any theme that someone gets an idea for, we just start writing it, start working with the song and melting it into a metal song. Then we send it around to the other guys – if I start working on a theme, I’ll just work on it a bit, get all my ideas down, then send it to everyone else and whoever has an idea will make suggestions and we’ll go from there.
MM: I know you guys don’t want to give away your track list for your upcoming album focused on video games, but can you give us any hints about what you’ve been working on?
Bassil: I can’t really say anything official, but I’ve been working on a bunch of ideas for the One Winged Angel theme, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. So hopefully there’ll be a little more Final Fantasy VII on [the new album].
MM: Is there a theme that you guys have tried and tried that just didn’t work?
Nick: This one everyone wants us to try – and we tried and just could not do – is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We did a lot of that song. Bonded By Blood did a pretty cool thrash version of that song.
Bassil: They did a good job.
Nick: Yeah, they did do a good job. I liked that. You know, we tried to mix it with some other songs, like make “Turtles in Time”, and in the end, we just couldn’t quite get it.
Nick: Also, we write in a program called Guitar Pro. Some of the songs we’ve written and tried also just don’t translate as well once we actually go to record them. Like stuff from Mega Man X.
Bassil: I don’t know, that one we actually still might do. There’s a bunch that we kind of leave on the back burner. We’re working on the Spark Banjo and the Highway theme. We’re going to put them together to make a Spark Highway theme. That one, I was working on it for Metal Kombat, and we were messing with a bunch together. That was one of the ones where it felt like it was almost there. It didn’t quite make it on, but we felt like maybe, OK, in a couple years, we can revisit this. Definitely, for the next album, we’re going revisit it and look at it again. It’s always impossible to tell if they’re going to live up to what we hope it can sound like.
Nick: A couple other songs we wanted to do on the last album, as far as cartoon themes go, Tiny Toon Adventures.
Bassil: Thundercats. That was another one.
Nick: Thundercats. Captain Planet.
Bassil: Another thing with the cartoon themes is that a lot of them have vocals in the first place. Other than the Pokemon theme, we’ve pretty much done them all instrumental, so there’s a question of whether it’ll translate as an instrumental song or not. Even the Pokemon theme, we put out an instrumental version of it. We put out both so that people could listen to what they like better.
In lot of them, we try to encourage a sing-along, especially in the live setting. Like Power Rangers, we did an instrumental version, but we tried to get them to sing along with it. Some kind of work in that format, and some just feel like they’re missing vocals.
MM: Maybe when the vocals are too much of the melody?
Bassil: Yeah, exactly. If it takes a real front, leading role in the song. Sometimes, it just feels like it works, and sometimes, it just doesn’t. It really depends. That’s why we try to go at a lot more songs than we actually end up putting on every album.
MM: Taking a stab at so many different cartoon themes, what have you noticed there is some sort of magic in common with all of these themes. What is that?
Bassil: I don’t know. Maybe, a lot of it’s just the nostalgia of watching these themes when we were kids. Obviously, we’re choosing songs that we thought were awesome in the first place; songs that we get excited when we hear them, and everything.
MM: The songs themselves, what made them hold on?
Bassil: I mean, often, it’s good, catchy melodies, I guess I can say more for video game stuff than the cartoon stuff. So many of these songs, when you’re dealing with the Nintendo or the Super Nintendo sounds, you can’t rely on the fact that these days, you can have a huge orchestra and a massive choir, and everything sounds incredible. [Back then] they stuck to such a tiny sound palate, it’s all bleeps and bloops and everything, so I feel like it was a lot more limiting for all the composers to really write a melody that sticks, and it’s really catchy, and works really well.
I always think of Mega Man, and even a lot of the Final Fantasy stuff, where it’s really about the core progressions and the melody being something that really translates the feeling and the mood; instead of, you know, if you want a battle song, instead of just having a lot of staccato, really powerful, string section playing it, you really need to make it translate in the music itself. So I feel like that’s a lot of why a lot of these themes translate really well: it’s a lot easier to make it really powerful when played in a metal setting.
MM: What would you say is the hardest part of taking an eight-bit song and translating it to a full-blown metal song? What is your process and what is the hardest part?
Bassil: The process in general basically starts with one of us getting motivation to do a song. We’ll start to tap it out and program it in Guitar Pro and then send it around to everyone to see if we can get more ideas. Actually, a really big part of our writing process is in the studio. When we begin recording, we mess with the songs in the studio and they end up changing a lot.
Especially in the last two albums, Nick and I did the bass and the drums together, kind of co-produced each other. We’d come up with grooves and lines that fit and mesh with the melodies. The same thing, Chris and Alex did all the guitars together and a lot of things changed last second. When you’re going from these old Nintendo sounds and MIDIs that we create to actually playing on an instrument, certain things sounds great right off and certain things just don’t quite sound right. That’s when you have to spend some time to make it work.
Probably the hardest part, especially with the cartoon themes, is that a lot of them are 30-second intros. So we have that much material — and it’s great material – but it’s just 30 seconds. So, how do we turn [a 30-second intro] into a full metal song without getting redundant or becoming boring because it’s instrumental? How much do we want to change, how much do we want to keep the same? That definitely is a bit of a challenge, but it makes it more fun too because we write a lot of original stuff to go into each song, flesh them out as well.
MM: Is there a limit where “too much of you guys” makes it’s no longer the theme? Do you hold yourselves back when expanding a song?
Nick: I think it’s important to stay true to the original song. If we do go off on a tangent, let’s say different from the Batman theme, we try to make it sound like something that would be in the Batman Movie. So we think of the theme base. For The Nightmare Before Christmas, [to create] all of the original parts, we watched parts of the movie and kept those themes in mind. I’d say as long as you stick with the theme and you have plenty of different variations of the main melody, then you’ll stay pretty true to the song and have your own thing.
MM: It sounds to me like you’re not just trying to pick up Batman; you’re trying to understand Danny Elfman.
Nick: Exactly. We learn a lot from the composers that we like, just looking at their arrangements you learn a lot about writing original parts.
MM: Which composer do you find yourself continually falling back to?
Nick: I’d say for first album it was the Nobuo [Uematsu] – we’ll probably revisit his stuff again – and the last album we had 3 Elfman songs, so he’s another favorite of ours for sure.
Bassil: Yeah, I’ve noticed two composers definitely – Nobuo Uematsu, who does a lot of Square Enix stuff, and Danny Elfman – I know personally has had a huge effect on my writing, even with our original material. Justthe way they master overboard progressions and the way they intertwine melodies always amazes me over and over again.
MM: Where do you guys have more fun? Taking an 8-bit, 30-second song and expanding it, or taking a complex theme and simplifying it to the instruments you have available?
Bassil: It’s all really fun in both directions; I love writing and composing.
Nick: To me, I think the most fun is creating medleys; you can take the best parts from each song and combine them into, like, one giant fist of awesome.
Bassil: Yes, a giant fist of awesome.
MM: How do you feel that the evolution of video gaming and technology has affected the themes for videos games recently? Do you think there is more or less inspiration there?
Bassil: Now that you can essentially have whatever sounds you want and whoever you want playing it, the sky’s the limit, but there’s less of a focus is on just specifically the melodies of the songs. Originally that necessity to write a song that will sound great, even with such a small palette, isn’t there anymore, which is why so much of the material that we take is from the original games. There’s definitely really cool themes still coming out, though – all that Devil May Cry stuff is really, really awesome, as an example.
Nick: Today you’re seeing more and more games hire full symphony orchestras to make the themes way more orchestral. It almost seems like they take more of a film score approach, like in Halo and God of War.
MM: You guys take so much that’s already out there and make it your own- have you been approached yet for your own music to incorporate it into games or shows?
Bassil: Not really, yet. I mean there’ve been little projects here and there, but nothing for a big movie, show or video game yet. That’s one thing that we actually really want to get into; we’d really like to try to like license some stuff into games.
Alongside a bunch of video game stuff we’ve been working on for the next album, we’ve also been working on themed original songs. So we’ll be writing, say, a hero’s theme, a battle theme, desert theme, or temple theme or something. So they’ll be our original songs but they’ll definitely invoke imagery and sound like its part of a certain scene in a video game or a movie. A definite goal of ours would be to get these songs licensed into video games and shows – especially video games. This is definitely an area we’d like to get into.
Nick: It’s the same way the metal, the music industry is in a very close, small circle, that’s very hard to get into, the video game music world is the exact same way. They all know each other and it’s a very tight-knit group; they have a lot of the same composers working for numerous games. So for a company to just like reach out to a small band like us, they’d have to probably already be a fan of the band or we’d have to get into that circle, basically.
MM: Have you guys considered doing work with Video Games Live?
Nick: We’d love to. There’s a group called the Video Game Orchestra, which is comprised of a bunch of students from the Berklee College of Music, where we went to in Boston. We were in talks with them for a while about doing a show together and that’s still something we’d like to do in the future – is to play some of our songs with a full orchestra.
Bassil: And if the Video Games Live guys are up for it, that’d be really cool, I think it’d be really fun to collaborate.
MM: I heard a little bit about your van issues throughout this tour – what happened?
Bassil: It’s broken down over and over again, this is the most, most uh transportation issues we’ve ever had during a tour.
MM: How many times and what happened?
Bassil: What are we on? Six I think. I think we’ve broken down six times. A few days ago, it broke down twice in one day – we fixed one issue and we drove for like an hour and then it died again. It completely crapped out up in Oregon, and we had to rent an SUV to get to the San Francisco, L.A., and Phoenix shows. We had to replace the battery in Toronto…
MM: How much did it cost you?
Bassil: We’re over four thousand in repairs already. It’s hurting, man.
Nick: We want to say that the van’s in perfect condition and we’ll be selling it in a few weeks. So, if you want to buy it, it’ll be on Craigslist.com.
MM: So is that actually a van you guys own?
Bassil: Yeah, we own this van. We’re probably going to, you know…not own it soon, hopefully. It smells.
Nick: Give it a Viking funeral.
MM: I haven’t seen many bands take merch and throw it out to the crowd and have them use it you guys did at the last show. Tell us a little bit about that – why do you do it ?
Nick: I love bands that put on a stage show. I’ve always loved bands like Gwar and Kiss; I’ve always appreciated bands that do a lot of entertainmen and a lot of thought and interaction into their live shows. Especially as an instrumental band, we don’t have a singer or a frontman—
Bassil: Oh shut up, Nick, you’re totally our frontman —
Nick: — so we try to make up for that by constantly engaging the crowd. So it makes a big difference, grabbing people’s attention and giving something a bit different live. Even if they don’t like us, I want people to say, “Who the hell is this? I need to check it out,” because we have a show that set us apart from other bands.
We have a giant man-eating donut on stage. [Bassil] built it. We also have a mascot it’s a giant floating head that shoots out fog and has LED lights. So we just don’t limit ourselves; we have a stupid idea and we just do it.
MM: So what’s his name?
Nick: Zebediah. He’s from the game Totally Rad. We decided he was weird and creepy, and, I guess we are too. [laughs]
Bassil: He’s kind of our mascot.
Nick: Oh, he’s our mascot. He’s our mascot forever.
Bassil: Okay, okay, he’s absolutely our mascot.
Building him was a pain in the ass. I drew out a big grid on a huge piece of plywood and painted it pixel by pixel. There are over 9000 pixels so it took forever.
Things like that are really worth it to us because we are really passionate about our stage show; we really want to go balls-out with it and try doing as much as we can. Every time we come up with a stupid or crazy idea, we ask ourselves, “Can we make it work? Is this even possible?” And if it at all is, we go for it.
MM: Is there any idea that you wanted to do but you haven’t been able to do yet? An idea where you say “one day…”?
Bassil: Well, this might be a pipe dream, but I’m hoping that someday we can make a giant padded joystick to put down in the middle of the pit; people could mosh into it and it would control a game like Pacman or something up on the projector. And it would have these massive buttons that people could jump on and you could smash into. We’d probably make it out of a punching bag or something. So that’s one of those things: is that possible?
MM: You just need to start shouting out at your shows, soliciting for a fan who’s a good hardware engineer. I’ve got friends who program stuff like this. If you get a good engineer on board, it’s definitely possible.
MM: So, my last question: I know you guys can’t leak anything more about your next album, but I’m really curious. Have you guys thought about doing the Kirby theme?
Bassil: In fact, actually we’ve worked a lot on a Kirby theme. From the Super Star game, which is the theme you think of. Definitely worked on that a while ago. It might end up on there.
MM: Alright guys, thanks for talking with us today. Rock on!
About the Author: Stephanie (a.k.a. Steph Rose)
Steph is a tea-drinking, metal-obsessed resident of South Florida. She programmed this site in the name of metal, she travels cross-country (and hopefully internationally eventually) in support of metal, and she should probably be in Manowar because she sure as hell would die for metal.