Warhog | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Speaker 1: All right there it is the new single from Warhog that is called Starflight and welcome everybody. We have entered our number three new Marrow trace of Matt Connorton Unleashed. We are live from the studios of wm NH ninety five point three FM and Glorious Manchester, New Hampshire. You can stream the show from anywhere or go to Matt connorton dot com slash Live. Jenny is here of course at the news table and joining us via Microsoft Teams. Let's get this up here. We have Scott Beatley returning to the show from the band Warhog.

0:29 Speaker 1: Of course. Hello Scott, Hey, how are y'all doing? Very well? Very well? It's wonderful have you on? I love this of course. The new ep Ethereal Journey brand new from this just came out. What April? Wait is this out yet?

0:44 Speaker 2: No? It's not.

0:45 Speaker 1: Oh it's about to be.

0:46 Speaker 2: Yeah. We dropped the single Starlight last month on the I think the tenth, the sixth of the tenth, I'm I think it was the sixth, just about a month ago, okay, and then the rest of the EP is out on the tenth of April.

1:00 Speaker 1: Oh okay, wow, okay, So coming right up. Very very cool. By the way, I apologize, I think I might have said starflight, but it's starlight Starlight. Yeah, I think I might have said starflight because you know the lyrics. I'm thinking about a star flight. I guess as as.

1:15 Speaker 2: As we all are. Yeah, launching I I've been keeping track of that. I knew that was coming, but I didn't realize the timing of it was so kind of perfect that it's the EP is going to release the day that they come back.

1:29 Speaker 1: Oh, that's cool.

1:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, it was kind of fun.

1:32 Speaker 1: So that's awesome. That's awesome. So tell us about the inspiration for this for this EP.

1:38 Speaker 2: So the EP's kind of got a funny story. It's the redheaded stepchild of sorts. We had Originally we were working on our last bunch of EPs Ethereal not in the Ethereal Journey, that's this one, uh dys dystopian chronicle.

1:51 Speaker 1: Oh yes, yes, right, we we had We had.

1:53 Speaker 2: Originally planned that to be an album with six or seven songs, and then we had actually written Ethereal already to be kind of the big third act of that album, and our PR folks that we were working with at the time were like, hey, you really shouldn't do that. You should break this up into multiple, multiple EPs. And then we got to a point where we needed they wanted us to do more singles and you know, individual songs than just release one EP that was one twenty three minute long song, and so we kind of did that, and we just kept putting off Ethereal Journey.

2:27 Speaker 2: We were like, all right, well we'll just do this next is its own thing, and and so that's we just finally got to this point. It was just kind of a coincidence that the song that was going to go with it ended up being Starlight. Oh yeah, those two songs together were kind of the ones that we really wanted to release. Starlight we needed to release it with something, and the next thing that we knew we wanted to release was Ethereal Journey. So it was like, ah, let's just do like a space adventure themed EP and just go from there.

2:59 Speaker 1: Right right. Something I want people to know, and I'm sure you want them to know this too, is you got to go online and see the video. I love the video for Starline.

3:08 Speaker 2: Thank you.

3:09 Speaker 1: Uh, I'm curious to know more about about that, because you know, you guys are in your your your space suits. I guess would be the her uniforms. Uh, it's just it's just and you know, and you're you're just playing the song, but it's it's it's a lot of fun. I really like the video.

3:25 Speaker 2: Thanks. Yeah. Well, first, real quick, before we jump into all that stuff, I just want to say hi to Gen and say that as much as we've been able to, we've been following kind of your advocacy stuff with the healthcare and all that. You know, it's really inspiring. You're doing a lot of great work and I just hope that you are seeing the results out of it that you want to see out of it. I just wanted to say that up up on the top of the conversation.

3:50 Speaker 1: So oh very nice in my bath and and by the way, she is wearing her Warhog shirt. We winning today as am I. We're both wearing our Warhawk shirts. You are one of my all time favorites. So your words quite a bit with me.

4:07 Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you. So so yeah the video. When we had this song put together, one of the things we knew we wanted to do was do what actual proper music video for YouTube, Like all the stuff we have right now, is just kind of stuff we've made for ourselves and it's just live shots and whatever. Yeah, so we started talking about, like, well, what's it take logistically to do something at that level, and we we decided we were doing for Starlight because it's kind of that anthemy, it's kind of it's very single perfect with the catchy chorus and all that, and it's under five minutes long, so that's also nice.

4:48 Speaker 2: So we really just kind of settled on this idea of like, well, let's just get Amazon Prime space suit costumes and let's just we'll just do it the easiest way we can think of. Eric's for lack of a better title, ex brother in law is a professional documentary filmmaker, and so he signed up to help us with this and he did a great job. I mean, his his camera work is really awesome, and he had a drone and he really knew what he was doing. He had done he's done some music videos before. And we just rented out this place that has this huge led wall and it was like, all right, well, let's just let's just make it look silly but also make it look serious like he want, you know, like obviously we are four dudes.

5:39 Speaker 2: In just the cheapest NASA knockoff costumes, Like our drummer is wearing a space helmet through the whole thing, which is a whole other story.

5:48 Speaker 1: That's true. You never actually see your drummer. He's got the helmet on the whole time.

5:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, and so we, you know, we were like, it's gonna look ridiculous, so let's just kind of play it serious and ridiculous the same time and hopefully it comes across because like, the last thing I want is people thinking, oh, these guys think they look cool, but they look like a bunch of idiots. Right, No, we we know we look like idiots, but we also know that are we believe you know that the song is really good, so it kind of shouldn't matter what we.

6:15 Speaker 1: Look like, right right, Yeah, all right, so why is the drummer wearing the helmet?

6:21 Speaker 2: So the on this EP we so our our drummer, Robert left the band at the end of last year. He left our in our after our final show in December, and we knew we we wanted this to come out. So we were working with another drummer, a friend of ours, through another band called the Humanist Project based out of I guess Houston and somewhat Florida. These guys that Eric knows, their drummer is a dude named Chris Lucci and he is a total monster. And you know, Eric took this opportunity to work with him on the whole So Chris did the drums for the whole EP.

6:58 Speaker 2: Okay, so that's so it's him you here on on Starlight and Ethereal Journey and then Doctor Doctor. But of course to shoot a video in Dallas, Texas, we needed a human drummer that we could have access to for a day, right, And so so our our original drummer from like when we were all in a like our young adult band, Blake knew we were looking for a drummer and said, hey, I'll help fill out for some gigs if you guys need me. And so we just pulled him in and said we'll just sit behind the kit and wear this space helmet.

7:32 Speaker 2: He was he was like, I mean true heroics there, because that's three hours in a room without air conditioning, under lights and fog and that big led wall was hot. He wore that thing and performed for like three straight hours and it was he handed me that helmet afterwards and it was disgusting. Yeah, but that but Blake has decided to to stay with us full time and be our drummer going forward. So okay, that's that's that is our drummer, Blake.

8:05 Speaker 1: Oh okay, but.

8:06 Speaker 2: He wanted he didn't want to he wanted to wear that helmet. That was kind of his idea because he didn't want people to misunderstand that that's not him playing drums.

8:16 Speaker 1: Okay.

8:17 Speaker 2: I didn't want to, like, you know, steal any of Chris's thunder because Chris did such a great job on the on the track, but Blake is also a total monster. Yeah, and we're really excited to work on some new stuff with them.

8:28 Speaker 1: So oh fantastic, excellent. Yeah. So when you play the song in the video, how many how many times do you have to run through it? Like during that because you said it was a three hour shoot.

8:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, we probably did it. I'd say ten, eleven, twelve times maybe.

8:44 Speaker 1: Yeah.

8:44 Speaker 2: We just we just would play it and then we would reset and just play it again and reset and play it again. It was it was pretty ridiculous. It was just non stop, just every six seven minutes we play the song over and over again. The best was when there's a couple of slow motion shots in the video that Jonathan's camera would film at forty eight frames per second, so he was able to film us at high speed and then slow us down. Oh yeah, which meant we had to mime to the song at two hundred percent speed, which was really hard to do, only because it sounded so ridiculous.

9:21 Speaker 2: And you know, you play things fast in a band, in a metal band, but like to hear a song and like trying to play along with it in mime and then like do the vocals and stuff. It was. It was pretty silly. I'm surprised we've got any good footage at all, but there you go. We saved that one for the end because we knew after that we'd be done.

9:39 Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Like I said, the video came out great. I love the video, Thank you. So I'm curious about the title track. So the title track is twenty three minutes. Is that the longest? That's got to be the longest song you guys have done, right?

9:52 Speaker 2: Oh yeah by far?

9:53 Speaker 1: Yeah?

9:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that was the thing Eric wanted. Eric's always wanted to do a really long, epic, continuous song like that.

10:02 Speaker 1: Yeah.

10:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, one of our favorite bands growing up is Dream Theater and they they had an EP that came out one time called Change of Seasons, and it was like one side A was this one song called Change of Seasons that was I don't know, five or six movements and it was twenty two something minutes long. Yeah, and the rest of it was all live recordings, and and he was like, I want to do that someday, and so that idea has stuck with him. As soon as we started Warhog and we started writing slower, longer songs and was like, oh, this song's ten minutes.

10:33 Speaker 2: Oh, this song's also ten minutes. This he immediately was like, I'm going to do ethereal Journey and I was like, all right, you like go nuts? He did. He showed up with it one day, yeah, and uh so, yeah, that's just it. It was just his little challenge to himself to write something that long and continuous, and then for us to all kind of start learning it and recording it, and it was a it's been it's been fun. I'm glad that we finished it so that other people can listen to it, because we've been enjoying it for I probably a year or so now sure, and knowing how kind of ridiculous it is.

11:08 Speaker 1: Well but interestingly, so, you know, when I listen to it, it doesn't seem like at the end of it, it doesn't seem like twenty three minutes has gone by, which and I mean that in the best possible way. It's like, like there's a band, there's a band in our area called able Blood, and they have a song called mental Note that's eleven minutes. But I remember telling those guys, you get to the end of it, you don't feel like it was eleven minutes. Somehow it seems like half that. And I get the same feeling listening to Ethereal Journey.

11:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's long, but at the end of it, I don't feel like it's been twenty three minutes. It keeps me engaged when I listen to it, So I you know, I think that's your credit. I think it came out great. I really like it a lot, and I encourage people to listen to it and invest invest the time to listen to it because it's really good, really good.

11:57 Speaker 2: Thanks, thank you. Yeah, now he will love to hear that. I agree. It's it's fun to go back, even for me to listen to because I I still you know, like obviously I recorded singing it, but I don't know that I know the lyrics all the way through. Like I don't know that I've got to memorize because I've always had the sheet in front of me because it is like nine verses or something music, right, you know, to where I'm just trying to figure out what I'm what comes next? Oh yeah, it's this part, you know, And so I'm always kind of even when I listen to it, I get taken on that little adventure myself.

12:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, this is this is the part where the drums kick in, you know, right, So it's it's fun. It's a fun little tune because that's what only knows if we'll work it up live and play it.

12:40 Speaker 1: I was curious about that. Yeah, that was gonna be my next question. Actually, do you have plans to play that live?

12:45 Speaker 2: But we've talked about what it would look like. I mean, the reality is it would take up so much of our set to do just the one thing we've talked about doing, Like let's pick the ten minutes that would be the best to do and kind of like hit all the spots so well, we'll maybe start looking at that this summer. But yeah, honestly, I honestly don't know if we'll we'll do that. It might just be something fun that we recorded and you know, you just got to imagine what it would sound like live.

13:12 Speaker 1: And the story that you're telling in that song, it's kind of I mean, that's the main crux of the story, right, Like Starlight's kind of the introduction. You know, here we are, we're going to space, and then the Ethereal Journey is the story.

13:26 Speaker 2: Right, Well, yeah, they're not really related, they're just they're just coincidentally themed, Okay, similarly, right, like, Starlight was a thing that I mean, in my head, Eric had already written Ethereal Journey. I knew what it was. I'd been you know, I had recorded demos of it for us to work through. Oh okay, you know, probably back in twenty twenty three. Okay, right, So by the time I'm writing Starlight two years later, I'm not thinking, oh, these two songs are all related, oh, because there was so much time between.

14:00 Speaker 1: Oh interesting, okay, yeah.

14:02 Speaker 2: Because we because I remember, the plan was to release it as the follow up from our first album. So like we've We've just been waiting to get this one out the door. Yeah, it just so happened that the timing was, like, oh, what are the two songs Ethereal Journey in Starlight? Of course they would.

14:18 Speaker 1: Be right.

14:21 Speaker 2: Sense, Yeah, so yes, Starlight's different. It's just it's it's kind of my you know, let's send a bunch of dudes up into space and send them on aure where Eric's is more like it's you know, apocalyptic future we've got to send It's kind of it's kind of almost Hail Mary ish in a way. Of course, I know that that had nothing to do with it, because he had not read that book and that movie was like years from being made. Sure, but it's like, you know, the planet is super dying and we get a strange message and he, you know, the the lone traveler, gets sent off to go find out what the message is.

14:58 Speaker 2: And it's not necessarily help. It's someone. It's someone or something that transforms this guy into a god, basically gives him all this cosmic power, and then instead of coming back to help the Earth, he's gonna come back and conquer it, you know, right, It's just kind of a weird, you know, that's that's kind of the story of Ethereal Journey.

15:20 Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and then so and then you you close it with You've got the cover of Doctor Doctor by UFO, which and by the way, you know some people are gonna listen to it and not realize it's a cover. You know, some people, obviously. I'm sure you have fans who may maybe have even told you. Oh I didn't realize that first of that was a cover because not everyone knows UFO obviously, But I really like that too, And I'm really I'm curious why you chose that song and uh yeah, I mean I guess, I mean the name of the band it's taken from obviously fits the.

15:54 Speaker 2: Uh yeah, I didn't even think about that. Oh yeah, yeah, of course that is I've I literally had not put that together until you just said it. That's hilarious. How can I even miss that? My god, I wish you could see me like I'm doing the whole like Captain Picard face palming thing, like what am I? So? I'm a huge Iron Maiden fan. I always have been me too, ye And if you've ever seen them in concert, they're kind of you know, between bands, they always play house music, yes, but Iron maidens like, all right, guys, everybody walked to the stage.

16:35 Speaker 2: Music is a live track of Doctor Doctor by UFO from the Strangers in the Night Oh live record. And they've been doing that for decades. Every time I've seen Iron Maiden since the nineties, they've come out to doctor Doctor. Okay, And Eric and I went and saw them a few years ago. We just happened to be at the same concert together, standing on the floor next to each other, and Doctor Doctor comes on, and I don't I don't know that he ever witnessed that, but like the crowd goes nuts. It's like it's that first step into an Iron Maiden concert, which for so many of us is basically like going to church.

17:11 Speaker 2: You know. It's like here we go and the crowd gets real amped up and we're all singing doctor Doctor please. And he's like, this song rocks, and I was like, yeah, it does. And I knew it. I like, I've recorded demos of it myself just for fun, and I was like, we should we should do this and he was like absolutely. Which Eric is not one usually for covers, because I think a lot of times when you cover someone's music, it comes with a lot of expectation, right, like, yeah, what bands do you really love and what bands are you trying to sound like?

17:45 Speaker 2: And can you pull it off? And and a lot of times it's best left, I think avoided right, right. But Eric was kind of like really keen on this idea of mine, which also he's usually not keen on my ideas anyway. So I worked on a I just worked this this version up, and uh, you know, we kind of went with it. And then when we had the EP and we were like, all right, well, we've got Starlight, we've got Ethereal Journey, we need something else to kind of round it out, and we really didn't have anything unreleased that we were waiting to release that isn't part of our next album.

18:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, and so we just kind of were like, well, let's could we should we do Doctor Doctor? And was like, yeah, that would be fun because then it's like, a it's a cover that we could probably release and that'll be fun and people that might listen to the original might find our cover and then find us and be like, oh these guys are you know kind of they're they're heavy metal, they're doing something interesting, and just give us one extra thing that maybe could end up on the radio somewhere. There's a there's a guy in Dallas, Chaz he Chas Night.

18:52 Speaker 2: He does a local show and one of his kind of recurring things is he'll do a show. He has maybe done it a while or I have not caught it, but he does like rock he calls it rockstar Karaoke, okay, and the whole the whole program of that hour long show is covers by other bands. So he'll do like Pantera's cover of what is it? Planet Caravan or like the Faith No More War Pigs, right, So like and I was like, oh, this would be a good way to get on that. We could be like a local band. One be a local band, but two having a cover that's kind of radio worthy.

19:29 Speaker 1: Yeah, so it you know, it.

19:31 Speaker 2: Was like, well, let's just throw doctor Doctor together and put that out there with it. And it turned out to we had fun doing it, and yeah, I think it turned out pretty well. And like you mentioned that, I still can't believe that completely slip my mind. Ufo, duh. And that's so funny. You think I'm kidding about that. But if you look anywhere that we've talked about the Epe. That's not mentioned because I had not put that together somehow. I was just I'm so focused on it being like a cover, and like, I hope this goes over well.

20:01 Speaker 1: I hope people, you know, like, oh.

20:03 Speaker 2: Why doctor, doctor, why are you guys doing the cover the UFO? But I never I really never put that together. I can't believe it.

20:11 Speaker 1: That's awesome, that's funny. So did did the song get on that show?

20:17 Speaker 2: We haven't released it yet. You're the you're if you're gonna play it, you're the first person to do it.

20:20 Speaker 1: Oh nice, nice, I am gonna. I am going to play it at the end of our conversation. So very good, very good. It'll be the world radio premiere of that track. I love it. We love those now. And when you when you do a cover like that, is that did you say that's the first time you've done a cover in Warhawk.

20:40 Speaker 2: Yeah, like an official cover of someone else's stuff. I mean we've we've early early days, we played like a Black Sabbath song at a at a at a gig one night because we needed something to fill the space, you know, like we only had ten minute long songs. We needed something that was only five minutes. Okay, let's just play this.

20:59 Speaker 1: So when so when?

21:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't really do covers.

21:01 Speaker 1: So when you do when you record a Doctor, Doctor, were you i mean, did you feel like you wanted to keep it close to the original or were you more concerned with kind of putting your own stamp on it, or what was your approach there?

21:14 Speaker 2: I'd say about fifty to fifty.

21:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I don't.

21:16 Speaker 2: I don't love covers that very wildly from their original, with the exception of like all Along the Watchtower, I think is like when you try to reinvent a song that's the gold standard, and we definitely weren't going to try and do that.

21:30 Speaker 1: Yeah.

21:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, but I also didn't. I didn't want to make it a joke. I didn't want to I didn't want to force it into something that it wasn't. So I think I just maybe slowed it down just a hair and I took some of the guitar noodling away, Like the intro's got this really great shanker kind of improv solo that every time I've listened to it live, it's it's a little bit different. It's got a little bit of a different flavor and then I can't really do that as one guitar player, right, So you know, we did the harmonies and I kind of did it well, if Eric and I were going to do this live, what would it sound like.

22:05 Speaker 2: So I worked out the two parts and then we kind of just all right, okay, So it's got the chug in the background, it's got some different rhythms going on, you know, held out chords and some other stuff that I like to do. So I kind of made it ours without without really taking it too far from I think what the original version is, which is just kind of like a.

22:26 Speaker 1: Heavy yeah, which is what we love so right right, absolutely, absolutely, So the ep Ethereal Journey comes out April tenth, and then it's going to be on all the streaming platforms. I assume that's correct. Excellent, excellent, And then are you playing these out live already or yeah?

22:44 Speaker 2: We we had a show in March in Houston, okay, our first kind of show with Blake, our new guy who's coming along with us. We've got four shows that we're doing. I dare to call it a tour. It's really more like an extended weekend, but we're doing four nights in four states back to back here in a week or in a week and a half. We're doing Joplin, Missouri. That we're doing Louisville, Kentucky, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and uh Nashville, Franklin, Tennessee. Got a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We're gonna go play with some friends of ours called Salem's Child.

23:17 Speaker 2: They're based out of Fort Wayne, kind of Cocomo, Indiana. We're playing with well, a bunch of great bands just kind of all along the the the trip. Uh and that'll be kind of our Ethereal Journey run. We're gonna you know, Starlight is the big one from that. Yeah, and uh so we're excited to play a bunch and get it out there. And it'll be nice that we have an EP that'll be out, the video will have been out, so hopefully people will have checked all of that stuff out and kind of know what they're getting into.

23:47 Speaker 2: We're not bringing the space suits or anything.

23:49 Speaker 1: I was about I was about to ask that, Yeah.

23:53 Speaker 2: It'll just be us in our you know, in our regular stage gear. But yeah, you know, we've got them, so who knows what will happen to them?

24:02 Speaker 1: Right right?

24:03 Speaker 2: They might end up in the mix at some point see.

24:06 Speaker 1: And then uh and then so what's what's next for you guys after this, Because you're always working on music.

24:10 Speaker 2: We are, we are, We've got to We've got a couple of things. I you know, with Blake coming in, we want to give him an opportunity to kind of work himself into the band. So there's some smaller projects that I think we're going to try and get out this year. One of them is uh. I've been teasing it on YouTube if anybody has been paying attention, But I've been working on an EP celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Transformers, the movie Oh No Kidding, that we're going to release as Warhog. And it's because that that soundtrack had a bunch of like really great kind of eighties rock tunes, including the Transformers theme.

24:47 Speaker 2: So I've I've been doing them and putting them on YouTube, and we're going to get Blake in the studio and he's going to do the drums on him and Eric's gonna mix and master them and we're going to release the is just a fun EP I think at the end of the summer. And then we've got we're gonna try and get in and do it live studio recording with Blake and just knock out a couple of the songs that we're playing on this little tour. Yeah, and then because we're gonna do a full album at the end of the year, start working on this thing called The Collector that we've we've been developing in the background, and hopefully it'll come out early twenty twenty seven.

25:29 Speaker 2: Okay, the nine songs all kind of intentionally five minutes or less, very kind of straight up traditional metal, half concept album. But it's gonna be fun. We're some of the songs were really really excited about. But it's gonna be kind of, I think our big eggs in a basket moment where we're gonna put all of our effort into this thing. We're gonna get it sounding perfect, and then we're gonna hopefully start shopping it around to labels and see if we can do something with it. I think it's going to be maybe we're hoping that it'll be the thing that starts to really push us forward in a lot of ways.

26:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Well, you guys are already doing great stuff. Love to see its absolutely absolutely love the EP. So Scott in a moment, we'll let you go. We'll hit that track, Doctor Doctor, the world radio premiere of war Discover of Doctor Doctor by UFO. But where's the best place for people to go online to keep up with everything that you guys are doing as a band?

26:28 Speaker 2: Social media, Facebook and Instagram. We are at Warhog DFW. That's Warhog w a r h O g DFW like Dallas Fort Worth and our website Warhog band dot com. But we're real active on social media all the time, so anything that we're up to, you will find out about it that day. We would love to get more followers and more folks getting years on our stuff, so we're on all streaming platforms. We've got a YouTube channel. We're pretty easy to find once start looking for us.

27:01 Speaker 1: Absolutely and speaking of the YouTube channel again, I cannot stress enough to our listeners, please go check out the video for Starlight. It's really really fun. I just absolutely love it, absolutely love it all. Right, Scott Beatlee of Warhog, thank you so much, my friend for joining us today. We'll let you go and we're gonna hit that track. But always love talking with you and thank you. Absolutely love the music and I'm sure we'll talk again soon. You guys are always up to something, so I'm sure we'll be talking again soon.

27:29 Speaker 2: Absolutely. All right, you guys have a great day.

27:31 Speaker 1: Thank you, you two, Scott, thank you, bye bye bye Jen. All right, that is Scott Beatlee of war Hoog and right now. Okay, so this is I get to use the bumper. This is the world radio premiere because this is not out yet. The EP comes out April tenth, so you know the single Starlight, you can find that, but the EP comes out on the tenth, so you will not hear this anywhere. What we're about to play UFO Doctor Doctor, as covered by Warhog. Here we go.