Burn Halo interview

You were with Eighteen Visions for so many years before you guys broke up. Were you tempted to just hang out and chill for a couple of years before you dove back in with something new?



No, you know I didn’t really have that opportunity given my age and where I’m at in life. I really didn’t have a couple years to sit around wait to see if music was something I wanted to continue to do. It was kind of either now or never for me, you know? It would have gotten to the point where I would have had to go get a day job and probably get really, really comfortable doing that, and then from there I’d probably be stuck with it. I wouldn’t be able to take the risks that come along with really trying to get out there and make a record happen.

It sounds like you felt you had a lot riding on this record.



I definitely do have a lot riding on it. So far everything’s paid off and everything’s panned out. It’s just not the way I guess I had originally intended it to when I first started working on this album, but everything’s working out for the better, I think.

How did you get hooked up with Zac Maloy as a songwriter and producer?


As a songwriter he was sent to me, I guess you could say. When Eighteen Visions broke up, I had arranged a meeting with him in LA to discuss the type of album I wanted to make, and then Eighteen Visions played out last two shows, and they very next week I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma writing songs with him. We just had great chemistry, wrote the whole album with him pretty much, and I really felt comfortable with him and the songs. So I felt really, really good about him producing the record as well. We had talked about some A-list producers, but at the same time I really didn’t want them to, you know, get into the songs and take away from some of the songs that we had worked so hard on. They always want to come in and kind of tweak things and put their stamp on the songs, and that’s cool, I totally get it, but I felt like the songs were already pretty much there.



You’re a heavy rocker from California, Zac is from Oklahoma and his most famous radio song was the Nixons ballad “Sister” – did the two of you turn out to have as different of musical backgrounds as the stereotypes might have suggested?


No, I think that Zac is just for the most part a great, great songwriter. He gets it. And as a songwriter, I think that me personally, it’s something that I would like to get to later on in my lifetime. And knowing that, you’ve got to be able to expand your horizons, you’ve got to be able to cater to a pop star, a rock band, a metal act. Whoever it is that you’re gonna write for, you’ve got to be able to keep your doors wide open. And I think for Zac, he was a rocker in the nineties. He maybe came from a little bit different background, and Eighteen Visions and the stuff that I wrote down there kind of spoke for itself. But to be honest with you, I was always pushing that band in more of a rock direction.



Dirty Little Girl is your first single.


It’s about a girl that I knew, she dated one of my best friends for a couple of years, and she just kind of caused trouble and got away with a bunch of stuff, and was pretty much able to do whatever she wanted within the relationship, go out and do her bit of hard partying, flirt with guys, hook up with a couple of his friends, even. And for whatever reason he kept her around. The instability of the relationship, I think he was attracted to that. and I’m sure that he was really, really into whatever she was giving him sexually as well.



Here With Me is the one that keeps getting stuck in my head.


That was one of the last songs that we wrote together. Zac had brought up the idea of trying to write a very timeless type, I guess you could say, balled in the vein of Sweet Child O‘ Mine. And with that in mind, he was “Dude, I’ve always wanted to write a song like this.” And I said okay, we’ll try it out, we’ll see what we can do. We wrote this really, really simple music bed, really great chord progression and changes, really easy, and I just went with it and came up with some really cool, I think, melody lines. And lyrically, I wanted to touch on the idea of life without somebody meaningful, having them in your life and then the idea or thought of not having them anymore, and what it would be like.



You made this record for Island Records and then they decided not to release it. Did that come as a shock, or were there warning signs?


I kind of sensed it when my A&R guy was let go right before we went in to mix the record, that something kind of bad could happen. They let me finish making the record, we mixed it, mastered it, which was really cool of them. And then it was really weird. I met with a couple of the A&R guys in LA, and had some I think pretty positive meetings, at least on my part, on being able to sell what this record was all about. Now whether they got it or not, remains to be seen. I don’t think they got it, cause I’m not with the label anymore. They ended up having me do a showcase to kind of stay on the label, which was really, really weird.


It was just awkward, man. They ended up not wanting to move forward with me and the record, which was a blessing in disguise at the time. I had no idea until I’m here talking to you now, that the gameplan that we have for this record now is, I think, fairly different from the gameplan that they would have had for the record a couple of years ago. We’ve just been doing things our way, and we haven’t really had anybody step on our toes and get in our way, which a lot of major labels tend to do at times if they don’t see things they way you do.



A few months ago, iTunes featured your record as one of its Staff Picks. I thought it was kind of funny that Apple seems to “get” your music even though the labels didn’t.


It’s great that somebody gets it and likes it, you know? And when I was in between labels, the funny part is that I had countless meetings with different A&R guys at different record labels, trying to sign this thing, and for whatever reason they couldn’t get it to go through, and now that the thing is up and running and we’ve done all these great tours, these people are starting to come knocking at the door again.