Did you ever hear an album that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go? I mean, an album that’s so unbelievable that you say to yourself, “They don’t make music like this any more”? Six Minute Century’s forthcoming album Time Capsules hit me like that. From the first song – “Under the Moonlight,” which opens with an atmospheric church organ (reminiscent of Rick Wakeman circa 1973) and features a killer riff, stratospheric vocals, and an infectious hook – the CD never let up. Time Capsules is a juggernaut of everything I like in my music: stunning guitar solos, jaw-dropping vocals, intelligent lyrics, and riffs up the wazoo. Even the production is crystal clear and bottom-end punchy. (I’m listening to track three, “One Man’s Dream,” as I type this thinking, “Holy shit this is good.”
Guitarist Don LaFon is no stranger to making great music. Nor is he a stranger to performing live. As part of Krucible, Don and company wowed the audience at last year’s ProgPower USA metal fest in Atlanta. Now, as part of Six Minute Century, he’s poised to become one of the most talked-about guitarists in power metal. My prediction: if SMC can keep up this level of songwriting, it’s going to be the band to watch in the years ahead.
Don recently had a lengthy chat with Bill Murphy about the origins of the band, the killer songs on Time Capsules, the band’s upcoming appearance at the Nightmare Metal Fest, and (believe it or not) raising horses in the great state of Texas.
This is Part One of Two Parts.
BM: Hello? Is this Don?
DL: Yeah, is this Bill?
BM: Yup. Thanks for your time tonight. I appreciate it.
DL: No problem. Thanks for calling.
BM: Time Capsules is amazing. I mean this is really incredible. Chuck Williams hits notes that only dogs can hear. I haven’t heard a voice like that since Steve Perry.
DL: Yeah, Chuck’s pretty good.
BM: Well, tell me about your involvement with this. You’re in at least three bands that I can count. You work with Mindcrime and Krucible and Six Minute Century?
DL: Yeah. I do all three. I mean, Mindcrime and Krucible is pretty much the same band.
BM: Right.
DL: Except for Mindcrime has Chris Salinas from Zero Hour, as the singer. And obviously, Krucible has Lance King as the singer. So yeah, I do all three.
BM: Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Gee, which band am I guitarist for now? How do I write songs?" Or is it easy to keep them apart?
DL: Well, it’s easy enough, I suppose, because Mindcrime plays all Queensryche songs, so we don’t have to worry with that.
BM: Yeah.
DL: And I’ve had Six Minute Century way before I was in Krucible or Mindcrime, we’ve been together since 2004, so you know, Six Minute Century, I write all the songs and stuff, and for Krucible, the bass player, Shane [Dubose], and the guitar player, Eric [Halpern], write the majority of the material.
BM: Where does the name come from, and what does it mean? What significance does it have for you?
DL: Oh yeah. When we first formed, we had a different drummer, so the bass player and myself and Chuck, who’s the singer, unfortunately at that time, we had a lot of time on our hands when our drummer wasn’t there. That’s why he’s not here now. [laughs]
BM: [laughs]
DL: But when we sat around in the practice room, and once it got to be where we decided what the name of the band would be, Chuck likes to write a lot of songs in something maybe to do with a historical event, or something that might have to do with history. And I wanna say our bass player was watching something on the History Channel and saw a commercial or something that said, “30-second century.” I didn’t see it, so I don’t know what it was, but maybe it was like, maybe it went through what happened in a century in 30 seconds. And he had written that down as one of the band titles. And we were all going to go through titles, and I was like, “Well, that’s kind of a cool idea, because we could use the history aspect of it, but 30 seconds doesn’t really fit.” So we came up with Six Minute Century, being that six minutes may be the length of the song, and the century being the history part of it.
BM: That’s cool.
DL: Thank you.
BM: How do you classify this music? I know Lance calls it power prog, but I hear a lot more going on in there than just prog and power. There’s ‘80s metal, shoot, there’s hard rock, a lot of things. What do you say your music is? How would you classify it?
DL: Yeah, that’s difficult for me as well, because even for our MySpace page, I asked a few people that came out to see our band play, another band, and I said, “You know, what would you maybe compare it to?” Because when you’re that involved in it, it’s hard for you to say what does it sound like. And it was probably what I wrote on the MySpace thing, where a few people I asked said, “The music might be Savatage/Dio-esque with maybe a little bit of Dream Theater in there.” We’re nothing like prog like that. So for me it was kind of hard to put Dream Theater in there, but that’s what some people said it could remind them maybe a little bit of. But then with the vocal style, more of the Dream Theater or TNT or I think one of Chuck’s favorite singers is Ray Alder from Fates Warning. So it’s hard for me to compare, because I don’t know, I mean being that close to it, I can’t really say what it sounds like other than Six Minute Century.
BM: [laughs] Chuck’s got a better voice than James LaBre though, I can tell you that. [laughs] Chuck’s almost on the level of Steve Perry. He’s got a tremendous voice.
DL: Yeah.
BM: You could have put Journey in there. In fact, if you guys did a Journey song, it wouldn’t surprise me. If you played it live, he would sound like Steve Perry. He’s got that range.
DL: Yeah, well I believe that, our bass player and Chuck have known each other for many years, in fact, they played in a few bands before. And to hear them talk about it, I think Chuck was more of a regular rock, Journey-type singer until our bass player introduced him to Judas Priest.
BM: [laughs] Yeah.
DL: Yeah, but he definitely I guess has always, I mean, I haven’t known him that long before the band formed, so I haven’t gotten to see him perform in other bands, but they do have some other bands where they do some Journey songs.
BM: Well, boy, he hits some notes. Wow.
DL: [laughs] Right.
BM: [laughs] Well tell me about the lyrics. You’re right, they cover a lot of territory. I mean, there’s stuff going on that I don’t often hear in power metal bands, you know, Martin Luther King, or freedom, or religion. Do you ever have a difficult time putting music to some of the lyrics, or does it all come together really quickly and easily for you?
DL: Usually we start off with the music first.
BM: I see.
DL: I’ll bring in a song, and have the idea flowing, and then Chuck will write as he goes. Chuck’s not real fast, where the minute we start playing, he starts singing. So he’ll put more thought into what he wants to write about a song. Every once in a while it happens backward, where the second song on the CD, called “The Perfect Picture”, he kinda told me what he wanted to write about, so I kind of got the whole intro working based around what he wanted to write about. But usually it’s the other way around.
BM: It’s rare to hear an album where the guitars are right out front. You’ve got some great guitar sounds. And yet the vocals are right out front too, crystal clear. Did you go into this recording studio thinking, “I wanna make an album as clear as I can with every instrument right out front”? Or did this happen organically, or just accidentally? How did you get this album to sound this way?
DL: I would have to say accidentally. We went in and we recorded the CD more than a year ago, maybe even a year and a half ago, with the intentions of going in to record the CD before we shopped it to labels, so that we wouldn’t have to go back in again. But it wasn’t necessarily that everything that we record is gonna be the final product, although it ended up being that everything we recorded was done then. But part of it had to do with Lance as well. I have to give him some credit, because I sent in some rough mixes, and one of the things he asked in particular was turn the guitar up louder, and the vocals. So part of it has to do with Lance and, “Turn this up, turn this up where I can hear Chuck better, and where I can hear the guitar better.”
BM: Wow.
DL: So this is the first CD where I’ve actually ever done a full mix on, so I always like to have other people give me an idea as to what they think the mix sounds like.
BM: [laughs] Tell me about how long it took to record this. If you’ve had it in the can for a while, when did you start? What was the whole recording process? How long did it take from start to finish?
DL: The recording of this really did not take us a long time, because one thing with Six Minute Century, we do not have a full-time keyboard player. And so for our live shows, our drummer plays to a click track the whole show, and the keyboards are sampled. And so, when he went in the studio, none of the rest of us were even there when he was there, he just played all the songs to the click track and to the rhythm guitar that we had recorded. And then we all went in individually and did each part. And we all knew these songs already. Some bands, when they write, they write the songs towards, well, I don’t know how to say it, but they write the songs having never played the songs live before. So they’re kind of maybe rehearsing the songs as they’re recording them. Whereas we had already played all of these songs live on many occasions before we went in to record. So the recording process for us didn’t take very long at all.
BM: Really. That’s great. Let me ask you the song titles, and you tell me what you remember most about the song or what’s important to you about, or what it’s about.
DL: Ok.
BM: You mentioned the first three, tell me about the fourth one, “April 19,1995.”
DL: Ok, the song is about the Oklahoma City bombing that happened on that day, where I guess it was Timothy McVeigh and somebody else blew up that building.
BM: Oh yeah, I remember.
DL: And Chuck, that’s very close to him, because April 19th happens to be his birthday.
BM: Oh wow.
DL: And so that was the meaning behind that song for Chuck.
BM: How about “Zero Hour?”
DL: “Zero Hour,” even though there’s a band called Zero Hour, [laughs] we wrote this song before we ever knew who they were. And this song is kind of a, it’s not really about 9/11, but it kind of has to do with the whole war in Iraq. In fact, that’s the song that Chuck wrote because I believe that he had said one of his cousins came back and was talking to him about being in Iraq, in the army, or Marines, or something. And so “Zero Hour” kind of has to do with Ground Zero and the war and it all together.
BM: The sixth track, “Guitar Concerto.” Man, that’s absolutely brilliant. Are you playing all those guitars? And did you compose that? It’s quite a virtuoso performance.
DL: Oh, well, I really like a lot of styles and different players in different genres. I would say Randy Rhodes is my probably all-time favorite guitar player. Not probably, definitely. All-time favorite guitar player. And then other guitar players that I like, I really like Ronni Lé Tekrø from TNT. He's one of my favorite guitar players. And Steve Vai.
BM: Yeah.
DL: Those would be my older influences, but now, I really like Michael Romeo.
BM: Oh yeah.
DL: I think that he’s probably one of the top progressive, I guess, guitar players that I really like.
BM: He’s got a phenomenally fluid style with a heck of a lot of classical overtones to it.
DL: Definitely, yeah. But I wrote that whole song on my computer, the whole piano and orchestra and everything. I did it all on my own.
BM: I had that song on repeat for a long time today, it’s just phenomenal. It’s got a lot of emotion in the beginning, reminds me of Gary Moore. Like in his “Still Got the Blues” era. It’s just a phenomenal track.
DL: Thank you. I remember Gary Moore more from more of his rock or metal days. I forget what the CD, or back then probably the album, was called that had—what was the song? “Come Tomorrow?” I forget now what the song is called. But he has one called Out in the Streets or something?
BM: Definitely, yep. I remember that album.
DL: Yeah, I listened to that back then.
BM: How long have you been playing guitar?
DL: I’ve been, 25, 30 years now. And I’ve been playing as a pro guitar player since probably 1989 or so.
BM: You have a great style. There’s an awful lot of speed there, but there’s a lot of emotion too, which is sometimes a difficult thing to balance. That’s one of the things people have against Yngwie Malmsteen. They say he’s just a flash player who couldn’t feel a note to save his soul. But it seems like you have both sides of that covered.
DL: Well, our whole band, we kind of take that attitude, that some bands—and I wouldn’t say any bands’ names or even think of one in particular—but a lot of times, it’s more about, “How many notes can I play?” Or, “How many drum licks can I play?” Or, “How many time signatures can every song go through just to make a super prog record?” And Six Minute Century, we would rather write songs that people would like to listen to. But at the same time, but enough of the prog elements, or the fast guitar parts, or the high vocals, we want to put enough in there that a person who likes the progressive rock or metal into it, but at the same time, we would like to keep the people that don’t maybe listen to Symphony X, keep them interested as well. And that’s really what we try to strive for, is writing songs that can break the boundary of prog or metal or whatever.
BM: That’s one of the things I like about your album. It really has hit me in a way that a lot of albums haven’t lately. I think it’s because it’s got that ‘80s metal riffage going on that I can air guitar all day long to, but it’s also got some technical elements that are intriguing to my mind as well.
DL: Right. I don’t know, I can’t really say that’s what we’re going for, because I can only write what comes out. I can’t just sit down and say, “Oh, today I’m going to write a song that people will like to listen to.”
BM: [laughs]
DL: But you know what I mean?
BM: Yeah.
DL: It’s gotta come out, but we all try to say, “Well, that riff, let’s not even use that riff, because maybe we can’t work with it.” Not that it’s not good enough, but there’s a whole different idea that we wanna try to go through. The other thing about Six Minute Century is we try to make every song different. One of the other things I find with a lot of the, whether it be power metal or prog metal or whatever, is that one song to the next, you might not know, if there wasn’t a break in between the songs, that it was a different song.
BM: Yeah, I know what you mean.
DL: And we try, what we try and strive to make every song a different song. It’s not, “Everybody likes ‘The Perfect Picture’. So let’s write 10 more of those.”
BM: [laughs]
DL: It would be nice if we could, but it’s not that you can purposely go out and write a song that everybody’s going to like. So we try and mix it up to where every song has a different idea maybe.
BM: Well tell me about the next song, as I’m going through, “Saved in Time,” track seven.
DL: Ok. “Saved in Time” is, to be honest with you, that’s not a historical song. Not all the songs we do have something to do with history. That song was a riff I came up with. Actually, that one may have the most odd meter, for a progressive-type thing, in the beginning of it. Although I think our drummer may play it straight, but if you listen to the guitar and bass, it’s like a polyrhythm, I believe. But that song, to be honest with you, I don’t really know where the inspiration came from for Chuck's lyrics there, because it doesn’t have anything to do with a historical event.
BM: Well, he’s not a one-trick pony. Not every song has to be about history. [laughs]
DL: Well sure. “The Perfect Picture” didn’t really have anything to do with history either.
BM: No.
DL: Or the first song either, “Under the Moonlight.” That was just a song about a vampire. So we just kind of, we didn’t want to say, “Every song that we play has to do something with history,” because then we’d be reading encyclopedias forever.
BM: [laughs]
DL: Some songs are just going to come out, and some songs are gonna have a certain idea about them.
BM: How about the eighth, track eight, “Heaven’s Gate.”
DL: Ok, “Heaven’s Gate” is a song Chuck wrote about, I believe it was a cult that was in San Diego. And I believe they were called the Heaven’s Gate cult or something. The guy was going to take everybody up to heaven or something, so they all committed suicide.
BM: [laughs] Yeah.
DL: And so that’s the inspiration for “Heaven’s Gate.”
BM: How about track nine, “Get Your Wings.”
DL: “Get Your Wings” is not a historical event at all, it’s a kind of uplifting, we’ll maybe not uplifting would be the right word, but build your confidence-type song. Get your wings and fly. [laughs] Has nothing really to do with any kind of historical event.
BM: Yeah. You know what I find is a real catchy song is “Seven Seas.” Tell me about that one.
DL: Ok, are you not familiar with the song?
BM: Oh yeah, definitely.
DL: No, I mean, not our song, but the original?
BM: No. Who did it originally?
DL: That’s a remake of a TNT song.
BM: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs] I knew it sounded familiar, but I’m thinking, “Wow.” Yeah, no wonder. That’s a cool riff. I used to listen to TNT.
DL: Yeah, TNT is one of my favorites, so when we started doing the band and I was with a singer that could actually sing TNT stuff, we’ve been doing “Seven Seas” from the beginning of Six Minute Century. So when it came time to record the CD, we were like, “Hey, why don’t we just throw that on there, just in case we have extra room or whatever.” So yeah, that’s a TNT remake.
BM: It’s cool. Are any of these songs difficult to play live on stage, or are they all, can they all execute pretty well?
DL: Well, I mean, there’s a certain aspect live that I guess sometimes gets a little difficult, and that is that our drummer has to play to a click track the whole night in order for all the keyboards to come out. So there has been
[Continued in Part Two]
Guitarist Don LaFon is no stranger to making great music. Nor is he a stranger to performing live. As part of Krucible, Don and company wowed the audience at last year’s ProgPower USA metal fest in Atlanta. Now, as part of Six Minute Century, he’s poised to become one of the most talked-about guitarists in power metal. My prediction: if SMC can keep up this level of songwriting, it’s going to be the band to watch in the years ahead.
Don recently had a lengthy chat with Bill Murphy about the origins of the band, the killer songs on Time Capsules, the band’s upcoming appearance at the Nightmare Metal Fest, and (believe it or not) raising horses in the great state of Texas.
This is Part One of Two Parts.
BM: Hello? Is this Don?
DL: Yeah, is this Bill?
BM: Yup. Thanks for your time tonight. I appreciate it.
DL: No problem. Thanks for calling.
BM: Time Capsules is amazing. I mean this is really incredible. Chuck Williams hits notes that only dogs can hear. I haven’t heard a voice like that since Steve Perry.
DL: Yeah, Chuck’s pretty good.
BM: Well, tell me about your involvement with this. You’re in at least three bands that I can count. You work with Mindcrime and Krucible and Six Minute Century?
DL: Yeah. I do all three. I mean, Mindcrime and Krucible is pretty much the same band.
BM: Right.
DL: Except for Mindcrime has Chris Salinas from Zero Hour, as the singer. And obviously, Krucible has Lance King as the singer. So yeah, I do all three.
BM: Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Gee, which band am I guitarist for now? How do I write songs?" Or is it easy to keep them apart?
DL: Well, it’s easy enough, I suppose, because Mindcrime plays all Queensryche songs, so we don’t have to worry with that.
BM: Yeah.
DL: And I’ve had Six Minute Century way before I was in Krucible or Mindcrime, we’ve been together since 2004, so you know, Six Minute Century, I write all the songs and stuff, and for Krucible, the bass player, Shane [Dubose], and the guitar player, Eric [Halpern], write the majority of the material.
BM: Where does the name come from, and what does it mean? What significance does it have for you?
DL: Oh yeah. When we first formed, we had a different drummer, so the bass player and myself and Chuck, who’s the singer, unfortunately at that time, we had a lot of time on our hands when our drummer wasn’t there. That’s why he’s not here now. [laughs]
BM: [laughs]
DL: But when we sat around in the practice room, and once it got to be where we decided what the name of the band would be, Chuck likes to write a lot of songs in something maybe to do with a historical event, or something that might have to do with history. And I wanna say our bass player was watching something on the History Channel and saw a commercial or something that said, “30-second century.” I didn’t see it, so I don’t know what it was, but maybe it was like, maybe it went through what happened in a century in 30 seconds. And he had written that down as one of the band titles. And we were all going to go through titles, and I was like, “Well, that’s kind of a cool idea, because we could use the history aspect of it, but 30 seconds doesn’t really fit.” So we came up with Six Minute Century, being that six minutes may be the length of the song, and the century being the history part of it.
BM: That’s cool.
DL: Thank you.
BM: How do you classify this music? I know Lance calls it power prog, but I hear a lot more going on in there than just prog and power. There’s ‘80s metal, shoot, there’s hard rock, a lot of things. What do you say your music is? How would you classify it?
DL: Yeah, that’s difficult for me as well, because even for our MySpace page, I asked a few people that came out to see our band play, another band, and I said, “You know, what would you maybe compare it to?” Because when you’re that involved in it, it’s hard for you to say what does it sound like. And it was probably what I wrote on the MySpace thing, where a few people I asked said, “The music might be Savatage/Dio-esque with maybe a little bit of Dream Theater in there.” We’re nothing like prog like that. So for me it was kind of hard to put Dream Theater in there, but that’s what some people said it could remind them maybe a little bit of. But then with the vocal style, more of the Dream Theater or TNT or I think one of Chuck’s favorite singers is Ray Alder from Fates Warning. So it’s hard for me to compare, because I don’t know, I mean being that close to it, I can’t really say what it sounds like other than Six Minute Century.
BM: [laughs] Chuck’s got a better voice than James LaBre though, I can tell you that. [laughs] Chuck’s almost on the level of Steve Perry. He’s got a tremendous voice.
DL: Yeah.
BM: You could have put Journey in there. In fact, if you guys did a Journey song, it wouldn’t surprise me. If you played it live, he would sound like Steve Perry. He’s got that range.
DL: Yeah, well I believe that, our bass player and Chuck have known each other for many years, in fact, they played in a few bands before. And to hear them talk about it, I think Chuck was more of a regular rock, Journey-type singer until our bass player introduced him to Judas Priest.
BM: [laughs] Yeah.
DL: Yeah, but he definitely I guess has always, I mean, I haven’t known him that long before the band formed, so I haven’t gotten to see him perform in other bands, but they do have some other bands where they do some Journey songs.
BM: Well, boy, he hits some notes. Wow.
DL: [laughs] Right.
BM: [laughs] Well tell me about the lyrics. You’re right, they cover a lot of territory. I mean, there’s stuff going on that I don’t often hear in power metal bands, you know, Martin Luther King, or freedom, or religion. Do you ever have a difficult time putting music to some of the lyrics, or does it all come together really quickly and easily for you?
DL: Usually we start off with the music first.
BM: I see.
DL: I’ll bring in a song, and have the idea flowing, and then Chuck will write as he goes. Chuck’s not real fast, where the minute we start playing, he starts singing. So he’ll put more thought into what he wants to write about a song. Every once in a while it happens backward, where the second song on the CD, called “The Perfect Picture”, he kinda told me what he wanted to write about, so I kind of got the whole intro working based around what he wanted to write about. But usually it’s the other way around.
BM: It’s rare to hear an album where the guitars are right out front. You’ve got some great guitar sounds. And yet the vocals are right out front too, crystal clear. Did you go into this recording studio thinking, “I wanna make an album as clear as I can with every instrument right out front”? Or did this happen organically, or just accidentally? How did you get this album to sound this way?
DL: I would have to say accidentally. We went in and we recorded the CD more than a year ago, maybe even a year and a half ago, with the intentions of going in to record the CD before we shopped it to labels, so that we wouldn’t have to go back in again. But it wasn’t necessarily that everything that we record is gonna be the final product, although it ended up being that everything we recorded was done then. But part of it had to do with Lance as well. I have to give him some credit, because I sent in some rough mixes, and one of the things he asked in particular was turn the guitar up louder, and the vocals. So part of it has to do with Lance and, “Turn this up, turn this up where I can hear Chuck better, and where I can hear the guitar better.”
BM: Wow.
DL: So this is the first CD where I’ve actually ever done a full mix on, so I always like to have other people give me an idea as to what they think the mix sounds like.
BM: [laughs] Tell me about how long it took to record this. If you’ve had it in the can for a while, when did you start? What was the whole recording process? How long did it take from start to finish?
DL: The recording of this really did not take us a long time, because one thing with Six Minute Century, we do not have a full-time keyboard player. And so for our live shows, our drummer plays to a click track the whole show, and the keyboards are sampled. And so, when he went in the studio, none of the rest of us were even there when he was there, he just played all the songs to the click track and to the rhythm guitar that we had recorded. And then we all went in individually and did each part. And we all knew these songs already. Some bands, when they write, they write the songs towards, well, I don’t know how to say it, but they write the songs having never played the songs live before. So they’re kind of maybe rehearsing the songs as they’re recording them. Whereas we had already played all of these songs live on many occasions before we went in to record. So the recording process for us didn’t take very long at all.
BM: Really. That’s great. Let me ask you the song titles, and you tell me what you remember most about the song or what’s important to you about, or what it’s about.
DL: Ok.
BM: You mentioned the first three, tell me about the fourth one, “April 19,1995.”
DL: Ok, the song is about the Oklahoma City bombing that happened on that day, where I guess it was Timothy McVeigh and somebody else blew up that building.
BM: Oh yeah, I remember.
DL: And Chuck, that’s very close to him, because April 19th happens to be his birthday.
BM: Oh wow.
DL: And so that was the meaning behind that song for Chuck.
BM: How about “Zero Hour?”
DL: “Zero Hour,” even though there’s a band called Zero Hour, [laughs] we wrote this song before we ever knew who they were. And this song is kind of a, it’s not really about 9/11, but it kind of has to do with the whole war in Iraq. In fact, that’s the song that Chuck wrote because I believe that he had said one of his cousins came back and was talking to him about being in Iraq, in the army, or Marines, or something. And so “Zero Hour” kind of has to do with Ground Zero and the war and it all together.
BM: The sixth track, “Guitar Concerto.” Man, that’s absolutely brilliant. Are you playing all those guitars? And did you compose that? It’s quite a virtuoso performance.
DL: Oh, well, I really like a lot of styles and different players in different genres. I would say Randy Rhodes is my probably all-time favorite guitar player. Not probably, definitely. All-time favorite guitar player. And then other guitar players that I like, I really like Ronni Lé Tekrø from TNT. He's one of my favorite guitar players. And Steve Vai.
BM: Yeah.
DL: Those would be my older influences, but now, I really like Michael Romeo.
BM: Oh yeah.
DL: I think that he’s probably one of the top progressive, I guess, guitar players that I really like.
BM: He’s got a phenomenally fluid style with a heck of a lot of classical overtones to it.
DL: Definitely, yeah. But I wrote that whole song on my computer, the whole piano and orchestra and everything. I did it all on my own.
BM: I had that song on repeat for a long time today, it’s just phenomenal. It’s got a lot of emotion in the beginning, reminds me of Gary Moore. Like in his “Still Got the Blues” era. It’s just a phenomenal track.
DL: Thank you. I remember Gary Moore more from more of his rock or metal days. I forget what the CD, or back then probably the album, was called that had—what was the song? “Come Tomorrow?” I forget now what the song is called. But he has one called Out in the Streets or something?
BM: Definitely, yep. I remember that album.
DL: Yeah, I listened to that back then.
BM: How long have you been playing guitar?
DL: I’ve been, 25, 30 years now. And I’ve been playing as a pro guitar player since probably 1989 or so.
BM: You have a great style. There’s an awful lot of speed there, but there’s a lot of emotion too, which is sometimes a difficult thing to balance. That’s one of the things people have against Yngwie Malmsteen. They say he’s just a flash player who couldn’t feel a note to save his soul. But it seems like you have both sides of that covered.
DL: Well, our whole band, we kind of take that attitude, that some bands—and I wouldn’t say any bands’ names or even think of one in particular—but a lot of times, it’s more about, “How many notes can I play?” Or, “How many drum licks can I play?” Or, “How many time signatures can every song go through just to make a super prog record?” And Six Minute Century, we would rather write songs that people would like to listen to. But at the same time, but enough of the prog elements, or the fast guitar parts, or the high vocals, we want to put enough in there that a person who likes the progressive rock or metal into it, but at the same time, we would like to keep the people that don’t maybe listen to Symphony X, keep them interested as well. And that’s really what we try to strive for, is writing songs that can break the boundary of prog or metal or whatever.
BM: That’s one of the things I like about your album. It really has hit me in a way that a lot of albums haven’t lately. I think it’s because it’s got that ‘80s metal riffage going on that I can air guitar all day long to, but it’s also got some technical elements that are intriguing to my mind as well.
DL: Right. I don’t know, I can’t really say that’s what we’re going for, because I can only write what comes out. I can’t just sit down and say, “Oh, today I’m going to write a song that people will like to listen to.”
BM: [laughs]
DL: But you know what I mean?
BM: Yeah.
DL: It’s gotta come out, but we all try to say, “Well, that riff, let’s not even use that riff, because maybe we can’t work with it.” Not that it’s not good enough, but there’s a whole different idea that we wanna try to go through. The other thing about Six Minute Century is we try to make every song different. One of the other things I find with a lot of the, whether it be power metal or prog metal or whatever, is that one song to the next, you might not know, if there wasn’t a break in between the songs, that it was a different song.
BM: Yeah, I know what you mean.
DL: And we try, what we try and strive to make every song a different song. It’s not, “Everybody likes ‘The Perfect Picture’. So let’s write 10 more of those.”
BM: [laughs]
DL: It would be nice if we could, but it’s not that you can purposely go out and write a song that everybody’s going to like. So we try and mix it up to where every song has a different idea maybe.
BM: Well tell me about the next song, as I’m going through, “Saved in Time,” track seven.
DL: Ok. “Saved in Time” is, to be honest with you, that’s not a historical song. Not all the songs we do have something to do with history. That song was a riff I came up with. Actually, that one may have the most odd meter, for a progressive-type thing, in the beginning of it. Although I think our drummer may play it straight, but if you listen to the guitar and bass, it’s like a polyrhythm, I believe. But that song, to be honest with you, I don’t really know where the inspiration came from for Chuck's lyrics there, because it doesn’t have anything to do with a historical event.
BM: Well, he’s not a one-trick pony. Not every song has to be about history. [laughs]
DL: Well sure. “The Perfect Picture” didn’t really have anything to do with history either.
BM: No.
DL: Or the first song either, “Under the Moonlight.” That was just a song about a vampire. So we just kind of, we didn’t want to say, “Every song that we play has to do something with history,” because then we’d be reading encyclopedias forever.
BM: [laughs]
DL: Some songs are just going to come out, and some songs are gonna have a certain idea about them.
BM: How about the eighth, track eight, “Heaven’s Gate.”
DL: Ok, “Heaven’s Gate” is a song Chuck wrote about, I believe it was a cult that was in San Diego. And I believe they were called the Heaven’s Gate cult or something. The guy was going to take everybody up to heaven or something, so they all committed suicide.
BM: [laughs] Yeah.
DL: And so that’s the inspiration for “Heaven’s Gate.”
BM: How about track nine, “Get Your Wings.”
DL: “Get Your Wings” is not a historical event at all, it’s a kind of uplifting, we’ll maybe not uplifting would be the right word, but build your confidence-type song. Get your wings and fly. [laughs] Has nothing really to do with any kind of historical event.
BM: Yeah. You know what I find is a real catchy song is “Seven Seas.” Tell me about that one.
DL: Ok, are you not familiar with the song?
BM: Oh yeah, definitely.
DL: No, I mean, not our song, but the original?
BM: No. Who did it originally?
DL: That’s a remake of a TNT song.
BM: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs] I knew it sounded familiar, but I’m thinking, “Wow.” Yeah, no wonder. That’s a cool riff. I used to listen to TNT.
DL: Yeah, TNT is one of my favorites, so when we started doing the band and I was with a singer that could actually sing TNT stuff, we’ve been doing “Seven Seas” from the beginning of Six Minute Century. So when it came time to record the CD, we were like, “Hey, why don’t we just throw that on there, just in case we have extra room or whatever.” So yeah, that’s a TNT remake.
BM: It’s cool. Are any of these songs difficult to play live on stage, or are they all, can they all execute pretty well?
DL: Well, I mean, there’s a certain aspect live that I guess sometimes gets a little difficult, and that is that our drummer has to play to a click track the whole night in order for all the keyboards to come out. So there has been
[Continued in Part Two]
