SHAI HULUD
Cleveland Ohio
July 18, 2008
by Mike Hammer
Matt Fox, guitarist and founder of Shai Hulud, says his band would use some of the gorgeous Burning Angel girls on the artwork for the next Shai Hulud CD, but he thinks fans of the band would freak out with the sexiness. He thinks fans of the hardcore/metal band, that led the way for many of today’s metal bands, are nerdy guys who are into kickass music, and might be disturbed by the sexiness.
Fox himself seems to talk more about the music, than the sexiness – but his band does have a new CD out and he does have a Burning Angel connection so that’s why I sat down with him for an interview about the disrespectful hardcore scene, the new Shai Hulud CD and how he has nothing to offer metal chicks.
Hammer: Are you aware of Burning Angel?
Matt: Yes. A good friend of mine is friends with Joanna.
Hammer: What’s the Joanna connection?
Matt: My friend Ronen does a podcast called “Issue Oriented” and he grew up in Jersey and they’ve been friends for like 20 years.
Hammer: And you haven’t gotten into porn yet, with that inside hookup?
Matt: No, no.
Hammer: How bout some porn soundtracks?
Matt: I’m not the biggest porn guy.
Hammer: So you wouldn’t wanna be on the next Burning Angel porn soundtrack?
Matt: No, no, Absolutely I’d do it. Absolutely no problem with it. Just for me I’m not the biggest porn guy.
Hammer: Different strokes for different folks I say. But… You are Matt Fox, guitar play in Shai Hulud. And, for those who don’t know, I assume most members of the sites are nerds but…, tell us where the name Shai Hulud came from.
Matt: Yeah. It’s from the book “Dune” by Frank Herbert, which is a science fiction epic novel. Why did we choose that name? Um.. when we were starting there were a lot of bands that had what we were calling “Johnny Hardcore” names like X Throwback or X Tacklebox, just your standard generic hardcore names. Nad even though we didn’t know what the band was gonna be about, we knew that we wanted it to be a little different and socially deeper. But we didn’t have any lyrics or any songs yet so we didn’t know what we were gonna be about, so we decided to take it from a cool novel, or some literature based thing to give it some sort of depth. And a lot of us, the main two guys anyway, me and this guy Dave, who started the band were big science fiction guys. Him probably more so than I, but I was really into “Dune” at that point. I had just finished reading the novel and I had watched the movie, so I suggested something from “Dune.” We went over a couple different names and there was a miscommunication and he thought one thing and I thought the other, but eventually we decided on Shai Hulud. Which I believe was actually a mistake. He wanted to name the band after a different character and I thought he was talking about Shai Hulud. Then when we watched the movie together he said “So this is what we’re named after,” and I said “No now, that’s something else, we’re named after this. But we had already booked our first show and there it was. A great way to start a band, on a miscommunication, and thus we picked Shai Hulud.
Hammer: Excellent. Shai Hulud is the big worm creature in “Dune” who eats people right.
Matt: Well, I don’t know if he eats people intentionally.
Hammer: Did the band share his eating people mantra? You’ve always been a tenacious band. And you’ve been around a while. You started in the mid ’90s right?
Matt: Yeah. I think we really started in ’95. What I mean by started is when we got together said let’s name a band and lets start throwing together riffs. I don’t think we played our first show until ’96, or maybe it was ’95. I know the idea for the band, where the ball started rolling, looking for members and such, was in ’95.
Hammer: OK. Back in 1995 I was graduating high school and the hardcore scene was pretty big and I remember Shai Hulud was a part of that. I had a lot of friends who were into hardcore and straightedge bands and such. What’s the difference between that scene then and the scene now?
Matt: The hardcore scene? There’s always a lot of differences and sometimes I remember some of them and sometimes I remember others. But, the main thing, when I’m asked this question, the main thing that comes to mind is the violence. It’s not to say that there was no violence back then or that things were better back then, but it to me it just seemed, at least in South Florida, maybe cause it was a smaller, close knit scene. But it seemed everyone was friends, there was very few fights and very little disrespect and certainly no intentional gunning for people while dancing. And these days when I go to shows, I don’t even go to shows because of this.
Entertainment to be is not worrying about other people’s safety. When I go to shows these days and I watch people playing, and it’s not during our sets cause I don’t think we give off that kind of vibe, I watch people just throwing their fists around, almost intentionally trying to hurt somebody, to gain tough guy points. That hurts my feelings as a human being. Forget about the music I play forget anything, that offends me as a person because above all I’m a human being and I don’t want to see other people hurt because they’re enjoying a piece of music they hear. So the main difference I see is that the hardcore scene seems to be based on a lot of fashion, a lot of disrespect and it’s now become a lot more cool and a lot more accepted to be ignorant. Where as when we started it was cool to be aware. That’s my perception.
Hammer: I get a little bit of that. Cause I remember going to shows back then and if someone got knocked down in the mosh pit, people helped them up, you helped up the person you hit. It was your buddy you were moshin with, and nowadays some stranger might come and crash you on the back of the head and just not care.
Matt: Yeah and its not to say that there aren’t aspects of back then now, and it’s not to say that everything’s shit now. Cause there’s always good and there’s always bad. And, maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, but again, in ’95 and ’96, even all the way up to 2001 – when Earth Crisis was running the show it was cool to have respect and it was cool to be aware and it was cool to care. Now it seems a lot cooler to be apathetic and ignorant and violent.
Hammer: You mention awareness. I remember going to hardcore shows and festivals and there used to be tons of tables with info and zines and literature.
Matt: Yeah. You don’t see that much anywhere these days.
Hammer: Do you see it anywhere across the country?
Matt: I’m sure. There’s still some tabling. PETA2 is pretty active in the hardcore scene, but it doesn’t seem like there’s an overwhelming desire to share information these days. But, like you said, I used to be able to go to a shows back then I could check out merch, I could check out distros and then I could check out 3 or 4 tables of people trying to share ideas you might not be aware of. And, again, that’s not to say that it doesn’t happen these days, cause it does happen, I know there’s quite a few organizations around, I know there’s some organizations in Connecticut that are still tabling, but it’s a lot less now than it was then, from my vantage point.
Hammer: Even though you just put out your first album in a while, you’ve been touring a bit right?
Matt: Yeah. We’ve been touring. It’s all been kinda under the radar. But we did just put out our first album in 5 years. And we have to get back out there and build up our presence.
Hammer: And you guys have gone through a couple line up changes.
Matt: Always.
Hammer: Is that just part of Shai Hulud?
Matt: I think it’s part of a lot of bands, bands at this level anyway. Bands of this level have a lot harder of a time staying together than, say.. the Rolling Stones or Metallica. Bands that the money and the comfort level keeps them together. There’s no comfort level in Shai Hulud. We’re in a hot van with no air conditioning.
I would say we were making a little bit of money in 200, 2001, then we dropped off and now we’re a new band again. And line up changes are difficult to avoid sometimes, and necessary sometimes. You’ve got guys that say I can’t live like this, I don’t wanna sweat next to you for 6 weeks again. I don’t have to do this. I can go home and get a real job. Or this guy is married, or this guy wants a better job or this guy can’t go on tour and come back with 150 dollars, or come back having lost 150 dollars.
And we’re very picky. A lot of the time people that we have with us are hired guns. They say “Hey, I’m married or I have a thing and I can’t join the band, but I’d love to go on tour with you guys for a month and help you out. It’ll be fun for me. You’ll pay me a little bit of money and I love playing music, I haven’t done it in a while. So we will say cool and that guy will get us through tour and then “who’s next?”
Finding a guy who is talented, hard working person who is mature and doesn’t have a drug problem, and is respectful can be difficult. So lineup changes I don’t really see as our fault, or any bands fault. When you’re touring in a band and your guarantees are 2 to 300 a night and it costs that much to drive the next place, how can someone who’s got a life and a wife or a job or a mortgage do that? How can that person who didn’t start the band, whose heart is not in the band, possibly do that on a regular basis?
It’s easy for myself and Matt Fletcher who have started the band and been with it more than 10 years,we have our minds and our hearts and our souls in this band. So if we come home at the end of the tour and we take a serious financial hit we do what we have to do to make ends meet, because at the end of the day we are leaving our dream. And we’d like to find members who think the same way, what want to put their hearts and minds and souls into Shai Hulud so we can make it work. But, it’s just not that easy.
Hammer: For me though, in the hardcore/metal genre that Shai Hulud is in, the guitars are usually what I hear and what hooks me first, not vocals or drums. And you’ve gone through some singers too. So you constantly being the guitarist keeps the Shai Hulud sound grounded and that is what I’m drawn to anyway. But, what do you hear first when you listen to a hardcore band, what grabs you first?
Matt: What grabs me? Oh, it could be anything. It depends on the band. Take a band like Bane, it’s the lyrics and the vocals, then take a band like Strongarm, a band from the ’90s and it’s the song structures, the guitars and the drums. Not that the vocals weren’t great, but there are other things that I listened to. But for us, luckily for us, I’ve been in the band since the beginning and I’ve been writing a lot of the stuff since the beginning and I think people that like our band realize that no matter who is singing for the band, or who is playing second guitar, whether the other members are contributing or not, the core of what they liked is always gonna be there. Shai Hulud is always gonna progress, even if it’s not always the same lineup, cause no band wants to record the same album twice. There’s always progression, but the heart and the mind and the style and the soul and the intention is the same now in 2008 as in was in 1998 and it will be in 2018.
Hammer: I’ve gotten the new album – Misanthropy Pure – and I like it a lot. And even though it’s the first Shai Hulud album in years, I hear the same things in it that I used to hear in Shai Hulud in the ’90s. Is that something that you intentionally try to keep. Like you said, every band changes, but is that signature sound just something that naturally happens?
Matt: Yeah. Naturally. It’s like your handwriting. When you go to write something down you can spend a little bit more time and make it neater, or you can make it sloppy, but at the end of the day it’s still your handwriting. You can’t really change that. Even if I was to start a new band that wasn’t in punk, hardcore or metal, I’m pretty sure somebody would say “That’s the same guy from Shai Hulud,” because my approach to writing music is my approach, for better or for worse.
Hammer: So explain what you tried to do with the new album?
Matt: What we tried to do with the new album – which is called Misanthropy Pure and came out on Metal Blade records in May – was really give our last album –That Within Blood Ill Tempered – a swift kick in the ass. What we really liked about Blood Ill Tempered was that we did our best to make it very melodic, very catchy and very heavy. But, the heaviness didn’t come through quite as much as we wanted, so understanding that we said let’s take all those elements and really beef them up, and give Ill Tempered a swift kick in the ass, and that was how we described the album to ourselves. And based on what I hear now when I listen to it I say “Mission Accomplished.”
Hammer: So how did you make that goal happen? Were you strumming something and said “that’s not heavy enough,” or do you try to set up the studio to captures sounds in a certain way or what?
Matt: We know the elements and the characteristics that make up our band. So if I write something, one of my favorite bands is They Might Be Giants for crying out loud, a riff that’s silly and sounds like They Might Be Giants song I’m clearly not gonna put that in Shai Hulud cause that doesn’t work. But usually when I write, it will fit into Shai Hulud. And what we did for the new album was we were working on themes, musical themes, and what I mean is that why write a riff and I say this song is gonna be defined by a lot of melody, nothing really chunky and no fast parts – and that was the song Misanthropy Pure. Then with some other riffs I could tell this song will be melodic and flowy, no hard parts, or OK, this song will be fuckin heavy and pissed and bouncy and groovy. So you write the songs and you have one that’s flowy and melodic and now there’s one that’s heavy pissed and crunchy and you fit them all together. And I wanna vary the album, I don’t wanna have 10 or 11 songs of all the same thing. But, we probably worked on the track order of this album, more than any other album, because we wanted to pull out different feelings. Let’s start out with a punch in the face, then let’s bring them over here, then fuck, let’s bring them all the way over here into the melodic aspect, then let’s punch them again and them bring it down.
The goal was to make the best Shai Hulud album ever - if somebody likes it or not that’s up to them, but we worked harder on this album than any other album because we really wanted to make the people who liked our band proud.
Hammer: Awesome. So now you’re touring to support the album. Are you riding around in the tour van listening to They Might Be Giants? Or do you just sit and sweat next to each other?
Matt: I think I’m the only one in the band who likes The Might Be Giant. We just talk, sweat next to each other, our merch guy was watching some television, me and the merch guy were playing Connect 4.
Hammer: There’s no porn in the van?
Matt: There’s definitely no porn DVDs, somebody might have some porn on their computers, but I don’t. I don have Alfred Hitchcock presents on DVD.
Hammer: That’s a little pornographic. Alfred was racy for his time.
Matt: In the van there’s nothing too interesting going on in the van.
Hammer: Is there anything interesting going on at the shows? Any hot metal chicks around?
Matt: I don’t think we’re the hot metal chick type band. I’d like to be. But I don’t think we have the personality, I don’t think we have the sound and I don’t think we have the demeanor. Not to say that we focus on specific issues, but we go on stage and focus on our hearts and our minds.
Hammer: Hearts and minds are OK. Listen. Hot metal chicks are reading this interview right now, this is your chance to talk to them. Give them a good pitch.
Matt: The thing is, I have Nothing. People ask me if we have groupies and stuff, but we don’t. Any girl that would be considered a groupie, I have nothing to offer them.
Hammer: You have that van. And you have like 150 bucks at the end of the month.
Matt: I’m not built for a one night stand and my interests, I wanna talk about Carl Sagan…
Hammer: Metal chicks don’t wanna talk about Carl Sagan?
Matt: I don’t think so. I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer a girl like that. I wish that I did. I don’t like to party, I quote Jawbreaker when I say “All I want is a life without partying.” A good time to me would be watching a Woody Allen movie with a girl and then maybe fooling around, but without drinking. I’m a pretty boring guy overall.
Hammer: So, is that your plan after every show – going back watching a movie and making out.
Matt: It wouldn’t be a bad idea, I don’t know if it’s ever happened. The Woody Allen part has happened. It’s usually me and Woody by ourselves. I can confidently say I’ve never found a girl at a show who was excited about going and watching a Woody Allen with me.
Hammer: Did you ever try that pickup line on a girl?
Matt: I don’t know that I ever had a pickup line ever, but I know that I have met a girl at a show and she said she liked movies and I said I like movies, I like Woody Allen movies and usually the response is “Umm… Ewww” or “I’ve never seen anything by him. So, it’s never worked thus far and I venture to say that it never will.
Hammer: Are there more girls at your shows now. Now that you’ve been around a while, are the crowds the same as they were a decade ago?
Matt: Actually I think now is a really bad time for music. At least for us, or bands our size, which is very small. We’re not a big band, we have never been a big band.
Hammer: So give a pitch, why should the people reading this article come see Shai Hulud?
Matt: I wouldn’t tell anyone to come see us. I’m not out to solicit.
Hammer: You’re a terrible PR guy Matt.
Matt: I don’t have anything to offer, other than what my band offers. We play music that is given a lot of thought and a lot of emotion and we play it passionately with ever fiber of our being every night. If that appeals to you, come see us.
