As far as touring, where were you when you heard about the Metallica tour?
We were on a headlining tour in the UK with Black Cobra and Trivet, our drummer, is our manager, he got a call from their guy at Q Prime. He was like, ‘Hey Metallica wants to offer you the Eastern European tour.’ We were like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ So we did that and got to hang out with all the guys. We had with Lars [Ulrich, drummer] before, and he said that he was going to take us out in the U.S. and then kind of said some things that were contrary to that, so we didn’t know what was going to happen. So I guess it was about halfway into the Clutch U.S. tour that the dates were posted on the Internet and we were on it. We were like, ‘Okay, I guess we are on this tour.’ So we had to get prepared.
What’s it like having your drummer be the manager as well? Does it take the pressure off in a sense because you know you have someone who totally has the band’s best interest at heart?
If you ask Trivett you are going to get a different answer, because he does do a whole lot of work for the band. To point where we just have to come in and say, yeah or nay on certain things. All the people that we have met with who would want to be our manager, they haven’t been able to do all the things that Trivett would normally do. Trivett would essentially look for someone to completely take over his role, so he could just drum, but there are so many things that he does as far as accounting-wise and whatnot. I think it’s best to play it close to the chest like that and know exactly what’s going on and there’s no weirdness.
It always kind of shocks me when young bands talk about having managers and stuff like that. Some bands truly do need it, but all of us have been in prior bands for many years and all have like tried to do what we are doing as far as like playing in bands and playing clubs and putting out CDs. We knew what all the wrong decisions were, so we just try to make all the right ones. Like don’t oversaturate yourselves in your hometown, like make your show a show. So many bands in Austin play every weekend, and then it’s just like a non-event. Like, ‘I will check out you guys next weekend.’ To only play once every five, six months, it becomes like an event than a non-event.
Why did you choose to do the Freya EP live from CBGB’s, were you just enamored with the club’s history?
For sure, there was a lot of that for sure. We had a chance to record in there, and we were like, ‘Of course.’ They were closing in like a month or two, we were one of the last in the handful of shows that was going to be at that club. I got to mix that, so it was cool. A little piece of history there. There were like a thousand copies of that, but there are some other tracks from that show that went on the Japanese release of Age Of Winters.
