Oceans of Slumber Interview - - Cammie Bevery and Dobber Beverly: 7/23/24
Jack Mangan: Nobody loves no one. What’s up, everyone? I’m here with two of my favorite people in the music and Metal world: Dobber and Cammie from Oceans of Slumber. 2024 is looking to be a really exciting year for them; the new album, “Where Gods Fear to Speak” is coming out. Thanks for taking a few minutes to talk to me. It’s been awhile.
Dobber Beverly: Yeah of course. We’re stoked.
Cammie Beverly: Yeah.
JM: I saw you guys on your tour with Moonspell and Eleine, and Cammie, I loved your introduction to the band, something like “Southern gothic storytellers. . . “
CB: It was “Southern Sonic Storytellers.” We’ve evolved a lot. We’re first and foremost storytellers. When we aim to create music it isn’t just us sticking to some formula or doing some predetermined structured plan, it’s us interpreting the world around us, and our own experiences for a unique story every time. And it’s about us interpreting and sort-of analyzing everything we see, the ailments that befall us, the country, the world, and turning it into digestible musical elements that people can find refuge in and find hope in, or find their feelings in. And so, I think that that’s the best way to encapsulate what we mean and what we do. To experience us is to experience what an old-timey storyteller, in my mind, would be, the people that travel town to town and have tales to tell, is what I feel like we are.
JM: So let’s get right into what is gonna be on many people’s “Album of the Year” lists for 2024. “Where Gods Fear to Speak” is another triumph for you guys. It’s kicking my ass. So let’s start with all of the different voices on this album. I understand that a lot of these are coming from you, Cammie.
CB: I wanted to try some new vocal elements. I’ve dabbled in obviously singing along to a lot of Death Metal, and when I lay out tracks and I write the songs for the guys’ parts, in the past, the demos are me doing the growls. And so, I really wanted to challenge myself and I didn’t want there to be anything in my vocal range that was off limits, or that anyone would think that I couldn’t do. Especially when so many female peers of mine are growling, and it’s like, well I wanna do it too and see what the fun is about. It was really interesting to start to dive into it because I didn’t realize how much detail there was to it. It sounds pretty straightforward but there’s definitely a lot of different elements, and then it’s a completely different technique, and so that was a fun challenge for me to take on. I was really stoked to be able to add that.
And THEN I get to mix growled singing with Mikael (Stanne) from Dark Tranquility, and just to do a song with that many vocal dynamics is still so cool to me. He’s been a fan of the band for a long time and we’ve been a big fan of him, and we’ve gotten to cross paths a handful of times, and he agreed to be on the new album, and so we wrote that with him in mind, and he brings such a wonderful, dark, ominous quality to the song, like, he’s just a signature force.
And then we have, equally amazing, Fernando (Ribeiro) from Moonspell, who when we went on tour, we talked about it then, and he agreed, under no pressure to do it. And so, to get his clean singing, and his wonderful growls. They’re both such different dynamic singers, I feel super-privileged to have not one but two guest vocals. And then there’s the group that was in Bogota, they’re a band made of locals that came and added percussion, that came and added vocal embellishments. And that was a truly awesome day in the studio. It was really fun, and such a wonderful way to, even moreso, intertwine ourselves with the landscape of where we were. So yeah, there’s a very healthy spread of vocals on the album.
JM: You kinda set it up, let’s talk about the recording of the album, I understand you did some of it here, some of it in Bogota?
DB: We did all the preproduction here. We did all of the music and instrumentation you hear on the record we recorded in Bogota. So the framework, and going through demos - - which, this record had the most extensive demoing we’ve ever done - - so there’s a whole version of the record that’s the demo version, and then there’s the whole version that you guys hear.
It was just being as ready as possible for making the giant pilgrimage to South America, the money and effort and time it took. But you know, if it’s worth it to you, you invest in yourself, right? It keeps you honest, it makes you perform and seek to perform. . . When you put yourself in a professional environment.
I flew to Bogota with just sticks, cymbals, and pedals. I had to get a drumset down there, and I had to get acclimated in the room, and I had to be ready to play at the best of my ability at the time within a day. And that kinda stuff is stimulating, you know, as an artist and musician. To put people in that kind of scenario makes you either rise to the occasion or you fail. And it worked out. I think so, at least. It’s like a necessary pressure, a necessary stress that helps the creative process blossom and flourish. . . .or fail miserably.
JM: And you used the same producer from New York from Starlight and Ash (previous album). And how did you end up choosing a studio in Colombia?
DB: Right before the big freeze hit in Houston of 2021, we were demoing stuff because we were dead in the middle of pandemic, and where we were in our lives at the time, and so I had the demos and I was working on something completely different and something more homelike, and that’s what Starlight and Ash felt like to me. It was more rootsy, more, you know, a return to form for me. . . It wasn’t about the narrative of “Metal” or “is it this?” worrying about genres and all that crap. And so I had a list of engineers/producers because I’m an audio engineer also and I‘m really heavy into the audio work and that part of it. And Joel (Hamilton) was on my list, and we wound up hitting it off like crazy from the get-go, and actually become really good friends out of the deal, so when we went to New York with that project, we spent a full month there, every frame of the song to the very last finished product. I wrote the songs but they were loosely built, and so we went there and fleshed them out in like a very old school way of like 28 days of tracking, recording, and everything else, and all the little nuances are in there. You put the headphones on and you can hear the room. Very much the old-school way of recording.
But then, once we did that, I turned around several months later and we did the Necrofier record in New York. He’s got a background in heavy stuff and hardcore punk. And then we were kinda dusting ourselves off and started talking about the new (Oceans of Slumber) record. I said we’re gonna do a new record and it’s gonna be really heavy and cinematic. Let’s do this, let’s take another swing at it and see what we come up with.
I didn’t want to track the record in Houston because I’m from Houston. I wanted to be out of my element, I wanted to be “just a musician” somewhere. Not at my day job, then going to the studio, come home, have my kid, do all this stuff. Like I wanna be completely removed and have the band put in the situation so we could do it the old way. And he did the Highly Suspect record in Bogota, as well as a bunch of Colombian artists in the past. And I said, “Why don’t we go to Colombia, you’re always yapping about it.” I know they have one of the most coveted consoles in recording, and he was like, “Holy shit, let’s go to Columbia.” And we got a crazy good deal, money-wise, it was way way under-budget; flying there, staying there was within the means of what we had. We spent every single dollar we had to make the record, going down there to make the record.
I’m not into the bedroom producer kind of thing; I don’t care what the results are, I think the sterility and the common instruments, and the technology basically create music for a lot of people, but there’s something cold, and something I’m not really into. You know, going down there and putting ourselves out like that. . . You know, Shakira made her career in that place 25 years ago. They don’t do a lot of Metal down there in that studio, but it’s a very high-end studio.
JM: I wanna tell a quick story. The first time I met you guys, you had just finished a trip across the California desert in the middle of summer in a bus where the A/C had broken, and you guys and Insomnium were just suffering. So the Rock n’ Roll/music life is hard. You guys are veterans. What would you tell young artists, or if you could go back in time to young Dobber and young Cammie, what advice would you give?
DB: Don’t.
CB: I mean, things have changed a lot, not just for us, but the music industry, and so it’s hard to even look at it the same way, or even compare who we are and where we are now as musicians to where we started. You’re comparing apples to oranges. I have no idea what I’d tell. . . “Make sure you’re making a thousand videos a day! Learn videography, learn marketing and sales!” It’s a completely different thing to be in the music industry now than what it was 10 years, twenty years ago.
I wouldn’t change anything and I wouldn’t not do it. For me, I have a very unique experience. Everything I’ve done is intertwined with loving him (Dobber), and so I can’t speak to separating the two from an impactful relationship that I have, so I’m a little bit more embedded than other people (laughs). It’s a part of our dynamic, it’s a part of our relationship. I’ve never been in another band that did anything to this caliber that didn’t involve him. So obviously it works for us, and it makes it very special and it makes it less painful and less stressful. But it’s hard. Prepare yourself for anything and know that your biggest fight is gonna be with yourself. There’s no predictions, there’s no knowing where this goes. Technology is going to ruin everyone’s lives.
DB: I would tell myself to get over thinking you’re going to change how things work. Going into the thing, I thought I was gonna find a way to revolutionize something or bring an element into a world that would benefit and extend what’s possible. You know, I thought that it was gonna be impactful in that kinda way. Once you get in a room with everybody, you kinda realize that there’s nothing you can do to make the status quo change.
Girls are pretty much only viewed as one thing. En masse, you’ve got 25% of the Metal populace is gonna accept a band with a woman singing in it in the first place, and zooming out on that group, you’re not gonna find people outside of that group magically start liking what women bring to the conversation. Hey, in the beginning I thought it was gonna be different, I thought we had something special, and that our uniqueness was gonna be our calling card, and then I found out that any uniqueness was a poison arrow, and that it made things a lot more difficult.
JM: So let’s talk a little bit more about “Where Gods Fear to Speak.” The whole album is great, but for today, “Don’t Come Back From Hell Empty-Handed” just floors me. I think that’s peak Oceans of Slumber.
DB: That’s such a sleeper song. So that’s the last song Cammie finished, and she hated it.
CB: I didn’t hate it. (laughs)
DB: Because of the changes, and it kinda goes everywhere. And then by the time we were in the control room with the mains going and she heard the big synthesizer section (sings it), when she heard that fleshed out, she was like, “Oh holy shit, this is fucking crazy.”
CB: Sometimes it’s hard to hear where the song is gonna go. And the demo doesn’t have the embellishments that fully tie it together. I saved the hardest songwriting. I saved this for the last. I think this is one of the first songs you (Dobber) sent to me, so I had it the longest, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do on it. But it came together really strong.
DB: The first two songs written for the record, which we recorded, aren’t even on the record.
CB: Yeah, they’re in the vault.
DB: There are more tracks on the album than we pulled. Only to keep it. . . you know, we’re fighting attention spans.
CB: It’s already a really long album.
DB: The two songs we pulled were the slow numbers. One is like a Metal Jeff Buckley song. It’s like a crazy love song to moms and mothers. The other song is about fathers, and so, they got pulled, and they’re full, they’re finished, they’re gonna be added to a special release that’ll come out in a little while.
But uh, so those two songs, and then I started piecing “Don’t Come Back From Hell…” together. Because I’d written it as 2 separate songs, and then figured out a way to link them together into this Progressive Metal Epic.
I was always a big fan of it. And then at the end it had this big Rick Wakeman meets Hans Zimmer meets Soundgarden. I thought it was such a cool song, and then she started complaining about it. (laughs) A lot of people have mentioned that song, which makes me wonder if we chose the right singles.
JM: Tell us some of your favorite moments on the album.
CB: I love Poem of Ecstasy. That song came together very quickly. It’s a love song, and it captures the kind of love story that I like where it doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, it’s just real and raw. I hadn't seen Dobber for awhile, he was on tour with Necrofier, and so it was my first song to demo when he got back, and I wanted to impress him and show off this new thing I’d learned. Specifically, recording that demo and then me reuniting with him marks that song for me. All the songs relate to what I felt when I wrote them. And then once they’re on the album, they mean something else.
DB: For me, “Impermanence of Fate.” I think it covers so much ground, from the large flavor of the vocals. You’ve got this massive, moving neo-noir synth line, this large kind of attitude, and the second movement, how it goes right into like a Russian Princess part. The song is about self-realization. I wrote the lyrics on that track.
JM: And that’s the last song on the album before the cover, “Wicked Game.”
DB: We had finished recording in Colombia, and so we went out to this sushi place. And they had this, what I would consider AI electronic music version of Wicked Game, and I was just appalled. And I was looking at Joel and I said “it’s just horrendous to do this to this song.” When that song came out I had the black single tape. Remember those? And my sister was married at the time, and the guy she was married to was a drag racer, and so I would get dragged out to the drag strip every weekend, and so I would sit in the truck and listen to Wicked Game over and over - - or Alice in Chains - - it was like, this song was just enchanting. And so I grew up with that song, and so I have quite a soft spot for that record. And so I hear that song in that restaurant and I’m like, “This is disgusting, this is fucking bad.”
We’d prepped “10s” by Pantera as a cover and we’d prepped “Crying” by Roy Orbison, and then an Acid Bath song, probably “Dead Girl” or something. So we’d done all this, and then Joel is like, “You should redo THAT song. That should be the cover.” And so we got to the studio the next day, and that was our final wrap day where we had to break everything down, and we had about 6 hours in the studio, and I kinda sprung it on everybody, and I was like, “This is the song we’re recording. We’re gonna go into the Studio A room, Joel is gonna drag a snake microphone in there, and we’re gonna track this live. And if we don’t get it, then that’s it, we don’t have a cover for the record.” By the time we got everything set up, we had like an hour before we had to exit the studio. So we went through the song 4 times, and the 4th time was the take that’s on the record. And so it’s live.
100% live.
Oceans of Slumber Official website: Oceans of Slumber Official website: https://oceansofslumber.com/
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