If you’ve been listening to metal in the past 25 years, chances are Chris Black’s talents are featured on at least a few albums in your collection. From the US power metal glory of Pharaoh and blackened explorations of Dawnbringer, to the filth driven sleaze of Superchrist and the joyous heavy rock of High Spirits, Black does it all and then some. Hot off the heels of a brand new High Spirits album, Safe on the Other Side, we spoke to Black about his various projects, what the future holds, and Europe’s hidden headbanging past (the band, not the continent). Gather ’round students! The Professor is about to begin!
Greetings Chris and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Chris Black: I’m doing well Joe. How are you?
I’m doing fantastic. I’d like to thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Before we talk about the excellent new High Spirits album, Safe on the Other Side, I’d like to start from the beginning. What was the impetus for High Spirits? Which bands were its biggest influences upon formulating a sound?
CB: That takes us back to 2009. January of 2009, I believe. The impetus as I can best reconstruct it was that we had just finished working on a Superchrist record, Defenders of the Filth. During that process, or maybe as a result of that process of writing and recording that album, I was kind of kicking out some riffs and some song ideas that clearly did not belong within the Superchrist universe, but nevertheless, I was compelled to work on and start forming these alternative songs. I think I’ve described it before as almost logging out of the guitar and logging back in as a different user. I think that’s a pretty good way to describe it.
As far as influences, it was largely the same. Most of my influences and most of my listening, really for a lot of my life, focuses on that late ’70s, early ’80s period where that line between hard rock and heavy metal was really indistinct. It was very transitional, transformative. There was a lot of mud in the river around that time for the whole rock genre. It was that kind of…what’s the word? Tension’s not the right word, but it was like this chemical reaction you could see happening in real time almost. Not that I was there in real time, but to go back and listen, that’s what I feel like I’m hearing. The body of musical influence for High Spirits wasn’t all that different for what it had been for any of my other projects. I think the way it manifested was what was new and different for me.
I’m so glad you mention that era, because I even addressed it in my review of this latest album. It takes you back to the days when a bill like 38 Special and Iron Maiden wasn’t out of the ordinary.
CB: Right, exactly. All of those animals were in the same zoo. Those boundaries just weren’t as clearly defined and I think…you know, I had a conversation about this a few weeks ago. I think that’s still the case. I think the media would like us to believe that things are a lot more segmented than they truly are. Not just the media, but the record labels, the record company structure that’s part of that. Part of selling a record is putting a label on it that says, “This is for fans of X, Y, and Z.” There’s some usefulness to that I think, for the record buyer, but I think it also kind of creates the illusion of these barriers that in reality don’t really exist.
I know what shirts people are wearing at our shows because I’m facing them. They’re facing me. I can see the first two rows. The variety there is just incredible. That tells me that this idea of everybody kind of staying in their own corridor is kind of false. That’s kind of an illusion. I do agree with you that seeing the way things were advertised and things that were placed side by side in previous decades, it was maybe a little more apparent that the audience was a lot more open minded than maybe we gave them credit for. But again, for me, I was born in ’78, so it’s not like I have firsthand memories of these things. I know you were born a little more recently than that even.
Yep, ’99.
CB: We’re looking back with modern biases that we have. But anyway, I kind of lost the thread of your question, but it’s true that my wish has always been for High Spirits to not only musically reflect the entirety of the rock genre, but also appeal to the entirety of that audience, at least to the greatest extent possible.
Fast forward nearly 15 years later and we’ve arrived to the release of the latest High Spirits album, Safe on the Other Side. How long after the release of Hard to Stop did work get started on this one?
CB: The actual work didn’t begin until summer of ’22. There are bits and pieces of certain songs that have existed longer than that that I’ve had in my pocket or maybe as a demo or sketch. The song “One Day Closer” is an example of that. I’ve had that chorus in my pocket for a while. The idea for the song “Good Night” has been around for much longer than that, but the actual work of setting up the microphones and hitting the drums began in the summer of ’22.
When you write, is it specifically for High Spirits, or are there instances where it could be for High Spirits or Professor Black or some other project altogether?
CB: It used to be the first way. It used to be, “OK, now I’m inside this box and what I’m writing is going to be for Superchrist.” Or, “What I’m writing is going to be for High Spirits.” More recently, being say the past 10 years, I’ve made an effort to get out of that way of thinking and write what I’m in the mood to write. That was definitely true with this album and you could even say, going back to the origin story I was telling at the beginning, that’s where High Spirits originated. It was following my mood and following whatever idea I was having at the time.
Like I said, I’ve tried to stay within that mindset and not make too many assumptions about what’s about to happen or what I’m about to come up with. I think that can be detrimental to…it can be detrimental to my enjoyment, is what I found, which is, like I said, why I tried to make an effort to work on what I’m in the mood to work on. Let it be what it wants to be. Take myself out of it, if that makes sense.
How did you settle on the title Safe on the Other Side? Were there any other titles in consideration?
CB: Yeah, there were a lot actually. That was unusual for me because I often have the title that I get stuck on early in the process. Sometimes even before the recording begins, I have the title in mind and sometimes even the way the album cover would look and the whole feel. This time around was the complete opposite. There was so many titles that we considered that were like, “That’s pretty good.” Then, the next day it’s like, “Nope, what else you’ve got?” We came close to calling it Heartlands. That was probably the one that came closest. We even kind of started brainstorming some cover concepts around that.
That felt pretty good, but then I wrote the lyrics for the song “Good Night”, which contains the phrase, “Safe on the other side”. That jumped off the paper at me. I was like, “Nope, that’s it.” I decided no turning back from that one. Luckily, there was still time to put the album cover together according to that. I’m glad for that because Heartlands was gonna be pretty good. It would’ve looked pretty cool. It fits the music pretty well, but Safe on the Other Side fits the whole…I don’t wanna say the whole journey of it, but the whole…my personal relationship with the album is much better captured in that title.
Upon first few listens of Safe on the Other Side, this might be the most diverse and dynamic High Spirits album to date. Was this a goal you set out to achieve when writing and recording this album?
CB: No, that happened on its own. That was a natural result of, again, writing the songs I was in the mood to write. Letting things take the time they needed to really form and I think that variety was a natural result of letting the process by open ended in that way, letting the individual writing sessions take the direction that they wanted to take. It’s great to hear that from you, from anybody that the diversity is there and that the variety is there because there’s always an equal…once you’ve made three or four or five albums, it’s inevitable that there’s a certain segment of feedback that says, “Oh, it’s just the same thing every time. I wish there was something newer or fresher on this.”
There’s usually an equal sized segment saying, “Wow, this is really different from the last time! There’s a lot of cool new stuff.” You can’t avoid that. There’s always gonna be that contrasting feedback. It plays into peoples expectations and it plays into the way that individual people hear things. It’s not a good or a bad thing. Like I said, it’s inevitable. I tend toward how you’re hearing it, that there are some interesting and unexpected twists. I accept anybody’s feedback really.
Now that you mention it, I think most of the bands that people tend to dismiss as putting out the same record don’t. One band who was constantly branded with this label and even seemed proud of it was your favorite and one of mine, Motörhead. Lemmy would just say, “It’s all rock n’ roll.” However, even Motörhead had variety. One could say Orgasmatron is darker. Ace of Spades is a drinking record. The ’90s albums were even a little thrashy.
CB: They’re all completely different. They’re a good example. An example along those lines is my former band, Superchrist. We set out, we intended to make every album sound exactly the same. That was part of the whole concept. “We are going to make the exact same record ten times.” Even if you tried to, you can’t. You gain experience. Even if you have the same microphone in front of the same guitar amplifier running into the same tape machine, day by day, it’s not gonna sound the same. There’s gonna be, literally, environmental things that are different and mentally and physically, that environment changes too.
I don’t think it’s a drawback in most cases. I tend towards that if I like a band, I just want more of that. Unless it’s a band like Circle from Finland comes to mind where their thing is that every single album sounds completely different. From a band like that, that’s what I would want. If they made two albums that sounded the same, I’d kind of be like, “What’s going on guys?” But in most cases, most of my favorite bands, that’s why they’re my favorite bands, because they sound a certain way and that’s what I want from them. I don’t think that’s a negative thing.
Expanding upon that last question, how does a High Spirits song come to be? Do you start with a riff, melody, lyric, or perhaps someting completely different?
CB: It varies. It varies by song. Often I’ll get a chorus in my head or a guitar melody. I would say that’s most often where it starts, a fragment of a chorus or again, a guitar melody. That’s often the gateway to a full song. It can happen though that then following that into a full song, the original thing can fall by the wayside. Or a second song can be discovered within the song. “Oh, this part doesn’t really fit in this song, but I can take it out and put an entire other song around that.”
It really varies. There’s no one pattern to it. There’s a lot of give and take in the process. Using computer software rather than analog tape makes it very easy to test out different ideas, make changes to song arrangements, just try out as many ideas as I can. Often the outcome is that I come back to the way it was, but at least I tried those other 99 ways and ruled them out. It all kind of comes together as a single thing. It’s hard to describe and it’s hard to point to one particular method.
But again, using computer recording, if I want to change a bassline, I’ll change the bassline. I don’t have to take the whole song apart in order to change the bassline. But maybe after I do, then maybe there’s something I want to do differently on the guitar. Then that changes. Everything’s kind of all being fit together dynamically to reach whatever the endpoint is gonna be. Often I don’t even know what that endpoint is gonna be until I get there. It’s a pretty convoluted answer, but it is in some ways a very convoluted process.
When you started back in the late ’90s with Dawnbringer, was it all analog back then?
CB: It wasn’t analog, but it was on tape. There was no editing that we were doing. We still had to play it into the tape and then rewind and play it back. There was none of the rearranging stuff. The technology existed. We just didn’t use it. We recorded on eight track tape which was, strictly speaking, digital tape, but that was the only digital aspect of the process.
I want to talk about some of the songs on this album, starting with the opening cut, “In the Moonlight”. What was it about this song that led to it being the lead off track and first single off this album?
CB: I just loved it. I was really happy with how it turned out. I think it has all the right pieces for a High Spirits song. It’s almost exactly three minutes, I think. It’s a really good sized song for a single. Like I said, I love it. I was just really happy with how it turned out. I had a lot of confidence in it as a single and as a leadoff track. There was a moment where I was like, “I don’t know if I really wanna be bashing people with “In the Moonlight” so much.” But then I thought, “Actually, I do!” I think if there’s a song to lead on…when you hear that, you know it’s High Spirits. You know right away whether it’s for you or not.
I’ll tell you what was really validating about that song was we played a festival in France, the Pyrenean Warriors Festival in September. The song hadn’t been released yet. We were selling the 7 inch at the fest that day. It was the first time you could buy it, so nobody actually…maybe a few people had bought it, but nobody had actually heard that song. It wasn’t out streaming anywhere. Literally nobody besides us had heard the song at that point, but we played it. We played it third or fourth in the set that night and people got it by the second chorus. People were singing along. That was really validating. I was like, “OK, we got ’em. It’s a good one. It’s doing the thing it’s supposed to do.” That was cool. That was a cool moment that I’ll remember for sure.
It’s funny because when that song hit streaming services, I was up at midnight, ready to click on it the second it dropped. By the time it was over, I said to myself, “Yep, this is gonna be another great High Spirits album. I knew it already, but now its been validated.”
CB: *laughs* Cool! Thank you. Yeah, like I said, I had a lot of confidence in that song. It seems like I was mostly right.
Another song that caught my attention was “(There Will Be) Magic Tonight”, which reminds me a lot of your Aktor project. Is this resemblance a coincidence and how did this song come about?
CB: I’d say it is a coincidence because I don’t write the music for Aktor. I’m not denying the similarity, but it is a coincidence. That song, actually we recorded for Hard to Stop, but it didn’t get finished because at a certain point I decided that it wasn’t really needed on that album. It didn’t quite fit. For reasons I don’t remember, it didn’t seem like it was the right time or right fit for that song. We dropped it with the full intention of picking it back up for this album. In a way, it’s one of the oldest songs that’s on this record. It’s something a little different. It’s got that kind of strut to it.
I don’t know if it’s gonna work as well live. We may give it a try. It may be destined to be just an album track. We’ll see because its got some sound effects and stuff that was definitely fun to put together as a studio song. If the demand is there, we’ll do it. We try to take that into account when we pick the songs for the live set, what peoples favorites seem to be, so we’ll see. I’m glad you dig it. I was really happy with how it came out too.
Of the 100+ shows High Spirits have played around the glove, which ones stand out as your favorites?
CB: Well the French festival that I mentioned, that Pyrenean Warriors Open Air, that was definitely one of my favorites of this year, especially because of the “In the Moonlight” moment. That was part of it. It’s always a good feeling to come off the plane and be in the van and nobody has slept and everybody’s hungry and kind of sweaty and get up onstage and it all clicks together and we do our thing. There’s definitely some satisfaction in being able to do that, being able to turn it on no matter how rundown we are from the travel. Also at that festival, we had a really cool timeslot. It was an outdoor stage and we had the sunset time. It was not quite full sun when we started, but the sun was still up and by the end, you could see the stars and everything. That was definitely memorable.
Off the top of my head, we’ve done a lot of good shows in Chicago. We’ve done a lot of good shows in Hamburg, Germany. That’s one of our other home bases. We had two great shows this year actually. One of our other favorite places to play is Newcastle in England. We’re kind of a…I wouldn’t say adopted local band, but there’s always been a uniquely strong and dedicated fanbase there. We actually did a three night stand of Newcastle in May of this year, which is unique in our history for sure.
Specific shows over the years? There’s a couple of duds that stand out honestly, but as far as the highlights, the whole thing has been a highlight. We’ve done some tours where at the end of the tour, we look at each other and say, “You know what? Every single one of those shows was kickass.” *laughs* That’s one of the advantages of doing 9 days instead of 39 days, when you have a chance of every show being kickass. I’d have to give it some thought to make a top 10 or anything, but lots, lots, lots of highlights.
That answer opens the door to some hypotheticals I’m going to throw your way if you don’t mind.
CB: Go for it.
Having been a High Spirits fan since Another Night, through the years, I’ve shown people in my orbit your music who are hardly rock fans, let alone metal fans. They’ll immediately go, “Oh wow! Who is this?” I’ve gotten so many people into High Spirits just through that. I guess where I’m going with this is when I think of High Spirits, I can’t help but think of another one man project that started around the same time and is now currently the biggest rock band in the world right now, Ghost. If you had the opportunity to embark upon High Spirits on that large of a scale, would you take it and why or why not?
CB: Well, that’s a very hypothetical question because…to frame that as an opportunity is kind of a stretch. Those are the kinds of situations that bands work for. They practice and prepare and set up their business network in a way that is open to that kind of career. The motivation for that, for a career on that level, has to be there. That’s not a mantle that is granted by the powers that be. If it’s OK to rephrase the question, would that be the type of career that I would want? I don’t know.
Maybe in my younger days I would’ve looked at that and said, “Yeah, that would be great.” It’s definitely true that I want High Spirits to reach an audience on that scale, but I don’t think that that’s the pathway that I would choose. What I’d rather have happen is what you described, people championing the band and turning people onto the music the way you described and becoming a favorite band more organically than with advertising and promotional tie-ins. I’m not talking about Ghost specifically now. I’m just talking about that level where there’s the merchandising and the marketing.
I think the amount of work that those artists have to do and they amount of support staff that they have is something that I would be turned off by. I don’t think I would enjoy, especially the media workload that goes along with that. I know that I don’t enjoy the amount of merchandising that goes along with that too for a number of reasons. I’m kind of anti-merch. I don’t enjoy having to hump around t-shirts on tour. As a fan, that’s never been my orientation. If I like a band, I’ll buy the record and go to the show. I’m much less likely to buy the shirt or the hot sauce or listen to the podcast and so on and so forth.
These are the things that bands need to do if they want to exist on the level. There are people out there who are very motivated and very successful in those ways. I’m not dragging anybody for that. That’s their profession. As a profession, that’s actually really cool. There are sacrifices that I would not want to make in other areas of my life, and also as an independent artist to do that. If a band from that realm called us up and said, “Do you want to tour with us?” I don’t think I’d say no to that, but for me, to be one of those artists, that’s not the track I’ve ever been on really.
Speaking of one man bands, it was about a year ago that our mutual friend Athenar of Midnight released an album with Midnight’s live band under the moniker Whitespade. Would you ever consider doing an album with High Spirits’ live band under a different moniker?
CB: We’ve talked about it. We’ve talked about doing a live record, obviously with the live band. Yeah, but we’re used to…we’ve been a band for 15 years. Except for one lineup change, we’ve been together for 15 years now, so we’re very used to working in a specific way, doing what we do as a touring band, as a live band. I don’t know if that would translate as well to a studio environment. You’ve seen us live. It’s very collaborative. It’s not me standing at a podium with four guys in the shadows behind me. It’s very much a real band. I would think a studio project would have to be just as collaborative, but I don’t know that our current dynamics would necessarily translate that way. So I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll ever try it or not, but it’s an interesting idea.
Speaking of interesting ideas, correct me if I’m wrong, but at least on the studio releases, High Spirits haven’t done any covers yet.
CB: Correct, and I always swore that we wouldn’t.
Would you ever consider doing any covers and if so, what would they be?
CB: Well there’s a cover on the new album, which is where I thought you were going.
There is?
CB: “Memories” is a Europe song.
No kidding!
CB: I would not have necessarily known myself. That’s a band that I’m not familiar with. I’m really only aware of their radio songs that everybody knows. I always swore that High Spirits would never do a cover because a few reasons, but the main reason was we already had enough material for a live show, just from demos that pre-existed the live band. When we started playing live, we didn’t have to fill out our live set with anything else. We had enough to work with.
It was one of these stubborn Chris things. We’re never gonna do a cover. We only gained more songs since then. Why would we do a cover? We’ve got plenty of our own material. And then, I stumbled across this live video of Europe from 1984 and they played this song. I was like, “It sounds like they are doing a High Spirits song. What is going on here?” Like I said, I’m only familiar with the band through their super commercial radio hits. This was a version of that band I had never conceived of. It was like Iron Maiden with Clive Burr. They were kicking ass.
They did this song “Memories” which I had never heard before and like I said, it sounded like it was already a High Spirits song. I was like, “Well, this is testing my rule right here.” Long story short, I ended up doing it, not knowing if it was going to turn out well or not. Maybe I’ll give up on it. Maybe it’ll be a B side. I don’t know. The more I worked on it, the better it sounded. It ended up where it ended up on the album so yeah, there you go *laughs*.
I’m trying to remember now. I think that’s on the debut.
CB: It’s the last song on the debut.
Which I haven’t listened to front to back in ages. Wings of Tomorrow and The Final Countdown are the two albums I return to the most. The rest of Europe’s catalog, vast as it is, every now and then I’ll revisit an album over the years. It’s definitely time to revisit the debut.
CB: See your knowledge is deeper than mine on them already because I never really checked them out intentionally. A friend of mine and I were researching this old Stockholm venue called Studion. He came across this video of Europe playing there and sent me a link. He was like, “Hey, check it out man. I didn’t know these guys played like this ever!” I was like, “Wow!” I got to “Memories” and was like, “Oh no. *laughs* This is shaking my foundations here.” The studio version I only referenced to pick apart the guitar riffs a little bit. This live version is far, far superior.
I’ll have to check it out.
CB: Yeah, I’ll send you the link.
Awesome! I’d love to ask about some of your other bands and projects, starting with Professor Black. Next week, you’re going to be playing alongside Nunslaughter, in which Professor Black will unleash a full Superchrist set. How does it feel to play those songs again and what are the chances of a Superchrist reunion?
CB: The second part is easy to answer. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. We briefly talked about doing this show as Superchrist because that’s what we were playing. That didn’t feel right either. That was a pretty short discussion. It’s best to just leave that where it is. It feels good to play those songs. Going back to pick the setlist for this show, there was a few that I was looking at the track list on the back of the CD and was like, I literally cannot remember what that song sounds like at all. There are a couple that when I did play it, I was like, “Oh, that’s why. This song kind of sucks.”
There were plenty of songs that didn’t suck! Those are the ones we’re focused on for this show. It’s pretty close to the real thing. We’re doing it as a three piece band. I’m the same. The drummer (Ian Sugierski) is the same. Jon (Woodring), the guitarist in High Spirits, is playing guitar. We’re keeping it a three piece band. We’re just doing it for fun. The offer came up for the show and it first I was kind of like, “Well no, wait a minute. That does sound like fun! Yeah, let’s do it!” Like I said, we’re doing it for fun. We’re keeping it simple. We’re not any farther than December 8th with that. It’s like, let’s play the songs for people who haven’t heard them in a while or maybe never heard them live. It’s been a damn long time at this point. That’s what’s going on there.
In my case, I never got to see Superchrist live. I befriended you right around the time the band was winding down and I remember you playing Red Line Tap and all these 21+ venues when I was 12.
CB: And you couldn’t go!
Yeah, so for me, it was incredible when you opened for Autopsy and you busted out a few of those songs.
CB: Yeah, we’ve done a handful of Superchrist songs with the Professor Black band, but this is the first time that we’re doing it all the way. We’re doing two or three of each album. I think you’re not the only one that was aware of the band but just was too young or didn’t have the chance to see us. This will be pretty close to the real thing I think.
Next year will see the return of Dawnbringer for select shows. Are there any plans beyond that?
CB: No. We’re doing four shows and putting it back to bed. There was never any intention of doing any new recordings or a tour or anything like that. Similar to the Superchrist stuff, yeah, I miss playing some of those songs. Dawnbringer’s stuff is challenging in a way that…High Spirits is challenging for sure in it’s own way. Dawnbringer is challenging in a different way. There’s a different energy source that you have to tap into to perform that stuff.
We almost did it this year. There were a couple of tempting offers for this year, but it wasn’t quite right because High Spirits had a super busy year this year. Maybe if we were 10 years younger, we would’ve found a way to fit it all together, but we were like, “Nope. If it’s not 100% the right time, we’ll wait.” I’m glad we did. Now High Spirits shows can take a little break and we can give all of our attention to this, and then put it back to bed and move forward.
Is there anything new brewing on the Aktor front?
CB: There is. We’ve got some new songs going right now actually. Again, we tried to get something going last year. It wasn’t quite the right time. Jussi (Lehtisalo) got a hold of me about a month ago saying, “How about now? Do you want to do this now?” Similar to the Superchrist Professor Black show offer coming in, I was like, “You know what? That sounds like fun. This is the right time. Let’s do it.” We’re making demos. It’s a long process, but we have 8 or 9 songs demoed out and a tentative…it might be a concept album.
We’ll see. We’re tossing some ideas around, but I wanna make sure I can pull it off. You can’t go half-ass on a concept album. I gotta summon up my forces and make sure I can go all the way on it, but yeah, it’s cool. It’s cool to have, after a few years of real artistic depression, if I’m being honest, the tides come back in and have so many different things. Little things, a few little shows here and there, making some demos, taking it one day at a time, but it’s cool to have some stuff going on after a low period.
In closing, what does 2024 have in store for High Spirits?
CB: We have a hometown show in February. We’re not promoting it as such, but it’s kind of an album release show and 15th anniversary show. We’ll do our whole thing. We’ll do a full 75 or 80 minute set that night. After that, that’s gonna be paused so we can do the Dawnbringer shows, because that’s three of the same people doing that. There’s just gonna be a lot of rehearsing and a lot of air travel related to that. That takes us up to May. After May, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s gonna be next. If I had to guess, we’ll probably do some US dates later in the year, simply because we focused on Europe so much this year.
This year we did 20 gigs in Europe and 1 in the United States. I think maybe it’s time to shift that balance for a little while, but it partly depends on where the offers come in from. It’s always a combination of fielding what offers and invites come in versus also steering the ship ourselves and saying, “This is what we’d like to be doing.” and seeing what we can drum up on our own. It’s both things that build the schedule, but yeah. Going back to your question, there’s the Chicago show in February and then after that, we’ll have to wait and see.
The new High Spirits album, Safe on the Other Side, is available now on High Roller Records. For more information on High Spirits, visit www.facebook.com/highenergyrock.