Edge Reviews recently caught up with Jon of Halcyon Way. Read on to find out what he had to say about their debut album and what's next for the Prog Metallers!

Follow up:

Edge: Hi guys. First off we'd like to say thanks for taking the time to do this interview for Edge and congratulations on finishing the album and having it debut on Nightmare Records.

Jon: No problem! We really appreciate the support and the nice review of the record!

Edge: How did you happen to meet up with Lance King and eventually get signed to Nightmare?

Jon: Well, pretty much we met Lance a few years ago at ProgPower USA, he’s pretty accessible and does a Nightmare vendor table at the show each year, and we just kept seeing him there each year. We played the Pre-Party in 2004 and although I’m not sure that he saw us that year, we got a good bit of publicity out of that gig, and so I’m sure we were on his radar at that point. We’ve always been pretty guerrilla about marketing to that crowd – we have spent a lot of money on ads in the program, tracks on the CD, and postcards/flyers – and I’m sure we were noticeable that way too, because we always work hard to stay visible. We annoy people into paying attention! We’d been talking to him about releasing the album, but it didn’t go too far until we had a finished product. When we stepped in to play the ProgPower Showcase in 2007 when Vanden Plas couldn’t play, that really got us a ton of attention and press. So I think between Lance seeing us really bust tail to promote, and getting the higher profile shows, it was a foregone conclusion that we would make a deal once we wrapped the album up. Also, while we were negotiating with Lance, the opportunity to play Rocklahoma 2008 came up because he was a sponsor of the festival, and there was a cancellation. We stepped in fairly last minute and pulled it off, and if it wasn’t sealed by then, after that show it was.

Edge: I've noticed that at a few of your shows you play a good many songs that aren't on the album. Do you plan to release those sometime in the future, possibly on an EP?

Jon: Definitely. Most everything we’ve played that is not on “Manifesto” will go on the next album, and since “Manifesto” took so long to get to the finish line, we’re wasting absolutely no time on starting the next one. We actually start pre-production on the next record in February of 2009. We have 14 songs written currently, and we’re trying to do 4-5 more. Then we will cut the weakest ones and knock it out. The next album is tentatively called “Building The Towers” and it’s a politically themed album. It’s not about 9/11, it’s more about how we as a society are trying to rebuild the Tower Of Babel, and how our country has really strayed from what it was founded upon. There’s such an entitlement mentality these days, and it’s destroying us.

Edge: Take us through the steps in creating a Halcyon Way song. Does it start with the lyrics? A good riff that just builds? Is it a group thing? How does it all come together for you guys?

Jon: It depends on the song – sometimes, I’ll have an entire song written, or at least roughed out, and I’ll present it to the band and we go from there. That’s how Manifesto was written, for the most part. Some songs that we’ve written started as a lyric that Sean wrote, and I would take that and put a riff to it. In a couple of cases, Sean sang a melody, and we wrote the riffs around that. Some of them are all of us throwing riffs or ideas into the mix. Sean & I write most of the lyrics, and we bounce ideas off of each other well. Zane has written some stuff for the new album too. So there’s not a set way of doing it.

Edge: Where do you get inspiration from when writing lyrics?

Jon: For “A Manifesto For Domination”, I was personally going through a period where a lot of willpower & perseverance was required of me to get from point A to point B. So a lot of the songs deal with that – we basically make choices in life, and we have to take responsibility for the consequences, whatever they may be. Successful people never take no for an answer, and they push hard, and work hard – and that’s what a lot of the album is about. Some of it was about relationships gone sour with other people. Not love songs, but situations where friends or family made some extremely poor choices, and they burned bridges.

Edge: What's your personal favorite song off the album? Why?

Jon: It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, because they’re all like my children….but my favorites would have to be the title track, “Blind Eyes To The Sky”, “Deliver The Suffering”, and “Physician, Heal Thyself”. I really dig the way they ebb & flow, and the songwriting on them. “Physician” is a really personal song for me, and it looked for a while like it might not even make the album, but once we got the vocals finished and the keyboards to solidify the arrangement, it was perfect. A lot of people really seem to dig that song a lot.

Edge: Which bands have inspired you through the years?

Jon: My favorite band of all time is Queensryche – Operation:Mindcrime is the best album ever by anyone, to me. So they’ve been a big influence on me. Others are Fates Warning, In Flames, Galactic Cowboys, Exodus, Forbidden, Testament, Dream Theater, Megadeth, Believer, and so forth. What I try to do with my songwriting is merge the prog elements of a Fates or DT, with the heavy & technical thrash riffs, and the big vocal parts of a Galactic Cowboys or King’s X. And the hooks….they have to be there too, like Mindcrime.

Edge: This album was a long time coming. How long do you think the next one could take?

Jon: Knock on wood, not nearly as long! Manifesto was very difficult to do, and it took a ton of perseverance, ironically enough! We had a series of lineup changes, technical problems, disappearing data from hard drives, and then once we got all that done, we had to go through three producers to get the album mixed.

Edge: You have a lot of guest keyboard players on the album. Any plans to add a permanent keyboard player?

Jon: Not really, it would be cool on the one hand, but we’re already a 5 member band, and we feel that getting another personality involved would make things harder. I can play a little keyboard, and if need be we can get hired guns for the album again. We play to a click track live now, and have the keys from Manifesto piped in, and that works well for us.

Edge: What do you guys do for kicks when not playing shows?

Jon: To be honest, between work, being married, and the band, I don’t have tons of free time. I’m self-employed, so there’s a lot of long hours involved in that. I just got a PS3 not long ago, so I’m wasting some time on that! I have a couple of side projects that I’d like to do musically, but haven’t had time to do yet. I collect vintage Transformers, so that’s the inner nerd coming out! Zane is married and has two young kids, so that’s pretty much his thing. Kris plays bass & sings for a black metal band called Xeroderma, that’s his side project. Sean is a big gamer and sleeps once a week I think, and Ernie does videography for a living, and since it’s his hobby too, that works for him!

Edge: Do you see Halcyon Way taking off as a full time thing as in, replacing your day jobs?

Jon: That would be quite cool, and I think all of us would welcome that opportunity – but the fact is that the music business is in tatters right now, and it’s very hard to monetize what we do. So we don’t see that happening, unfortunately.

Edge: What's next for you guys? You've got the album out finally. Do you have any tour plans?

Jon: We were offered, and accepted, a 30+ day US tour this March with some bands that you would be very familiar with, but the deal fell apart due to the economy. We would have been the 4th band on the tour, and the headliner decided that they’d rather keep the money that we would have been paid. Understandable, given the cost of doing a tour on that level, but it was a bummer for us.

Edge: If you could tour with any band, who would it be and why?

Jon: I think it would be Queensryche, for me, and I know I can speak for Sean on that too. It would be a natural fit since they were such an influence on the two of us. For Zane, it would be Twisted Sister I bet. Ernie would probably cry like a baby if we toured with Angra or Rage. Kris comes from a black/death metal background so I’m not sure who he would pick.

Edge: Where did the idea for the belly dancer come from?

Jon: Hehehe….Kadria is one of our biggest supporters, and she’s also Kris’ better half now. One thing about Halcyon Way is that when we do a show, we put on a SHOW. We’re not a shoegazing depressed grunge band from 1995. We are there to rip your head off! Since our album’s intro is kinda middle-eastern sounding, we approached her about dancing for us during the intro to our set, and we did that for about a year. She sings for a band called Inviolate from Atlanta, you should check those guys out. But she was at all our shows for a while, and we knew she danced, so we just thought it would be cool and asked her to do it.

Edge: You do a lot of fests. Aside from the Nightmare festival, do you have any plans to play any other ones?

Jon: We hope to be able to do Rocklahoma again this year, and we’re also talking to a couple of other ones, both in the US and abroad. Those gigs are a ton of fun, so any opportunity to do it we’re going to jump on if at all possible.

Edge: And finally, When are you coming to Montgomery to play a show?

Jon: Haha! Hook us up with a club and some bands that we can jam with and we’ll make that happen! We’re always up for a good show, and one thing we’re going to focus on, now that the album is out, is to get out of Georgia more often. We’ve played out of town on a number of occasions, but it hasn’t been too planned. We’re actively looking for ways to get out there and win people over.

Edge: Thanks again for your time and we're looking forward to more heavy things from Halcyon Way!

Jon: Thanks so much, and again we really appreciate the support!