By Martin Popoff
Thrash legends Flotsam And Jetsam release their My God opus on May 22. Different, dark and doomy, My God is distinguished from past fare due to the fact that vocalist Eric A.K. writes all the lyrics and guitarist Mark Simpson writes all the music.
Drummer Craig Neilsen explains. "The main difference is that Mark Simpson wrote this one almost entirely, at least the music, 11 of the songs. Whereas on the last one Mark only did three songs. We saw Mark Simpson as pretty much where we wanted the future of Flotsam's songwriting to go. He's the most excited and motivated. Not that we're not all excited and motivated, it's just that Mark wants to make a name for himself as a prominent songwriter in the metal world. And we wanted him to have a record to develop that confidence and experience in the studio. It's one thing when you have your riffs going on in the rehearsal studio, but the songwriter has to learn about the difference between what a song sounds like when you are writing it and what the finished product sounds like. And this was that record for Mark Simpson to gain that experience. We're very happy with what ended up happening. So we wanted to make that transition from the bass player being the main songwriter back to being a guitar-driven band. I know Steve Harris gets away with writing a lot of the Iron Maiden stuff, and we're very happy with Jason Ward's songs so far. But in my mind, it's still a little strange that the bass player be the main songwriter. He wants to contribute in the future, but we wanted to make sure we were a band where the guitar riffs actually come from the lead guitar player (laughs)."
FLOTSAM & JETSAM - A.K. Simpson? Page 2