PipemanRadio Interviews Black Daggers

0:04 Hey you unto Yes, that's sure from see Wow for you young whacoup of America. It's time for the Adventures of Pipeman on W four C why dot com best pomp Beach is number one internet radio station. Here's your host, the White Man. You take the brand of what's it topless console? Then taking the souls and said you said it's as the White Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four C Y Radio. When I'm here with our next guest who has some killer music that I want to share with you. So let's welcome to the show. Spencer from the Black Daggers. How are you excellent? Thanks Dean, appreciate it. Thanks for being having us hear me.

1:11 Hey, my pleasure. And so it's pretty funny because I have a friend right now who is in a Dallas airport. She left early this morning from the snow of Alberta to come visit me in South Florida where we're having a weird storm ourself. But it's not snow. Yeah, it's actually right where I'm at. So we're in Red Deer. There isn't really any snow right now, but it woke up to a bunch of frost so it's definitely cold enough, but yeah, the snow's coming. Yeah. She sent me a picture this morning when she was going to airport and it was definitely a lot of snow where she was. Yeah, so yeah, that would have surprise me. So Florida would be fun. Maybe I'll come down there shortly.

2:02 There you go. And I always think that's why some of the best music comes out of places like Canada or the Scandinavian countries, because when it gets that cold and that's snowy and that dark, you got nothing better to do but to sit inside and create. Yeah. That, you know, I've heard that analogy before, like even going back to like the classic rock days of you know, legendary bands like the Guess Who and you know Backman Turner, Overdrive, you know the Randy Backman stuff. You know that. I think that's a quote he said. He's like, what the hell else are you supposed to do when it's minus forty out there? Right, and you just get together and you just hang out in each other's basement and have a couple of wobbly pops and see what kind of noise you can make.

2:51 There you go. I love it, So tell us about your newest album. And you know, for people that haven't listened to you, for how you could paint the picture of why they should listen to it. And for those at r RA fans of you guys, how is it the same? How is it different from previous music? Okay, so full disclosure, it's it's actually our first record as as the Black Daggers. So Valentine vandall, who's the singer and lyricist. Uh, he and I kind of met and then uh we started writing and recording stuff and and and kind of blossom from there. We brought Stan on, and we brought Mike on to fill in uh, you know, another guitar and bringing the low the low end, and it kind of went from there. And but as far as the album is concerned and the music, you know, it's we've we've always kind of thought of it as like we're we're a rock band, We're an alternative band, uh kind of thing. We you know, I what really got me into what we were doing was, you know, for me, it's very much a I describe it as kind of being a bit of a therapeutic thing for me as well. It's a bit of an outlet. So you know, we just songs that invoked a kind of an emotional response out of us is kind of what we were after, and that's kind of what we thought we were able to throw together with this record, and it turned into this concept thing, right, So it kind of tells the story that of kind

4:23 of somebody, you know, kind of given their all in life and then eventually, you know, they make a deal with the devil because things aren't going so well, and then you know they're kind of you know, high on life after making this deal. But then of course it starts to fall apart and chaos ensues. So that's kind of the story behind it. And I think there's a lot of practical things in there that the average person might be able to relate to on some level. Maybe not the entire thing, but there's definitely stuff in there that I think everybody could find something to relate to. It definitely, you know, kind of get gives me, you know, flashbacks of it's kind of like my life. Yeah, I mean like there's definitely some like really like lyrics in there that that I can deeply personally relate to, right, And that's kind of what you know, got me going for it, because you know, Valentine was able to construct this character who's like, you know, I've been calling it like an amalgamation of all these different types of people or experiences or people like it's not just us, it's like it's people we know, and he just like brought them all together into this one character, right, And and the whole album is just the Each song is like a chapter of a progression through this story of this this character's life and experiences and and the chaos that comes from from living a

5:55 life of chaos, I guess. And you know what, Yeah, And you know what's funny looking at all in the songs, you know, listening to them and what they're all about. It even has which I like because it's type of person. I have this like positive overtone to it, you know. At the same time as what you're talking about, it's also giving like some you know, for lack of a better way of playing motivational positive influence to people. Yeah, Like it's I mean, if you look at it right on the surface, it might come across as as more on the darker side, which I wouldn't dispute, But if you if you really dig into what the message, if you can call it a message is and there it's actually positive. It's it's you know, it's it's it's really kind of a hey, don't you know, try not to let things get out of control and and you know, you've only got one life and you know, try to make the best of it. And you know, really, at the end of the day, it is you know, like the last song Carpet DM is like a retrospective from Beyond the Grave, is how Valentine wrote that. It's just kind of like thinking back about you know, the lessons, the would it could have should us right, you know, as they say, yeah, exactly, and don't we all kind of do that?

7:16 That's why listen that one. I love the name of that one because I live that every day, you know, and I've always since I'm young, I felt like you got to live every day as if it's your last, because you just never know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean I wish sometimes I could take my own advice, and I'm sure there's a lot of people that could relate to even that feeling. Yeah, you know, it's easy to preach, it's harder to live it, right, So absolutely, but you know, at the end of the day. We you know, our goal with this record just like was we we wanted it to be authentic, right, Like what you're hearing is authentically us, you know, it's we recorded it at my house in my basement, the entire thing.

8:07 I engineered the whole thing. And then you know, we worked on the songs together collectively, like Valentine wrote the lyrics and most of the melodies. But you know, we all brought like Stan, Mike, myself and Valentine all brought different aspects of you know, the songs together and then that's what we recorded. Like it's all recorded. You know, we wanted it to sound like a band, is what I'm trying to say, right, Like it hasn't been like that was the goal. Make it sound like we're authentic, We're a real band. It's got that human element and the emotions are raw. So that was the whole goal behind the entire record, was just make sure it's real and people can relate to it and it's yeah, it's it's just it's us humans playing music and projecting emotions. That was the goal. There you go, And it is so important that music be authentic because listen, it's obvious when it isn't. And really that music is invokes emotion and the only rate and the way you're gonna invoke emotion is by being real and authentic. Mm hmm, yeah, exactly so, and that was the goal. And I hope we achieve that. I can safely say that, you know, even if only two people ever heard this record, I can safely say, hey, my bucket list item is checked off, like I put something out that I'm proud of, and nobody can take that away from me. I can stand behind this. So you know, I'm super proud of what we've been able to achieve. And that's coming from, you

9:37 know, an introvert who doesn't like to, you know, say anything nice about himself because you know, I'm introverted. So it's like I hate everyone, but mostly I hate myself, right, yeah, right. And it's so funny you bring that up because people don't realize, like most musicians are introverts, and they think because they get up on stage and do what they do that they're extroverts, and actually it's quite the opposite. And when you're on stage, you are, and people don't understand you kind of are being an introvert. You're in your own world, even if you're performing to one hundred thousand people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean getting up on stage is yeah, like it's you're right, you're supposed to go out there and you're supposed to engage the audience put on a show, and they're there to be entertained at the end of the day, you know, so you kind of got to do that. But you know, for I could just see why so many musicians like get burnt out from touring and doing shows after a while, because I mean, if you're like, that's that's a lot to go out there in front of a lot of people people right right, you know, and could fool yourself into thinking that you're going to entertain them, right. Yeah, So that's that's I can certainly understand that. And I'm also somebody I'm big about album artwork, so I think it's really cool.

11:00 But the album artwork was shot at the abandoned Riverview Hospital. Yeah, that was super cool. I actually lived in the South Story White Rock area when I was a oh my elementary school days, and I had no idea that that thing was there, and I had never heard about it until we started doing like this record and working on the artwork, and I was like, oh, no way, you know out in Coquitlam there, which you know, lower Mainland Vancouver area, And yeah, seeing the pictures, I was even watching videos on it and the history behind it, and I was blown away, and I'm like, yeah, this is totally it totally fits for what we're doing. You know, It's nice. I love it.

11:46 Like one of the songs I'm here is the story of him being in a mental institution and trying to break out, and part of the Riverview Hospital was effectively a mental institution. Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of a and then ones in the US by the way, you know, like I used to live across the street from one that's closed down now and it used to be pretty creepy. Like me and my bro would just sit out on the front porch and there would be like mental patients a walling and bet hiking on the road in front of my house. Like yeah, whoa yeah, yeah, some things, man, no doubt, no doubt. So tell everybody how they can connect to you guys on socials on the web, how they can get the new music check out everything you got. Yeah, okay, So we are in the process of Okay, so the basics, we're on most of the socials or I mean the major ones, I mean uh TikTok, Twitter or x as it's now called from Facebook where all you know all those just look up Black Daggers. It's virtually all Black Daggers or Black Daggers music. Our website is Blackdaggers music dot com. You know, you can kind of every thing is kind of connected through those channels. Music.

13:03 We're on all the major streaming platforms, and we have physical copies coming out here. There's gonna be a limited run of one hundred physical copies of the album with the hospital artwork on the front, and then that's it. After that, there's gonna be we will re release it, but it's gonna be different artwork. So we're working on getting that the logistics behind that sorted out, so you can see that that'll be coming down the pike here pretty soon in the new year. Will be probably when we re release with the other artwork, and there might be some additional b sides because we've got a ton of music in the in the Warchester in the vault that we wrote. We only pulled out the eight songs that we thought fit the best for what we were trying to achieve for this album and also for timing, right, you know, there was you know, we took on, like I said, we did this whole project by ourselves, and there was you know, only so much we could handle going day in, day out for two or three months before you start to go crazy. Right, So yeah, right, yeah, yeah. So we ended up capping it at eight songs and felt that that that got the entire story and message across we wanted to and and so we'll re release it and there might be one or two additional songs included in the re release that aren't on this one. Nice any other things you want or final words you want to share with the listeners that we haven't covered already. I think that's most of it, you know. Valentine might have

14:39 a few other things. He's usually the one to He's he's been spearheading a lot of the marketing and promotion of the record as well. So I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting, But follow us on the socials and you'll see kind of what's going on. We'll have announcements of what's coming up, especially with the hard copies, with with the Riverview Hospital and and you know, any any additional news and future releases. I think we're gonna be doing some more streaming on TikTok. We got a lot of interesting feedback. Uh. Valentine and I were re recording or transposing a song last week that we had recorded in standard tuning because we're recording it down to sea, and we were just streaming that whole process, and we're like, well, all two people might like this, but apparently a lot of people liked and want us to do it again, so we might do some more of that. You know.

15:31 I just kind of seeing the creative slash recording process of us beginning to work on some of these other songs we want to release in the in the new year. So you know, some people might find that interesting, some people might find it boring as hell. Well I hope they check everything out because you guys are badass. And thank you for giving us your art and thanks for being on the DRAMs of Pipe Man. Yeah, thank you for the kind words, thanks for having us really appreciate it. So yes, thank you, and thank you to everybody who's taken the time to listen our music, because it really means a lot We put our heart and soul into it. So if you listen to it and you're able to take one positive thing away from it, our job is done as far as I'm concerned. So love it. Yeah, that's great and I look forward to hearing a lot more from you guys. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks Dean, Thank you for listening to the adventures of fight Man. I'm w for CUI Radio.