Lightworker just recently released their first full length album ‘Fury By Failure.’ The album perfectly combines both heavy and melodic instrumentals, smooth and aggressive vocals, and lyrics that send a message to push through and overcome, making it definitely worth listening to! Guitarist Grayson Hurd chatted with me about the band’s background and the new album.
VV: You guys are based out of San Francisco and your Facebook page notes that you are the remnants of former bands. How did you all come together as Lightworker?
GH: I think I think our Facebook page probably says that we’re from San Francisco and our bio might too. Honestly we try to stay San Francisco Bay Area. Technically none of us live in San Francisco funny enough. We’re all throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in California. San Francisco is the easiest place we know that people would be like oh okay I know where that is, but we’re all around the Bay. For example, Joe, our singer, is probably the closest- just below San Francisco and then you have Brad, our bass player, and myself. We’re down at the end in San Jose and then our drummer, he’s from here. He’s from the East Bay but he actually lives in San Diego.
It’s kind of a longish story considering the fact that, like most bands, you have people that have been in the band for a while and people that are newer so I guess it kind of all started back in 2014. I know I’ve told this story before. The cat’s out of the bag in terms of the song the band actually started from. It was kind of started on accident as well.
Our singer, Joe, had a song he was writing and he kind of wanted to do it just for himself. Not really as anything he would want to put out with a band or anything like that, but he sought out the help of one of our friends, Nick, who’s a really good producer and he’s actually the original guitar player in the band and still is a good friend. They basically ended up writing or Joe ended up showing him that song, they demoed it out kind of just for him so Joe could have it, and then more ideas started coming. Then Joe kind of just figured you know what I actually think this probably should be a band after all and so our first EP for example was written by the two of them.
The band wasn’t actually fully formed until after the EP was already written even though it took us 2 years after that to actually put it out so that’s when I came in because Joe and Nick were looking to round off the lineup. From that original lineup that’s where Joe brought me in. I wasn’t even guitar back then. I came in as a bass player. Historically I’ve been a guitar player. Shoot, I’m going to date myself here but I’ve been a guitar player for about 18 years/almost 18 years. He actually said well the guitar player positions are actually full but if you want to do bass and help me with the vocals that’d be sweet. At that point I had just kind of parted with another band fairly recently from there so I was like yeah I’m going to need a performance outlet like that.
That kind of just grew from there so I was there at the beginning. Our bass player, Brad, I think we kind of just met from people in the scene in a sense. We were looking for a bass player and we kind of just found him through word of mouth. That was pretty simple. It was just one of those things. We met and he was cool. We got to know him and he tried out in terms of just like I sent him a bunch of tab files and had him learn the songs and everything. I really don’t remember how that happened but it was pretty simple.
And then Ryan, our drummer. When this project first started he was actually supposed to be the original drummer for this band before I was even considered in the picture. There are actually pictures of Joe, Nick, and Ryan as the first promo shoots of the band that were never released because it didn’t end up working out back then. So when we were looking for a drummer after our first drummer of the band, Kenny, Joe was like well you know the drummer that I used to play with back in the band before this? And I was like yeah and he was like I wanna hit him up and see what he says and that was Ryan. So he hit up Ryan and that kind of just happened from there.
VV: It sounds like everything kind of fell into place.
GH: Yeah it all fell into place in the end and I feel like every single time this stuff kind of happens it’s just very DIY. You just figure it out as you go along and you have no idea how it’s gonna work but it does.
VV: You guys just released ‘Fury by Failure’ and something that I really love about this album and you guys as a band as whole is that you seem to really have a great balance between heavy music while also combining melodies and sending a more positive message in comparison to some of the things I think we’re used to especially in the metal scene. So who are some of your influences that really kind of bring that out in you guys?
GH: This probably isn’t going to come as a surprise to a lot of people. It really depends. I mean I know that the whole vibe of the record first of all came from a place of us not wanting to necessarily decide on a direction for the album if that makes sense.
I know that Joe and I had this talk when we were writing the record. At first he was kind of like hey if we had a theme or a direction or this kind of like focused sound that we wanted to drive towards to make the record very distinct and cohesive that’d be awesome. I told him dude I totally agree, to be fairly transparent, I think that is something that would be very cool to do on like album two or something like that. But I know that for me I was kind of just in a place where I was like let’s just write songs that we at the end of the day genuinely really, really enjoy and not think too much about what they’re gonna sound like. He totally agreed.
This one we just wrote what we wanted. We wrote what felt good, what sounded good, and honestly, lyrically, I think the whole record ties in really well because Joe kind of kept with certain things on the record just for himself and everything and we kind of just went with that.
In terms of the sound, I don’t know. We have a lot of different influences when it comes to the musical side of things. We kind of meet in the middle here. Joe and I are both huge fans of bands like Killswitch Engage, Haste The Day, and all of those really notable metalcore bands. Obviously it’s no surprise. We’ve gotten some comparisons and stuff since the album’s come out and honestly I don’t try to hide it. For me personally, Killswitch is one of my favorite bands so it’s like obviously there’s gonna be some I guess influences of course. By no means do we try to like sound like that. It’s just natural right? If you really like something, your favorite band’s always gonna make a dent in your inspiration behind certain things or your influences.
We both really love the heavy stuff. Joe’s much more into almost more of the European style of metal or I like to say he really likes more of that metal that’s just straight double kick, 4 pattern drums beats and everything almost like simplistic straight forward just blasting metal. Then I, for example, I like that stuff too but I also really like rhythmic bass, like groove bass metal and things like that so you know if you had to pick someone who’s really into bands like Periphery or even if you want to go outside of full on metal and says bands like Issues that are more hybrid, mixing different styles and everything, that’s me. So that kind of all just incorporated into the making of this record.
But outside of that, specific bands that influence us to maybe write this kind of stuff, I couldn’t put my finger on it. There might have been a few times in a song or a part where we were like oh you know how this band does this in this song, how that impact happens because of what came before it, or something like that. We might reference things like that but in terms of pinpointing a band that actually influenced certain sounds on this record I personally don’t know because again at that point it was just so ingrained in what we liked. That kind of just came out in what we did because it’s what we wanted to do if that makes sense.
VV: Absolutely it does! When you really like something it just kind of is always there so I get that. And that kind of leads into my next question too. I’m sure you guys could not have predicted the current state of affairs but I will definitely say that your record really goes along with that in terms of again keeping a positive note with some of these things that are going on. Was there anything that really prompted you or inspired you to write certain aspects, even just where you were personally or things that you saw going on in the world? What prompted that message that you guys are sending with this record?
GH: Yeah I mean honestly that’s all Joe. A lot of the stuff on the record, for example, it’s all just personal. Joe’s definitely a thinker. There’s just a lot of personal experiences that when the music was done for a song, he dove into writing the lyrics. If there was something that he was going through at the time ultimately that song became a part of that or that song became about that. He kind of just pulled all of these different topics out of things that he was feeling, things that he was thinking, or things that he has gone through within the last- If you count a song like “Cholera” which, by the way, that’s the song that I was telling you before that actually started the band.
It was supposed to be on our first EP but I remember we actually had the conversation this should probably be on a full length because it makes more sense on a larger body of work. So that’s why we kept it and I’m kind of glad we did too because I think that one song needed to see a larger audience and we think it makes a lot of sense on the record. So it was a lot of different topics either about what Joe was feeling, thinking, or going through but the way that he approached all of them I feel like is what makes it cohesive as you were saying where a lot of the stuff that we try to do lyrically in the band is always giving that sense of hope but not necessarily just throwing hope at you like hope is everything and positivity is everything.
At the same time we don’t flinch from the grittiness of the truth. Obviously the acknowledgement that there are certain things that are maybe less than awesome that happen is just a fact. I think that part of being able to have hope and push through those things of course is acknowledging the fact that those things do exist, those are things that we all go through, and those are things that we all have in our heads and we ultimately have to battle that thought right?
VV: Absolutely. What was your recording process like for this album?
GH: Just to go back a little bit, we did the album before we signed with Solid State so we actually built the team. The first person that we got was Daniel [Gailey] from Phinehas and Fit for a King. We had talked to him about producing the record and he ended up producing the music for the record so basically the instrumental game essentially was with Daniel.
That process was us working with him down where he lives in Southern California. The recording process kind of went over the course of about a year and a half to two years. There was a time where we maybe thought that we were gonna release a song independently as well just to hold us over or something and that ended up not happening which I’m kind of glad about. So there were a couple of times where we flew him up here and we tracked a song here in my home studio instrumentally and everything.
Then when it came to do the full record, we drove down to him and I think we did one week with him, two weeks off, went back down for another week and rattled everything off so a lot of the instrumental recording and the recording of the music was done down there with him. It was a mix honestly. It was done down there with him and also up here. I know there’s a song on the record that I actually completely engineered and tracked myself like with my set up so that was a little bit of a mish mash but we were with Daniel doing all of that music recording really with him.
Then vocally we ended up going to Beau [Burchell]. There was a gap. I think we went to Beau something like six months later or maybe 7 months later. We had locked Beau in because our manager, Chris [LeMasters], is in a band called Hundred Suns and Beau did the same thing for their record that he did for ours so he vocal produced, recorded the vocals, and mixed the record.
His place is in Temecula. In January we drove there and we did all the vocals with him. Actually, funny enough, we had to do it in January and February because Joe got sick literally as we were driving down to Temecula for the first, what was supposed to be the only time. Halfway through the trip Joe’s driving and he turns to me and he says hey man, I feel a tickle in the back of my throat and I was like dude really? [Laughs] I mean it’s not his fault but it’s just like the timing was impeccable. We ended up being there for about a week. He was able power through a bunch of stuff which was crazy.
“Empyre” was actually the first song that we recorded and it sounded great. Then, I think it was the next day, he woke up and it was just like that, you know, done so he actually spent some time at the air B&B recovering for a couple of days while Beau and I just like worked on stuff as best we could. So yeah, we went down there with him for that one time and then we went back in February after Joe had recovered because usually it’s like you’re sick for maybe a week or two but then your voice takes an extra week or two after that in order to actually get back.
There were actually a few things we didn’t fully finish there but we mapped them out with him for the sake of time and then those last things we just recorded up here. I had Joe and my studio set up and tracked the final finishing touches on the vocals and everything and then sent it to Beau for him do everything that he needed to do.
Honestly to put it a nutshell the whole recording process was very fun because we kind of just pieced it together as we went along in a sense. So it’s not like we had a set schedule and we’re gonna be in the studio for a whole month. We kind of did it in pieces as were figuring out what needed to happen for the record so it was constantly changing and evolving until we finally had it finished.
VV: I know with everything that’s going on with the coronavirus you guys probably can’t say about any tour plans right now. I am hoping we will see you on the road and you’ll have a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania show but in the meantime, when restrictions are lifted, what song on this record is the one that you are most excited to play live?
GH: That’s really tough. We didn’t have a tour that we were gearing up for or anything like that so it was kind of just praticing for the sake of practice. We haven’t really got in a room to full on rehearse the songs like we were about to go out on tour yet. Honestly, I’m just gonna go with “Empyre.” That song just has a lot of attitude and there’s a lot of different styles of riffs on there. There’s also enough spacing on it sometimes where it’s easier to move around on stage and do all that stuff whereas opposed to if you have songs like ‘The Willing Martyr’ for example.
Funny enough, remember when I was talking about stylistically between what Joe usually gravitates towards and what I usually gravitate towards? Basically if you take “Empyre” and “The Willing Martyr” that’s fairly close, at least on this record. If you wanted to put that into a two song comparison that’s what it is. “The Willing Martyr” is probably going to be very shreddy and I won’t be able to move around as much where as “Empyre”, there’s a little more grove in it and I don’t know. I’d probably say that one to be completely honest.
‘Fury By Failure’ is available now! You can stream it and/or purchase the vinyl or CD here.
