Back to Part I
 

iconoMUSIC: How would you describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard it?

Walt: Oh God, (laughs) it’s a bit weird because a lot of bands have like one individual thing they do and each song sounds kind of like the last. We not like that, I don’t know if you listened to the EP that much. We chose those three songs cuz even though you know it’s us they are kind of like diverse.  They just kind of have a different style; I mean we’re basically just a rock band. There are so many ways you can describe it. 

iconoMUSIC: Along those same lines, if you had to choose one song that would give people a feeling for what Silvertide is all about, what song would that be? Or can you choose one? 

Walt: If I had to choose one song? It hasn’t been written yet. I mean literally some of our songs are totally leftwing and others are totally rightwing and others are totally in the middle. And we haven’t written that one song that everybody can say I can hear that and that and that. Where if you listen to our album and hopefully you can say I can hear that and then hear that as the tracks lead on. 

iconoMUSIC: I think some of the best bands are the ones who offer a lot of diversity, so it’s cool that you guys are like that. 

Walt: Yeah, we have a little bit of a grassroots feel and the heavy stuff and the medium stuff. 

iconoMUSIC: I hear a lot of classic rock influence, like in the EP and the songs I’ve heard. 

Walt: Yeah all of us from an early age just like clicked on to the 60’s and 70’s rock era. We just really clamped on to it but like our bass player Brian, he’s more funk oriented and jazz and R&B, so he brings kind of like that real feel to it that makes it a little more exciting, to us anyway. We have so many influences; there are a few of the guys that like a couple modern bands but not that many. A lot of them are mostly from the 60’s and 70’s. 

iconoMUSIC: I hear a lot of Chris Robinson in your vocals. 

Walt: (chuckles) you know what’s funny about that man? 
(laughs)

Walt: You know what’s really funny about that is a lot of people have said that to me, especially me the singer they say “you sound just like Chris Robinson,” and no one, I swear no one in the band ever listened to The Black Crowes really that much until people started saying it. 

iconoMUSIC: oh really?

Walt: Yeah, when we were like six, seven months at a band people started saying like, “you sound like Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes” and I’m like “Really?” So I started checkin him out and you know we have our differences. 

iconoMUSIC: Oh yeah.. I was just saying..

Walt: A different thing going on. They have a whole other vibe, they are very very grassroots as a band. I mean my voice kind of has similar things. 

iconoMUSIC: Yeah, similar register. 

Walt: Yeah, there is a lot of things you got, people can say a lot of things like, you know you got Creed and people say they copied off of Pearl Jam but where did Pearl Jam get something from? Did they get it from Creedence Clearwater Revival? It’s like weird, you got Humble Pie, is that were they got their influence? 

iconoMUSIC: Well, you definitely don’t sound like Chris Robinson’s new solo album..

Walt: I haven’t heard it yet. 

iconoMUSIC: You don’t want to, it will put you to sleep. 

Walt: (laughs)

iconoMUSIC: What do you think of the current state of rock? Do you think we need to get some real rock bands out there or do you think real rock is represented right now? 

Walt: To be honest, I really don’t know what’s going on in the mainstream right about now.  I’m really not up with modern times right now at all. It’s really bad; I mean I hear people talk about bands and stuff you know. There are so many bands out there; I’m just now getting up to the late 70’s. Maybe eventually I’ll get up to the year 2000! 

(laughs) 

Walt: There is no way that I think rock is dead. It’s always there, whether it be in a band that no one has ever heard of playing in the middle of Memphis that I might see on a drinking binge one night and they might be the best band in the world. They might just play locally. You never know, they could be just floating around. 

iconoMUSIC: Yeah, especially you guys were out there playing five, six nights a week and people are going, so that tells you something there. 

Walt: Yeah. 

iconoMUSIC: Ok let’s move on to the next question.. What first got you into music? Was there like one album? 

Walt: My dad was a piano teacher; he played in cover bands up until I was like ten years old. To me, I was just always raised around music; he had like a little mini recording studio in our basement when we were younger.   He was always like a huge music freak, he listened to a lot of like really music-oriented bands and my mom was more into like the Stones and stuff like that. So I got kind of like a full spectrum of rock from an early on. There are so many albums out there. I’m like a big fan of, I don’t know if you ever listened to Jesus Christ Superstar, the original album. 

iconoMUSIC: No

Walt: It’s a pretty insane album, it’s got like.. not necessarily the content but the singing on it from Judas who was played by a black dude and his voice is phenomenal and the rock grooves that are laid underneath it are just phenomenal. 

iconoMUSIC: Cool, I’ll have to check that out. 

Walt: The original one, the vinyl. Don’t get the new one, the 30 year anniversary stuff. 

iconoMUSIC: Oh, sort of like Ozzy’s remakes..  What advise would you give to an aspiring musician? 

Walt: Pick what you want to play and play it as many times as possible and what people say, do good in school and stuff like that but if you want to do music, do it all the time and eventually someone is gonna notice. You know, whether it will be like in our case a record label or just a town. I mean if you’re happy doing it. We were pretty well off in Philly, you know and it’s such a thrill to be able to play in front of, like we played the TLA out there and we sold it out after being a year and half as a band. Seeing that many people sing our songs back to us is awesome. Just keep on playing, that’s the only thing I can say. You can’t say like do this or do that, all I can say is you pick what you want to do and keep on playing it. That can be applied to anything, you know. A shoemaker, you keep on doing it and eventually you’re gonna be real good at it. Hopefully in twenty years I can say, I’m pretty good at this. 

iconoMUSIC: That’ probably the best answer to that question, I have ever heard. Along those lines, you mentioned Philadelphia, what’s the Philly music scene like? 

Walt: It’s very very small. Obviously there is more of an R&B bluesy feel, it’s really big there. There is a lot of different stuff going on down there. It’s a very small, big city. Even though, it’s one of the larger cities in America, if you’re playing music down there you somehow know every band. You bump into all of them during your escapades during the year. It’s cool, when we were starting to grow as a band and get more people at shows, you could say that the scene was going in that kind of direction with us. So it’s kind of like a pull and take. If it wasn’t at that exact time, we don’t know what could have happened. Just at that time, it seemed to be going up and people were like going out to see different bands and we teamed up with a couple of different bands and we played shows and had a lot of fun, found all the rock bands that we never heard of. One of my favorite bands is from Philadelphia, and they are not even big or nothing yet. 

iconoMUSIC: What’s your song writing process like? 

Walt: Every motherf***er in our band plays guitar, even the drummer. He writes a lot of riffs, he’s a riff madman. It’s pretty insane, we all just bring in individual ideas. People bring like a full song and say, “what do you think?" And we’re like "oh we like this section of it" and we take it and put it with another idea. Me and the rhythm guitar player Mark, we do all the lyrics and I do all the melodies. The rest of the guys are starting to help out with melodies and stuff which is cool. That’s starting to open it up a little bit more. It’s really awesome that we have five guys that play because people get writers block, you know and we have to create songs, that’s what we do and if one guy is freezing up one day, and is like “man, I suck today” and another guy brings in an idea, it might get the other guy out of that. So it’s like “f***, you just made me think of something!” It’s pretty crazy. 

iconoMUSIC: It also helps bring some diversity to the songwriting. 

Walt: Definitely, diversity is the key to everything cuz you can turn around and play one type of thing with one beat all the time and only one certain group of people listen to that. But the fact that you can have some slower songs and you can have some really heavy songs. Like one girl who might only listen to ballad rock, she might turn around and listen to one of our songs on an album and eventually she might start to like the rock stuff. She might be like, “holy s***! Listen to this stuff.” 

iconoMUSIC: Your bio mentioned how you guys really made a name for yourself with your live show and you mentioned that too. Do you think that the studio records, all we’ve heard is the EP, do you think you did a good job of capturing your energy, like your live energy? 

Walt: I think we did a really good job, it was like the first time we have ever really done that and it was a little strange cuz you don’t have 500 or a thousand people in front of you. And that energy man, the lack of people is a total lack of energy, it just makes you kind of like very dry. It’s a hard thing to do, believe it or not when you got a bunch of people in front of you, you go nuts, you start breaking s*** on stage and you start freakin out, start playing you guitar a little bit harder and start screamin’ a little bit louder. 

iconoMUSIC: Like feeding off the crowd? 

Walt: Yeah, like really feeding off the crowd. I think we did the best that we could at that time capturing it. But can we do it better? Absolutely! 

iconoMUSIC: I thought it [the EP] was great. I have never seen you guys live, so I don’t know what to judge it by. 

Walt: I hope you can see us live. 

iconoMUSIC:  Get some LA dates and I’ll be out there!  Speaking of which, any major tour dates in the works or are you guys just concentrating on the album right now? 

Walt: Concentrating on the album. Just the music on the album, we’re not looking at anything else. 

iconoMUSIC: What would be your dream tour? Past or present? If you could tour with any band, who would you kill to tour with? 

Walt: The Stones. There are not that many bands that are really left. The Who would be cool but how many members are left now? The Stones are a great example of a band that just stuck around years, Aerosmith is another one. 

iconoMUSIC: You guys already did that one! 

Walt: You so the Stones would be like incredible! 

iconoMUSIC: One final question here. What do you want the fans to take away from your music? 

Walt:  Wow. We we kind of like want to raise the bar. All the music that we listen to is pretty hard to top. We’re just kind of like, "wow!" We don’t know if we’re up to that point yet, that we could top it. We might not even be ten miles close. But we’re hoping we can eventually be up there and have the same caliber level as all of those great bands that just really ruled the world in the 60’s and 70’s. We just hope that we could get up to that. We hope that people will say that “there is music out there that’s being really thought out but still is rockin”, you know. It doesn’t have to be jazz. It doesn’t have to be like R&B. Definitely there are unbelievable, incredible rock bands that changed the world and changed the face of music. I hope that one day that we could get a speck of that. Be able to put a marker on there and you know people could look at us and they could say, maybe we can turn them on to stuff that we listen to, I guess is what I am saying. Maybe we could really make a difference and make all that great music not be forgotten, maybe they can hear it and say “what do you guys listen to” and we’d say, you know we don’t sound anything like them but here is the kind of stuff that we have really dug for years. And people could really, really just take that off. I mean, we in no way are trying to be anything.. we’re just playing what we know. It’s that simple, we play what we know and we know what we love. We just play what we love. 

iconoMUSIC: Yeah, I know where you are coming from, that’s cool 

Walt: It’s insanity. 

iconoMUSIC: Well, judging by the EP, I expect great things for you guys. 

Walt: I hope we can deliver. 

iconoMUSIC: It’s good to hear a really solid rock band in this day and age. Look forward to the album… thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us. Good luck! 

Walt: Thanks man. 

Now that you know a little bit about Silvertide, click here to visit their official website to learn more and also download their Digital EP to discover why they are primed to help revive guitar rock! 

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