MATT PIKE INTERVIEW
Yeah, so I took a look at the PDF of the book and it’s pretty thick basically it is pretty much all of your lyrics that you’ve written for hire and fire comprised in one book correct?
Yeah, everything from The Art of Self Defense up to Electric Messiah pretty much my life’s work as far as lyrics go. So far, there’s more to come, maybe there’ll be round two in 20 years.
I just figured it was about time. The past years really made me look at your life’s work and go Jesus I’ve written a lot of songs that is so many it’s enough to fill a book you know.
Do you often go back and read your own lyrics? Or is that something you kind of just put behind you once you complete it?
Does it depend you know? If I get stuck or something I can go back and read the lyrics. That’s a David Lynch thing to do is go back and transcendental and meditate on your previous work. Look at your old work to see what you were doing when things were successful for you. Things that might have slipped through your fingers, or something that you were thinking.
Do you look up to David Lynch a bunch? He’s super big on transcendental meditation.
He’s, he’s a pretty crazy fucking dude. He’s the guy you refer to when you walk into that weird bar in the middle of a trailer park at some place you’re fishing at in the middle of nowhere. There’s a bunch of creepy people doing karaoke, and you go, this is like a David Lynch film.
Did you love reading lyrics to songs when you were a kid?
That’s what I liked. yeah. When I was a kid, I used to love when you got to open a Slayer record or when Metallica came out, any record really, you’d get excited about it and I’d sit there and read the lyrics while the song played. For the rest of my life I always knew the lyrics are most of them you know? When you get visual and audio and a mental picture all at the same time, it’s not just one dimensional So with me, the work was already done, so it was just a matter of making it look nice.
Sorry I’m yawning I got up pretty early this morning. I got a toothache for a couple of weeks. So I keep tugging my gum and what’s left on my teeth. Getting new ones eventually I just got to save up some money now. pay my taxes first I guess.
Priorities right?
Yeah, taxes then teeth. I don’t know why anybody’s paying for shit right now.
We should put our money into a good team or an electric chair and start frying politicians. All of them. I don’t care what side of the board you’re on. They’re all fucking assholes. That’s just my opinion.
Who’s first on the chopping block?
I’d just started pluggin’ in Congress or the Senate? Work my way up from there. It seems like our president is too stupid to actually pin anything guilty thing on him. And so was the last one. I probably have a good shot at running for president now.
What would you say you enjoy more, writing lyrics? Or writing riffs?
They both are kind of different, there’s a joy to doing both. Riffs are more when I’m in a manic state.
I have extreme ups and downs. When I’m in a manic state, I tend to play and I write music a lot better,
I’ll think of the way that I’m going to sing on it. But then when I sit down and write, and usually I’m in a calmer mode, I’ll sit down and have a coffee or a tea and then really think out what I’m talking about and do research. I’m a lot more subdued. I smoke more weed when I’m in that state, I’m studying something, and then I’m trying to fit syllables to a hi-hat and use words cleverly. It’s more like solving a puzzle than it is like letting, letting the universe flow through your heart into your hands, creating the great joy they call it.
When you’re starting to write a song, do you have a picture in your head that you’re trying to paint? Or is it kind of just a stream of consciousness, letting whatever happens, happens?
Well, sometimes it can start with an idea or a joke, like being mean one of the guys will be joking around. With High on Fire, with my solo thing, or Sleep, everybody’s so funny that someone will say something that ends up turning into a whole idea list. Then I’ll take one of those ideas and run with it, make it a little more serious or a little more metaphoric, and then I’ll go research shit on it.
Things that intrigued me things that are esoteric, or metaphoric about my personal life that I can fit into a song and not exactly explain what I’m talking about, There are so many different ways of writing things like poetry or lyrics. It’s all a matter of what you’re thinking and feeling and what’s going on in the world.
I know you write the majority of the lyrics for High on Fire, did you write the lyrics and sleep as well?
Not so much. I mean, I’ve helped out with some stuff or just given them some ideas you know? Especially for the older Sleep stuff.
Both of us he was raised Catholic, we got bashed over the head that same way. We mixed Old Testament talk with pot, and went from there.
But those are all Al (Cisneros)’s ideas. I had the same idea as too it’s just better at wording them., I learned a lot of my songwriting techniques, especially vocals, by watching the way Al put them together. He was inspirational to me for that particular talent. He’s just a super, incredibly smart guy.
You got to put your own style on something, even if you learned it. You got to learn something from somewhere, put it in your toolbox, and then add your style.
I think the most common strings that tie through lyrics are very imagery heavy. You’re very good at painting pictures and describing scenes very well. They’re very filled with long epic journeys. In a lot of situations that are fight or flight situations, do or die almost.
Well, war is a common theme. I guess that comes from my upbringing, I’ve always embraced the darkness just like I do. The kind sight of the light and what’s not light and dark. You can’t have one without each other. The yin and yang to everything, you know?
Now does a lot of that inspiration come from like your Christian upbringing? Did you just not get down with what your parents were teaching you or what you were hearing?
Yeah, that or Ronnie James Dio.
I just knew there was more to it. I was too smart to be brainwashed and told, this is like this, and this is like this.
It’s way more complicated than that. I’m sorry but it is, you’re here to figure out what your particular energy needs to do to get the fuck out of here.
Something in your songs you come up with ideas and stories that draw parallels to your own life. Instead of stating like, this happened to me and I’m going through this. Instead, you more or less tell. stories from the third person point of view.
You can switch the binoculars by simply using I or they or we. I’ve done that and written songs like it’s like a screenplay
Steps into Ziggurat was on this last electric Messiah record. I played three parts, I play Nin Hertzog or ISIS, Enki and Enlil, which would be, you know, throughout the time, like the Annunaki that were apparently here or not, I find it an interesting story. So I kind of went through the whole the war that they’ve been in forever, it’s this family of giant humans that are kind of godlike and manky is like the serpent in the tree, for Adam and Eve, and I believe the Fertile Crescent was a petri dish, and we were an experiment and they were the ones experimenting on us.
Were the product.
Do you feel like music has lost anything today?
I think musi’s lost and gained something, the whole world’s changed. It’s not as special as when we had to go to a store and get a record and you wouldn’t get a whole lot of. chances to see a lot of these people being interviewed. The world’s changed a lot, music especially I think it’s getting even better. But at the same time, access to it makes it less valuable.
Definitely, you get tired of something way quicker, because you’re bombarded with so much new stuff that it’s hard to keep something for that long or have something last the test of time.
It’s like overkill. I had ADHD before they even knew what it was. So they had to put me in classes with like, a single teacher, I would totally make the room chaos, just trying to get attention from the other kids or trying to fuck with the teacher or whatnot. I had a hard time paying attention too.
Did you see that as a negative as a kid?
I don’t know, I’d go to jewelry class and art class and those would be classes that I liked and didn’t mind.
But then some days, I just didn’t go to school, take acid and go skateboarding with my friends or play hacky sack and smoke.
Did you skate a lot as a kid?
Yeah up to a point. I mean, I was never really that great. But I’d go real fast, we’d go like downtown Denver and just cruise all the way down the 16th Street Mall.
It was illegal in some places so we’d run away from the cops and be tripping balls we probably get someone to bootleg a bottle of Jim Beam for us and go and drink Slurpees with Jim Beam in them.
Score some dirt weed. That’s all they had when I grew up. Now the weed is so good you forget your name. and the flying saucer you came from?
Dude, skating on acid. It’s probably the funnest thing ever.
Oh yeah, until I this one time… Okay, we were up in this big parking garage that goes down in a circle. There was a piece of rebar sticking out of the wall and I was going like, had to be 25 miles an hour and my board hit it and just stopped.
I went flying while I was totally tripping balls. Slid on my shoulder, I skinned it off. iI wouldn’t bleed because there’s so much asphalt in it.
Half my face was like that, I had to go to McDonald’s and dig it all out in the sink while I’m on acid. Dude that was a bummer. Massive bail, so fucked up.
Dude I couldn’t imagine how bad of a time that may of been.
Like I said I wasn’t the greatest skater.
We’re you watching any skate videos back then? Who were your favorite skaters?
Yeah like Neil blender. Lance Mountain. I actually lived in San Jose, I knew (Steve) Cabbalero and like, my band used to practice in a warehouse next door to his skate park he has there He’d let us go in there and skateboard around.
Who would you say are some of your best or favorite lyricists of all time?
Well, definitely you know Roger Waters had a way with Pink Floyd. I always loved Iron Maiden, and I loved how Steve Harris is like your history teacher. Gotta love some Lemmy, you gotta love the old punk stuff like Henry Rollins or any and Black Flag. Circle jerks.
There’s some deeper shit like I know a bunch of people will say something about it, but I always liked Leonard Skinner. That dude (Ronnie Van Zant) had some deep lyrics like, The Ballad of Curtis Loew. In that song, you could really feel how a bunch of dudes from the south would be blamed for racial tension. It’s about this old black man he would learn guitar from. He used to pick up bottles and stuff just to go buy him wine so he could hear him play his guitar you know? Then at the funeral, he was like one of the only people there. No one there but this little kid that learned how to play the blues from him.
Being from New York, I think most people from the north, for the most part, think people from the south are just inherently racist.
The KKK is horrible and all of that shit is horrible, But It’s not like that everywhere in the south. Because the ruling class doesn’t want any of those to get along they can’t make a profit that way.
That way they have to have us killing each other for them you know?
Divide and conquer
At least someone knows that. Whatever they’re saying on Fox news is coming out of one asshole’s mouth and CNN is coming from the other asshole’s mouth. Really at the end of the day, it just sounds like a bunch of shit.
That’s so true, if you’re watching the news about anything, just flip between Fox and CNN and you’ll see the narrative that they’re both trying to push about the same event.
That’s the division, that’s the whole point. They’re working in conjunction to fucking brainwash us.
I just watch Congress now in the house. I just watch them debate on the floor, then you don’t get any bias to anything you just get to see the kind of bullshit these people are fucking doing. I know, I watch it every day.
You’ve referenced him a bunch of your songs, but I know a huge inspiration to your lyrics is H.P. Lovecraft. How important is his writing to you?
He was tapped into something weird man, he knew some things about us being in a microcosm comparatively to the macrocosm. “As above so below” kind of thing.like What happens up there happens down here and what happens out there we couldn’t even fathom because we’re not equipped
That’s my attraction to HP Lovecraft. There are stories where you’re like living in someone else’s body immediately and you know these deep dark horrifying thoughts before you even know your name.
You think he saw a piece of like a greater picture we couldn’t really comprehend?
Perhaps I mean on a sub-dimensional spiritual level, what would happen if you got stuck in what would be a different kind of hell. Somewhere else you know and maybe you could tear down these electrons, neutrons and protons like a poster and there’s something like Yog Sothoth and Cthulhu right there.
Quantum physics is starting to prove more and more that that type of stuff is real.
Is quantum physics and like metaphysics, something you pay attention to a lot and study.
To a degree, I like listening to it. I’m not an avid student of it, but I understand as much as I can about it. It intrigues me definitely, If I was going to really dive into that I probably would have gone and got a PhD. and not gone on tour.
Yeah, you reference a lot of different cities and random imagery in your writing.
There’s a lot of that there’s a lot of Philip K Dick stuff, Poe, a lot of biblical references because I know that book so well. {Laughs} Ray Bradbury. It’s just all sci-fi and horror stuff, esoteric shit,
That stuff totally intrigues me. The points of view that humans have the choice in understanding something a certain way and not understanding it another is a is a narrow point of view.
