You might remember this limerick from elementary school: “Back to back, they faced each other/ They drew their swords and shot each other/ The deaf policeman heard this noise/ Then came to kill the two dead boys.”
Even if you don’t, The Chariot’s bassist Jon ‘KC Wolf!’ Kindler does, and one day, out of nowhere, he blurted it out. Intrigued by the poem, frontman Josh Scogin (ex-Norma Jean) decided to fragment all the phrases to compose the song titles for the band’s second album The Fiancée.
“I did some research on it to make sure it wasn’t in a book or something, [then] I made up my own version of the poem so that each track would have its own title,” Scogin tells MTVnews.com’s Metal File. “And when reading it together, it would still make sense and keep in line with the original poem’s story.”
Such a conceptual approach might perfectly lend itself to some pretentious, thematic album that would take the band forever to complete. But The Chariot had no intention of doing the all too trendy concept album. Instead, they shot from the hip, stressing spontaneity and impulse to create a record far more immediate than their 2004 debut Everything is Alive, Everything is Breathing, Nothing is Dead and Nothing is Bleeding.
“It was actually a very easy record to write,” Scogin tells Metal File. “It came more naturally to us. Sometimes with art, there’s the art of, ‘Well, I just created it because that’s just what I wanted to do,’ and then there’s the art of, ‘Well, we have a deadline, and we have to be done by this date — no exceptions.’ This time the record was more the former — we wrote all of these songs within a week of each other and they all came very naturally, very fast and very easy. I like that process a lot better.”
For the rest of the interview with The Chariot and more of this week’s metal news, check out MTV.com’s Metal File.
Then check out the video for The Chariot’s “The Company, The Comfort, The Grave”:
