Neverlight is a band from Colorado Springs, USA. They re-releasing their album “Nova Red” and our writer Joey, took a little chat with them about both the band, the re-release and their history.
Neverlight:
My name is Joey, I am a writer for RavenRockSite.dk. I hope you guys are up for answering a few questions about your band Neverlight, and your upcoming releases?
- So, Josh and Amanda Farrel are obviously the masterminds behind Neverlight. Would you like to introduce yourselves, or maybe each other’s primary roles in the band?
Amanda: I am the vocalist and one of the songwriters for Neverlight. I also play some cello.
Josh: I am the guitarist and the other songwriter in Neverlight.
- What was the spark that brought both of you guys together around the idea of Neverlight?
Amanda: Josh and I have been married for over 22 years, and writing music together for fun for almost as long. But for me, the galvanizing event was in 2012, when I was diagnosed with cancer. I had been taking voice lessons, and resisting my coach’s attempts to get me to audition for smaller opera roles for awhile, but I always thought, “Oh this is never something that can be serious. You have a kid, a job, this can never amount to much.” But then when I had to have surgery, they told me it might damage my voice. The surgeon suggested I might want to record myself in case my voice was never the same. And that thought, that I may never really be able to sing again, was crushing. Sometimes you don’t really know how much something defines you, or how much happiness it brings, until you may lose it. So when I came through the surgery with my voice undamaged, I thought, “Ok, this is a gift. You have to do something meaningful with it now.” So we did.
Josh: Around the same time, I was starting to feel more confident with my compositions, so like a lot of things Amanda and I do together, the music just meshed and felt right.
- How long before your 2014 EP did the band come to be?
Amanda: We officially formed Neverlight in early 2013, pretty much as soon as I knew I would get my full range back. I told Josh I had to sing, either with him or without him! But of course, we work so well together, it was never really a question. I think the first song that would really be a Neverlight song, I wrote in late 2012. The song was called “Neverlight,” and it’s about a mother who dies but refuses to move on so she can still watch over her child.
- How would you guys describe the genre of metal that you play?
Amanda: Dark metal that transforms. Actually, I’m stealing those words from a friend of ours, but he was exactly right.
Josh: People have called us “symphonic” and “gothic” and “progressive,” and we have a bit of all that in what we do, but I think we’re more eclectic than any of those labels calls to mind. “Dark metal” fits us better, I think.
- You are obviously huge fans of metal yourselves. Are there any particular bands or albums that you remember, which made you finally decide: “This, this is what I want to do”?
Amanda: My realization that this is what I wanted happened slowly over several years, and there have been lots of key players who helped that happen, but at the moment I would say, Bruce Dickinson, Floor Jansen, and David Bowie.
Josh: The big turning point for me, and the thing that completely changed the way I approach writing music was our discovery of Evergrey in 2003.
- You have a re-launch of your second album Nova Red coming up. When you were initially writing the songs for that album, what were the primary driver(s) of your creative juices during the process? Was there a particular theme that you wanted to get across?
Amanda: We take a lot of our inspiration from gothic fiction and graphic novels, but primarily we are very introspective people. So we write about that. Our fears, our weakness, and our struggles and triumphs as well. With Nova Red, I was feeling very intense grief. As I said David Bowie was my hero for a lot of reasons, and he had just died when I started writing for Nova Red. I actually wrote the song Nova Red the day after he died. It was my way of dealing with what I perceived as a tremendous loss. What a huge hole he left in the universe! He always seemed immortal; outside of time. And how do we, as musicians, even try to fill that hole? No one can. So I wrote Nova Red, which essentially references the nova of a red dwarf, which is the smallest, least bright sort star. And the idea basically was, if I burn myself out small and insignificant as I am, will it even make a difference in this chasm that is left? What if the light we shine only makes the shadows longer? And a lot of those songs on Nova Red are about that, about looking inside and pulling all those fears out into the light to examine them. That’s what In Darkness is, and The Revenant, and even Your Medusa. I suppose, now that the album has been out for two years and I can look back on it, that what we were really doing was a lot of self examination to help us find our way. We had a radical shift in our focus between Violent Delights, our first album, and Nova Red. We lost some members, and made the decision not to bring anyone else in on a permanent basis… I think we were finding our way. Hopefully we brought our fans on an interesting ride along the way!
Josh: The lyrics I wrote for Nova Red are largely about my struggles rationalizing my religious upbringing with my life experience, an ongoing process with me. The biggest, most important reason I make music is to create moments of catharsis through which I can become a more balanced human being. An exception to that is the song, “Shallow Grave,” which is a more light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek song about the consequences of trust.
- Re-launch of your album, re-launch of your FB-page. Does the upcoming release mark some kind of full-on Neverlight ‘revival’? Or are they two separate events, that just happen to correlate?
Amanda: They are two separate events, but all to the same goal. We are trying, and have always tried, to build relationships with our fans. So the re-launch of the Facebook page, while it was painful to do it, is something we believe will help us reconnect with our true fans, and help us to reach them better. The re-launch of Nova Red is to reintroduce us and to get people ready for what’s coming.
Josh: And we’re really excited about what’s coming!
- Besides the Nova Red re-release, I also read on your blog, that you guys have a bunch of new songs written for a whole new album. How is that process coming along?
Amanda: They are great! They are done! We actually wrote and recorded 19 songs, but the NEW album has 11 songs on it. We are very pleased to say that album is finished. I am extremely excited about it! There will be exciting announcements in August about that, and it will be out in the fall of this year.
Josh: We brought in some new faces this time to help us achieve our vision. Leo Margarit from Pain of Salvation on drums and Anis Jouini from Myrath on bass, and of course we retained Ruben Wijga on keys, piano, violin and other things. These amazing guys all finished up months ago now, and we just got the album back from Jacob Hansen, who mixed and mastered it.
- I noticed a Facebook-video of you guys heading to a music shoot on a rainy day. How does the whole music video operation work for a band like Neverlight? Do you hire outside help, or do you have friends of the band willing to assist you?
Amanda: At this point, it’s just us. We have friends who volunteer to help sometimes, but oftentimes it’s just us, and our daughter who helps with lighting and cinematography. It’s a family business! And then we incorporate that with the excellent skills of Artside Studio, who we have worked with since Nova Red.
Josh: Between the two of us, Amanda and I have a broad set of skills, and we love developing new ones. We do it all the time. And part of it is that we’re a small band with big ambitions, so we do as much as we can ourselves because it’s more affordable, but the other part is that we have a vision and it’s sometimes hard to trust others with that vision.
- When you only have two primary members in a band, does that make touring especially difficult for you? I would imagine it would lead to a more stripped-down live performance.
Amanda: At this point, we don’t tour. With us both in the band, it would be hard to do that and to still give our daughter some stability. But I miss the stage more and more every day, and I would really like to do some limited, shorter tours, with more full time touring in the future. I really do not want a stripped down performance at all, so it would take some time and planning to do something worthy of our fans.
Josh: We talk from time to time about going out and doing some little acoustic things, but that would likely be separate from what we do in Neverlight.
- Speaking of touring, assuming you guys got a full band together for a tour. What would be your dream line-up to be a part of? No limits!
Amanda: I’d have to say Caligula’s Horse, maybe Ragnar Zolberg, and Evergrey. As far as a dream tour package goes, I’d say Iron Maiden, Nightwish, Dream Theater, and Evergrey. That would blow my mind every night!
- Is there any experience that you as a band have fond memory of? Any show, recording session, writing session, that you hold especially dear?
Amanda: We played this crazy fourth of July show up in Denver right before we went into the studio to record Nova Red. I remember we played “Scarlight” (not the piano version you get on the extended edition of Nova Red) to open up, and as the song went on the place got more and more crowded as people came in to hear. When the song ended, there was just silence for a few beats, and then the crowd went crazy. That was a great feeling. Also for me is being in the studio and recording the new material. I’ve come a long way as a vocalist, and I felt relaxed and confident in my performance. That is a great feeling of a different kind.
Josh: One thing that sticks in my mind is a moment from the demo recordings for the new album. We were stuck on how Amanda should sing the bridge of one song, and I suggested she do it false cord, which is a style she had never done before. She said “okay,” and nailed the part in one take, and then, just for fun, doubled it. It was so good, we didn’t bother rerecording it.
- Do you guys have any musicians or bands that you are crazy about at the moment? Feel free to shout-out someone you feel like deserves it!
Amanda: In constant rotation for me at the moment is In Contact by Caligula’s Horse,and Dan Tompkins’ Castles.
Josh: I’m still listening to Tesseract’s Sonder quite a bit, as well as the stuff Amanda mentioned.
- Being a husband and wife-driven metal band is not the most common thing. It must lead to a writing process that differs quite a bit from your average band. How do you guys split up “Family time” and “Shreddin’ time”?
Amanda: This is a constant struggle, and I won’t lie and say that music doesn’t take up most of our time. But it’s very fortunate for us that our daughter is a musician too, so she helps out with the recording, photos, and videography as well. But sometimes you just have to forget about how much there is to do, and just walk away. In the midst of all the chaos, you have to make sure that family is still a priority, so we take time off together, and take short vacations here and there.
Josh: I think the big difference for us is that we’re together all the time, so we write all the time and work on other aspects of being in a band – taking photos, making videos, and the like – all the time. We don’t have to schedule four or five people to make time to get in a room together. The downside of that is that it can be hard to turn off.
- Lastly, I’m going to give you a chance to give me a quick pitch. To our Danish readers who might not be familiar with your work, give them a reason as to why Neverlight is a band they should go check out right now!
Amanda: Neverlight’s music isn’t just about the lyrics, or the vocals, or the heavy guitars or detailed drum parts. It’s about combining all those things to tell a story. Everything fits together to create a complete picture which is grounded equally in imagination and reality. Our music is at once a work of fiction, and a mirror.
Josh: I think Neverlight offers something new and unexpected while still retaining familiar elements that keep us accessible.
Amanda: Thanks for your thoughtful questions. We had fun answering them.
About the author:
Assignments: Reviews of concerts and releases / Band interviews / Editorial Tasks
Active since: 09-09-2019
Favorite genres: Punk / Hardcore / Metal in all shapes and sizes