Making “Take It Sleazy”
Before recording Take It Sleazy, Will had lots of momentum–in the wrong direction. On one reviewer’s website, his last album “Sorry To Disappoint Ya” received a slightly worse rating than another artist’s called “Jar Of Farts”. To be fair, that album delivered on its promises. This is when the advice “never listen to your critics” kicks in.
On a more tragic note, Will’s friend and drummer Tony “Doctor” Pepper passed away suddenly at 23 years old, leaving him and bassist Mojoe Murphy with a large hole in their lives, and as a band. It’s easy to let negative thoughts get the better of you in times of loss, and that’s what happened. Will was just done.
A couple months after Tony’s passing, Will went to a video game design conference looking for new things to do with music. There he found out about Hotline Miami, a game with a killer soundtrack. For the first time he heard Synthwave, with artists like Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, and Dan Terminus. There was this entire underground scene in Paris full of guys who decided to make awesome 80’s-style music exactly the way they wanted and let someone else worry about whether it’s any good or not (it is!).
Hearing these rad dudes re-ignited the spark. Will made some calls and found St. Louis session drummer Tony Barbata, gave him the demos with Pepper’s drum parts, and knocked out the tracks with engineer Chris Turnbaugh at Sawhorse Studios. Then he got Mojoe Murphy into the home studio to hammer out the basslines. After lots of fretboard blisters and shredded vocal chords, top producer and “Ally in Metal” Joel Wanasek (Dope, Blessthefall, Machine Head) was brought in to make this record slam like he did with Will’s first two albums.
With its release, Take It Sleazy accomplishes Will’s mission–to make an uncompromising 80’s Metal album that rocks like hell. There is nothing he does better, nothing he loves more. And when you feel like that, great things happen!
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