Love, Death and One Bad Pig
It's been a long time since they rock and rolled. One Bad Pig is back. One listen to their new album, Love You to Death, and you'll agree that this is a very good thing...
Ever heard of a fluid cover story? How about a fluid, as-you-go magazine? Who cares? This is how we're doing this One Bad Pig cover story. To start things off, we have an interview with guitarist Paul Q-Pek. What led to the Pig getting back together after all these years? The band members were asked by Carl Phelan to come to his house in Austin so he could interview us for a book he was writing about the Pig. Leading up to this meeting we wondered about possibly writing a new song and throwing it out there on social media to see if there was any interest in a new Pig recording. We challenged Carey to come up with some lyric ideas and at the book interview the one that resonated with us was "Love You To Death." This was early in 2015. In the middle of the year I received a message from Audiofeed Festival asking us if we would be interested in doing a reunion show there in 2016. Most of the band thought that we could use that as an anchor that would spur us on to do a new album and have it ready by then. (For more information on the book, go to OneBadPigForever.com). What were some of the challenges to make the band "work" after all this time and the distance between band members? There were many challenges and hurdles to overcome to making our first studio album in 25 years. First of all, there was no record company and so no money. We all had jobs and families and ministry commitments. Most of us still lived in the Central Texas area, but Carey was living in Camden, Tennessee, where he pastors a church. Phillip told the rest of the band that a new album and shows wouldn't work with his busy schedule this year. It was a tough decision to try to do it without him, but with the Audiofeed window of opportunity before us, we decided to press on. We put together a list of drummers in our area who are believers and have the skills to handle our music. Our first call was to Paul Roraback, who was a member of Grammatrain and had also played with Bloodgood. His style lately had leaned toward Prog-Rock with his PJ Bostic projects. He was intrigued by the idea and he took a few days to consider it and pray with his wife. He said yes and he also offered his studio and his producing/engineering skills to us. We all began to feel that God was up to something special. The album was crowd-funded through Kickstarter. Carey and I contributed the bulk of the songwriting, with Daniel and Lee helping out as well. Paul R. would record me doing a scratch guitar and vocal, then he would develop and record the drum parts. We used his drum tracks to record our guitars to. Then Carey would come down for a few days and lay down his lead vocals. Again, scheduling was not easy to work out, but God showed us His grace during the whole project. What were some of the first songs that were written? Tell me about them. The song "Love You To Death" was a theme that we kept coming back to. Also some early lyrics that I worked on were "Get Your Hands Dirty" and "Tumbleweed." I had the idea to cover the 77's "The Lust, The Flesh, The Eyes And The Pride Of Life" for a while. I would work it out in my church office, imagining it as a Pig song. I wanted to take what I considered to be a classic song that was not too upbeat musically, and Pig it up. We have a bit of a tradition of doing this to songs like Petra's "Judas Kiss." We did an initial run of 1000 CDs. After fulfilling our Kickstarter commitments and selling at shows and online, we are almost out. Hopefully we will be able to order more soon. We reached our stretch goal and are going to press up a small run of vinyl copies, which will be extremely rare. The most amazing thing about this season with the band is hearing the stories from people who had their faith strengthened through listening to our music. We are doing a simple, little thing, but God's Word never returns void. So we stand on that truth and have seen, much to our amazement, that time and time again God has used a foolish thing like One Bad Pig to accomplish His purpose. [To be continued...]
