Cassius King is one of several musical projects for all who are involved, but it’s one that introduces new musical and thematic possibilities to create its own ethos. Field Trip is the first full-length album delivered by Cassius King and is currently available digitally with vinyl on preorder from Nomad Eel Records, who are also the label for related outfit Vessel of Light. Doom Metal band Vessel of Light members Dan Lorenzo, Ron Lipnicki, and Jimmy Schulman are joined by Jason McMaster of Dangerous Toys for lyrics and vocals to craft the album under a moniker that Dan Lorenzo has been using for side projects for a number of years, but never in such a cohesive way as this album suggests. In addition to a powerful team behind it, the album features art by Claudio Bergamin who you may recognize as the artist on the Judas Priest album Firepower.
Field Trip is the result of intensive collaboration between these team members into sounds more like guitarist and songwriter Dan Lorenzo’s earlier Speed Metal band Hades with a Blues twist, but it also arises from a time when Lorenzo has been incredibly productive, releasing four albums in three years for Vessel of Light. With Lorenzo writing guitar parts to build the songs and then sending them to McMaster to craft lyrics and vocals, the new album took shape pretty quickly. McMaster also collaborated with Schulman on lyrics for some of the new songs, as he explained to me when we had a substantial chat about all things Cassius King, but more particularly, about how McMaster approached the lyrics and vocals for Field Trip.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Not everyone is in the position of having guitar parts, and then writing the title, the lyrics, and vocals. You’re in a position with a challenge of a different kind.
Jason McMaster: You’re exactly right. Because of how efficiently Dan Lorenzo works, I have that option. For the speed with which he was sending me material, you could call it “the godsend”. For some of the lyrics, I had ideas that I’ve been pack-rating for years, including phrases and titles. Every once in a while, something will come along that I’ll recall and have to go dig for. I’ll go find that scrap and apply it as needed. For the most part, though, it’s a convenient way to work with the guitar parts.
HMS: Does it mean you have to be more flexible while writing, almost like sliding pieces of a puzzle together?
JMcM: Yes. But Heavy Metal and Hard Rock always seem to get a bad rap, and head bangers are not helping themselves with the long hair, tattoos, and wearing all black. That could scare grandma, but you might be the nicest guy in the room. But it’s all a façade and a uniform to express yourself. In the end, you’re an artist. You’re part of a movement.
What I’m getting at is that the in Rock ‘n Roll culture, the lyricist writes to a sound they hear, whether it’s a riff or a song. Whether it’s collaborative all the way, or you’re sent a finished song, it’s not really any different than someone having to write a script to a visual, like a movie. Maybe you’re sent a clip from a movie and you have to write a song that goes with it. It’s no different than that as far as the narration that you’re creating.
HMS: That’s a great comparison. I know that you’ve done vocal work under the Cassius King name for cover songs, but is this the first time you’ve written songs for CK?
JMcM: Yes, it is, but Dan Lorenzo started sending me stuff 12 or 13 years ago but nothing ever came of it. We stayed in touch but nothing ever got finished until about two years ago. I’d do an Aerosmith song, or a KISS song, or a Cheap Trick song, but nothing ever made it over the finish line until the past couple of years. But I’ve known of Dan since the mid-80s.
HMS: When you’re doing vocals for covers, like you’ve done with Cassius King, do you have particular strategies for how you interpret the songs?
JMcM: There’s a division here, because some fans like it when musicians do a “rewrite”, their version of a popular song. That’s admirable but I gotta tell you, when I get asked to do a cover song and I’m a huge fan of the band and singer, I become obsessed with the idea of nailing it to the wall. I sound like a serial killer or something. [Laughs]
But I want it to be scary close. I just got a commission to do “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” from Judas Priest. I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try my best to my best Rob Halford on that song. I’m not just going to be willy-nilly on a vocal track, I’m going to try to keep it true. I rarely turn things in if I’m unhappy with them, whether it’s covers or original songs.
HMS: I heard that the album title, Field Trip, comes from a line in the song “Leave of Absence” and that you almost called the album “Leave of Absence”. What made Field Trip the right choice?
JMcM: It turned into a concept because we had already been talking about someone with mental illness or visions of some confusion. The song “Leave of Absence” is very vague on purpose, but the first line is, “Dancing in the fields until the doctors find you…”. That’s a “field trip”. That’s an escaped patient who’s having a great day in the meadow with the flowers and with whatever invisible friends that they may see and no one else does. They just see someone in a hospital gown in the middle of a meadow talking and dancing with people who are not there. That sounds very peaceful and actually kind of nice so it worked really well with the vision that we were already working on.
“Leave of Absence” was the very first song that I wrote for the record and it all kind of snowballed from there. I changed the title from Field Trip to Leave of Absence at first because I didn’t think it was a strong enough title, and I thought Leave of Absence had more drama. But when you’re looking at this album art, which is an escaped mental patient who has wandered into a cemetery, it doesn’t matter where they are because they are seeing visions, whether they are scary visions or not. I feel strongly that there might be some good invisible friends there as well, like your first pet or your best friend from first grade. The artwork conveys that.
HMS: I agree, it’s like the name of the album needs to go with that image by Claudio Bergamin. It’s like they play 50-50 roles together to convey the whole meaning. What led to the imagery in the song “Cleopatra’s Needle” and the video that’s been released? Have you visited this Egyptian obelisk in London?
JMcM: No, but I’ve written about these spires before. In another band I’m in, Igniter, we have a song called “Shadow of the Needle”, so this is kind of related to that song. It’s like Part 2. I found out about this spire, that’s nick-named “Cleopatra’s Needle”, even though it doesn’t line up with her reign, by watching the movie called From Hell. It’s about the Jack the Ripper killings. There’s a scene where the killer and a lady are looking up at the spire, though you don’t see it, and the killer says, “Hundreds of men died bringing it here.” In my mind, I was wondering what they were talking about.
I did some research and found out that these spires were a gift from Egypt and one of them ended up in London, and one in New York. Getting this 200 ton hunk of rock on a boat was a bitch and people died. They had to build a specific vessel to ship it. In “Cleopatra’s Needle”, there’s a line where the boat gets lost at sea and people have to bail out. Some people drowned. The Igniter song “Shadow of the Needle” is about a more fictional idea, but “Cleopatra’s Needle” is more literal, in a sense. I really tried to refer to what was happening in White Chapel surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders. Though there were actually not that many deaths, it became this giant headline that made the rest of the world react. It became something bigger than all of us, though by serial killer standards, it was a little peck. I’ve just always thought that it was an interesting portrait of old England.
HMS: The Jack the Ripper stuff really looms large in the public imagination and it probably will forever. It was one of the earliest media frenzies. Now we have the internet, but back then it was the papers.
JMcM: Yes, the media fed that. That’s part of the point, too. The people walking through that area of England were a melting pot of rich and poor, businessmen looking to get high or have a drink, so all of this imagery was fun to write lyrics about.
HMS: Did you think about tying the songs on the album together with certain themes, or did you just let that develop naturally? They all do seem to tie into ideas of visions and menacing places in some way, but not in an overt way necessarily.
JMcM: I think they do tie together for a common reason, and that’s just that when I hear Dan’s riffs, those are influencing me to write a certain way. They influence me to “go dark” because the sounds are dark. They are very Black Sabbath, and dare I say, J.R.R. Tolkien before Led Zeppelin. Though a lot of these lyrics were taken from ideas I already had, there are some songs on there that do tie into the concepts of the album but might be a little more personal.
More than once in a few songs, I’m talking about a ghost or spirit. More than likely, it’s someone who is welcome more than not welcome. I like to think that it could be my mother, if it were personal, but I try to keep the lyrics vague, like in “Traveller”. “Below the Stones” is another song that talks about the graveside. I hate to dabble with death in so many songs, but death is real. That sort of thing weaves in and out of the song lyrics.
HMS: One song that really got me was “I Move with the Moon”, which has a lot of interesting ideas.
JMcM: That one was a collaboration with Jimmy [Schulman]. He’d send me poems, basically, and sometimes his rhyme schemes weren’t working for what I was trying to do. So I took a lot of his vision and melted it into mine by changing the rhyme schemes. Sometimes his words would impress me in such a great way that the lines would just write themselves. He was a really great jumping off point for that song. The song has a lot of lycanthropy or night stalker ideas happening in it.
HMS: That’s another one that totally fits the idea of the album because the moon has always been associated with craziness and visions. This album has a lot of Ozzy and Dio worship built into it. It sounds like that proceeded naturally from the guitar riffs you were getting and then you brought it forward to the vocals. Is that true?
JMcM: You are 100 percent correct on that. When I felt Ozzy, I made my voice more nasal. When I felt Dio, I did more soft palate, which is more back of the throat and guttural. It was me trying to sing like a tenor when I’m not a tenor. It’s important to me that those voices happen because of the way that I hear the riff. But those visions are all coming from Dan’s riffs, just like with Vessel of Light, and I think it’s important that fans know how this works.
