INTERVIEW with Thomas Dutton of Forgive Durden
Tyler Davidson
Issue date: 6/2/09 Section: Entertainment
Highlander: You were still in the conceptual stages of "Razia's Shadow" when most of the band left. How did that change the dynamics of Forgive Durden?
Thomas Dutton: We'd completely demoed one song, "The Exit", and even had Brendon [Urie of Panic at the Disco] sing on it and everything already to kind of show other singers what we were talking about when we asked them about it and to show the label what we were talking about. I already had kind of the whole storyline pretty much planned out at that point, so when everybody left...Thomas [Hunter, ex-guitarist] and I did continue to talk a little bit about [a] "would you want to finish writing the musical, but just not tour with us anymore and just go from there" kind of thing, so we'd talked about that for a bit and we worked on some other ideas. Then I just decided to ask my brother Paul, who is a music composition major, to kind of come down and write the record with me.
H: Do you still keep in touch with your former bandmates?
TD: Yeah. Not that much, but I see Thomas once in a while, just because we're both in the music scene in Seattle and everything he's still playing a lot of stuff. So we see each other a lot with music stuff. Then the other two guys are going to school and stuff, so I'll talk to them randomly but we don't really cross paths. But there's no hard feelings or anything.
H: Were there any guests you had planned for the record that didn't come to fruition?
TD: Yeah. One was...the intermission track that's just me doing vocals or whatever, we wanted to have Dan [Nigro] from As Tall as Lions do, and he totally agreed to do it. He was actually one of the first people, he recorded like half of it, but...like I tried to kind of write most of the songs, because I would have the singer in mind when we were writing it, so I'd try to write the melody and stuff and put it in the right range for them and write it in their style a little bit so it would fit with their voice a lot, you know? That was one where it wasn't...we just wrote it and asked Dan to do it, it wasn't really written for him, so after doing half of it, we just weren't that stoked on it, he kept saying like, "I just feel like I'm kind of forcing it out. It doesn't feel natural, it's not my sort of thing," so we decided to just have me do it instead. So that was one where I was bummed because I really love his voice and wanted to have him on the record and everything.
Thomas Dutton: We'd completely demoed one song, "The Exit", and even had Brendon [Urie of Panic at the Disco] sing on it and everything already to kind of show other singers what we were talking about when we asked them about it and to show the label what we were talking about. I already had kind of the whole storyline pretty much planned out at that point, so when everybody left...Thomas [Hunter, ex-guitarist] and I did continue to talk a little bit about [a] "would you want to finish writing the musical, but just not tour with us anymore and just go from there" kind of thing, so we'd talked about that for a bit and we worked on some other ideas. Then I just decided to ask my brother Paul, who is a music composition major, to kind of come down and write the record with me.
H: Do you still keep in touch with your former bandmates?
TD: Yeah. Not that much, but I see Thomas once in a while, just because we're both in the music scene in Seattle and everything he's still playing a lot of stuff. So we see each other a lot with music stuff. Then the other two guys are going to school and stuff, so I'll talk to them randomly but we don't really cross paths. But there's no hard feelings or anything.
H: Were there any guests you had planned for the record that didn't come to fruition?
TD: Yeah. One was...the intermission track that's just me doing vocals or whatever, we wanted to have Dan [Nigro] from As Tall as Lions do, and he totally agreed to do it. He was actually one of the first people, he recorded like half of it, but...like I tried to kind of write most of the songs, because I would have the singer in mind when we were writing it, so I'd try to write the melody and stuff and put it in the right range for them and write it in their style a little bit so it would fit with their voice a lot, you know? That was one where it wasn't...we just wrote it and asked Dan to do it, it wasn't really written for him, so after doing half of it, we just weren't that stoked on it, he kept saying like, "I just feel like I'm kind of forcing it out. It doesn't feel natural, it's not my sort of thing," so we decided to just have me do it instead. So that was one where I was bummed because I really love his voice and wanted to have him on the record and everything.
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