Mark Krueger:With me are a couple of people from the band Metaphor, and we have here...
MK: Very good. I discovered your CD when I was at Nearfest, somebody said, "hey, buy this, it's pretty good." So I bought it, and I enjoy it. Tell us a little bit about the band, who would like to say something here, a little history.
MK: Cool. How did you get the deal with the label out of Switzerland?
MK: Do you guys play out a lot around the LA area? Is that where you're from, I'm assuming Los Angeles here…
MK: Oh, you will? Any plans of doing a ProgFest? Have you approached any of them, or sent tapes out for, like, Nearfest, Progfest, Progday - there're so many of them!
MSp: I am Marc, keyboard player
MK: What are your plans for the next album? This one's been out for how long now?
MK: You read these reviews and everybody's "sound like Genesis, sounds like Genesis" it's always the same, but I think it's just the heart and soul that goes into the music…
MK: When's the new album going to be out, and is it going to with the same label, any target date maybe?
MK: Cool. If there's one track, now you guys are going to have to agree on this, let's pick a song to play from the new album, what would you like to hear?
MS: Listen to prog radio!
(To review index)
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John Mabry:John Mabry, I'm the singer
MK: And...
Malcolm Smith: I'm Malcolm Smith, the guitar player/composer
MS: Well, the band, like a lot of other prog bands, apparently, started out as a cover band for some other prog bands. So we did a lot of early Genesis stuff, as the original version of this band, and then finally sort of moved our way into original music which, as you might guess, has a little bit of influence of that early Genesis.
MK: Yeah?
MS
: We've kind of gotten a lot of that out of our system. We've had 30 years of great Genesis music built up, and it all came out on Starfooted, our first CD.
MS: We really did a bit of a shotgun approach, and sent out tapes and CDRs to a lot of labels and distributors just to kind of test the waters. A number of labels expressed an interest in us. Galileo really came through, out of Switzerland, with real sort of personal attention to us, so we happily signed with Galileo.
JM:No, we're from the San Francisco Bay Area, most of the guys from San Jose, I live up in Oakland, and our drummer over on the San Francisco side. We haven't done a whole lot of playing out yet, mostly just writing and recording. We'd love to play out, but really haven't gotten the opportunity.
MS: But we will!
JM:Let us say we have not been approached.
MK: Ok, well maybe you will!
MS: We're doing the approaching.
Marc Spooner: We just approached them!
MK: And here's another member of the band, you are…
MK: Good name.
MSp:Well thank you, I've used it for most of my life!
MSp: It's been out about 6 months officially, about a year and a half unofficially. We're about a year behind schedule. It was like, "we're waiting, we're waiting" and finally it was done. And now it's old news to me, let's get the new one going. So we're working on new stuff, and working in a new bass player, I don't know if you guys mentioned that yet.
MS: No, not yet, not yet.
MSp: A new bass player named Jim Anderson. The new stuff is definitely a progression, if you'll pardon the expression, from the first one, so hopefully we'll go from Genesis rip off, in the reviews, to a Gentle Giant rip off…in the reviews.
MSp: Absolutely.
MK: And sometimes these reviewers really have nothing else to compare it to because they know about five bands of this vein.
MSp: Exactly!
MS: It's not that we deny there's a lot of Genesis influence, it's certainly there, and I think that reviewers talking about that help people…to direct people to the style that they like. I hope that we have enough of an audience that when our new stuff comes out, which is, not a departure, but it's certainly a progression and an expansion and a growth, I think people will hang onto that. They'll still hear the symphonic edge to it, but also, I think, with some new stuff.
JM:Plans? Plans?
MS: Target?
MSp: I would say…late 2001 release.
JM:"Seed."
MK: Seed?
MSp: How about "In the Cave?"
MS: Either one.
MK: You like "Seed…"
JM:I'd go for "Seed."
MK: Well you were the most vocal, so that's the one we're gonna do. Metaphor, thank you guys for joining us here on Planet Prog. We're live at the Progfest in Los Angeles, and let's hear the tune "Seed" from them right now, on 91.7, WMSE, Milwaukee.
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