Kissing Judas

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Bret Gyrich: See how they me. You see how they treat me. They’re gonna overwork me. He just confessed it right here on your show.

Dave Sullivan: Oh, yeah. We’re gonna overwork you and once you can’t do it anymore, we’re gonna make you do some more.

Corey Sullivan: It’s the only way to get the best emotional performance out of a singer.

Music News: All right.

Bret Gyrich: It all worked out.

Morgan Sullivan: And it’s beautiful Bret. It’s beautiful.

Bret Gyrich: Thank you. Thank you.

Music News: Well, at least the subjects on the songs really are different right here. It’s not like you were going over the same subject on these and they’re pretty widespread here. “Last Days Of Youth.”

Morgan Sullivan; That’s Bret.

Music News: That’s Bret... That’s your song?

Bret Gyrich: Yes, sir. Tell me about the “Last Days Of Youth” then.

Bret Gyrich: Well, “Last Days Of Youth” was actually the first song I had ever written on my own. I was in bands before and I’ve written lyrics here and there but “Last Days Of Youth” was my first attempt of writing a song all by myself. I had just learned how to play the guitar. And, you know, I just learned how to strum a few chords. And it was actually my mom who sat with me and showed me a few finger picking styles. We kind of came up with the original guitar part of “Last Days Of Youth”, and it’s evolved throughout the years, but that’s what it is now in the record. Lyrically I wrote it when I was 18 years old, and it was about me and my friends about to graduate high school. Moving away to college, saying goodbye to each other. We’re done with childhood, it’s adulthood time. It was the last days of youth and that’s where that came about. And the cool thing about that song was that I wrote it in like 5 to 10 minutes, and I did not even know that it was done, but apparently it was. What happened was, I was actually in the in the backyard of my friend’s house with a guitar and a six pack and a notebook and a pen. I sat down, I’m like, you know, I’m gonna write a song. And then a friend stepped out to the backyard and was like, ‘Hey Bret, what are you doing?’ I looked down and said, ‘Well, damn, apparently I wrote a song. Here it is. Let me play it for you. Let me let me know what you think’. The rest is history.

Music News: All right, well, how much did the other members of the band contribute to make that, to make your visualization of that song come to work?

Corey Sullivan: He brought the song to us. Let us listen to it. It brought tears to our eyes and we said, we’re doing that.

Morgan Sullivan: Yeah.

Corey Sullivan: We added some strings in the background and...

Morgan Sullivan: But really, it was beautiful the way it was, that one.

Corey Sullivan: There was nothing that we needed to do to change it.

Morgan Sullivan: That was a no brainer. Yeah.

Bret Gyrich: I didn’t even like present it to the band. I think we were doing soundcheck, getting ready to rehearse and I just kind of played it and at the end of that practice, Dave wanted to hear it again. And it became part of our repertoire, just like that.

Corey Sullivan: Yeah, he grabbed our attention so hard. We were like, No, are ‘you’re not just noodling right now. This is, this is good stuff.’

Morgan Sullivan: Yeah. Like, we’re totally doing this.

Dave Sullivan: He was playing it. and I said, ‘Whoa, do that again. What the hell is that?’ And he played it again. I was like, ‘yeah, what are you doing with that?’

Bret Gyrich: To be honest, I didn’t think that was something that you guys would want to play, record, much less put on the album.

Dave Sullivan: No, I was like highly impressed. I was like, I want that. Let’s do it. Let’s work on it.

Corey Sullivan; We did toy around with the idea of making it a bigger song, a full band song. But really, we didn’t have anything that stuck out better than just the bare bones as it is.

Morgan Sullivan: We couldn’t have made that any better. That was one of those. It was just kind of perfect.

Corey Sullivan: It would be fun live to hear and then do a crazier version just for shits and giggles. But if we were doing it justice, we won’t do it.

Bret Gyrich: It’s so open for other interpretations, so yeah, I’m sure we can come up with something to play that live out someday, someday soon.

Morgan Sullivan: It’s a beautiful song. Thank you so much for doing that.

Music News: The next song is “Cheshire” and you have Billy Sheehan playing bass on this one. So tell me about “Cheshire” and how you recruited Billy Sheehan.

Morgan Sullivan: He (Dave) can talk about Billy Sheehan. I can tell you about the song.

Dave Sullivan: You tell about song.

Music News: I’ll flip a coin to see who goes first.

Morgan Sullivan: He can go first.

Dave Sullivan: No, Billy was one another one of those... The guitar on this is real fast paced and kind of reminds me of the old you know, 80s guitar driven songs and stuff. I kind of reached out and just on a whim said, Hey, Billy, I’ve got a couple of songs and I was wondering if you’d be interested in playing on them? And he said well send them to me. So I sent him two songs. And I said yeah, if you if you like one enough to do it, it’d be awesome to have you play on one, let me know. And I went to bed. This was, I don’t know what time in the middle of night. I woke up the next morning and got an email from him that I saw and said, ‘Hey, Dave, I like them both. Would you mind if I play on both’ and I was like, continued on page 16