Kissing Judas

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Morgan Sullivan: Absolutely, absolutely. He was the inspiration. It was written for him. But I don’t want people to get the idea that his head was necessarily going there. Okay, but I just took creative license with it.

Dave Sullivan: One of the cool things is we’d only rehearsed this a few times before we went in the studio to do this. And we had, how many bars and how many this and how many, you know. We had everything kind of down and Corey’s in a totally separate room. And this was at Magik Studios and Karim was, I think, engineering that day and he’s in another room. I’m in the control room. I’m playing my double neck SG Jimmy Page model on the 12th. And most of it’s on the 12 string except for the guitar solo where I switch over to the second solo. I switch over on the six string, but we’re playing it and Corey and I are not... we can’t see each other. We don’t.... we’re just on the headphones together and that’s our only connection. But during the guitar solo it was supposed to be like eight bars shorter, but for some reason it was the most organically natural thing I came up with off the top of my head. It was literally all what I came up with on the spot. And instead of Corey switching back into what the next part was going to be, we have that... I don’t know it’s like a telepathic connection. Who knows what do you want to call it?

Corey Sullivan: Let’s just say a connection.

Dave Sullivan: Yeah, so he went with the feel of it and we stretched it like another eight bars and everything just came together perfectly.

Corey Sullivan: I’ve listened to you play guitar and solo my whole life so I can kind of have a feel for where you’re headed and like the way you make your way through the solo so it was like he’s not, he’s not there. He’s not at the end yet. Just keep playing this part. He’s not at the end yet. And I heard like a certain cue like when you start going down a little bit differently. Alright, here we go. This is it.

Morgan Sullivan: How was it for you to sing that Brett? “Alone”, how’s that for you to sing that?

Bret Gyrich: It is also a workout... a lot of high notes on that song but it’s one of my favorite ones. I would say that that was the one that I fell in love with the most with. One of the ones that you guys gave me, as it’s a great power ballad ,which I’ve always been a fan of and it was a challenge to deliver it, but it’s a great song.

Music News: Cool. Last song on the album is “The Road” and you’ve got Billy Sheehan on bass on that one. So obviously that was the second song that you sent him and he must have liked that one a lot because he’s on it. Who is the person behind that song?

Dave Sullivan: That was an email I got from her, Morgan, probably the first two weeks or week we were talking together and the lyrics were in that. And then when we started the band, just doing the whole band thing, she brought the lyrics and we kind of wrote the song around it and...

Music News: You know, this is beginning to sound a little like Morgan’s album.

Morgan Sullivan: No, it’s everybody’s album.

Corey Sullivan: The majority of the lyrics were written by her.....

Morgan Sullivan: But that’s not my music.

Corey Sullivan: The music is everyone.

Morgan Sullivan: Yeah, no, it is not Morgan’s album.

Corey Sullivan: We had lyrics that we wrote a song around or we wrote a song and then she picked something from her file cabinet to put on it.

Morgan Sullivan: No, it’s really not... couldn’t do it without all these guys at all. It’s not my album actually. It’s kind of theirs.

Music News: I understand that, but you seem to have put in a lot of work on lyrics on this album.

Morgan Sullivan: It is my only talent. I’m not even sure if it is a talent.

Bret Gyrich: Oh, it’s a talent... come on.

Corey Sullivan: It ain’t easy.

Dave Sullivan: She writes great lyrics. Brett writes great lyrics. Mine are cheesy and sound so 80s. Oh my god.

Music News: Well, so what is “The Road” about?

Morgan Sullivan: It’s about sitting out there lonely and not sure what direction you’re heading. Okay, cuz we had a long-distance relationship, him and I, you know, at first, like, for a long time actually. A long distance relationship and I was just sitting out. I was actually up in Flint, Michigan in the middle of snow. It was like freezing out there and I was allegedly having a cigarette outside and it was really cold and I was just sitting there and you couldn’t see the road because it was covered with snow. So it’s kind of about like, not sure what you’re doing or where you’re going kind of thing. Yeah,

Corey Sullivan: I thought it was about Houston road construction.

Morgan Sullivan: Hwy. 290.

Dave Sullivan: The funniest thing too. We...

Morgan Sullivan: Glenn Gilbert loves that song.

Dave Sullivan: I have tons of local bands that do a cover of that and one of the bands actually put it on their album. I was up in Colorado working and I’m like, I gotta get my butt home because people are putting our stuff out faster than us. But if I don’t hurry up and get home, there’s gonna be a Kissing Judas tribute band out playing.

Morgan Sullivan: No, we were very honored. Thank you. Shotgun Sally. By the way, check out their version of “The Road”. It’s rockin’, Glenn Gilbert rocked out with us when we made that song. continued on page 20

Corey Sullivan: When we were writing it, the music for it, Glenn was pretty much holding my hand through writing in that genre, because it’s not something I’m very familiar with. And he was like ‘drive it.’ ‘You got to drive it.’ And this was like, okay, yeah, because he would be playing this stuff and he had all kinds of energy to him. And he just maintained eye contact with me the whole time we were working on it and kind of gave me cues on where to move the song energy was. And so honestly, that drum part I kind of credit to him because it was really his baby, musically. He loved that song so much. He wanted to make it happen so bad.

Morgan Sullivan: He still plays the crap out of it. and I love every time I get to hear them play it. It’s great.

Dave Sullivan: Glen filled in when Matt had to leave and couldn’t play bass with us anymore, Glenn would fill in a lot. And he was actually on the touring and playing for Richie Ramone at the time. So you know, he’s really into the punk scene, the rock scene, everything like that. So he comes in, and he’s like, now we’re rockin’ this song out a little bit more, and doing that he really did help shape it a lot. He’s one of our good friends. He would come over, we’d hang out all night, drink beer, play songs.

Morgan Sullivan: Great people. They just had a baby too. So Mazel Tov. Oh, yeah.

Music News: I really enjoyed the album when you sent it over to me to begin with, you know, the digital files. I really enjoyed it. I thought there’s a lot of really radio worthy songs on here. You may not be able to get every single one on the radio, but is there even radio that you can get stuff played on anymore?

Morgan Sullivan: Why not?

Corey Sullivan: It’s pop music or the Classics. There’s not a lot of room for newer rock bands from what I hear on like, FM radio, at least.

Corey Sullivan: I’m with Queen on this one. Someone still loves you radio. How about you Bret, What do you think?

Bret Gyrich: About?

Morgan Sullivan: Radio? He was asking.

Bret Gyrich: Oh, what do I think about the radio?

Morgan Sullivan: Yeah, can you can still get new music on the radio and I’m saying yeah, I’m saying yeah.

Bret Gyrich: Yeah. Yeah, I have discovered plenty of new songs on the radio recently. But I don’t really know a whole lot of people who really pay much attention to the radio stations anymore, which is sad to say.

Music News: Well, everything’s gone satellite now.

Bret Gyrich: Yeah.

Music News: Either that or download and people are taking their flash drives and putting them in their car.