Dead Rhetoric: You’ll be opening for Yngwie Malmsteen locally in a couple of months – what have been some of your favorite records of his through the years, and was he one of your personal game changers along with Dave Mustaine to push you further with your abilities on the guitar?
Petersen: Yngwie was absolutely my lead guitar teacher growing up. I was into Yngwie Malmsteen when I got into high school, my junior or senior year. I had a Best of CD, whenever that was put out around that period. It went up to 1992 for material, all of his 80’s stuff. One of the very first songs I learned to play all the way through that was foundational to my guitar playing was “Far Beyond the Sun”. I printed tabs out for that song over the internet, I do recall spending one summer while I was in high school, just playing that over and over again. That was one of my big guitar projects I took upon myself to learn – that wasn’t the very first lead guitar solo I learned, I had Metallica songs under my belt. But it was mostly the pentatonic scales and blues stuff, which I still do a lot of to this day. My favorite stuff, I used to love Rising Force the album a lot, as mentioned since I’ve gotten more into 80’s poppy stuff I actually like his Odyssey album with Joe Lynn Turner. I love Magnum Opus with Michael Vescera. I read reviews on that album on Metalreviews.com, it had really good reviews and that’s what made me buy it around 2000 I think.
I still like Megadeth a lot, Dave Mustaine is a personality. I actually saw Megadeth about a year ago, and it was a great show, it was when they still had Chris Broderick on second guitar and the Canadian guy drumming (Shawn Drover). Dave was one of the first metal influences, I had been listening to Megadeth since I was in seventh grade. They were one of the first bands that got me into metal. I was into Metallica before them and I remember reading about this other band from an old Metallica member called Megadeth. Even before learning to play guitar, Megadeth was one of my favorite bands. My fanboy-ishness has diminished a bit, I am still crazy about Rust in Peace. The song “This Means War” on Off the Grid, I think that’s the most Megadeth inspired song off the record. There’s a riff on that song, every time I hear it, it sounds very much in that Rust in Peace vein. I remember that was one of the last Megadeth albums I bought. My first album I bought was Cryptic Writings, I bought that the day it came out in 1997- then I started getting all of their back catalog. Aside from Killing Is My Business, which back then was out of print and fairly hard to get. In high school I was more into Youthanasia, Cryptic Writings, and Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? And I remember posting on the Megadeth forum, it took me a little while to see how great that album (Rust in Peace) is actually.
Dead Rhetoric: What are some of the goals that you set for yourselves from this point forward? Do you feel like you have a better handle on the business and financial aspects than in the past?
Petersen: Yeah. The big thing about this album in comparison to Enter Deception without blowing too much smoke towards myself, I and the band have much more control over this album then we did for the last album. From how it was produced to how it is going to be distributed, and the opportunities that we find and take for this album are going to be completely within our control, and that’s going to be a good feeling. I take all of the lessons I learned from the Enter Deception album cycle and put them all towards this end product. Everything from finding the right members to writing the best types of songs to the presentation of the album, the distribution, the right label- and getting it into the right hands of the people that can help us bring to the album to everybody.
Dead Rhetoric: Beyond touring endeavors for 2017, are you confident that you’ll get another album out before the end of the decade to make up for lost time?
Petersen: I hope so. We talk about it within the band all the time, it’s been so long since we put out an album, we owe it to everyone to be quicker about getting out more albums. Because this album has been finished since 2015 we have had time to write new material. We are four songs into the next album, Eric (Meyers) is our newest member, our new lead guitar player, and he and I have been sitting down at least once a week writing and recording new material. I have a mini-studio here in my home that I used to record the entire Honor Forth EP and to track all the guitars/vocals for Off the Grid too. Eric has a lot of good songwriting ideas, so we’ve already tracked four songs. It is our goal to hopefully release another album by next year. We will see what the touring is like- obviously the new album is our first priority, it still deserves a lot of attention and work/focus. Especially with all the positive reviews and acclaim it’s receiving so far. I have already been talking to Pete about getting the new album out in 2018- I already sent him one of the new songs to get a feel for things.
I want to do several videos for Off the Grid, we did the lyric video for “Shadowfold”, but the conceptual video will be the second single. YouTube is of utmost importance, we want to be represented there as long as the budgets are within our range. We want to do at least two music videos, and several lyric videos- I don’t know if that’s overly ambitious, it’s what I want to do. We do want to hit the East Coast on tour ASAP- we did one West Coast tour with Hatchet in 2014 for the EP, it was a month long. I talked with our agency and they asked what we were wanting to go, and I said the East Coast and Canada- because these are two places where we have heard from a lot of people, promoters and fans and they want us to come out there. I remember touring there for Enter Deception and it was amazing. We are still in talks to find opportunities in Europe and Japan. Scarlet has good distribution in both territories- we have a really good Japanese deal that they sub-license to. It’s all about finding the right promoters. We never did play Europe for Enter Deception, and we did one Loud Park Festival appearance in Japan.