A mainstay in the heavy music world for thirty years at this point, Mushroomhead stand at the cusk of releasing their ninth album, Call the Devil (their second for Napalm Records). Given the band’s rich history of blending and blurring the lines between industrial and metal, as well as music and art, there is much to discuss. We were able to have a chat with drummer and mastermind Steve ‘Skinny’ Felton to discuss everything that falls under the Mushroomhead umbrella. There’s much talk about their new album, looking back over the years at how things like line-up changes and the attention to visuals and masks have evolved the band, to even Skinny’s thoughts on the drums as well as what he might teach outside of music, given the opportunity.
Dead Rhetoric: What stands out to you about Call the Devil?
Steve ‘Skinny’ Felton: In and of itself, just doing 9 albums is crazy. It’s been 30 years! To think that we here go again with an honest opportunity to present our music to the world, when we think back to the last one, which came out in June of 2020, we didn’t get that opportunity. We spent a year and a half crafting it in the studio and getting it ready, and we didn’t get to go out and perform right away. So the excitement level is definitely way higher than I remember things being in a while. Some of that post-COVID angst and everyone is just hungry. For a minute we thought we might not get to do it again, but here we are, and the world is turning back on in a good way. We get to support this album for the first time, and we are really looking forward to getting out there and playing fresh material.
Dead Rhetoric: It’s odd sometimes looking back at 2020, where a lot of bands released things, and now we are just getting back to it in 2024. Everyone has that same idea where you didn’t get to support your last album properly and there’s a fresh excitement in the air.
Skinny: Absolutely. Again, it seems to me that entertainment and heavy metal and even our brand of heavy metal is more accepted and people are hungry for that brand of entertainment even now, post-COVID. It’s an exciting time to release a new album.
Dead Rhetoric: With Mushroomhead, there’s obviously a big visual piece that sits in alongside the music. What is important to you about that presentation – anything from the masks to the music videos to the sound itself. What is the big thing that tethers it altogether for you?
Skinny: It’s strange because it all fuels each other in a lot of ways. It doesn’t matter what we set out to do, somehow it always ends up kinda creepy and doomy and dark. I guess that’s just our nature or the type of things that we want to get out. But I think some of the visual does fuel the audio and vice versa. Things are very cinematic in the audio world, and sometimes you can kind of see the other elements come together. It’s interesting to have notes and melody turn into color and a color palette, that turns into actual visual frames of a perspective.
Things came together really fast for this album with the last two videos. The songs themselves pointed a direction that said to go down a certain path. Since the last two videos were very diverse from each other – one was a little more straight-on and the other is a little more artistic and dreamy and open. So I think the visual element and audio kind of fuel each other and it takes a turn. But Mushroomhead is very cinematic when you break it down.
Dead Rhetoric: Steve question: As the sole founding member, what keeps you motivated to keep going? I can look at you and see the genuine excitement, 30 years later.
Skinny: You know, the more things change the more things stay the same. I don’t think a lot of the artist in me or the kid in me has seen what I need to see. Every day I am hungry to learn. Whether it’s collecting these hobbies or gathering them together under the idea of Mushroomhead: sculpting, painting, photoshop, or the audio engineering, or the cinematography of it all, or editing the video – all of that goes into production – it’s a collection of all of those hobbies and being able to bring it all together and focus all of them, strangely at an outlet with all the ADD I have going on, I think there’s a never ending hunger to learn. I can take anything I learn and create with it.
Dead Rhetoric: I think the hunger to learn piece is important, speaking as a teacher. As you get older, you have more going on and have to prioritize, so that hunger to learn more is always important.
Skinny: Yeah, I think it goes into the drive too. The more you learn the more you want to know, the more you experiment, then you learn more about how you can see it through. Like, what worked or didn’t work on something. We focus on experimenting and a willingness to learn, a willingness to fall on your face and then get back up. I think it’s a part of life, and how we handle them – sometimes it happens at the same time and its simultaneous. You have to be grateful for what it is, and a lot of this is the hunger and drive to keep doing this. The more I learn, the more I want to do. I wish I lived to be 300 you know.
Dead Rhetoric: To that end, for you, how do you feel that you have changed, in terms of your personal journey, over the years with Mushroomhead? How has that affected your growth as a human being?
Skinny: As a person and a human, it has affected me massively. There was a time when I thought that all that mattered was having the coolest heavy metal band in the world, the next show and the next show, and the gold record, and the plaque and trophies. As you get older, things happen and maybe you can relate to this a little bit, but you just get over yourself a little bit. You see life for what it truly is. I have been blessed to have truly talented people around me and the ability to create art around me for a living and I can’t say enough about all of the things that went wrong and what I learned, and how to apply the patience that I wish I had, and how to apply it now to get a lot further. Like, absorbing everyone’s ideas before you interject with your own. Because that really helps. If you have the opportunity, because not everyone always does.
There’s budget and things like that, but I think being older and doing 30 years of this, it’s about being a little more patient and being a little more willing to step out of your comfort zone. You might find something that you had no idea that you would fall in love with or could be the time of your life that you might not have been necessarily into.
Dead Rhetoric: I see that, as someone in their mid-forties, you step out of that limelight. You are more receptive to things that you may not have been earlier in life.
Skinny: It just gets to a point where acceptance. You get cool with yourself and everything else kind of rolls off.
Dead Rhetoric: Talking in the here and now, how do you feel about this current iteration of Mushroomhead?
Skinny: I am super excited for it. A lot of people think of things a certain way, and there’s nothing traditional about Mushroomhead. It has evolved on its own and taken on its own life if you will. Changing line-ups has always been – stepping out of your comfort zone – you aren’t sure what you are going to get and its fresh ears, fresh blood, and fresh excitement. For me, the exciting part is that we get to do a lot of experimenting and play around to find things that you didn’t necessarily look for.
That’s been the best part about this current line-up, especially with the vocals. We played around with everyone quite a bit, and it’s amazing how well they complement and contrast each other in their harmonies, or even just going from part to part. There’s many trade-offs, or passing the baton as we say. It doesn’t just break the spell. You just keep bobbing your head and its fine. When things are abrupt, we try to smooth things over, and it was very easy to do that with these guys. It was very collaborative and things came together fast.
Dead Rhetoric: While it hasn’t been a revolving door per say, you have had a lot of changes over the years. As you said, it brings new opportunities. Do you feel that there are both positives and negatives to having line-up changes all over the place?
Skinny: I don’t think there’s anything negative at all. I think people feel that way because of the traditional bands like The Beatles or Metallica. But it has never really been that way. Change is a part of life, and things happen that are beyond our control in many instances, so you have to go with your gut. If you believe in it, make it as much as you can. I will say, as a personal note, producing this stuff and being around for the full 30 years, if people looked at it a little more objectively, like art or cinema or film, and see what I do and how each album is it’s own little mini-movie if you will.
Look at how Quintin Tarantino works. He has like 8 or 9 films out and a lot of them have the same cast and crew. It’s the same people putting together different forms of art. But when you go to his world, you don’t know what the plot is. But you know the world you are getting into. It’s going to be super violent, you know it’s going to be in your face and mix drama, humor, and action. If you look at the Mushroomhead collective like that, it’s like, okay whats the next album going to consist of? It fits in the strange mold if you look at it that way.
Dead Rhetoric: Looking at yourself, what piece of the musical puzzle does drumming play in the overall sound of the band?
Skinny: Its always been the heart and soul of the live machine. The heartbeat – it all comes back to natural, tribal rhythms. It’s such a natural thing. Any sort of drum through history, its a cool thing in and of itself. As far as in the metal world, it’s become almost the forefront, we see lead kick drum all the time. The kick drum is almost as loud as the voice or guitars. It’s been interesting to see it take on its own life whereas before it was more of the backbone. It’s the heart of the song, but it sits in the forefront, especially with metal and I absolutely love it. I’m a big fan of industrial metal. Anything percussive or theatrical, I’m a big fan of that stuff. The drums are very dear to me.
Dead Rhetoric: So in terms of the fanbase – are you at the point where fans will bring their kids because of your longevity?
Skinny: Absolutely, it has become generational. It’s absolutely nuts! People who saw us when they were 18 for the first time are now 35-38 and they are bringing their four year old. Or bringing their 13 year old cousin who is just getting into metal. It’s crazy to see that sort of thing happen. The same thing that goes with the ones who were like twenty something when we first started. Now they are in their fifties and going to their 180th Mushroomhead show! How do you keep track? But there it is!
Dead Rhetoric: The masks haven’t stayed static over the years. What’s exciting to you about taking a step forward and having a new mask come out for a new album cycle or something like that?
Skinny: With the new album cycles, we try to upgrade. Like with Mortal Kombat, you have characters that have upgrades or battle damaged. It’s similar but slightly different. Sometimes there’s slightly new characters that we bring in and develop. It’s really exciting to have that element to bring to the stage. When you put it on, at least for me personally, you take on that alter ego almost. Your heart rate changes, you can hear your own breathing. Your peripheral vision becomes limited and your audio is limited so you get into a different mindset, mentally. It’s really cool to be able to do something like that, even if sometimes it’s very hot and dark so you have to watch your step. But it’s a cool extension of the artform, especially live.
Dead Rhetoric: I did actually want to discuss that one aspect – do you feel that wearing masks aid in developing a persona outside of yourself with the band?
Skinny: As long as we can breathe right and kind of hear, you definitely get into the zone. You can almost forget the mask is on, to some degree. It sets the emotion, tone, and the attitude of the music a little bit more. You aren’t worried so much about if you are looking directly at someone or if you were smiling too much. You know, we are having fun up there, I’m smiling a lot! So it definitely makes it a little more freeing to be yourself. I have watched the live footage back before and it’s cool how evil and sinister everyone looks, because I know that people are really smiling and having fun!
Dead Rhetoric: So do you feel the mask aspect has been tethered to at least of some the early success of the band?
Skinny: Yeah, to some degree. It was always part of it, because of the early inspiration of it before the band even existed. Growing up and checking out bands like Kiss and Alice Cooper, all those bands that I didn’t really care for the music, but I liked the visual aspect of it. Like, wow, what a performance! So I looked at more bands like that as I got older, and one band that really set me off was The Residents. They had tuxedos, eyeballs, and top hats. They weren’t metal, but boy was it interesting and underground art. That was one that totally changed the game for me. There’s no rules, you can do anything. So mash up all those ideas and make it heavy and kind of electronic and hip hop – all the things I liked, and just mash them together and make some sense out of it.
For some reason, the masks when we put the band together, we wanted that theater. We wanted a collective for what this entertainment and artform was. We wanted to do something different in the early ‘90s that was visually as well as sonically different.
Dead Rhetoric: Thinking way back to the ‘90s, I can recall a time when the more underground metal community was more off-put by Mushroomhead and other bands like Slipknot or Coal Chamber. Do you feel that in terms of the more elitist, metal crowd, that Mushroomhead has received a more positive outlook over the years?
Skinny: Yeah, as time has gone on and these eras and the titles we gave bands in that period, like nu metal and things of that nature, have resurged. Even though we had been out there for a while before that, when we started getting [bigger] we sort of got lumped into that title. It wasn’t that I was offended by it, but does that mean that it’s newer metal that just came out in that decade? Now I understand that it was just what was popular during that era. Being that early on, and with the bands you mentioned, they were really toughing it out on the road and probably way ahead of their time because they are all still rolling and rolling well.
I saw Machine Head just the other day. We did a huge festival with them and they were amazing! Twenty five years ago they were in vans, bussing it out. It’s great to see. Back then it was definitely tougher. In the ‘90s we had the whole grunge scene, there was no internet, so when metal started to branch off it got really heavy and pretty extreme, which was great.
Dead Rhetoric: So you have been on bigger and smaller labels over the years, going from places like Universal to where you are now with Napalm. How has that journey been in terms of labels, and in terms of Napalm itself, what makes it kind of work for you as a label?
Skinny: Everyone we have worked with has been really open with us in terms of letting us do what we do. Even if they don’t know what that is. They didn’t want to creatively control us at all. It was that we were interesting and not many people do what we do. There’s a reason why they were interested in the band, and realized that if they tried to control it, they’d muck it up somehow. Believe it or not, for the majority of the run, most of the creative call. With the relationships we built before we signed, or with the longevity of the band, and with Napalm, they understood what they were signing. We were kind of art rock, and very heavy and creepy.
So anytime any label does want to collaborate, we are wide open for it, because otherwise we just do what we do. We know enough that you can’t learn and that you couldn’t see it, if you don’t let other people attempt to see what they can do. Fresh eyes and fresh ears help. Even just a fresh approach. Brad Armstrong, who did this album cover just had the title and we didn’t speak to him at all to come up with the image. We had a different thing put together, but the label suggested other artists, so it was interesting to see someone else’s interpretation of the title. Obviously, he looked at the band and our history too but it came back pretty cool. That was not my original album vision.
Dead Rhetoric: If you were to teach some sort of a class that wasn’t about music, what would you want to teach?
Skinny: I don’t know, because there’s so many little hobbies I like, such as sculpting a mask out of clay. When was the last time anyone sat and used their hands and a few tools to sculpt something? Anything with a canvas and a paint brush. That all comes into play with what we do with the masks and stuff. I’m always open to make some art with anyone.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s planned for the rest of 2024?
Skinny: We have the album coming out and we are playing Wacken, then we will run around Europe and the UK for about 13 days. Then in October we have a US tour for about 3-4 weeks. We are looking forward to getting back out there with fresh songs.