On Thursday, July 5th, I got the opportunity to interview famed guitarist Matt Pike of the bands Sleep and High on Fire. In this 28 minute interview we cover topics such as Sleep’s upcoming shows at the 9:30 Club, the stories behind various Sleep songs, details about the next High on Fire album and other songs that were supposed to be on the Dopesmoker album. You can download the entire interview as an mp3 for free here, stream it by clicking the orange play button below or read the full transcription under that. As always my words are in bold.
This is Metal Chris of DCHeavyMetal.com and today I’ve got Matt Pike of the bands Sleep and High on Fire on the phone with me. Sleep has 2 upcoming shows at the 9:30 Club right now. The first is going to be on Sunday, July 22nd and the second is the following night, Monday, July 23rd. The Sunday night show is already sold out however tickets are still available (here) for the Monday night show that was added recently. To start things off Matt, can you tell me what will be different about the set Monday night?
We’re playing Holy Mountain which, that’s always a great thing. We do it every great while someone will ask this but we can do it. I just gotta rent and acoustic [guitar]. Yeah, the difference is it’s shorter but we’re playing a pretty arcane album. It’s old music that we know very well cause we played it over a million times but yeah, I love playing that album and Al [Cisneros, bass/vocals of Sleep] and Jay [Jason Roeder, drummer of Sleep] do too. It’s kind of easy for us actually. Haha. So we’re good at it. If you know Holy Mountain you know that it’s before we got too weird.
Will you be playing any songs from The Sciences or anything else during that set on Monday night?
I’m not sure. The set’s probably about 50 minutes. The shortest Sleep usually plays is like an hour and that’s at a festival and then this is not a festival it’s our show so we’ll probably add something else but I don’t want to ruin the surprise if it’s something weird. It’s gonna be a full set is what I’m saying, hahaha.
Matt Pike photo by Jason Roeder
Ok, cool. Alright now back in April on 4/20 actually, Sleep released their first album in 15 or 20 years, depending on when you count Dopesmoker as actually having been released. The album is titled The Sciences and it really lived up to expectations to both fans and critics. On it we finally have studio versions of songs like “Sonic Titan” and “Antarcticans Thawed” and those are songs that you’ve played live for some time since you reformed in 2009. Were there other songs that were older on this album or was the rest of it written more recently?
Well what we did, it’s a reprise of music that Al and I had but we had to restructure and work with Jason. Obviously Jason’s a different drummer than Chris [Hakius, Sleep’s drummer in the 90’s] so the only drums we ever had on the songs that we were playing were Chris Hakius’s versions and we had to retime it, figure out BPMs, figure out time signatures. We basically recreated something that we did twenty years ago. That’s only for some of the songs. Some of them are brand new and original and some of them we took skeletons of what we had and redid them. Made them brand new for us just because I think we’re a little more experienced than we were when we were just kids which you lose some of the magic from when you were a kid but at the same time you actually understand things like timing and what you’re doing music theory wise. So it was a big chore for us to go through but we had been playing some of those songs live for a long time and I think it helped us kind of rewrite them just having that in our muscle memory or whatnot. I don’t know how to explain it but if you’ve been playing a song for a long time you’re all “ok let’s get serious. We’re going to record this. Maybe we should think about all the little things in it.” If that explains anything. I’m sorry. I’m just waking up having coffee.
Haha no, no, it does. So what’s an example of one of the songs on The Sciences that’s actually a new song that was written for this album?
Oh I wrote “The Sciences” for this album. That’s my version of a Vietnam vet meltdown, heh heh heh, and I was thinking of like Jimi Hendrix, haha, and I didn’t want make it a lead at all. I just wanted to make it a rhythm solo which it’s just so fucking weird, hahaha.
I actually like it a lot. That’s one song I put on to people, I’m like, you can listen to this and I’m like, if you like stoner metal you will like this and if you do not you will not like this, haha.
Yeah, no, yeah, haha. It definitely critiques towards a certain type of person, hahaha.
Well in 2014 Sleep released the song “The Clarity” through the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim summer singles series and this was the fist new Sleep song, at least to be studio recorded and released to the public, after the 2009 reformation of the band. How did this song come about? Was it one of the old songs that you had from the 90’s or something and kind of redid like some of these other songs or was this a new thing you did specifically for the Adult Swim release?
Well since we had the opportunity to write a new song, “The Clarity” was us putting together new music and seeing if we could do it without killing each other. All of us are in other bands that write. We hadn’t put together charts and things of that nature and truly tried to arrange something, and then Al just sent us the intro to the song which is just like “wah wah, wah wah, wah wah.” It’s like a horrible keyboard. Well that’s how Al wrote the riff and sent it to me and Jason. Me and Jason were looking at each other and just laughing like, what the fuck?
Haha.
What the fuck are we gonna do with this? But if you know anything about Al, if he sends you something like that there’s method to it, so me and Jay are staring at each other like trying to figure out how to make a riff out of this thing but we knew that Al had already fucking thought the whole thing through. He’s a chess player so if he does something like that it’s thought through it’s just the presentation was that horrible keyboard part at the beginning that we rock out to and hahaha, there’s a derogatory thing to that. It’s like, this is how it was presented and then we made a song around it you know and then when the song kicks in you understand. It’s kind of like how “Dopesmoker” was too. It’s like, what the fuck is this guitar intro and then when everything comes in it makes sense. So that was Al just getting stuff started with a riff that was recorded like, horrifying, hahaha, and then we decided to keep it cause that was the beginning of it and then we all just added onto it. Since Al had it planned out he left space for me to write a riff and left space for Jason to do things with and yeah, that was the first thing we really wrote together since we had gotten back together. It’s a special song. I love playing that thing. It’s fun. It was one of those things where we were forced to write together and it’s the first time we did it and it was successful cause we did it in like a weekend which is unheard of for the three of us. We’re all so picky and anal and weird, and me included. I’m not talking shit. I’m saying, it’s kind of amazing how that band puts its stuff together and what we do. It was the first time we had written something just off the cuff from scratch. It’s like we’re making a pie from scratch and it worked really fast and yeah, I’m in love with that song. It’s really cool. There’s never a dull moment when you’re playing with those guys and you’re Matt Pike I guess but I hope they would say the same about me, heh heh heh.
Well you guys also recorded and released another song with Adult Swim recently that’s called “Leagues Beneath.” It really sounds like it really fit in with the rest of The Sciences and in fact when I usually play The Sciences digitally on my computer I actually edited the ID tags to make it like a bonus track basically, to the album. Was this recorded at the same time or was this another one that you guys kind of wrote together just for the Adult Swim release?
No it was just for the Adult Swim. It turned out really cool. That one is the craziest. I’m glad I learned it in the 1990’s. Me and Al had that song, which, of course Al, he wrote most of the intro to that whole thing and I remember [saying] you know, “Ok Al, we gotta turn it into a song where you sing now.” You know?
Hahaha.
The whole intro you’re just picturing this barge on huge hurricane seas with stuff going over the side. Then it’s all, “Ok, where do we go from there?” At the time we were really influenced by [Black] Sabbath. We’re always really influenced by Sabbath, but it’s just all kick drum. You hit every odd note in between the kick drum to make the riff and then when the riff comes in it makes sense so it’s another Al… I don’t know. That guy’s pretty amazing, man. And it’s not like I don’t contribute it’s just he thinks differently than most people you ever met. It’s pretty crazy, hahaha. But yeah that song turned out amazing too. It’s one of those things where, when we get together and write all this magic shit happens cause everybody’s so fucking pissed off at the world that you get all these weird things. And that one though we did have the whole intro and we had the main body of the riff and then other than that we had a couple other parts and then my job in Sleep is to kind of add weird details but then have Jay time ideas I have because if I don’t have timing I’ll just wank so that band tries to teach me how to be patient, heh heh heh. So I’m learning how to be patient and wait for my part to come up. It’s hard to explain unless you’re in the room. It’s weird but we had that song for fucking I swear to god twenty years. That should have been on Dopesmoker and it just never happened like that and the same thing with “Antarcticans Thawed.” It should have been on Dopesmoker. Those two songs were written about the same time but then we just changed the tuning and Al wanted to use a five string so I had to figure out the theory behind– I am not going to buy a seven string guitar cause I think that’s fucking lame. I figured out a drop tuning that would keep up with him in B, which means I actually have to tune every other string up a half step and then drop my tuning. It was weird but it’s cool experimenting like that cause we get used to something too long and then we try something different [and] sometimes it works out.
So another thing I wanted to ask about was the whole issue with Dopesmoker like you were saying, which was originally released in ’98 as Jerusalem and had been kind of chopped up into different parts by the label and I know the band wasn’t really pleased with that version.
No. I took action cause Al was missing in action. He took like eight years off of music altogether. Chris went into the mountains and wasn’t doing anything. I got together with Al and Chris for the first time in like eight years and I was like, “hey dudes, we have a chance to get this back and release Jerusalem as Dopesmoker how we intended it with different masters and a different version” cause Al had one that had desert lyrics and Al had one that had space lyrics and so we went with the desert theme on the second release but the first one was chopped up because at that point in time there was not downloads, there wasn’t streaming, there was barely internet and they needed a radio version and that’s what they were trying to sell it as. “You just aren’t seeing the future here” and so we had to go into hiding before people discovered that it was a piece of work.
It reminds me a lot of what Rush said happened [to them] around the recording of their 2112 album.
Yeah well they were looking to drop us too and they did. They shelved it and I was like, “what a waste of a good piece of music” so I was pushing to get it out but then one dude wanted to bootleg and I’m like, “that’s on you, man. If you get sued or something like that, that’s on you, that’s not on us” but he tried to pay us or whatever and that got shut down. And then we finally got back together, got a lawyer [and] got the rights to that record back and then we could release it with Southern Lord properly. So that was all done legally, you know? Before that, that record label went bankrupt so no one knew anything about anything.
One thing you said though, it got released properly but then you said earlier that “Leagues Beneath” and “Antarcticans Thawed” should have been on that album too. Were there other recordings of these?
We tried but I just think all of us were smoking too much weed and it was hard enough to get the one 72 minute version of Jerusalem done, you know what I mean? It was hard enough to get that song done. It was the first time I think a band tried to do something that long that wasn’t improv. We had it written and it took us four years to write and having that much information in your head and then trying to do other songs, that wasn’t even doable. That’s too much to ask anybody to fucking memorize. After that whole album happened we were all kind of burnt on being around each other or anything. Me and Al weren’t but I think Al and Chris, that separated them for a minute and then they got back together and they started playing music together again. That’s where Om came from and then [I] think Chris just decided that he would rather hide in the woods and not be on tour, which I don’t blame him. [It] takes a special kind of person to be on tour and deal with all that kind of stuff and so I think the evolution of Sleep has happened properly the way that it should have. It just takes time. It’s a very patient band and it waits for its members to be ready to do things and it’s a special band. It’s definitely different. We got our own thing going on.
After the break up around then you went off and did the High on Fire thing, Al and Chris did the Om thing and it’s always kind of made me wonder what led you guys to come back around 2009?
Well cause we got offered one show that was in England. Or it was actually two nights and it was with Jesus Lizard and I just think that the band grew while we were taking a hiatus and when we saw the reaction to us walking out on stage after that long of [a] period of time, none of us had played together in that long and we played some pretty good shows. The two sets we did were amazing and then I think all of us realized that when we were kids we had a lot of magic but then we’re getting older and there’s something to all this. People love it. We have a cult following and it was like, oh wow, man, we can do something with this and all of us enjoy playing with each other but Chris didn’t want to be on tour and Jason, we grew up, me and Al, just kind of worshiped Neurosis [Jason’s other band] and the Melvins and like all the shows we’d go to in Berkeley. That was Gilman’s Street and that’s where we grew up as kids just tripping out on all these crazy bands like Nomeansno and Nausea and Glycine Max and Neurosis and the Melvins and all the good shit that was going on there so Jason knew us since we were little kids like that and Jason just knows all our music because, shit, quite frankly Sleep wouldn’t have ever done anything without Neurosis taking us out and believing in us so they’re like family to us cause we’ve known them our them our whole lives.
That’s pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Sleep 2009 reunion shows poster art by Malleus
You were talking about that show in London which I think was the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.
Yeah it wasn’t in London though. It was out on the Southwest coast and it was at the place, Butlin’s. And Butlin’s was a place for English working class families to go while dad gambles, mom gambles, and the kids run around and there’s like an amusement park for pasty, white English people that don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s cold and wet and it’s weird, heh heh heh. I think that’s where werewolves came from, I don’t know.
Well I know that show is pretty much the only one, or the shows there that you played, were the only ones with Chris back on drums since the reunion, right? After that Jason I think took over everything.
Yeah well cause Chris didn’t want to really do it. He was real hesitant and although he had been touring with Al but I think Chris just isn’t cut out to tour. He’s a great drummer. He doesn’t like the limelight. He doesn’t want to be famous. It takes a certain type of person. Like Al and I for myself, we really care about what we do. We want to leave a legacy a little bit. It’s not like we’re narcissists or something like that we just want to leave a legacy because we care about our playing and we spend a lot of time getting good at what we do and Jay has just known us since we were little kids so he totally understands why Sleep does what it does and ever did what it did. It’s about amplifiers and tone and loud and fucking with people because we got that from Neurosis and the Melvins. Fucking with people through music is like a great thing. Whether it’s derogatory, funny or very serious, we cover all those aspects. I mean I can improv all day with those dudes but then when it comes down to serious arrangements, we don’t want it to be what people expect. We want it to fuck with people’s heads a little bit. Like why? Why did they do that that way? Fuck, why do I like that? You know, question why they like what they’re listening to. That approach works for us.
So do you think you’ll ever play again with Chris? Even like a one off or a festival somewhere?
With respect for Jason, if Chris wanted to do a weird set with us or something, I wouldn’t be opposed. I love Chris Hakius but I love Jay too and Jason’s like our main dude so with respect if Jason said, “yeah, you should do a show with Chris” I’d be like, “dude I’m not opposed to playing with anyone.” It’s like the old jazz blues bands. Everybody moonlighted in between each other’s bands so I’m not opposed to anything. I just enjoy playing. I try to leave politics and head trips out of what we do.
Alright so shifting gears a little I would like to talk to you about your other band a little bit and one thing I’d like to know is, how did you form High on Fire? Like how did you find the other members and kind of pull that all together after Sleep was kind of on hiatus there?
Well I got out of Sleep and I had a bunch of fucking songs that I wrote that I was going to show them to Al or whatever if he ever got out of being depressed about music, which he ended up doing. I knew it would happen. So the first song I wrote I was actually just trying to start a band with anybody so I got a friend of mine, Karl [Larson], who was more of a Soundgarden-y guitar player, and later on I figured out I don’t work with other guitar players well usually, unless they’re my bass player, so yeah, I started a band and I met Karl and he had some stuff to contribute but I had all these riffs that were kind of Sleep-ish riffs and then I met Des Kensel who’s an East Coast hardcore drummer. And then when I started trying to play some of the Sleep riffs to the hardcore drummer it like clicked. We were like married and then Des didn’t like another guitar player either. Even though I love Karl who started that band with me, we moved on and we had a friend of mine, George Rice, come down to start singing. I thought he sucked at singing but he’s a great guitar player/bass player, so he just started playing bass and I started singing. I was a shitty singer for like ten years and then I started figuring it out. Started going my way a little bit more but it’s cause I met this total little super drummer, but he was very different than what I was used to. But I always liked thrash metal. I love my like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, that sort of thing so it works. So basically High on Fire is a metal band but it’s a weird metal band. It’s just strange what we do. But I just finished doing an album which is coming out in September.
Yeah I wanted to ask you about that. Do you have any other details? You said it’s going to be out in September. Do you know the album title yet?
Yeah it’s called Electric Messiah.
Cool.
Yeah and it’s the best album we’ve ever done, by far. It’s ridiculous. And I’m really proud of that. So to do Sleep The Sciences and that album, between 2017 [and] 2018 that’s two albums that I’m really fucking proud of in one year. I’ve been working hard. I haven’t had any time to myself til recently. This is my month off and then pretty much I’m on tour all the way up til next year. And then I’m sure I’ll be making plans for next year in the next week here or something. It is by far the best High on Fire record ever which is hard to believe but it’s fucking bad ass, heh heh heh.
That’s cool man. I can’t wait to hear it. How many tracks?
I think there’s ten tracks, eleven tracks. It depends cause there’s a bunch of songs, like I wrote a Sumerian anunnaki rock opera that actually is two songs but they’re separate tracks. And then there’s a lot of slash songs. There’s a lot of songs that– you know [how] Opeth will have like one song but it makes like three songs if you really think about it?
Yeah, yep.
It’s kind of a bunch of shit like that because we’ve had this conscious stream of riffs and we put it together. I like when I do High on Fire records to have a lot of interludes and weird shit going on so you never lose focus but it’s constantly changing. It’s a lot like, Death Is This Communion is like that. There’s tracks that don’t have names but, they’re there. It’s just one stream of High on Fire consciousness and it’s fucking good, that’s all. I’m really stoked on that record.
So I suppose you’ll be touring to support that at some point, probably in the fall or something?
I think we’re going to be on tour with Municipal Waste. Cause we’ve been kind of beating a dead horse, dead in the water for a while so we’re doing a co-headline [tour]. Municipal Waste dudes are our good friends so we figured we’ll just punch the country together, swap spots and no one gets tired and all that stuff and yeah, it should be good. I want to get High on Fire rolling again so it’s full throttle. We took a lot of time to write this record, really make it good.
I’ve always kind of wondered, which band do you like performing with more, Sleep or High on Fire?
They’re apples and oranges. It’s so different and so the same. It’s weird but the common link between High on Fire and Sleep is obviously my guitar playing. I like having my own voice and being able to sing my lyrics. High on Fire is my baby like that. But Sleep definitely, I am a third of that thing’s heart and I get to express myself in different ways that I don’t get to in High on Fire. It’s very visceral. It’s super tight and visceral and very detailed but it has its own soul and I can do different things. Sleep’s like a weird science experiment because I learn about tones. You know if I used my rig from Sleep for High on Fire you wouldn’t even be able to tell what we were playing. It’s too fast, heh heh heh. Sleep’s one of those bands you’re supposed to play loud because you hit one note every fucking five minutes, you know.
Hahaha.
It’s a tone experiment and High on Fire I have to be very, very– both of them I have to be very careful about the controlability of my rig. But I like singing too so that’s the other part of it that I love High on Fire for is I like singing. It’s like a part of my playing. It’s fun to see what I can pull off and between Jeff [Matz, current High on Fire bass player] and Des, they’re constantly pushing me to be able to sing and play more shit than James Hetfield would when Metallica came out. It’s hard, heh heh heh. And it being hard is a good thing for me cause I like challenges and I usually like rising to the occasion.
Alright well, this is Washington, D.C. and so I really want to make sure I ask you about all these Matt Pike for President stickers that I’ve seen around [get them here]. Do you think you might actually run for president in 2020?
I’ll run for president, I don’t give a shit, if you guys really want. You know I think I’d be more popular than Trump instantly.
Hahaha.
I’d be a great diplomat. I am so unorganized and I have ADD so bad I think I’d either be a awesome president by luck or a horrible president that has a lot of resistance, you know?
Heh heh.
Hahaha. No I’d be a great diplomat. I think I could bring world peace but I think I’d fuck up our infrastructure. I have no idea how that would go but I hear it at every show and it was like a gimmick and the fantasy of being president in some sort of alternate universe, I’d like to see that on film just to see what [would] really happen. Hahaha. It’s a funny notion. That was a great idea. Shit, I don’t even get money from that or anything. I didn’t do that. It’s just some kid made something funny up and it just started going ape shit. And they did it for Frank Zappa and Ozzy Osbourne in the 80’s so I felt kind of flattered I guess.
Well I think we all know that Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath are major influences on you but I’d like to know some of the other bands and musicians that are also influences on you.
Well, kind of everything. You know second to Tony Iommi I always loved David Gilmour from Pink Floyd. I always loved John McLaughlin you know in Mahavishnu Orchestra and just everything that guy’s done. He’s just [an] amazing guitar player. And I’m influenced by a lot of early punk. I grew up in the 80’s and I was exposed to the Dead Kennedys and the Exploited and Black Flag, all the classic punk shit when I was a really little kid cause I had a babysitter that, she’d just do bong hits and show me punk rock music. And when Mötley Crüe came out, MTV came out and I always liked ZZ Top. I always liked, you know all the classic stuff. I love W.A.S.P. I love a bunch of cheesy ass shit and I like so much stuff in my playing. I went to school for– I never went to like Juilliard or something. I went to a community college cause I felt that I needed to learn music theory and my art a lot better. I actually went to college for jazz for a couple years so I learned jazz improv and I always played blues, I always played classical so, I could play guitar very well before I even knew what I was doing. You know what I mean? I just have an ear for it. And then, as I went through that, it just kind of made me better and better so my influences come from all over the map. I love fucking Angus Young and Malcolm Young [of AC/DC]. I love K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton [of Judas Priest]. I love Slayer. I love all the things that I got to grow up on and I was spoiled with.
Well D.C. is known for its harDCore scene as well and we also are known for a lot of the doom bands that came out of here. Are there bands from the D.C. area that you would say are influences to you at all?
Oh dude yeah. Fucking Alfred Morris III [of Iron Man], rest in peace. Bless his heart. Me and Al loved the shit out of that guy. He was the greatest fucking guitar player. It’s a shame that his death had to come. Sleep had Iron Man play a couple different shows when we were in your area with us because we were big fans of that. Wino is from out of that thing. I really love the Spirit Caravan thing. You know I kind of knew Wino before that with the Obsessed but then the Spirit Caravan, he was doing that and High on Fire was raging about that time so I got to know that dude around then. There’s a lot that comes out of there and it is definitely doom. Yeah Washington D.C. has definitely got a doom thing to it.
[Do] you like Clutch at all?
Oh yeah dude. I’ve been on tour with them. They took High on Fire out for a bunch. They have one of the coolest crowds ever. Those are some of the better tours that High on Fire had cause they were really cool to us. And that drummer, fucking J.P. is fucking retarded. It’s so good, hahaha. And I like anything with [Clutch vocalist Neil] Fallon.
Are there any new bands or albums that you’ve been listening to lately?
Well I’ve been so wrapped up in trying to get the masters done for Sleep and High on Fire [that] all I’ve listened to is my own band for a while and then, haha, I have a girlfriend who’s substantially younger than me so I get all my new bands through her. She’s an artist and she’ll just sit here– she’s also a musician but she’ll sit here and draw and then put on weird shit and occasionally I’ll walk through. I’ll be all, “what the fuck is this?” she’s all “you mean you never heard Portal?” Portal’s fucking awesome, hahahahahaha, but it’s so fucking dramatic and extreme I love the shit. I really like Lana Del Rey cause she’s creepy. I don’t know. I listen to all sorts of shit that comes my way. It just depends. I don’t listen to metal all day but when I do like metal I go deep. I get into like obscure metal quarterly because I have a millennial girlfriend that knows about it, you know.
Hahaha.
Hahaha.
Alright well, that’s about the end of my questions here. I thank you a lot for taking the time out to do this interview with me. I’m pretty excited about the show you’re going to be playing here with Sleep– the two shows on July 22nd and 23rd. Those should both be pretty cool and it’s cool you’re playing different sets each night so people can go to both and see something different each night.
Thank you for trying to sell tickets for us man. I appreciate it. And yeah, I’ll see you at the show huh? Come up and say hi. I’m pretty approachable.
Yeah, sure man.
You have a great day and thank you for the interview. I appreciate it.
Yeah no problem man. Thank you.
Alright man, have a good one.
Alright, bye.
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