[laughs]

There's a revenue stream when something broadcasts, when it is on television, it is on the radio, or it is in a the- a theater overseas, not domestic, but overseas.

There's a revenue stream.

There's money that gets paid, gets paid to the writer and the publisher.

According to copyright law, if you hire someone to write music for you, i.e. you're a film studio and you hire a composer, you own both those things.

Traditionally and historically, those are split between the studio that keeps the publishing and the writer that keeps the writer's share.

So I'm saying that to say that, like, a song that I really care about and poured my heart into, when it gets some spins on Spotify or when I go, you know, I go into Warsaw on tour last year and I played a song from my new record and I saw people singing along to it, I honestly wanted to cry on stage.

Mm-hmm

Did you have any of those people in mind for when you were recording it? Or is it just happenstance and luck and reach

out? It's a little bit of all of the above.

I mean, I definitely started off my rock projects with my first record that came out in 2024, The Singularity, and now this one, with a wish list, as I moved into rock.

But also, I was very lucky, because I started off knowing a few of these folks socially.

I became friends with Serge Tonkian from System of a Down and Scott Ian from Anthrax, and just knew these guys well enough that I could write some sketches and send it to them and say, I don't know, is this any good? What do you think? Because I thought...

They will be honest with me if this sucks, right? So their encouragement, the fact that I had encouragement from people like that right out of the gate is part of the reason I did it.

On the new record, there were a couple of people that I had wanted to work with on the first record and the schedules didn't work out who ended up working on the second one.

Is that the case for you? Or are you like the Brian Setzer Orchestra, where it's cripplingly complex, where 40 onstage people are traveling every show?

But what does it mean to you to put out a record that's that is in this rock and metal vein for those who know you from the media, film, video game ecosystem.

Yeah, look, I'm very fortunate to have worked in a lot of different genres and scored a lot of different things.

It was sort of odd to me that around 2018, going into 2019, I was realizing I was not happy.

I still felt this burning desire that I felt when I was 22, 21, just getting started.

And I thought, well, I'm scoring TV shows, I'm scoring games, I'm scoring big movies.

What's missing here? What's the problem? And I realized I was not challenging myself as an artist in the way that I think I really wanted to.

I love scoring other people's stories.

But the fact that you and your brother have worked together on this record and the second record, what does it mean for you as a composer, as somebody who's putting out their solo records? What does it mean for you to work with your brother again on Eclipses?

Was that something you brought? And was there any pushback on that?

Funny you'd mention that.

I mean, yes, very much.

You're reading the tea leaves correctly.

It was more like it wasn't that I was given more creative freedom in the second season of Lord of the Rings.

I was more confident in exerting my own influence and bringing more of my personality.

Yeah.

Yeah, I thought it was great, but I like Meshuggah and Lord of the Rings so much.

and to add to not only to add to the the list from the first album and so when you're going into these collaborations what is your mindset you kind of briefly gave away a little bit of it but was it you wrote a song and you're like hey this person would be cool for this let me reach out to them or is it oh hey i want to do a song with x person let's write a song together or is it like kind of a mishmash of all of those things

I definitely have found, okay, a few things.

One, this is not something people do a lot.

I never thought of it that way, but like, you don't see this a lot, maybe more in the hip hop world than the rock world where it's like, oh, there's just tons of guests.

One of the reasons I think I've been able to do it, A, is it takes a long time, but B, In my career as a film composer, one of the skills that I developed is being able to meet someone and figure out how they want to work.

Every time a filmmaker, a new filmmaker meets with me and they go, okay, well, how do you like to do this? I always turn it around and go, hey, tell me about your creative process.

Like, this isn't about me.

I got on the

[laughs]

Interestingly, like, the, there, there, there, there was a sort of darkness and thematic, um, lyrical thematic unity across these songs in Eclipses even more cohesive than the, the first record.

So while I don't wanna be too prescriptive and say, like, this is how it fits, because I want people to be able to, if they know the story from the first record, to be able to feel for themselves where it fits, I mean, I definitely have my idea of, of what part of that story, what chapter in the story this is.

Um, and it's called The Singularity, you know, for a reason.

It very much fits in there.

Um, there is definitely this commentary about where we are as a society, as a world, as a, as a planet, and I think oddly Black Box really, um, uh, the lyrics that we wrote with Joe Duplantier were, were actually very, like, emblematic of what I think a lot of the record is about.

So it was cool when I discovered, like, Eclipses is this Ancient Greek word, 'cause I was like, eclipse was a word, it's a good word.

Yeah.

Are you concerned about AI music pushing you out of a job?

We could do a whole podcast about this.

So I'm going to keep it concise.

My short answers.

No, I'm not concerned.

I haven't seen any of that.

I can tell you that first and foremost, my job is not writing music for you.

Every track is so diverse and unique that it's an interesting listening experience without being like... random or just like doesn't make sense as as a collection how is that writing process especially like the the track with store copeland i mean it almost sounds like a modern police song and so like

That

part of it really was a surprise early in my career, because I think part of it is therapeutic.

Now that you mention it, I don't think about this a lot, but now that you mention it, I've been writing music every day since I was 12.

When I was about 12, I started writing with my keyboard, my Yamaha PSR-510, and my mom got me a four-track cassette recorder.

I started making music.

I started writing scores for imaginary movies.

But when I say I was writing every day, I mean before school.

um i feel like that question right there the whole bulgarian thing it's you're kind of tapping into joe's niche already because his background and just the way he sings you like he even knows like oh that's i know why he's approaching me with that type of uh subject and and that track was ridiculous that's the one i probably put the replay button on the most but

How is meeting with the film's director and how it affects your work?

That is everything.

Of course.

I mean, I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but I, but, but I feel very much I'm writing a score for someone else's vision.

Of course.

And if the director had the training, skill, and time, they would score their own movie.

Yeah.

If he can get a chance to rescore a film that's already been done, which ones would he do?