Joel McKinnon Interview
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: My first "band" was with a couple of close friends in high school and we called ourselves the Banner Brothers. I strummed an acoustic guitar, sung a few songs (pretty badly) and mostly tried to keep up with the main creative artist, a very talented guy named Tom Barnes. We made a couple of albums worth of inspired and very strange recordings with a lot of improvisation. I wrote and performed a song about a mythical space monster that devoured the Earth named Turtox, the name taken from a chemical company catalog on the shelf in my math class. I was looking to be rescued by oblivion or something like that. Still not so great at math.
Fast forward 15 years or so and I joined up with some friends who were writing and recording some fairly sophisticated material, Barnes among them, calling themselves "Baby Fae's Heart." The name came from a news story about an attempt to transplant an ape heart into a human that failed pretty badly. They had Tom on keys, a talented and somewhat somewhat erratic guitarist who will remain unnamed, and my new friend Byron Bellamy on lead vocals. They needed a drummer and a bassist. I couldn't play either one. One night I went to see Roger Waters in concert and was blown away by what one guy with a bass guitar and a mediocre voice could accomplish. I bought my first bass the next day and learned to play it so I could join their band. We were in Boulder, Colorado, but Tom had just moved to California. We decided to crash at his place while we figured out how to conquer the music industry. Tom wasn't buying into our crazy plans, so he booted us out, we found a rental house and a drummer, and became The Brickbats playing R&B standards and originals. The guitarist wrote all the music, Byron wrote and sang all lyrics, and I tried not to be completely useless. A year later we got our first gig which was a fiasco. The guitarist got a little ripped as the gig went on and started badmouthing the rest of us right on stage. We kicked him out of the band after the show. The chaotic dissolution of the Brickbats became the beginning of the Jupiter Sheep.
Jupiter Sheep eventually became a seven-piece outfit and created a lot of what I still think is great original music (all available to download at a funky website called jupitersheep.com). We got Barnes back in as an all electronic drummer, found two really good guitarists, a female backing singer and an amazingly talented keyboardist named Melissa Olsen. Byron still wrote and sang all the lyrics, and I learned to write music and it was a revelation. The band had a very organic writing process. I would put bass riffs together, Byron would find melodies and match up his poetry with it, and the rest of the band would grow the songs from there. One of our best tunes was a power ballad named "Bound to You." It got the best results from our gradually expanding fanbase, but after about five years the band dissolved due to failure to get signed and some members need to find real work. I moved to San Francisco and left music, apparently forever, until Planet and Sky, the rock opera, sprang into my head.
Q: You mention in 2008 you got an itch to write a rock opera. Where do you think this came from and were there any individual operas that inspired you?
A: Around the turn of the millennium I joined the Mars Society, a group dedicated to promoting human settlement of the red planet. I'd always been a huge astronomy and sci-fi buff, and these guys were my new soul mates, including their President Robert Zubrin, and a great writer named Kim Stanley Robinson who'd written Red/Green/Mars, a trilogy in which human settlers eventually terraform Mars making it suitable for human life. Elon Musk even hung in those circles, before he created Tesla or SpaceX. I promise I'll get to why this is all relevant to your question.
In the mean time I'd also become a huge opera fan, mostly through attending the SF Opera and viewing a lot of video productions. My favorite composers were the essentials; Verdi, Puccini, then Wagner - who blew my mind because he did everything himself - score and libretto. I discovered many other composers like Janacek, Massenet, Donizetti and a lot of others. Opera appealed to me because of its epic scope and how it tackled the most profound aspects of what it means to be human, with everything - music, voice, visuals, stories - taken to the extreme limit.
The idea of Planet and Sky was to combine these influences, sci-fi, opera, music, and the meaning of life, in one big, ridiculously ambitious project. I realized I was absolutely unqualified to undertake it, but I was equally incapable of resisting the urge to go through with it. I began writing immediately and it all just materialized. The libretto seemed obvious to me. Then it was just necessary to fit the right music to it. I had to learn to sing so I could express all the parts. I chose to play Planet, the male lead, and enlisted my old bandmates to join me. Melissa played Sky and Byron the Chief Scientist. A subplot developed involving an asteroid harboring three lifeforms that impacts the planet and seeds its eventual biosphere. We each took one of those voices as well. Melissa helped me enormously in fleshing out the musical parts with her awesome keyboard skills, and she became a perfect fit to represent the voice of Sky. Byron also lent his services as sound engineer and provided the studio where we recorded everything. Darryl Dardenne picked up the drum parts very quickly and Lance Taber came in to do all the guitar work. He'd worked quite a bit with Melissa in the past so their parts fit together beautifully.
Q: I often find musical concept albums with a narrative a little hard to follow if it’s just auditory. This is usually because the story isn’t very straightforward in how it’s told. Can you talk about the story and how it’s told in the album Planet and Sky?
A: I don't blame you a bit for finding it hard to follow. It's about as unusual a story as it gets. It's basically a love story wrapped inside a space opera, but the lovers are obviously not human. There are also, in a way, two versions of the story, only one of which - an incomplete version - is told in the lyrics. I'll describe that version first, then at least hint at the other when I discuss the podcast.
In the beginning, explorers encounter a planet where "Something is Dreaming." This is the prologue, and it's external to the love story. They have arrived at a barren, apparently lifeless planet, and discover a data stream emanating from the subsurface. Upon decoding it they discover it's the story of the life of the planet as told from the perspective of the protagonists; the planet itself (Planet), and its atmosphere (Sky). Moving into the heart of the story in "Round," the atmosphere is revealed to be a sentient female character and the planet an obtuse and narcissistic male character who believes he is alone in the universe and likes it that way. Sky seduces him and convinces him of the value of their union. The song begins with Planet singing "I'm round," and concludes with the two of them jubilantly singing together "We're round." The instrumental section in the middle is the million years when Planet considers Sky's offer to become one with her, ultimately relenting.
"Eons of Joy" is the young lust phase of their relationship with lots of confusion, big emotional swings and implicitly lots of sex :). Planet's volcanoes and earthquakes and Sky's storms and nurturing rains represent their physical interactions. Then we get into the lovey-dovey stuff as Planet sings a song about all the ways he loves Sky, "Such is Love." There's just a hint of trouble in Sky's interruption of his song in the bridge ("fail not your precious hold on me"), but he easily blows past that into the joyous crescendo. Listen carefully to Melissa's piano part in the instrumental. It's one of my favorite musical moments in the opera.
Then tragedy strikes as Sky, always the prescient one, informs Planet that she is drifting into space (as apparently happened with Mars' atmosphere billions of years past). Sky's "Planet My Love" is the capstone aria, highlighted by Rebecca Rust's cello solo, interspersed with more gorgeous piano and Melissa's sublime vocals. At the end they agree to cease to exist together, a la Romeo and Juliet. The instrumental "Empty World" follows. There are no voices as all life has left the planet. The parts of this song were originally meant to represent the five stages of grief, but it kind of departed from that. I only wrote the main theme and Melissa devised the rest of the chord changes so I've shared songwriting credit for that one. It should be noted, however, that she had a huge creative part in all of the compositions.
Finally, in "Wake Up!," the scientists - inspired by the story they've decoded - bring the planet back to life with a huge terraforming effort. Planet and Sky awaken and rejoice to be together again, at least for a little while longer. Throughout the story, the travelers - the three voices of the lifeforms that arrived on an asteroid - frame the story. They describe their interstellar journey in "Travelers," the ominous cooling of the planet in "Beautiful Life," (BTW - the tempo reduction symbolizes them getting colder and finally freezing before the resolving final note) and then their awakening from dormancy in the final tune. They have three distinct characters; Byron voices the ambitious, positive thinking first traveler, Melissa the frantic and pessimistic second traveler, and I the contented and imperturbable 'anything goes' third traveler. The sections of Wake Up! describing the terraforming effort are voiced by Byron again as the Chief Scientist.
Q: I read you were releasing a podcast as well which will feature different tracks? What are details we should know about?
A: Yes indeed. I had the great fortune to become friends with one of the best podcasters in the business, Doug Metzger of LiteratureAndHistory.com. I let him know I was considering a podcast about the opera - knowing I would have to explain the story - and he offered his assistance. Without revealing too much I'll just say he ended up helping a lot in the creative process. He also promised to do a promo on his podcast which should help expose it to a much wider audience than I'd be able to do on my own. The idea for the podcast format evolved considerably. At first I intended to offer my commentary on the songs, chat with some of my collaborators, etc, like a 'making of' feature. What it became, however, is entirely different. It's an expanded version of the opera libretto told in prose, a full sci-fi novella. As I alluded to earlier, it is an alternative version of the story with a lot more room for creative ideas that go beyond the limited format of lyrics to eight songs. Listeners will find out a lot more about how the data stream was encountered initially and by whom exactly, so new characters will be introduced. The love story will involve a lot more introspection by the protagonists. The deeper story will also reveal how the story was encoded in the first place and who is ultimately responsible. It was a lot of fun to write, so I hope it will also be an engaging listen.
Each of the episodes will be centered on one of the songs, and will feature the song itself. There will also be new music, some ambient music behind the narrations created by Melissa Olsen, and interlude music that is still being finalized. I hope to have the first episodes out no later than October.
Q: Can you talk about your creative process?
A: As you can tell from my musical history, my creative process is frustratingly sporadic. I can go months and even years without writing anything, or I can get overwhelmed with ideas and write furiously. It sometimes starts with bass riffs, like in the Jupiter Sheep days, but more often now it starts with story ideas and I just imagine a suitable soundtrack. Like I said above with the Planet and Sky tracks, I am often indebted to superior musicians to contribute their own creative ideas within the chord arrangements I provide. There is one notable exception that occurred on Planet and Sky, however, which is a pretty cool story.
I had wanted to feature a classical touch somewhere, perhaps violin or cello, and Planet My Love seemed the best candidate. My wife and I attended a private party one day and were entertained by a charming and talented duo consisting of a gentleman from Munich named Friedrich Edelmann on bassoon and his wife, an American-born cellist named Rebecca Rust. Their performance was superb and they had traveled the world and played to some renowned private audiences, including the Princess of Japan. Rebecca's cello was even famous, as it had been created in the year of Mozart's death and had once been owned and played by none other than Prince Charles of England. They were both top-notch musicians. I recorded their performance on my iPhone and put it on YouTube for them. They were very grateful and we became friends. I finally got bold enough to ask Rebecca to play on Planet My Love and she immediately agreed, though it would have to be on their next visit in a few months. When the time came I, and even more Rebecca, got a rude shock. I'd always presented my collaborators with chords, a bass line, and maybe some ideas on tone and such, but Rebecca expected a full score! Fortunately I did have a melody in mind, and in our first session I did my best to sing it to her, but it was clear she wasn't very comfortable with the process. Before our next session, I learned to use MuseScore notation software, came up with a complete score somehow and she played it note for note. I still don't know how I pulled that off, but we both ended up pleased with the final product. I hope listeners appreciate it as well as I do.
Q: What else should we know about your music, projects, etc?
A: I encourage listeners who enjoy the music on Planet and Sky to visit jupitersheep.com and download a few tracks to listen to. I'm still very proud of the work of that band and think it holds up quite well. We hope to put a collection together of the best of the Sheep and release it on iTunes, Spotify, etc, in due course. Melissa Olsen and Byron Bellamy are featured extensively as well as my own humble bass guitar work. In those days we used stage names; Byron was surnamed Callisto and Melissa is Missy Io. I was and remain Max Wyvern in my musical form, hence the band name for the rock opera. Will there be further works upcoming by Max Wyvern Band? Almost certainly, as I have a lot of ideas. Some are multipart story lines like Planet and Sky, but others are individual songs I plan to develop. I'm also intrigued by the idea of podcast fiction and am considering an ongoing series of podcasts on stories behind music, some mine, some by others.
There may even be a sequel to Planet and Sky at some point. At the conclusion of the opera, a thriving new world is born. I'd like to play in it a bit more. We'll see.
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: My first "band" was with a couple of close friends in high school and we called ourselves the Banner Brothers. I strummed an acoustic guitar, sung a few songs (pretty badly) and mostly tried to keep up with the main creative artist, a very talented guy named Tom Barnes. We made a couple of albums worth of inspired and very strange recordings with a lot of improvisation. I wrote and performed a song about a mythical space monster that devoured the Earth named Turtox, the name taken from a chemical company catalog on the shelf in my math class. I was looking to be rescued by oblivion or something like that. Still not so great at math.
Fast forward 15 years or so and I joined up with some friends who were writing and recording some fairly sophisticated material, Barnes among them, calling themselves "Baby Fae's Heart." The name came from a news story about an attempt to transplant an ape heart into a human that failed pretty badly. They had Tom on keys, a talented and somewhat somewhat erratic guitarist who will remain unnamed, and my new friend Byron Bellamy on lead vocals. They needed a drummer and a bassist. I couldn't play either one. One night I went to see Roger Waters in concert and was blown away by what one guy with a bass guitar and a mediocre voice could accomplish. I bought my first bass the next day and learned to play it so I could join their band. We were in Boulder, Colorado, but Tom had just moved to California. We decided to crash at his place while we figured out how to conquer the music industry. Tom wasn't buying into our crazy plans, so he booted us out, we found a rental house and a drummer, and became The Brickbats playing R&B standards and originals. The guitarist wrote all the music, Byron wrote and sang all lyrics, and I tried not to be completely useless. A year later we got our first gig which was a fiasco. The guitarist got a little ripped as the gig went on and started badmouthing the rest of us right on stage. We kicked him out of the band after the show. The chaotic dissolution of the Brickbats became the beginning of the Jupiter Sheep.
Jupiter Sheep eventually became a seven-piece outfit and created a lot of what I still think is great original music (all available to download at a funky website called jupitersheep.com). We got Barnes back in as an all electronic drummer, found two really good guitarists, a female backing singer and an amazingly talented keyboardist named Melissa Olsen. Byron still wrote and sang all the lyrics, and I learned to write music and it was a revelation. The band had a very organic writing process. I would put bass riffs together, Byron would find melodies and match up his poetry with it, and the rest of the band would grow the songs from there. One of our best tunes was a power ballad named "Bound to You." It got the best results from our gradually expanding fanbase, but after about five years the band dissolved due to failure to get signed and some members need to find real work. I moved to San Francisco and left music, apparently forever, until Planet and Sky, the rock opera, sprang into my head.
Q: You mention in 2008 you got an itch to write a rock opera. Where do you think this came from and were there any individual operas that inspired you?
A: Around the turn of the millennium I joined the Mars Society, a group dedicated to promoting human settlement of the red planet. I'd always been a huge astronomy and sci-fi buff, and these guys were my new soul mates, including their President Robert Zubrin, and a great writer named Kim Stanley Robinson who'd written Red/Green/Mars, a trilogy in which human settlers eventually terraform Mars making it suitable for human life. Elon Musk even hung in those circles, before he created Tesla or SpaceX. I promise I'll get to why this is all relevant to your question.
In the mean time I'd also become a huge opera fan, mostly through attending the SF Opera and viewing a lot of video productions. My favorite composers were the essentials; Verdi, Puccini, then Wagner - who blew my mind because he did everything himself - score and libretto. I discovered many other composers like Janacek, Massenet, Donizetti and a lot of others. Opera appealed to me because of its epic scope and how it tackled the most profound aspects of what it means to be human, with everything - music, voice, visuals, stories - taken to the extreme limit.
The idea of Planet and Sky was to combine these influences, sci-fi, opera, music, and the meaning of life, in one big, ridiculously ambitious project. I realized I was absolutely unqualified to undertake it, but I was equally incapable of resisting the urge to go through with it. I began writing immediately and it all just materialized. The libretto seemed obvious to me. Then it was just necessary to fit the right music to it. I had to learn to sing so I could express all the parts. I chose to play Planet, the male lead, and enlisted my old bandmates to join me. Melissa played Sky and Byron the Chief Scientist. A subplot developed involving an asteroid harboring three lifeforms that impacts the planet and seeds its eventual biosphere. We each took one of those voices as well. Melissa helped me enormously in fleshing out the musical parts with her awesome keyboard skills, and she became a perfect fit to represent the voice of Sky. Byron also lent his services as sound engineer and provided the studio where we recorded everything. Darryl Dardenne picked up the drum parts very quickly and Lance Taber came in to do all the guitar work. He'd worked quite a bit with Melissa in the past so their parts fit together beautifully.
Q: I often find musical concept albums with a narrative a little hard to follow if it’s just auditory. This is usually because the story isn’t very straightforward in how it’s told. Can you talk about the story and how it’s told in the album Planet and Sky?
A: I don't blame you a bit for finding it hard to follow. It's about as unusual a story as it gets. It's basically a love story wrapped inside a space opera, but the lovers are obviously not human. There are also, in a way, two versions of the story, only one of which - an incomplete version - is told in the lyrics. I'll describe that version first, then at least hint at the other when I discuss the podcast.
In the beginning, explorers encounter a planet where "Something is Dreaming." This is the prologue, and it's external to the love story. They have arrived at a barren, apparently lifeless planet, and discover a data stream emanating from the subsurface. Upon decoding it they discover it's the story of the life of the planet as told from the perspective of the protagonists; the planet itself (Planet), and its atmosphere (Sky). Moving into the heart of the story in "Round," the atmosphere is revealed to be a sentient female character and the planet an obtuse and narcissistic male character who believes he is alone in the universe and likes it that way. Sky seduces him and convinces him of the value of their union. The song begins with Planet singing "I'm round," and concludes with the two of them jubilantly singing together "We're round." The instrumental section in the middle is the million years when Planet considers Sky's offer to become one with her, ultimately relenting.
"Eons of Joy" is the young lust phase of their relationship with lots of confusion, big emotional swings and implicitly lots of sex :). Planet's volcanoes and earthquakes and Sky's storms and nurturing rains represent their physical interactions. Then we get into the lovey-dovey stuff as Planet sings a song about all the ways he loves Sky, "Such is Love." There's just a hint of trouble in Sky's interruption of his song in the bridge ("fail not your precious hold on me"), but he easily blows past that into the joyous crescendo. Listen carefully to Melissa's piano part in the instrumental. It's one of my favorite musical moments in the opera.
Then tragedy strikes as Sky, always the prescient one, informs Planet that she is drifting into space (as apparently happened with Mars' atmosphere billions of years past). Sky's "Planet My Love" is the capstone aria, highlighted by Rebecca Rust's cello solo, interspersed with more gorgeous piano and Melissa's sublime vocals. At the end they agree to cease to exist together, a la Romeo and Juliet. The instrumental "Empty World" follows. There are no voices as all life has left the planet. The parts of this song were originally meant to represent the five stages of grief, but it kind of departed from that. I only wrote the main theme and Melissa devised the rest of the chord changes so I've shared songwriting credit for that one. It should be noted, however, that she had a huge creative part in all of the compositions.
Finally, in "Wake Up!," the scientists - inspired by the story they've decoded - bring the planet back to life with a huge terraforming effort. Planet and Sky awaken and rejoice to be together again, at least for a little while longer. Throughout the story, the travelers - the three voices of the lifeforms that arrived on an asteroid - frame the story. They describe their interstellar journey in "Travelers," the ominous cooling of the planet in "Beautiful Life," (BTW - the tempo reduction symbolizes them getting colder and finally freezing before the resolving final note) and then their awakening from dormancy in the final tune. They have three distinct characters; Byron voices the ambitious, positive thinking first traveler, Melissa the frantic and pessimistic second traveler, and I the contented and imperturbable 'anything goes' third traveler. The sections of Wake Up! describing the terraforming effort are voiced by Byron again as the Chief Scientist.
Q: I read you were releasing a podcast as well which will feature different tracks? What are details we should know about?
A: Yes indeed. I had the great fortune to become friends with one of the best podcasters in the business, Doug Metzger of LiteratureAndHistory.com. I let him know I was considering a podcast about the opera - knowing I would have to explain the story - and he offered his assistance. Without revealing too much I'll just say he ended up helping a lot in the creative process. He also promised to do a promo on his podcast which should help expose it to a much wider audience than I'd be able to do on my own. The idea for the podcast format evolved considerably. At first I intended to offer my commentary on the songs, chat with some of my collaborators, etc, like a 'making of' feature. What it became, however, is entirely different. It's an expanded version of the opera libretto told in prose, a full sci-fi novella. As I alluded to earlier, it is an alternative version of the story with a lot more room for creative ideas that go beyond the limited format of lyrics to eight songs. Listeners will find out a lot more about how the data stream was encountered initially and by whom exactly, so new characters will be introduced. The love story will involve a lot more introspection by the protagonists. The deeper story will also reveal how the story was encoded in the first place and who is ultimately responsible. It was a lot of fun to write, so I hope it will also be an engaging listen.
Each of the episodes will be centered on one of the songs, and will feature the song itself. There will also be new music, some ambient music behind the narrations created by Melissa Olsen, and interlude music that is still being finalized. I hope to have the first episodes out no later than October.
Q: Can you talk about your creative process?
A: As you can tell from my musical history, my creative process is frustratingly sporadic. I can go months and even years without writing anything, or I can get overwhelmed with ideas and write furiously. It sometimes starts with bass riffs, like in the Jupiter Sheep days, but more often now it starts with story ideas and I just imagine a suitable soundtrack. Like I said above with the Planet and Sky tracks, I am often indebted to superior musicians to contribute their own creative ideas within the chord arrangements I provide. There is one notable exception that occurred on Planet and Sky, however, which is a pretty cool story.
I had wanted to feature a classical touch somewhere, perhaps violin or cello, and Planet My Love seemed the best candidate. My wife and I attended a private party one day and were entertained by a charming and talented duo consisting of a gentleman from Munich named Friedrich Edelmann on bassoon and his wife, an American-born cellist named Rebecca Rust. Their performance was superb and they had traveled the world and played to some renowned private audiences, including the Princess of Japan. Rebecca's cello was even famous, as it had been created in the year of Mozart's death and had once been owned and played by none other than Prince Charles of England. They were both top-notch musicians. I recorded their performance on my iPhone and put it on YouTube for them. They were very grateful and we became friends. I finally got bold enough to ask Rebecca to play on Planet My Love and she immediately agreed, though it would have to be on their next visit in a few months. When the time came I, and even more Rebecca, got a rude shock. I'd always presented my collaborators with chords, a bass line, and maybe some ideas on tone and such, but Rebecca expected a full score! Fortunately I did have a melody in mind, and in our first session I did my best to sing it to her, but it was clear she wasn't very comfortable with the process. Before our next session, I learned to use MuseScore notation software, came up with a complete score somehow and she played it note for note. I still don't know how I pulled that off, but we both ended up pleased with the final product. I hope listeners appreciate it as well as I do.
Q: What else should we know about your music, projects, etc?
A: I encourage listeners who enjoy the music on Planet and Sky to visit jupitersheep.com and download a few tracks to listen to. I'm still very proud of the work of that band and think it holds up quite well. We hope to put a collection together of the best of the Sheep and release it on iTunes, Spotify, etc, in due course. Melissa Olsen and Byron Bellamy are featured extensively as well as my own humble bass guitar work. In those days we used stage names; Byron was surnamed Callisto and Melissa is Missy Io. I was and remain Max Wyvern in my musical form, hence the band name for the rock opera. Will there be further works upcoming by Max Wyvern Band? Almost certainly, as I have a lot of ideas. Some are multipart story lines like Planet and Sky, but others are individual songs I plan to develop. I'm also intrigued by the idea of podcast fiction and am considering an ongoing series of podcasts on stories behind music, some mine, some by others.
There may even be a sequel to Planet and Sky at some point. At the conclusion of the opera, a thriving new world is born. I'd like to play in it a bit more. We'll see.