Full Interview with Christopher Bowes of Alestorm

This is the full version of an interview originally published in The Kelowna Daily Courier under the title “Metal’s more fun when the songs are all about pirates“

Jeff (J): So how’s the time off been before [your] tour? Or has it even been time off?

Christopher Bowes (CB): When was the last time we played a show? Well, we went to Japan and South Africa and a bunch of crazy places back in September, at the start of the month. We’ve not done anything since then, so I’ve just been sitting on my butt, writing songs mostly, writing the next album. Looking forward to getting back out there and doing what we do best.

J: Writing, I’d assume, mostly for Alestorm? I know you have a lot of other projects as well.

CB: Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of stuff going on. I’ve got my other band Gloryhammer, and we sort of alternate albums, so the Gloryhammer album came out back in May, so when that came out I said “right, time to get back to Alestorm mode” and started writing a bunch of songs. We’ve got an album 99% finished, we just need to finish off one more song, can’t really figure out what to do with it. But once that’s done, we’ll hit the studio and, you know, we’ll get out there and make some more records and things, you know?

J: Great! Any chance we might hear some of that on this tour?

Chris: Nah, not this tour, unfortunately. Thing is, we’re not really good at remembering how to play songs, and I think we’ve got to record them first before we can realize how to play them. Plus, we like to play songs that people know, because what happens is we’ll play a song a lot of times live and realize that people don’t want to hear it. You know like one of the weirder, rare tracks from deep inside our third album, or whatever, and we just kind of get strange looks from people. People want to hear the fun hits, so we play all the songs that people love, so we’ll go on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever and look at the top 15 Alestorm songs right now, and we just play those. We just want to make people happy. 

J: Fair enough. So is that mostly how you figure out what to play? You don’t really reach for those deep cuts at all, eh?

CB: Sometimes we try, but at the end of the day, we have to get up there on stage and do this every night. If the crowd’s not having fun, then we’re not having fun, and what’s the point? We’re not like pretentious artists who are trying to make a statement by playing weird songs, we just want to make people happy. If people went crazy for the obscure songs, we’d do them.

J: I gotta say on a personal note, I saw you guys over in Germany, and then in Minnesota a couple of years ago, and you played “Death Throes of the Terrorsquid”, and I was exactly that person. 

CB: That’s like a borderline case song, because it’s long and it’s weird, but it does have kind of a cult appeal. Maybe that will come back. 

J: For those of our readers that don’t know Alestorm too well, what can people expect from an Alestorm show in Kelowna?

CB: It’s fun, it’ll be a party. It’s just crazy chaos. We have some of the more energetic fans, especially for a band who’s… we’re not that heavy a band. We’re essentially happy pop-metal — easy-listening metal, I guess. Usually bands in our sort of scene, the fans are just sort of bopping their heads, maybe having a little dance, but our fans go crazy. Some people get terrified by that. Just watch out. People drink a bit too much, it gets rowdy, but it’s part of the fun. It’s absolute chaos, and everyone gets into it. Everyone sings along, we play a bunch of songs, we’ll insult everyone, tell them they’re all dreadful. Just good, painful fun.

J: Most of your songs are fun, they’re about drinking or sailing; you’re a pirate metal band, so you sing about pirates a lot. But there’s actually a lot of variety in your songs, musically as well as lyrically. So I was wondering: how do you manage to maintain both that musical and lyrical variety while staying really essentially about pirates?

CB: People often ask “how do you manage to make so much stuff with a very limited subject matter?”, but I feel like it’s pretty easy to make anything be about pirates. You cover all the basic topics like digging for treasure, walking the plank, yar, ahoy, cutlass, peg-leg, hook-hand, parrot, you know? But really, you can take any subject… like, Batman, I love making things about Batman, I think he’s a great example of stuff. You can make a song about Batman fighting against pirates, or Batman joining forces with pirates.

J: I think there’s three comics that are exactly that.

CB: Really? Great! I should read them! Exactly, it’s not hard to make any subject come back to a ship and some alcohol and a guy with a sword. They’re pretty basic topics. There’s no limit. I think it’s kind of fun when we can take the stupidest thing and make it about pirates. Our next album, it’s getting ridiculous. We’ve got all the classic topics, so it’s just getting into nonsense now, but good, honest nonsense. And I guess musically, we don’t restrict ourselves at all. We just do whatever we want. It’s kind of like punk-y sort of music, just simple, punky riffs. A violin plays some yo-ho melody…

It’s pretty easy to make anything be about pirates.

J: So you said you can take anything and make it about pirates, which leads me right into my next question. You guys have done a lot of covers, and those covers have been covers from just about anywhere. You’ve got “Wolves of the Sea” by a band Pirates of the Sea

CB: Yeah, that band was just made up for the [Eurovision] Song Contest

J: But then you’ve also got Taio Cruz’s “Hangover”, which is not explicitly about pirates — it’s about drinking. So I was wondering how do you guys pick which covers you do when you do covers?

CB: There’s sort of this trend of bands doing ironic covers of pop songs, and we don’t want to get caught up in that. You know, I think Children of Bodom used to do Britney Spears covers and things, that’s the classic one where they go “hahaha we’re a metal band doing a pop song, lol”. So we try not to do anything that obvious. We always try to pick something that has some relation to what we do, generally, it’s drinking songs, because there’s a lot of those throughout the world. Pop songs, folk songs, metal songs… or if there’s a song about pirates, that’s an obvious category. The next cover we’ve got going on is actually another one from a children’s TV show. I know we already did “You Are a Pirate” from Lazytown, but this next one is also from a TV show. It’s about pirates, but we’re not going to tell anyone what it is yet. We’ve definitely got some new ones coming up. 

I really want to do a full covers album at some point, you know 10 tracks of covers or whatever.

J: That would be cool.

CB: Yeah, it would be cool, but it’s not a “real album”. We’re going to get this album out first, then maybe 18 months down the line, we could do a little fun covers album, sort of a fun stop-gap. There’s so much stuff we want to cover, not even related to pirates or drinking or the sea at all, there’s just songs we want to play. I mean, we’ll give it the Alestorm treatment with violins and yo-ho-ho. But there’s a world of songs I want to do

J: You could just do what Ghost does and put a three-song EP out between every album.

CB: Yeah, that could work. No one complains to them. They’re a band that can do no wrong, I guess. That would be fun. Good idea, thanks for that one.