GOLD, FRANKINCENSE & MYRRH
https://www.facebook.com/thegfmband
TWO QUESTIONS TO THE GFM BAND about the album "Identity Crisis"
by Stephanie McKenzie
Links on Gryphon:
Interview with The GFM Band - 2016
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
Stephanie: As amazing as your freshman cd was, your sophomore CD, Identity Crisis truly shows a level of depth both lyrically and musically that’s sincerely impressive. What was the thought process going into new tracks?
The GFM Band: With this album, we wanted to, as you mentioned, take our music to the next level. We have improved so much since we released our EP, Death of Giants, so naturally, our album, Identity Crisis is going to show that. We wanted to play heavier music, and we wanted to explore as we wrote. We were still discovering the full potential of our talents, and we wanted to capitalize on that. A lot of the lyrics are more mature as well, just because we’ve in a sense “grown up.” Our eyes have been opened to so much more, we’ve had more experiences, we’re seeing things for how they really are. We’ve seen how great life can be, and we’ve seen how not-so-great it can be. A lot of Identity Crisis stems around finding selfworth, and we wanted to show everyone that they have a purpose to live. They are not worthless, and each of them is beautiful in their own way. I think that that’s something that has been said over and over again, but there’s a reason it is still a very popular topic. People still need hope, they still need to realize that they don’t need to be broken to fit in, and I think that GFM is just different enough, that we might be able to finally get everyone’s attention. Songs like Twisted Humanity, Graveyard of Identities, and Stuck in My Suicide deal with fighting within yourself and discovering your worth, while songs like Darkness and Evil Lies talk about what it’s like to feel stuck and unable to defeat the evil around you. The songs kind of tell a story when you put them together, even though “Identity Crisis” is not a concept album. I think all of that helped tie everything together with this album. We went into the studio, and we wanted to be true to ourselves.
Stephanie: I also noticed that some original GFM songs were taken back to the studio and seemed to be lyrically and perhaps musically altered. Can you tell us about that?
The GFM Band: Yes, so four songs were actually reworked in the studio and placed on Identity Crisis. Those songs were Darkness, Chatter in the Room, Death of Giants, and Dimensions. In all the songs, we went in and reworked the guitars and bass. Darkness had the least done to it; we kept the vocals and everything the same, but our producers, Jake Jones and Justin Forshaw, added some extra synths. With Chatter in the Room, we stripped away all the guitars and had Jonathan Chu (formerly of Skillet) come in and feature on it. He absolutely slayed on his violin. We also had Andrew Piland feature on Chatter in the Room, and he gave us such beautiful synths and strings and all sorts of things, that we didn’t know what to do with it all. It was just so great. After we got the instrumental part done, we went in and rerecorded the vocals. We really pushed ourselves to create this huge sound. With Dimensions, we reworked guitars and redid the screams on the song. Maggie has come a long way with her screaming, so we knew it was a must, when asked if we wanted to redo the screams on Dimensions. We also added some synths. Death of Giants, however, is a completely different story. With all the other songs, we kept the same lyrics, except for maybe some minor changes. With Death of Giants, we basically started from scratch. The title, Death of Giants, is something powerful, and we wanted to write lyrics that were aggressive and equally empowering. We spent several days rewriting and revising our lyrics to make sure that they said exactly what we wanted them to say. The reasons behind a lot of the changes we made coincide with the reasons that Identity Crisis sounds so different. We were at a different place in life, and as musicians, that is going
to show in our songs. We brought these songs back and revived them because we knew they had so much potential. We wanted to make a strong first real impression with our debut album, and we knew these songs would really help with that if we gave them a modern twist. That being said, we released Darkness as our debut single and it has been #1 two weeks in a row on Christianrock.net. We just released Beneath the Skin as our second single. Both songs have landed on Billboard’s most added charts and are being played in radio stations all over the world. And this is just the beginning.
by Stephanie Mckenzie