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An Interview With A Raven's Sorrow
Jeff and Jason sat down for a video interview with Jeff Royds from New England Garage Bands
Click Here To See The Full Video Interview
Jeff Glazier is the founding member of the quasi-rock band, A Raven's Sorrow, along with members Jason Percival and Joe Cox. Jeff writes the music and lyrics, Jason plays keyboards, and Joe is band's Producing Engineer. On June 2, 2010, Jeff and Jason sat down for a video interview with Jeff Royds from New England Garage Bands for a rather interesting conversation about their music and philosophy on life.
Where do you think your music fits in? Like, where's the appeal? Where would we find people attracted to your music?
Jason That is what we're trying to find out right now, actually. I don't know if you've heard the music, but it's not typical rock style music. It's not party music, it's not even that fun. But it's very serious and has a very specific message and it really does... it does not have mass... a lot of mass appeal...what people might call a lot of commercial appeal. Not something you'd hear on most radio stations. So we haven't been able to find a big fanbase playing clubs. Actually, there have been a lot of recent developments over the past week. We've decided that our target audience is probably not going out to a lot of bars and clubs, people looking for a good time and a fun show or covers - we don't do any covers at all. So, we're really trying to find where the people are.
If we were not in this band, we'd be fans of this music. So we believe that there are definitely people who want to hear this, and we're trying to reach out
for them through sort of art-minded communities. So we're now going to take more of a internet based approach in finding them now.
How would you categorize your music? What is the message behind the music? It's not happy-go-lucky bar music.
Jason No, and Jeff really doesn't even like to categorize it, and I've never even tried to, because I have no idea where to even start. It's very, it's very emotionally driven, and I don't know how better to say it.
I don't want to call it ambient music because there's already a genre like Brian Eno would fit into with, but it has more of those qualities, and a something that you'd really viscerally react too.
What are some of the things that have been said about your music?
Jeff I actually just got banned from ever setting foot in Berklee again, by the way.
You did?
Jason Oh, this is a great story!
Good for you. What happened? I'm not a huge fan of Berklee anyways, so...
 Jeff Yeah, they, umm, sent me an email saying I can't ever set foot in the building there again. I was recruiting there and it seems a number of professors and students were offended by - I believe the phrase they used was 'disturbing' and 'controversial' - for the imagery on our website, referring to the Hail Suicide title and artwork.
That was basically your web ad that you had, had that Hail Suicide, and then it went into, you know, we're looking for... we're looking for band members. But isn't that what rock and roll is about? Isn't that what music is about? It's about expression and isn't that what Berklee's trying to teach people is expression, or is it just, you know, scales and jazz?
Jeff That's what I tried to tell them. I was like, hey, guys, we're a rock band, what do you expect... but they didn't want to hear it.
Where do you hope to go with Raven's Sorrow?
Jason Top of the world.
Jeff That's not even a joke.
Jason I know, it really isn't. I know I'm making predictions about what people are actually going to like. I've never heard anything like our music, and people don't really listen to music like this, perhaps because there hasn't been anything like it before. Perhaps no one will like it. We'll find that out.
It's always really easy to say we're never going to make it really huge, this isn't going to be the next U2. But it could be, because they were doing something brand new when they did it. I don't want to sell this band short and say this is never going to be anything... it's never going to have a lot of mass appeal. I mean, this could become commercial music. I have no idea.
I'm sure a lot of people when they first heard the Seattle scene, Nirvana or something, they went what the hell is this, this is garbage...
Jason Exactly.
...and mainstream kind of went there and it exploded.
Jason That's what we'd like to see with this.
It changed the music scene forever. You guys could be what music is looking for. You could be the next generation, because we haven't had it in over twenty years. The music scene's just kind of been stagnant and the same.
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