Black Tusk Interview Bröötalisk: When you guys first started Black Tusk, you guys basically lived on the same street. [Cue Andrew “cleverly” remarking how I read their wikipedia page. I'm not bitter. I promise.] Were you guys really close before you started the band?

Black Tusk: [Andrew] Me and Athon had been friends and we kind of met James towards the tail end of high school. We all ran with the same kind of people. [Athon] Savannah's tight-knit to say the least, so you're gonna run into the same people if you listen to the same music. We had known each other for years and I met James and started hanging out with him. Andrew went to Atlanta for school and when he moved back we already had a punk house going where we had about 4 or 5 people living there. We turned one of the upstairs outdoor porches into a room for Andrew, and James ended up moving to a house literally three houses away down the street. Our old bands broke up within the same week and we just walked over to his house and said, “Dude let's start a band, let's start jamming”, so within the next week we found a place to play. It was in our basement. Well, garage. [Andrew] No, no we went to- [Athon] Oh we went over to the “Jamming Space”. [Andrew] It was this practice space in the fuckin hood. It had this GIANT hole in the ceiling. [Athon] You'd have to arrange your equipment around where the leak was. [Andrew] Cuz every time it would rain it'd rain right in the same spot so you couldn't put anything under it. So we're all crammin and couldn't use half the fuckin room. [Athon] I think I think Damad (of Kylesa) had one side, and then our side had Carst, Feeding the Fire, Chronicle AD...there were a whole bunch of Savannah bands that all shared two little rooms about this size. And then imagine a big ol' hole in the middle of the room. [Andrew] Now we've moved to our buddy's autobody shop! (yaaaaay) [Athon] Yeah upstairs we practice and look at broken cars all day. So, not bad.

Bröötalisk: Not as bad as a hole in the ceiling.

Black Tusk: [Athon] No, not at all!

Bröötalisk: So did that closeness help you guys musically?

Black Tusk: [Andrew] Well yeah, we put up with each other for ten years! [Athon] I think actually when we first started...James was in this street punk band and we were in a crusty punk band. When we got together, we kind of knew what music we wanted to play. [Andrew] It wasn't street punk and it wasn't crust punk. [Athon] It was somewhere between sort of that thing. And we just kind of let it evolve from there with no set boundaries or style we wanted to go for. And as we learn each other musically, even now 6 or 7 years later, we finally got the grasp of how that dude plays and so on. We just kind of let it flow. There's no real written plan for this band. Musically, at least. We just let it happen and see what comes out of it. We're not scared to scrap a song if it sucks. Bröötalisk: Speaking of your “origins”, I know that you guys have been hesitant to state who your guys' influences are. Why is that?

Black Tusk: [Andrew] It's not really any certain band that has influenced what we do. It's just a conglomeration of everything. [Athon] It's more the feeling you get from when you hear certain bands. In our van we listen to everything but gospel. It goes from straight gangster rap to 1950's country. We don't sit down and say, “Oh I wanna write a dystopian riff”. It just doesn't work like that. We wanna make our own style. And that's why we stay away from stating who we're influenced by. We're influenced by everything. I walk down the street and you get an idea in your head. You get in a bad mood and you come to practice, you're gonna write a pissed off song. So it's really not just music that influences us, it's just an entire feel.

Bröötalisk: On another note, you guys have crazy badass artwork. It seems to me that there's a recurring theme between each album. Is that just me or is there something bigger at work here?

Black Tusk: [Andrew] It's a character called Agatha. We kind of threw it back old school. Old 80's metal bands had the Eddy and everything like that. We kind of felt like we came up with a character that embraced what we were feeling and she's taylor made for every single album. As the feel of the album changes, her looks and aesthetic change. And it's just one of those universal things, what she stands for, and everything like that is a main thing for the band. We change her up a bit, keep things new. That was our idea and John Baizley embraced it. He told us he was gonna do that artwork from the beginning. So we didn't have to bug him or anything. But now we have to bug him all the time cuz he's so busy. He puts so much effort into the artwork you have to sometimes hound on him and give him a fake deadline to get it done on time.

Bröötalisk: Speaking of Kylesa and Baroness, and even Mastodon to some extent, you guys are all musically related one way or another. Are you good friends with any of those bands?

Black Tusk: [Athon] I think the people we're least friends with is Mastodon, but we just did a few shows together, and we've met them throughout the years through side bands and stuff like that. [Andrew] Yeah we saw Mastodon when they were still playing house shows. [Athon] Yeah, I think it was their second show that they had in a house in Savannah that was one of our friend's. [Andrew] I've got a CD-R that they were handing out. They called it “Lifesblood”. [Athon] And Kylesa, we shared a practice space with them. I actually drove them up to record their first album cuz they didn't have enough cars to fit their equipment so I drove my truck up there and took some pictures of them. We've definitely worked the same bar, working door for shows and stuff like that. Savannah is kind of a close scene, and Georgia in general people acknowledge other bands as kind of heavy. So, there's no distance between the bands. It's too small to be uppity. Bröötalisk: Do you think it's any coincidence that the same type of bands, Kylesa, you guys, Baroness, have all come out of Savannah?

Black Tusk: [Athon] Well, all those dudes are from Virginia, and they one by one moved down to Savannah and kind of started that project. Kylesa has been around for years in different incarnations with other bands. Some of their members are from Ohio and Florida and stuff like that. I think it's just an overall feel of the music is an overall feel of the town. Even reflected back to weather and stuff like that. You get a little cooped up and a little crazy and a little hot. It's just dingy and dirty. I think that feeling's going to happen no matter what, because even the country bands in Savannah have a little bit of that dirtier than everyone else kind of feel to them. I think it is the town, but it's more the mentality of where you live and how you take things day to day.