Interview: Marillion Drummer Ian Mosley - Page 4

It's there.

(Laughter) Well I guess you can tell me what's happening then. But that's what I heard — that we would be doing a pre-order on the internet.

Is this going to be a companion piece to Somewhere Else as I've heard?

No, I don't think so. This will be a stand alone — it will be an album in it's own right rather than a follow-through.

Marillion sounds, to my ears at least, like a completely different band than the one I remember from the Fish years. Who are your influences these days?

The different band members all bring very diverse influences. But I know what you mean. We really are a different band now. When Fish left, the four of us always wrote the music anyway and we knew we enjoyed working together and thought we still had something to offer. So there was never really any question of us splitting up. When Steve (Hogarth) came along and joined us for the Seasons End album, we had a lot of material already written. Apart from doing some great vocals, Steve's contribution at that time was quite minimal.

The next album, Holidays In Eden was hard work because it was the first time as a band we had to sit down and write an album together, and find each others direction. So that was a difficult album. But for me, the Brave album is the one where we actually became a band again. It took three albums for us to actually grow together to where we were a band again. But yeah, we are a different band now. The core sound is still there with Steve Rothery on guitar. But we still feel like we're moving forward.

The new album Somewhere Else seems to be somewhat more oriented towards individual songs as opposed to it's predecessor Marbles, which seems like more of a concept piece.

It wasn't intentional. When we all get together at the begining of the writing process, we never sit down and actually say "well what kind of an album are we going to make?". The way we write, we just go into a room and jam. Hopefully, not for months on end (laughter). But it's really all quite organic. We can jam for weeks and weeks, and than suddenly in a day or two we might come up with a few pieces of magic. But at no time in the entire history of the band has one guy come in and said "hey guys, I've got this song and it goes like this." So really we just go in with a blank canvas and start creating pictures and see what comes out.

Article Author: Glen Boyd

You'll find Blogcritics assistant music editor Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares on his personal blogs The World Wide Glen, and The Rockologist. In a previous life, Glen was a music professional and journalist whose work has appeared in The Rocket, SPIN, Pulse!, and The Source. …

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