We always felt that the album was never as heavy as it should have been, as it was intended to be. That was 'cause we had so many different producers have their hands on it and everybody had different opinions and things like that. I think it just kind of got lost in the mix really, quite literally. But the label now, the one that has Mandrake Project and everything, when they said, "Look. We wanna basically do the catalog and do it in Dolby Atmos and everything," I said, "Well, maybe we could take the opportunity of doing a bit of an upgrade on Balls to Picasso and make it sound like the record it should have sounded like when we first put it out. So Brendan Duffy, who's done all the Atmos mixes and has been doing that for all of my solo catalog, he said, "Well what do you want to do?" and I said, "Well, we wanna put some more guitars on it to beef it up. Hey let's see what else we can do with various percussion bits." Then we looked at the orchestra for "Tears of a Dragon" and also for "Change of Heart" and then we just went, "Well, let's just go for broke. Let's put a horn section on 'Shoot All the Clowns. So it is really an eclectic record to begin with, but it's now a much deeper, darker and heavier eclectic record. What happened was I said, "You know, it would be great to put some horns on that track," because it was always envisaged that we might try something like that but it was all done in such a damn hurry that we never got around to it. So then they came back and said, "Well, we've got this... we've done this ... and see what you think. Is it too much?" And I was like, "No, no, no. No, no, no. Never too much. That's great, I wanna hear more of it," because it really smashes the groove along. It's fantastic now. It really swings, that track. Again, it makes the album a bit more eclectic. It's not like a cookie cutter heavy metal album at all. Have you forgotten about this bit? Oh, there's a bit in there that we always thought should've been a little bit louder. But the solo guitars are all the same solos that they were from the same people. The drums sound fabulous, but those those are the original drums put through modern technology that just brings out that sound. Brendan's like a magician, so honestly I can't praise him enough how he's done it.
There's all kinds of stuff on that record that sounds for me at any rate and one or two commentators [have said] as well, "Hey, this sounds like a really contemporary, like a right now kind of record. The label were all over it because we did Mandrake Project and Mandrake was one of the most successful records for them last year worldwide. Well, we'll plug more Balls into the tour as well.
The things I love about the record are the different flavors of music on the record. The breadth of it. There's everything from bits of Faith No More to sort of dark Peter Gabriel-y stuff to really industrial stuff. There's rapping on it, there's all kinds of stuff. It goes the whole gamut across pretty much everything. There's ballads on it, there's love songs on it, there's brutal songs. it's a really broad record and I'm very proud of it and I'm really pleased it's gotten the revamp that it has.
I didn't do this selection of musicians with auditions or anything else like that. In fact, in a way, they kind of picked me. Dave Moreno I've known for ages and him and myself and Roy, we've worked together on albums for a while now. I've used his demo studio, the Doom Room. We actually recorded vocals and all kinds of stuff in there. Then there was the keyboards and the keyboard element to it. Now, all the keyboards on "Tyranny of Souls" and pretty much all the keyboards that I've ever had, have been done by this Italian sort of like little multi-talented genius. He calls himself Mistheria. And I'd never met Mistheria until a few years back and all this keyboard stuff would just appear from Italy. And I was like, I said, "Who the hell is this guy? He's just given us like 30 tracks of keyboards, every one of which would make an album on its own. Wow, who is this guy?" So I finally met Mistheria and we got along like a house on fire. In fact, I asked him to play piano, "Would you mind playing piano at my wedding?" And he did and it was awesome. She's great. She's so professional, a really, really great player. Really lovely, just great musical chops and a lovely feel. And she sings, as we discovered. Chris De Clercq, as it turned out, played some solos on Mandrake. I didn't realize. I thought it was Roy and then Roy said, "No, actually it was this guy, Chris." I went, "No kidding. I gotta meet this guy." So Chris came along and I'd spent an afternoon jamming with him and thought, "Well, he's great." And then I thought, "Well, we need kinda like two guitar players, really." And I thought back to my son, Austin, who was in As Lions and before that was in Rise to Remain and he'd played me some stuff he'd been writing with a Swedish guitar player and I went, "This guy's amazing." He had brilliant acoustic chops as well. I met the guy in the pub later on and I just had him down as like a mental thing of what a nice guy, what a talent. And I said, "Don't suppose you'd be interested in coming out on the road?" And it turned out that Philip was in Texas with the band doing, basically doing a session thing. And he said, "Look, I'll swing by L.A.," and he dropped by the Doom Room and played through basically the entire catalog of virtually everything I'd ever done. And I was like, "Okay, we should really do this." So now that's the band and I've played with them. We've been songwriting together. So that band is recording the album with me live. We've got 18 songs ready to go. And so we're not gonna do 18 songs for the whole album, but we'll just pick which ones we think are are the winners when we've done it. So it's really exciting time.
There was a band when I was a kid called Atomic Rooster and they had an album. And the gatefold was a complete full gatefold of Painting of Nebuchadnezzar by Blake. I didn't know who it was. I didn't know it was Blake. I didn't know anything. All I know is this painting absolutely haunted me. Then I realized later on that there were a few other paintings that were very similar and I went, "Oh my God, they're all by the same guy." So then I started doing a bit of reading about Blake and when I was doing The Chemical Wedding, I was kind of trying to just like channel him in terms of lyric writing and alchemy and things like that. I wanted to use his poetry to inspire lyrics and scenarios and things like that.
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