Chords for Matt Pike: The Challenges of Writing New Sleep + High on Fire Albums

I'm Matt Pike, you're watching Loudwire.
_ _ [N] Hey everyone, Graham from Loudwire here, sitting here with the only, one and only, I should
say, Matt Pike, asleep and high on fire.
Thank you so much, man.
Thanks, Graham.
Thanks for giving me some of your time today.
Yeah, not a problem.
You're a busy man.
You're a real busy man.
That's a fucking understatement.
And next year's gonna be nuts, working on new sleep and new high on fire, basically
at the same time.
How are you balancing both of those things?
Oh, well, I don't know, I just, it's my schizophrenic personality, I can do one or the other.
No, I'm a pretty persistent, determined guy, and all the guys I work with on either camp,
we all know each other, we're all friends, and we all try to work out the schedule, everybody
knows what's going on.
And the guys in sleep also, you know, there's neurosis, there's ohm, so there's a lot of
scheduling going on, you know, and also making, I think I work more than almost anyone.
Jason works a lot too.
Neurosis, usually, they have their dates out of the year, because, you know, Montil's a
teacher, Scott has his thing, he can only tour whenever, so we have to work around that,
and then high on fire is so busy all the time, all the time.
And I'm trying to get that thing to the next level, you know.
And then sleep's at this level where we can't deny the fact that we need to be playing shows
and making another record, because it's been_
It's been a little while.
20-some years.
Well, yeah, since_
And we did really good on the one single we made.
The Clarity?
It was awesome.
Yeah, and it turned out we did that in a weekend, you know.
That's so weird.
Put it together and jumped into the studio and made a 10-minute song that I think's pretty quality.
Yeah.
I like playing it, it's a lot of fun to play.
It's so bizarre to me to think that you made that so quickly, whereas with, like, Dope
Smoker, it took you like four years to create, right?
Four years, yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, is that_
But there was charts and second guessing and all sorts of_
A lot of label stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of label stuff, a lot of red tape.
Yeah, and all the musicians I work with are, like, top notch, probably the best, some of
the best in the world, but everybody's heady, so we second guess everything.
If one guy doesn't second guess it, I second guess it, and then_
Or someone else second guesses, like, what we're doing, you know, and it's always_
If you're a good artist, though, like, you kind of do that, you know.
At some point, you just gotta be all_
Let the cosmos kind of drop it in your lap and go from there, you know.
It's gonna happen one way or another.
I just gotta stop trying to control everything to the utmost, you know.
There's only so much you can control.
You can plan for things, but the outcome of it, you don't know what's gonna happen.
It's a what if.
So I know that in a past interview, you said you were hoping to finish the sleep material
in around March. Yeah.
So how far are you on that, and can you tell us anything about what it sounds like?
We're pretty close, man.
We got a lot of material.
I mean, I think_
We have some writing sessions coming up, you know, where we just focus on that, because
a lot of times we get together and we're just focused on the next show.
You know, we rehearse for the show and we don't really dig into, like, the material
we've been working on, and then we get together and we have material and we take, like, four
days and just boot camp it.
So I'm hoping that things_
You know, there's only a certain amount of control that you have, like I'm saying.
We just have to get together and do it and see how it comes out, you know, because there's
only so much time.
You know, there's only so much time.
And you can always push it back, but if you're making progress, you know, hit it while_
You know, strike it while it's hot, you know.
Do you think the clarity will be a part of it, or is that just a separate thing?
I think that's the_
I think the clarity just put us on the right track as to, like, what we're doing.
You know what I mean?
It's like getting a good footing again, because we hadn't written in so long together.
It taught us how to write together a little better than, you know_
It gave us some good footing.
New High on Fire, you're hoping to finish that in around June of next year.
I've seen an interview.
I'm dying to know, are there any lyrical concepts that are floating around your head for the
new High on Fire?
Oh, there's a lot, but I'm not going to elaborate on that, because I don't have anything pinpointed.
But, I mean, look what's_
High on Fire can be a lot of_
Like when I write, it can be a lot about personal stuff, or current events, or just Dungeons
and Dragons and sci-fi.
You know?
Or events like_
And a mixture of two, you know.
Or yeah, anything like esoteric or religious.
I believe that the religions were put here to separate us.
But it doesn't make me a non-spiritual person.
It doesn't mean I don't believe that, you know, there's something more divine to our
consciousness and our existence that connects us with what's out there.
You know, what's higher than us, so to speak, but we're a part of that.
So I wouldn't really call it higher than us.
I would call it, you know, we're just like a set of binoculars, each one of us.
You know?
The Bible is like_
You know, the transcripts to it, it's been transcribed so many ways.
And now people are talking about this Mandela effect and how they're just changing the whole word concept.
Like, you know, it used to be the lion laid down with the lamb.
I remember that from when I was a kid, because my mom used to say, March comes in like a
lion and lays down like a lamb.
And I remember that, and now it says wolf.
It lays down with the wolf.
And it's so weird that everybody's Bible changed that all at one time.
Doesn't mean I believe in the Mandela effect totally, but I did look at that and I was like, fuck.
And then they were raising the question, did John F.
Kennedy have six people in the car
when he shot or was it four?
And people remember four and people remember six.
My uncle was, he's old enough to like be there that day.
He said six.
And I was like, I remember it being six too.
So, but a bunch of people insist that it was four, you know what I mean?
And I was like, that's so weird because I remember it being six and I was totally like
trying to like disprove that fact, you know, un-fact of the Mandela effect, that there
were six people in that motorcade, you know?
So there's all sorts of weird trippy shit I think of like that, that will go into like
eventually my thought process of like what I put down as a poem to a hi-hat, you [C] know,
to some heavy riffs.
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