By: Johnny Price, Lead Senior Journalist
If you’re not out supporting local music in your area, you really don’t know what you are missing out on. Bands battle it out in the trenches and pay their dues before they are elevated to the level of being established stars in the industry. They live dual lives as average, everyday workers in their day jobs before transforming into rockers at night. It’s a tough balance and many sacrifices are made as they pursue their dream of hitting the big time. There’s a four piece rock band out of Roanoke, Virginia called Madrone who are the epitome of just that.
The band consists of lead singer/guitarist John “JD” Sutphin, bassist Blaine Davis, drummer Joey Coleman and guitarist Dana Cox. The band has been molding their sound for several years now and has recently released their new album entitled A Light in the Sky, which is the follow-up to Karma Catastrophe. The band’s mix of melodic rock with passionate, meaningful lyrics combined with taking their music to the people and performing it live at just about every opportunity given has seen the band develop quite a loyal following. I sat down with their lead singer before a show and he gave me a crash course on all things Madrone.
Hey JD, how are you man? You know, our paths seem to have crossed several times over the years leading up to this interview.
Hey, I’m doing great! Yeah, we’ve been in a lot of the same places at the same time kind of thing.
Let’s get cracking at this one with your band name. Is it based in any way with the Madrone tree?
Yes it is and I have the Madrone tree tattooed on my arm. I love everything about trees and they’re incredibly important to me. It’s an amazing thing because it’s like they’re always reaching and I’m a super positive person. You know, family is always number one with me and there’s the family tree. I even like the way that Madrone sounded because my favorite music when I was younger was stuff like Pink Floyd, Tool, Deftones an anything that was melodic in a way that it felt like it enveloped you. So, Madrone was kind of like my drone or my music. You know how when you were younger and you felt like that was your band and that nobody else knew about them? So, all of that really kind of sums up how we came up with the band name.
As I have listened to your music, I seem to pick up on a diverse mix of influences. Can you list some of them for our readers?
David Gilmore, Billy Corgan, James Hetfield, Maynard (Keenan) of Tool, but then also on the same end would be Johnny Cash, The Killers, Bruce Springsteen, so I’m kind of varied; I like any music that feels real. I love old school country, but then I listen to The Killers and Duran Duran.
Good music is good music, regardless of genre.
Absolutely, I totally agree.
Can you fill our readers in on how Madrone came to be?
The way that I write songs is really the way that the band got started, which is me on a solo acoustic guitar and going to open mics and coffee shops. I jammed around with different people, but I eventually met Joey (Coleman), our drummer through work. He and I talked online about our influences and it was really cool because his were outside of my spectrum. He loved heavy, heavy drums with melodic music and I was writing melodic music and I needed some heavy drums. We found Blaine (Davis) and we were actually a three-piece for a really long time. We had some touring guitar players, but then Dana (Cox) became our full time guitarist. That really changed the dynamics of the band completely, having a guitar player where I could just put the guitar down and just think about vocals. It was also great for the writing process as well.
I wanted to ask you about something that I had read about your grandfather. Wasn’t he an accomplished bluegrass musician?
Yes he was and he put out several albums. He was in a band called Jim Freeman and the Blue Ridge Cavaliers and he did an epic mix of music. He would do “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” which was popularized by Nirvana, but he was also big into (Johnny) Cash and Waylon Jennings. He got to work with Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley and judge competitions with those guys. He died well before I was born, so I never got to meet him, but every Madrone song is connected back to his guitar.
Madrone “House of Ghosts” (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
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So, what got you into music? Was it learning about the history of your grandfather?
My family actually did. When I was young, my parents divorced and I can still remember sitting in a courtroom listening to my head phones as they were bickering. I would listen to Metallica’s And Justice For All and tell myself that James Hetfield knew what I was going through. I was really into music, but I was actually an artist and I always thought that I was going to be a painter or a comic book artist. That’s what I did for my childhood years up until my late teens and I was a late bloomer because I was about fifteen before I even thought about playing guitar. My grandmother, Jim Freeman’s wife, was like ‘No, you’re playing music’ and she told me that I looked like my grandfather and I talked like him. I got an electric guitar and was playing around on it and not really taking it that seriously until the anniversary of my grandfather’s death on the Fourth of July. We had this big party and my grandmother made this huge presentation and told me that she was going to give me something that would change my life. It was my grandfather’s acoustic guitar: a 1961 Martin and that night, I wrote my very first song. She was right, it did change my life and she knew exactly what she was doing.
Did you know about the legacy that your grandfather had left behind before that point?
No, I knew that he played music, but I really didn’t know that much about it. We were a pretty heavy band up until the record before our last one Karma Catastrophe. The reason that album is even called that is because it’s a tribute to my grandfather because my aunt found songs that my grandfather wrote that he never got to record before he died. We didn’t even know these songs existed.
Did you find sheet music or rough cassette demos or what?
It was sheet music with lyrics, so I had to go back and learn how to read sheet music because I really wanted to learn these songs. I started to learn them and I learned chord progressions that I had never even thought of; I looked at the way he wrote lyrics and the way that he told a real story. It made me realize that I had not scratched the surface on what I could find to be melodic and then I pushed it even further with this new album. Karma Catastrophe was a tribute to him because the idea was that this amazing man died at such a young age – 44 years old. What if karma was this big machine and suddenly that machine misfires and takes out the wrong guy? With the new album, I had some interesting and terrible personal things that happened to me that influenced me in my writing. I wanted to be really personal and not just write about things that have happened, but things that happened to me personally.
Now, when you guys are taking your music out on the road, what type of radius do you normally cover?
We’ve gone as far north as upstate New York, west to Tennessee and as far south as Florida, but we have plans this year where we will go to the west coast and hit some mid-west places as well. We really want more people to hear this album.
What’s the biggest crowd that you guys have performed for so far?
That’s a good question; I think about 4000 people at a non-profit show for a school system. We opened for John Popper (Blues Traveler) at Elmwood Park and that was about 3500 and that was really awesome. We’re going to be playing Floyd Fest this summer and there’s 10,000 people out there each day, so that’s going to be nuts.
What would you say has been your biggest bump in the road or struggle so far?
That’s a really good question; I would say that it would be trying to figure out how to do it all on your own. It’s a big learning process in figuring out what your strengths are as a band and then how to survive off of those. You have to realize what you want to do musically; I think a lot of people get together because they just want to be in a band. When you realize that vision of what you want to sound like and can actually achieve what that is, then everything else can really fall into place. The Ramones wanted to write three chords and they wanted it to be fast while being a pop song, but someone in the Zeppelin-era might think that was too simple or crap. I think figuring out what it really is that you want to do as an artist or a musician is the biggest hurdle.
I love asking this question to band’s that I interview because the responses can be so varied. Can you give me three albums that influenced you as an artist?
I’d have to go with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Tool’s Lateralus and Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
It seems that I missed a question that I wanted to ask you earlier. Are there any more videos in the works for this new release or is it too early to say?
We have the treatments for several videos ready, so it’s definitely going to happen. We should start filming in April and we have an epic follow-up for “House of Ghosts.” That video was really thematic and a lot of things going on. The guy who did that video, Justin Reich, then became the personal videographer for Zakk Wylde and just did his new video for Black Label Society. Justin’s been doing some amazing stuff and he was before he worked with us, but now we want him back and he’s a lot more expensive (laughs).
Let’s keep our fingers crossed for you that it won’t be too much! Jd, that’s all I have for you. I’ll let you wrap it up for all of our readers.
I do believe that we’ve achieved something on this record. I thought we had done it with the last album, but we really hadn’t. This new album is what Madrone is supposed to sound like, even down to the mix. I spent hours and hours picking the track listing so that it really has a story. We really wanted to take the listener on a journey and I am really proud of it.
It’s great to see that mentality of an album being a complete journey and not just a few singles with filler between. There seems to be a trend of so many bands focusing on singles and not the entire work.
For people who have given up on putting out albums, the artist has to give up first. You know, if that is true, then why not challenge yourself to write something that can hold people’s attention for that long? It seems that everyone’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter, so if I can keep their attention for a whole record, then that’s pretty awesome.
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