TG: Shadow, first off I'd like to thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. If you could, could you give our readers who may not know who you or your band are a bit of your history?





Your debut album, Casket Spray, has been met with great feedback and multiple sold out pressings I believe. What was it like recording the album and seeing it's success?

Casket Spray Vinyl Cover by Tim Jacobus



Speaking of Casket Spray, you recently revealed an awesome new painted cover by Tim Jacobus of Goosebumps fame for an upcoming vinyl release. How did that come about?







I love the mood and tone you capture by combining inspiration from horror films and even using samples from films. What is the process that goes into writing your songs? Do you pick movies that inspire you or do you write music and then find a film to fit it?



Do you feel that horror punk is having a bit of a renaissance? I've been a fan of the genre since the early to mid 2000's and it seems to be getting back to it's former glory with a more lively scene. What do you feel has contributed to that?





A trademark of your image and live show is your use of theatrical props, make-up, and custom masks. What goes into the creation of these aspects of the band?







And finally, before I let you go, I'd like to hear about some of your film making efforts both including the video and otherwise. You are a film student if I'm not mistaken, do you think you will make more videos or even branch out into a feature film?





I'd like to thank you again for taking the time to chat with us. Is anything we didn't cover you would like to speak about or anything you would like to promote?

SW: It is my pleasure, thanks for having me. I formed Shadow Windhawk and the Morticians back in June 2013 as my solo project. At the time I was preparing to play guitar in Argyle Goolsby’s debut solo show. The band was originally conceptualized as a live five piece horrorpunk / doom / shock rock outfit, with me serving frontman duties and a backing band playing my songs. Getting a solid five-piece lineup together took some time. The original lineup that recorded “Casket Spray” with me was Trip MD on the drums and Rich Misery on bass / backing screams. I tracked the guitars, wrote music and lyrics and sung lead / backing vocals on the album. The album came out last February (digitally and on CD) and we debuted the band live together as a three piece, opening for Michale Graves. That was quite an honor. Shortly after that show, I brought on my friend Stich (All Gone Dead, Corvid, Tragic Black) to play guitar in the live band and we opened for Doyle in September as a four-piece. In October, I also brought in Tony “Mr. Drinks” Schvaneveldt on live guitar and he was slowly worked into the band during rehearsals, up until the five-piece of SWATM finally debuted live on January 30th this year, when we opened for Calabrese in SLC on their “Lust For Sacrilege” tour. As of now, Rich Misery is not playing bass for SWATM any longer. So the live lineup is back to Stich, Trip, Tony and I. At the moment, we’re working on the follow up to Casket Spray, called “Cremation Garden”. The album is a full length that I hope to have recorded and completed by Fall this year. We are also working in a new bassist at the moment, but for now we have no shows booked in the immediate future. We will announce more on all that when the time comes and rest assured when we return to the live stage it will be with a bite.It has been incredible and humbling, to say the least. I did not expect people to respond so positively to Casket Spray. The album has been enjoying a great deal of good press and exposure that only seems to continue as time goes on. It’s completely bizarre for a young band to have the audience we have at this point in the game, I’d say. People from all over the world write me on a regular basis now. Four people in the UK have SWATM tattoos now. It all just blows my mind, man. And yes, we sold out three small CD pressings of the album in 2014, which was really wonderful to see. However I have to say, success isn’t something I would measure by CD sales. In reality, we only ever break even with merch and CDs, we sell hardly anything compared to the bigger bands out there and no profit is ever seen, because all the funds we make from sales of the album go straight back into the band’s projects. If we do ever ‘profit’, it is in the fact that our next album will basically pay for itself as far as studio time goes. But we do things very quick and dirty in the studio, the way a band like ours should (in my opinion). Casket Spray was tracked in one 12 hour day and by the end of day two, we had the final mix and master in our hands.On a shelf high above my desk is a collection I keep of the original Goosebumps books that Tim illustrated. For me, they represent the aspect of my youth that inspired me to fall in love with, well to be blunt - scary shit. The old covers of those books played with my imagination when I was growing up. They set the tone for the stories that RL Stine was telling and put my mind in that headspace with one glance. The wild colors and dramatic lighting always struck my fancy, especially the cover for #1 “Welcome to Dead House”, which would become the template for the Casket Spray album cover. Today looking back, Dead House reminds me of Dario Argento’s Suspiria in a way. I love how Tim paints haunted houses. And that is what this all boils down to. I was sitting in my office listening to the album and looking up at these Goosebumps books, I pulled “Welcome To Dead House” off the shelf and got this wacky idea in my head of my band illustrated as authentic 90s Goosebumps characters, not this new stuff but the real deal - the Jacobus way. It seemed ridiculous and I definitely regarded the concept as a pipe dream. But the thing about me is, I actively pursue my pipe dreams. To me, nothing is outside the realm of possibility and once that is established in the mind, I honestly believe anything is possible. In May 2014, I contacted Tim through his studio. He agreed that my band would be perfect for one of his illustrations. We kept in contact and I launched an IndieGoGo campaign with SWATM to raise the money to hire Tim to create the new album artwork and pay for a pressing of the album on 12” vinyl. When the campaign closed on its goal, Tim and I proceeded with what we had been discussing and after a phone call cementing the old-school 90s feel and ‘true Halloween’ look I wanted for the piece, Tim went to work for two months. In February this year I got the cover back. Thanks to the fans, the band officially owns the illustration and it will be printed for our vinyl pressing which is currently in production! The whole process has truly been unbelievable. I am so thrilled to say this is one case where a crazy dream of mine actually came true.Thank you man. Every song I write begins with me and an acoustic guitar. I will sit and write lyrics with different potential riffs for the verses and choruses and then arrange the music so it has a clear and direct structure that can be brought to my band for tweaking and polishing up. Once I have that skeleton done and we are working with it as a band, I will tweak things periodically over time, or add little ideas here and there and Trip often will do the same with his drumming. I go home and play the songs on the acoustic with fresh ears after trying something new with the band and hearing Trip’s beats for them and at that point the songs find their final shape, they become cemented over time as we rehearse them over and over. The way we lock it all in as a band after I have written it determines a lot of the final result. Trip’s drumming might change the way I sing a song occasionally and in a lot of cases for the better. He throws his ideas rhythmically into my stuff and it makes me look at what I have started working on in a different light, which gives me ideas of different ways to sing a song in some cases. He interprets my songs and adds in the drums how he imagines they should sound and it flows out, not just organically but also in the sense that Trip understands my sensibilities and tendencies. He knows what I love already, so I really never have to worry about the drums. He knows what I want. I love working with Trip. We understand each other in a way that few others understand us, we’re like brothers in many ways. Aside from that process, some of my best work lyrically comes as a hook in my head, when I’m watching a film. I’ll get these random moments of inspiration watching my favorite horror movies, even if I have seen the film a million times. For example, I was watching Nightbreed on tape one night and got the lyrics and melody stuck in my head for the chorus of ‘Midian‘ - There’s a place where monsters go/when the world has crumbled/when I have lost my soul. It came out of fucking nowhere but I knew right then I had the chorus to a song about Boone and the Nightbreed. That spark metamorphosed into the skeleton of ‘Midian’ which ended up becoming the single longest song I have ever written and probably the longest song ever written about Nightbreed, by a horror punk band or otherwise. And I’m not saying that is exactly a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a ‘thing’, I suppose. Haha. So after Casket Spray came out, I’ve started referring to my old VCR as the ‘inspiration box’.Horror Punk is a small pond and it has its ups and downs. A lot of bands lack staying power. Some people might say that’s because a lot of Horror Punk outfits are immature, but I would say the same can be said for any musical genre - bands come and go for many different reasons. And there’s a lot of fucking bands out there. There’s a lot of great bands nobody knows about because we’re all broke and don’t have big labels to advertise for us or put us on tour. So I don’t know if there is a ‘renaissance’ going on, but certainly the genre is alive and well. As for returning to former glory, I can’t say for sure if that is the case. I see it all as an actively changing entity. Horror Punk is different now than it was and yet it is still much the same. The faces change but the pond always stays in tact somehow. If there is a big surge in its popularity now, I am all about that. It makes me happy to see the audience for bands like mine growing. I feel like Horror Punk definitely has not reached its peak yet. Not even close.I am a film geek and as such I love theatrics. I’m a huge Skinny Puppy fan and I love GWAR, Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper. My belief is that putting on ‘a show’ which is visually identical to a rehearsal in terms of appearance, presence and energy has become a bullshit standard. Sure, it is all about the music but there is nothing wrong with putting the SHOW back into the SHOW, you know what I mean? That is my mission. To keep working and building up my production on stage so I can get crazier and get more theatrical. Interacting with the crowd and ‘baptizing’ them in stage blood is one of my favorite things that I do on stage but I want to go so much further. It’s just going to take time and money, as with all things. As far as what goes into my band’s live theatrics at the moment, my brother Jimmy (Nex FX) is a fucking genius. He shares my Halloween kid spirit and understands my sensibilities as an artist. The pumpkin king scarecrow mask I wear on stage was custom made by hand, crafted and designed by Jimmy. He gave it to me for my birthday in 2013. I knew right away that mask was something special and so far I haven’t been wrong. The mask is a symbol of my band and I owe a lot to Jimmy for that. Jimmy also airbrush paints my band prior to each gig to give them the ‘dead’ mortician look that has become our signature style. His work can been seen in our music video and promo photos also. The chalice I use on stage was custom carved for me out of a baseball bat blank. It was made by hand on a lathe by my great friend, Mr. Steven L. Godfrey. Aside from that I use “Bottle of Blood” by Fun World. Tons of it. It’s probably gonna give me stomach cancer someday.It’s an indescribable feeling. It truly was a great honor to have been given permission to use the Myers Mansion for the filming of “Halloween ’63”. I initially got the idea from always trying to one up myself. The typical three dudes in a graveyard horrorpunk video and promo photo shoots are fucking played the FUCK out. And I’m not saying that as an attack on any band in particular but man. It’s done, put a fork in it. So I started brainstorming new ideas, settings that are uniquely horror but also special to Salt Lake, that represent us as a distinctly SLC Horror Punk outfit. The Myers Mansion to me is a monument to SLC’s horror history and it felt perfect to immortalize it as a part of my band’s image. Once I got the idea in my head I knew it was too good to not try it. But I also needed to be granted permission. I’m not an asshole and I wasn’t about to use somebody’s house for all this shit without them fully endorsing my endeavor. So literally the way this went down was, I walked up to the house on my way downtown from the University one day and knocked on the front door of the mansion. A young woman answered the door and I introduced myself as a local recording artist looking for a place to shoot promotional photos. She was very gracious and said absolutely we could shoot in front of the house. She was happy to hear how much I love the place and wished me and the band good luck with our project. The owner is a very nice woman and I owe a lot to her for granting me permission to celebrate a piece of horror history that has been forgotten for many years. The house really is like a miniature Hallmark Haunted House, you know the ones that light up? I adore the place. When the video shoot came up in November, I called the owner of the house back and asked if we could shoot the “Halloween ’63” video exteriors there. She was totally fine with it once again. Such an awesome person. So not only were we able to use the mansion for exterior shots in “Halloween ’63” and as the backdrop of our promo photos, but it also served as the background of the cover Tim Jacobus illustrated for the upcoming 12” vinyl release of Casket Spray. Yes, the house behind us in the Goosebumps style Jacobus painting, is in fact the very same Michael Myers Mansion from Halloween 5, rendered how Tim Jacobus sees it. I specifically requested that the mansion be featured in our cover as though it was the ‘Dead House’ from the first Goosebumps book. If that is not the crazy dream of a 90s kid / horror nerd I don’t know what is. I am damn proud that it all worked out how it did. It feels like a dream to know that Mansion is now forever connected to my music. It makes me feel even closer to the Halloween series somehow and as a die hard fan it means a great deal to me. Really crazy.Last year I made a little short called “visitation” for my production class at the University of Utah. I also produced my debut music video “Halloween ’63” and scouted locations, painted the Myers mask, etc. I am first and foremost a lover of all things to do with cinema. I am currently working on completing my BA in Film and Media Arts at the U. I am also working on the second draft of my first feature length screenplay, “Nine of Bats”. I do hope to make another short film, a dollar baby project I obtained non-exclusive rights to from Stephen King, which is called “One For the Road”. Hopefully I find the time to make that happen this year!Thank you, the pleasure was mine. Just as a reminder to all the boils and ghouls out there, you can now pre-order the 1st 12” vinyl pressing of the Casket Spray LP on colored vinyl featuring artwork by Tim Jacobus! Secure a copy at our website: http:// shadowwindhawkandthemorticians .com . If you want SWATM merch and records, that is the place to go!Check out Shadow Windhawk and the Morticians and give them a 'LIKE': facebook.com/shadowwindhawkandthemorticians