Variety

Making of a monster

Hurricane Bell’s Steve Schiltz on his track Monsters — featured in the Twilight Saga: New Moon’s soundtrack

Veda Aggarwal

Posted On Wednesday, February 03, 2010 at 10:48:57 PM

Date : February 5
Venue: Vishwa Bhavan Auditorium,Symbiosis Institute

We've read that Hurricane Bells is your new project after Longwave. Now, in India, unfortunately we haven't heard of either (except for maybe the number of Twilight fans, growing at an alarmingly fast rate globally!). Tell us a bit about Longwave and what made you decide to start a new project with a different sound.
Thanks for asking. Longwave has been around for about 10 years. We have toured all over the US many times, as well as UK, Europe, Japan and Australia.

We have put out four records, two of which were on RCA. Longwave is a guitar heavy, kind of noisy-bombastic indie rock band.

Hurricane Bells started because I had some songs that I didn't want to use the steamroller guitar treatment on. I wanted the vocals to be more important.

How did the Twilight soundtrack come about? And do you have any tips for Indian bands aspiring to vampire-goth-meets-teenage-romance background score?
Monsters is the song you are talking about, and I had it written for a couple of years before they asked for it. I made the recording completely by myself, and when it was done I decided it didn't fit with the rest of the Hurricane Bells record, so it was perfect for what the Twilight people wanted — they wanted something exclusive.

My music publisher in the US made that happen, they pitched the song to the Twilight folks. As far as writing the soundtrack stuff, I would say that there is no way to really make it happen. Otherwise I'd be doing tha right now and not this interview!

Has your Indian experience met the expectations you had before you landed here?
So far so good! The people have been very good to us and the impression I have is that our music is not very common stylistically here, but people are enjoying it and so that is great.

If we asked you a year ago, which would you have considered more unlikely — playing to packed concerts in a tour across India or being featured as part of the New Moon OST?
Well a year ago I had no idea what New Moon was. So I would have said India. But, if you explained the entire situation to me, I would have said you were crazy. I did the Hurricane Bells songs on the laptop I am typing on now. It's a real success story in that regard.

Both Hurricane Bells and Longwave are both classified as indie bands. Would you still be able to call them that given your rising popularity?
Ha! Well, in the US, indie is more a stylistic term now. Many big bands are on independent labels now and many bands on big labels are not popular at all. So where we come from doesn't matter so much.

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Making of a monster

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