Highlander: You were still in the conceptual stages of "Razia's Shadow" when most of the band left. How did that change the dynamics of Forgive Durden?
Thomas Dutton: We'd completely demoed one song, "The Exit", and even had Brendon [Urie of Panic at the Disco] sing on it and everything already to kind of show other singers what we were talking about when we asked them about it and to show the label what we were talking about. I already had kind of the whole storyline pretty much planned out at that point, so when everybody left...Thomas [Hunter, ex-guitarist] and I did continue to talk a little bit about [a] "would you want to finish writing the musical, but just not tour with us anymore and just go from there" kind of thing, so we'd talked about that for a bit and we worked on some other ideas. Then I just decided to ask my brother Paul, who is a music composition major, to kind of come down and write the record with me.
H: Do you still keep in touch with your former bandmates?
TD: Yeah. Not that much, but I see Thomas once in a while, just because we're both in the music scene in Seattle and everything he's still playing a lot of stuff. So we see each other a lot with music stuff. Then the other two guys are going to school and stuff, so I'll talk to them randomly but we don't really cross paths. But there's no hard feelings or anything.
H: Were there any guests you had planned for the record that didn't come to fruition?
TD: Yeah. One was...the intermission track that's just me doing vocals or whatever, we wanted to have Dan [Nigro] from As Tall as Lions do, and he totally agreed to do it. He was actually one of the first people, he recorded like half of it, but...like I tried to kind of write most of the songs, because I would have the singer in mind when we were writing it, so I'd try to write the melody and stuff and put it in the right range for them and write it in their style a little bit so it would fit with their voice a lot, you know? That was one where it wasn't...we just wrote it and asked Dan to do it, it wasn't really written for him, so after doing half of it, we just weren't that stoked on it, he kept saying like, "I just feel like I'm kind of forcing it out. It doesn't feel natural, it's not my sort of thing," so we decided to just have me do it instead. So that was one where I was bummed because I really love his voice and wanted to have him on the record and everything.
H: Speaking of the different vocal styles on the record, Shawn Harris sings in a drastically different style on "Doctor Doctor". Was that planned that way?
TD: Well I sent him that track with me singing as a reference, and I didn't sound anything like that. I sounded more kind of like...more almost like [My Chemical Romance vocalist] Gerard Way or something like that, just kind of this evil but sort of melodic [style]. So yeah, he just sent that back [with his vocals on it], and we were just like, "Oh my God, listen to this." He told me later that [when he was recording], he had put all this weird makeup on his face and put a mirror in front of the microphone so he could get into character and just go nuts on it, which is awesome. If the whole record had been like that with people just going over the top with really weird Disney-style voices, I think it would've been too much, like too much of the novelty aspect, you know? But just his on that one is so cool, it's really perfect.
H: Are there any tracks on the album that you especially enjoy performing live?
TD: Yeah, I really like playing "Genesis" and I like playing "Life is Looking Up". I like playing "Toba [the Tura]" a lot. Then there's other ones, like the more slow ones-because you know, people aren't grooving because these are love songs-where I get a little self-conscious sometimes, like "Are people getting bored? Am I putting people to sleep?" Then after the show, people are like, "The love songs are so good! That was my favorite song," and I'm just like, "Really? I thought I was boring everybody up there."
H: You've said before that the concept of the album being a musical was inspired by Disney and other musicals and stuff like that, but where did the actual story of "Razia's Shadow" come from?
TD: Let's see...so I really liked in "Aladdin" how he pretends to be somebody else, he pretends to be the prince or whatever when he's not. I kind of took that as far as when Adakias crosses over, he doesn't tell anybody his true identity or whatever. That kind of also happens in "The Lion King", when Simba and Nala meet back up, he doesn't tell her that he's Simba right away or whatever. So stuff like that, where [the characters] pretend to be somebody else. I really liked in "Moulin Rouge", how Nicole Kidman's character gets sick, so it adds a sense of urgency to everything, like there's this time limit to everything. So I used that, too, because I had to use some sort of device to make them have to act now a little bit. I didn't really hash it out that much in song, but it just happens in narration where she gets sick and has to go to the doctor.
H: Was there any specific direction you were trying to go with as far as the names go?
TD: Yeah, it's all like...there's this language called Aramaic, it's like the language Jesus would have spoken or spoke or whatever, anyway...they're all words in that language, and they all correspond to the character's traits; "adakias" means "the chosen one," and I think "anhura" means the light. Some of them are really obvious, like the king's name is King Malka, and I think "malka" means "king," so his name is "King King." So yeah, there wasn't like a huge glossary of words, there was just a few handfuls to choose from, so they're all kind of as close as I could get to it sounding cool and it kind of meaning something about the character.
H: Since you've taken the "musical" route, so to speak, do you find that people have any misconceptions about what you do?
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