Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Cellador

Though power metal, with its complicated rhythms, harmonizing guitars, majestic melodies and tales of dragons and other lore, has been popular in Europe for more than 20 years, it remains in its infancy in the United States. Nebraska’s Cellador, whose debut album, Enter Deception, is available now on Metal Blade Records, hopes to change that. The band won quite a few new fans when they opened for Trivium recently at the Recher Theatre in Towson, Md. After their set, Jeff Maki and Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net sat down backstage with guitarists Bill Hudson and Chris Petersen.

Live-Metal: Good set, by the way. You guys are fast, man.

Chris Petersen: It’s faster, like, to the crowd than it is to us. They’re all fast, but we think we’re playing it at the tempo of the album. But then we hear it on tape and we’re like, “Oh my god.”

It’s, like, twice as fast as on the CD, it seemed like to me.

Bill Hudson: Wow.

Chris: The songs are so fast anyway, it’s kinda—it’s a lot of notes. We try to keep it at the tempo of the album, especially for people who aren’t used to the music, so they know actually how all the melodies are and don’t just have it all shoved up in their face.

How did Cellador come to be? Members from Brazil, Russia and you ended up in Nebraska?

Bill: The band was started in 2003 by Chris Petersen. He basically wanted to introduce power metal to the Midwest U.S.A. Until, like, two years ago nobody knew what it was. Chris just started placing ads around, looking for the musicians. The first one he found was Dave [Dahir], our drummer, who at the time was only 15. He’s 17 nowadays. Chris and Dave started playing together. The next one they found was Valentin Rakhmanov, the bass player. He’s Russian, but he’s been living the States since he was 9. So, I mean, I don’t know how Russian that is. Actually, Valentin and Chris went to school together, to high school together. The next one that they found was Mike, Michael Gremio, the singer. They just placed an ad looking for a power metal singer. Right away, what they did was started rehearsing and playing, and playing live.

I was the last one and I’m the actual foreigner here. I am from Brazil and what I did is, I was in the States for about 10 months before and I was looking for a power metal band here. I mean, I just had the feeling that power metal was something that they had never heard about. Nobody knew what it was. So I went back to Brazil , frustrated, and I found Cellador online and I’m like, “Jesus Christ, these guys are from the States. Why didn’t I find them when I was there?” And then the day after, I found an ad that they were looking for a guitar player. Perfect. So I wrote to them. Chris sends me tracks back, asks me to learn them. In about 10 hours, I recorded everything and sent it to him and sent other stuff that I was working on. He sent me other songs that were not on the demo. For whoever is used to the album, they were “Never Again” and “A Sign Far Beyond.” And I learned those songs, too. So from the time I first contacted Chris until I moved to Omaha , it was about two weeks. It was a total change in my life. That’s how we got together.

You guys all live in Nebraska?

Bill: Yeah. I’ve been living in Nebraska since then. I went to Brazil for the first time two weeks ago since I joined the band.

It must have been a pretty big culture shock for you coming here.

Bill: Oh yeah.

How was that adjustment for you?

Bill: Well, at first it was weird, because the places I had been in the States before were California and Florida . I wasn’t really used to anything really American like in the movies. When I moved here, I was like, “Jesus Christ, it’s just like the movies.” It was a culture shock, definitely. I got used to it. I’ve been living there. I have my life there now. I went to Brazil and that was weird for me when I went two weeks ago.

Big Sepultura fan?

Bill: I like Sepultura, yeah. I mean, I prefer when Max was in the band. I don’t even know their newer stuff. You see, Brazil has a lot, a lot of good bands. People just don’t really hear about them. That’s unfortunate.

Seeing that power metal is virtually nonexistent in the U.S., do you see this as an advantage for Cellador and would you want to see more power metal bands popping up?

Bill: Definitely. I always had that in mind. Since I was, like, 15, I was thought that once there was a good power metal with good support coming from the States, it would break. That’s what happened. I mean, it’s really coincidence—people sometimes think it’s not—but us and Dragonforce, we showed up at the same time in the States. And it was really a coincidence, because we got signed before they got signed to Roadrunner. I don’t know what happened. And now, there are bands popping up everywhere, which is cool. I mean, especially where we live in Omaha , you can go to the local web sites and you’re gonna see ads looking for power metal bands. I think it’s great. I think it’s really great, Dragonforce selling out tours. I think it’s really great. But I do think it was definitely an advantage for us. If it was, like, a place with a lot of bands, I don’t know how much—it’s definitely a good thing for us.

What are some of your favorite power metal acts?

Bill: My person favorites are the oldest ones. One of my all-time favorite bands is Stratovarius. After them, I’d say Helloween, Gamma Ray, Blind Guardian. There’s a band from the Netherlands that I really like and nobody ever talks about that’s called Elegy. It’s kind of progressive, but it’s pretty power metal-ish, too. There are some bands that I never heard of before I moved here. For example, Lost Horizon, and I think it’s a great band. The singer’s incredible and I never heard of him before. There are some newer cool bands, like Dragonland and Lost Horizon. But my favorites are the old ones, even some stuff from Rage and stuff like that. I like the old Angra. They’re from Brazil , too.

How did Cellador end up on the Trivium tour?

Bill: Well, it was great. We were hearing talk about it and we weren’t really sure what was going on. So we went to Sounds of the Underground. Where was it, Chris?

Chris: We went to a couple Sounds shows, Sounds of the Underground, when Trivium was on it and we made pretty good friends with—well, not good friends, but he, like hung out with us or something and they said, “We really like you guys. We like the album.” And Mike, I guess, was good with words with them and they were like, “You know what? You should get on this next tour that we’re playing.” At least, that’s how I heard it.

Bill: The confirmation for me came when we went to Sounds of the Underground in San Diego . We were there hanging out, meeting everybody and the guitarist from Trivium—his name is Corey [Beaulieu}—he came to us and he’s like, “OK, so you guys want to do dates?” Great. I got really excited there. That’s where it was confirmed. I think everything started with Mike.

The crowd reaction tonight was pretty decent. Has it been that way for the whole tour?

Bill: Yeah. This is the third show we’ve played with them. The reaction is always surprising, to say the least, especially in Orlando . In Orlando and Atlanta , I saw a good amount of people singing our songs and it’s something unexpected to me. We’re a new band and I wouldn’t expect that. I think surprising is the best word to describe it.

What is the meaning of the album title, Enter Deception? Is there something behind it?

Bill: Yeah. Actually, we were talking about that, because the cover, the name of the album and the lyrics, they all go together with an idea that we have. I don’t know how to put that, because it’s something a lot of bands used in the past, but we use it in a kind of a different way. We deal with daily issues and everything that everybody has to deal with in our own way. But at the same time, we’re not preachers. I think relates to self-deception, when you have to change what you are and what you believe to fit a certain group of people. Something like that. We kinda had a hard time coming up with a name for the album because of that. But I think Enter Deception is pretty much what it represents.

You pretty much stay clear of the Dungeons & Dragons-type lyrics. What are some of the lyrical topics?

Bill: For this album, Chris wrote all the lyrics. We don’t go to the dragons and battles, but to tell you the truth, it wasn’t intentional. We never said let’s not talk about it. It just came out this way. ’Cause like I said before, it’s the way we deal with our issues. Chris writes the lyrics and we’ll be all sitting there giving ideas. All the lyrics, they basically say that, always in a different way, for example, “Forever Unbound,” we’re saying, “Don’t rely on gods.” But then again, we’re not preaching, not telling you not to rely on gods. We don’t rely on gods. That would be an example.

You were introduced to Metal Blade through The Black Dahlia Murder. What was the story there?

Chris: Well, we weren’t really friends with them until they came up to us. We basically opened a show for them back in the day when we unsigned locally in town. They were cool enough guys to come out and watch us play and they started rocking out on the side of the stage. They approached us after we finished our set and said, “Wow. You guys are amazing. Metal Blade was talking to us and they told us to keep an eye out for a young, melodic-style metal band from the States. They’re looking to kind of move in that direction with some of their bands, and we think you guys are exactly what they’re looking for. Do you guys have any demos to give us?” They wanted one for themselves and they wanted to one to drop off at Metal Blade’s offices, ’cause they were on tour and they were heading out to California , where Metal Blade’s located. I was like, “OK.” I gave them two demos, one for themselves and one to drop off, not thinking much of it. I mean, I was excited obviously, but I was just like, “I shouldn’t get my hopes up.” I just thought it was kinda of an obscure thought that a European-influenced, power metal-style band which has never really been popular here in the United States—not, at least, bands that are actually Americans getting popular in the United States. So I figured, “It’s worth a shot, but I’m not gonna get my hopes up too much.”

But anyway, I gave them a demo, and it was just, like, two weeks later after we gave them the demo that we got a call from Brian Slagel at Metal Blade and he just said that he was interested in the band and that he wanted to make contact and that he wanted to find out more about us, basically. So we got super excited, obviously. I called him up and he asked us a bunch of questions, you know, “How did you start this band with this type of music and your influences in Nebraska of all places?” And he asked us how long we had been a band, how many songs we already had. He came out and met us in Omaha . He flew out several times, actually. He took us out to eat just to get to know us and meet us in person, and he watched a show that we had locally. He offered us a contract, basically, later that summer. The whole process was probably about a month after he originally contacted us. It was just a month of talking on the phone and email and him coming down and watching us play live and he offered us a contact. We took a couple weeks to kind of review it ourselves. We never did get any legal help with it. We probably should’ve, but we signed it about a month later. It was later on in the summer of 2005.

Are you locked up long-term with Metal Blade or is it an album-to-album thing?

Chris: Yeah, sort of. Like a lot of recording contracts, they have options and stuff like that, but if they choose to renew all their options, yeah, the contract could potentially go for quite a while, five albums or something.

Do you guys write while on tour? Have you started writing anything for future albums?

Bill: We are already writing for the next album. To be honest with you, on this tour I haven’t written anything. Me and Mike, we already have two songs demoed, like, totally recorded demos. I know that Chris has some ideas. I haven’t heard them yet. We basically are writing but not this tour. I wrote some stuff on the last tour.

What kinds of things do you like to do when you’re out on the road?

Bill: I would like to have more time, because usually we’re driving from place to place. I guess my favorite thing to do on tour is to play video games and watch movies. That’s pretty much all we have to do.

Chris: We’ve got a little setup in our SUV that we’ve been taking on the road where we play X-BOX or whatever. It’s got a TV screen in the back, so it comes in pretty handy.

Bill: I like going out, too, meeting fans. That’s pretty much all the time we have.

Do you have any goals for the band?

Chris: I would love to play the U.K. , Japan , just go international, play some shows in other countries, see what it’s all about. It’s possible that might happen in 2007. Other than that, right now I think it’s just really plug the album, basically. It’s only been out since the 27th of June and it’s all about playing shows. There are still a lot of places that we haven’t covered yet in the country, a lot of places we haven’t been to yet and we want to play to. A lot of it’s really that and promotion in general. We’re doing a lot press, interviews. We’re still finding new reviews and getting photos done, just promotion in general. It’s pretty much in the promotion stage still, going out and playing, and the introduction. It’s kind of like the introduction phase of the band. It’s a little bit different for a rookie band. There’s a lot of things that you need to cover and you need to do to get your name out. It’s a really kind of detailed, systematic process to get a band’s name out. When nobody knows about us, there’s potential for a lot of kids who don’t know about us to discover us.

So that’s pretty much the stage that we’re in right now. We all really want to get some new material down, because we do have a lot of other material outside of what was on the record. Even before, when we were there doing the record, we had so much more material that didn’t make it on the album. Metal Blade wanted the album to be eight songs long and they wanted all the demo tracks. We told them originally, “We want to come up with all new songs for the album.” They’re like, “No, use those demo tracks.” So we have a lot of extra material. We would like to maybe hit the studio again next year, maybe for something to come out in 2007.

I have one more question that we ask all the bands. When do you think Chinese Democracy will be released?

Chris: Bill’s the Guns N’ Roses fan. His opinion matters the most on this.

Bill: I’ve been waiting for it for 10 years. [laughter] Honestly, I don’t even know if it will ever come out. I almost had an album with another band called Chinese Democracy just to piss them off. I don’t know. They said it would be out this year. I believe this time more than ever, to be honest. But if it doesn’t come out this year, I don’t think it will ever come out.