Interview by Kris Peters
Not content with fronting one of this country's most loved rock outfits in Hammers or saddling up behind the kit with blues funk trio Hot Cobra, Gold Coast-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Lucas Stone has now thrown his considerable clout behind his solo project, recently releasing the wicked 5 track EP Deathbed.
As if juggling two other bands with a hectic personal schedule wasn't enough, Stone also decided to write and perform the EP on his own, enlisting the help of a select group of musicians to add vocals and depth to his musical vision.
Raw, caustic and welding Stone's love for authentic emotion within heavy music with malevolent riff violence, Deathbed is simultaneously cohesive and yet stylistically indefinable; a true representation of who Stone is, his passion for the heavy realms, and what he has journeyed through to reach this point in his career.
HEAVY caught up with Lucas Stone last night to chat about the EP and more.
"Really cool," he replied when asked how Deathbed has been received since coming out on May 31. "I'm pretty busy with the Hammers stuff and I have squeezed this in amongst everything else. I had a bit of help from Tiana, but I was a little bit rattled from what was going on. I was maybe a little vacant for parts of it, and then it happened and was out, and the reception has been amazing. A lot of messages from fans of Helm and Hammers and even just friends and people that have followed my career online. It blows you away. It's cool to see people connecting with it on a level you hope the music does."
We ask Stone to tell us more about what he was going for musically on Deathbed.
"Honestly, I was going for nothing," he shrugged. "This was the release that… I've had some decent success across a handful of bands - namely Scalene, Tension, Helm and Hammers - and I'm happy with that. Those four bands specifically have given me a really cool, left of centre career in music. I'm no rock star, but I don't really care too much. It's more about the fact that I've been able to write this music with my own sense of integrity and no pressure from outside influence. I'm quite a selfish songwriter, I will admit to that, which has probably been detrimental to my career (laughs). This one specifically rings true with that more than any of them because I didn't even have any reflective sounding boards off anyone, because I wasn't in a band forum. It was all 100% a selfish project where it was 'I wanna do this' or 'I wanna do that, and I'm just gonna do it how I wanna do it."
In the full interview, Lucas talks more about the musical side of Deathbed, the guest artists who appear and why and how he chose them, playing everything himself and how that created a different sounding release, how Deathbed defines him as an artist and person, touring plans, upcoming stuff from Hammers and more.