Job For a Cowboy Frontman: “We Were the Biggest Posers in the World”
Job For a Cowboy’s Jonny Davy has granted a career-spanning interview to Alt Press, and the frontman tackles everything from the group’s early days as a “MySpace band” to the evolution throughout their career and their upcoming, as-of-yet untitled new album.
Speaking of the band’s early shot to stardom on the success of the Doom EP (2005), and the internet vitriol from the scene’s elder statesmen that came along with it, Davy offered:
“We were posers! We were the biggest posers in the world. That’s what we were. It’s just weird. I was such a huge fan of that genre of music. It sounds silly, but I think one of the first records I ever bought with my own money was Nile’s Amongst The Catacombs Of Nephren-Ka around 1998, and when I first listened to it, I did not understand it because I was so young.
“That opened the door for a lot of stuff as I got older. I was listening to so much stuff when I was 17. I was just trying to open as many doors as possible. It’s just strange getting that much negative feedback online, but it is what it is. I get it. I mean, we still get it today. We still have this perception of [being] a Myspace band. I guess a lot of people never gave us a chance. We got a stupid name that we got stuck with, so I understand it’s hard to take serious at times. I guess it just comes down to when the band started, we never took it that seriously because we never thought it would get to the heights that it did.”
He continued on that subject:
“We didn’t have any real intent to change [on Genesis]. I think our first couple of tours naturally influenced the change. We did a run with Necrophagist, just the ultimate, respected band at that time [2006], we did a big run with Cattle Decapitation and Animosity. We wrote the Doom EP when we were 16 years old, so think of how different you are when you’re 16 to 18/19. A lot of stuff changes, especially musically. In the end, I think it was a pretty natural progression. Even with that said, when we released that—going back to the backlash—that didn’t seem to help, either. It almost seemed to make things worse. We just couldn’t win. It was humorous when we look back at it.”
Speaking on how he currently views the Doom EP, Davy reveals he feels “it doesn’t hold up very well,” saying:
“We were really young when we wrote it. I wrote a lot of that myself on guitar over a few months with one of our original guitarists, Andrew Arcurio, just at his mom’s house. My perception of it now is that it doesn’t hold up very well in my honest opinion. However, I’m not ashamed of it. I get that a lot of people still like it and a lot of people dislike it. I just look at the band as having different eras because our music has changed steadily over our career. We had our modern death-metal phase and our technical death-metal phase, and now we’re floating in this little, slight progressive tech-death thing we’ve evolved into. I don’t think we’ll ever release the same record twice.
“It’s not a knock on bands that found their formula. I think the perfect example is the Black Dahlia Murder. Everyone knows what they sound like. Everyone knows who they are. They have a sound, and they stick with it, and it’s great. They figured it out. I think with us, we like to try new things. We don’t want to get bored.”
Shifting gears to the band’s next album, Davy echoed the points he revealed in his exclusive chat with MetalSucks over the summer:
“I wish I had more news about it. The drums are done. However, our guitarist Tony Sannicandro currently lives in Ireland and is in medical school. We’ve been trying to get him down to America, and it hasn’t been working out because of COVID. We’ve had to put it a little bit longer on hold than we would have hoped, but it gives us a little bit more time to overanalyze it [and] nitpick the hell out of it, so we’re not too bummed and concerned.
“Navene Koperweis, from Animosity and currently the mastermind behind Entheos, played drums on it. He’s an amazing drummer. He’s just a really good old friend, and we’ve worked together on Fleshwrought, which I guess you could call a solo project because he did everything on that except the singing, which I did. Thematically, the new album is the sequel to Sun Eater. That’s as far as I can go with it. Musically, I’d say it’s following the trend of evolving.”
Davy previously told MetalSucks the band were all set to record with producer Jason Suecof earlier this year, but Covid-19 put the kibosh on those plans. He also explained that the reason the band have taken so long in between albums is because various members went back to school, started new careers and began families. You can read that full chat here, and the rest of the above over at Alt Press.
