ZRockR’s Liam Tennant Sits Down For a Chat With Lead Vocalist/ Guitarist James Byron Shoen
The champions of underground progressive rock are back! Edensong’s newest album,
“Our Road to Dust” is a beautiful, thought provoking work of folk-informed music littered with
sweeping acoustics, daunting moments of heavy complexity, and flute ballads that would make
Jethro-Tull drool with envy. Edensong has been a prominent figure in the prog scene for a while
now, especially after the release of their goliath-sized epic album, “Years in the Garden of
Years.” A whirlwind of colliding sounds, Edensong maintained relevance even after taking a
nine year hiatus… and now, after all that time, they are back and more refreshing than ever.
Recently I had the lovely opportunity to reach out to James Byron Schoen from Edensong and
sit down to talk about the intricacies of what makes and Edensong record, how lyrics are formed
in such a technical space, and the logistics of performing such massive works of sonic texture.
Please enjoy.
Liam: Welcome to ZRockR Magazine, James, I’m glad you’re here to talk to us today
James: I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
L: Edensong, for those out there who don’t know, are one of the more experimental
contemporary progressive rock bands out there. I’d love to hear you explain what exactly your
sound is, and to people who have never listened to your music before, what they can expect to
hear from an Edensong record.
J: I feel like we dig deep into both acoustic elements, and also heavier elements. We grew up with a lot of metal, listening to Metallica, listening to Dream Theater, listening to a lot of classic prog like Jethro Tull, and Rush. All of that stuff winds up in there in a blender with some seventies folk, sixties folk, Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel, video game music, Nobuo Uematsu, I don’t really know every name. Just put it all in a big blender, and, yeah, that’s Edensong. We don’t set a lot of rules for ourselves, so I think we always try to do something completely different with each new record, so I don’t know that there’s an easy way to categorize or set expectations for what what you’re gonna get. It’s a lot and I think you just gotta listen.
L: I definitely can hear the Jethro Tull and the Dream Theater of it all. Simon and
Garfunkel is pretty clear, and there are definitely moments where I can tell that the folk stuff
really comes out. Video game music also makes a lot of sense. Are there any particular video
game soundtracks that you or the guys listen to that you regularly look to and pull from?
J: I mean, our our real code to was the Final Fantasy series, especially, like, the early,
Final Fantasy series, like, the stuff that Nobuo Uematsu worked on. He’s just an amazing
composer. But it’s funny, I feel like, a lot of that influence was really present on our last record,
and this one feels a little bit less, orchestral, a little bit more raw and more about the the band. I
feel like it’s a little bit more rooted in what the music that the four of us make together is like,
whereas previous efforts have been a little bit more conceptual, a little bit more orchestral.
L: It’s been nine years since you released your last album, “Years in the Garden of
Years”. What have you all been up to in that time?
J: And this was supposed to be our record to turn out quickly after spending so many
years in the prior album. It’s just that a lot of life happened in the interim. We toured a little bit
for “Years in the Garden of Years”, and, actually, right after our first tour, a couple of the guys
who were really instrumental in writing a lot of that music left shortly after that. It’s a lot of your
life to give to a project. We assembled a new lineup and did a couple more short tours, and I
think that coming back from the whole experience just left us a little burnt out, for one. I think
we started the record from a place of exhaustion and then got hit with a lot of life. We had a
pandemic, which, you know, forced us to change our lives in certain ways. I had a major career
shift that just took all of my attention. Myself and the other guys have small children, so I can’t
even say we were locked in the studio for eight years making our masterpiece.We just ended up
we trying to make an album that felt manageable to us, and I still think it is. And I love the way
this record came out, but I think the the reason it took so long was not because the the music took
long and that we labored over it extensively. I think that this was a case of just life getting in the
way.
L: The relationship between creation and consumption is a diametric relationship that I’m
deeply fascinated by, and I’d like to dig around that topic for a moment. We already discussed
what the influences behind the scenes are, but in terms of consuming music and art, have your tastes and habits changed at all, or do you find them to be in a similar place that they may have
been nine years ago?
J: That’s a good question that I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about. I mean, I’ve got
my go to records that I’ve been listening to since I was a kid, that are still very comforting to me.
I’m someone who likes to experience new music, and I want to continue to consume new stuff,
so I don’t think that my taste has consciously changed; but I think that the music we’ve wanted to
put out has changed, if that makes sense. I think that it’s more it’s more the first half of that
equation – the music we make – versus the music we consume. I think, like, my music
consumption patterns have remained somewhat, consistent. I listen to a lot of modern
progressive rock and metal, and I guess some of the more recent developments there get filtered
a little bit through what we’re doing. We don’t think too too much about that stuff. We sort of just
do what comes out.
L: I’m kind of similar. I don’t make music, but I do a lot of writing, and so especially in
the past eight or so years, the relationship that I have between what I used to write and what I do
now is so different. It’s not even conscious, like you say, and of all that is because I read things
now that I didn’t before, and that just kind of shifts naturally. And as a writer, I wanna ask about
lyrics. Is that an undertaking that someone specific does, or do you all kind of share in the lyric
writing?
J: Well, it’s interesting. So the last record, I think I wrote all of the lyrics, and our first
album, I wrote all of the lyrics. This time around, it’s pretty well split. I probably have written
most of the lyrics on this album, but TD Towers (the bass player and singer) has really stepped
up in his role as a vocalist on this album, and also as in his role as a principal songwriter and
lyricist on this album. Where in the past, I sort of had the seeds of the ideas even if they were
collaborative band efforts. Like, I would have the initial concepts that we started building from.
This time around there have been multiple band members with the seed concepts for songs. And
I think especially TD Towers (or TD Ben Ben Towers, whatever he’s going by these days. He’s
he’s my childhood bestie, Ben. So he’s Ben to me, but for whatever reason, in Edensong, he’s
always been TD Towers). For sure. Because yeah. But, yeah, he’s really stepped up his songwriting role on this album, which has been cool. It really brings a bit of a duality in the the lyrics on this record because he’s got a very different style than I do.
L: In terms of those seeds, concepts, and thematics of your lyrics, what kinds of things
are you playing with? I had seen a decade-old interview where you were talking about how much
you appreciate religious imagery and mythology, is that still something you think about when
you put words to this?
J: Certainly. The most overtly religious themed record was the first one, The Fruit Fallen,
and there was a lot of thinking about religions and the sort of shortcomings of religious thought.
That was definitely a preoccupation of mine lyrically early on when I was writing that record. “Years in the Garden of Years” doesn’t deal so much with that stuff. But I feel like it probably does to some degree, you know. I’m still interested in grandiose concepts, I guess. And that, I feel like, might find its way subtly into stuff that we do. Like, the lyric video for our song “Hall of Statues” looks like the inside of a church. You know? So in in subtle ways like that it gets included, but it’s not really a conscious thing on this record.
L: And, like so in terms of, like, shifting thematics and concepts and things, what, what
would you say, like, are the things that this album plays a lot more with that maybe hadn’t been
touched before?
J: It’s a very personal record to some extent, counter to the ways that “Years in the
Garden of Years” was very conceptually driven. This one’s a lot more thinking about my own
relationship to making art and the – not to sound too bleak about it – but the futility of it all.
Like, really trying to be introspective about why I’m doing this and just recognizing the the
enormous amount of effort that that goes into crafting something worthwhile and into making
something that feels meaningful, and the complete lack of practicality in that. I feel like it really
examines the sacrifices necessary to do something that feels so essential. And there are three
main pieces that are related to this concept, “The Illusion of Permanence”, “Hall of Statues” –
which basically deals directly with what I just discussed – and then “Our Road to Dust”, which is
sort of more collectively about the band and this brotherhood that we’ve built from this music.
L: In terms of linguistic form and syntax, was there something that introduced you to the
art of writing for words? For example, are you someone who is familiar with the poetic form, or
was your introduction to lyrical verse from writing lyrics?
J: Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, I think we learned a little bit of, poetic form back in, you
know, high school and stuff, but, yeah, that hasn’t stuck with me. I don’t think too much about it.
I’m not very concise in my lyrics. They’re often rambling. There are a lot of words to say, which
I’m realizing as a singer, is challenging. I always start with an idea that I wanna express. It’s
never stringing together words that I think sound nice together, and I know that there are some
lyricists who work from the sounds of the words and will sing a phrase to let that inform what
the words should be. I sort of just retrofit those words into the song. I shoehorn in a lot of words
so to get a lot of interesting phrasing. I think I’ve always written in rhymes, and I do strive to get
these, like, internal rhyming patterns. So, like, in, “Our Road to Dust,” I feel that it has a lot of
that stuff. And there’s a lot of continued phrase where the end of one line might be the first word
for the next line. So, if you like if you’re following along on a lyric sheet, you know, there’s some
continuity there.
L: Your music sounds a lot like your lyrics in that way, the shoehorning of sound and
such. I’m sure you don’t make conscious decision to do it, but you have so much happening in
your songs at all times, especially on your last record. As we talked about, there’s the acoustic
elements, you have the rock elements, you have the flutes and the more orchestral stuff
happening, but how do you balance all the different sounds and things you want to do?
J: That’s an interesting question, and, I think we had a lot of time to expand on all of our
tonal possibilities on the last record we made. I mean, we pretty much threw it all out there. This was more of a minimalist approach. It was more about taking layers away. I mean, we just lost the keyboards entirely when the keyboardist left and we did not replace that sound, and that was a conscious decision. Working within a reduced tonal palette helped that, and really helped to make the arrangements more thoughtful in a way because we could sort of sculpt out of the elements that we still have there. Does that does that answer the question at all?
L: Yeah, absolutely. There was a lot happening in some of your prior songs, like “Cold City” from your last album is insane. There’s so much happening, and it just goes up and down in terms of the layers of noise. I just found myself wondering that if you were to put it on a
spreadsheet of sorts and layer it down, how do you put together something like this? And put this
sound there and this sound over here and, like, where are the layers of tonality? And so that I
would say that answers my question pretty well.
J: Years in the Garden of Years was a truly maximalist album. There was certainly no one
telling us we couldn’t do something, and at the time, that’s what I wanted to do. This was my
prog opus, and I wanted to go down any tonal rabbit hole and embrace every tone
experimentation we could get to. And, you know, that was that record. And this feels – while by
no means minimalist – it’s a very thoughtfully stripped down, distillation of the Edensong sound based on knowing what we could accomplish with that last record, and then sort of distilling it
into this newer project.
L: I know you said this is the new one’s a much more stripped down version of what the
last one was, but is there any kind of nuance, influence, or layer that is in the new one that fans
might not have heard in the older albums?
J: I think it’s both our heaviest record and also our most truly acoustic. I mean, it opens
with a completely folk acoustic guitar introduction. In the middle of it, there’s a piece that’s
entirely flutes based on the same sonic and thematic material, and that stuff has no place in the
world of rock music, but here it is, you know, on this record. So I think that that already makes it
a little strange for a rock album. I also think there are certain songs on it, like “These Old
Wounds” and “Illusion of Permanence” that are more heavy than we’ve ever been before and,
really push the boundaries on that.
L: How do you perform all of that live? Because you only have so many members, and
yet you have so many sounds and things happening all at once. Most of the shows I cover and
attend – either personally or for ZRockR – are usually straight up metal or rock bands. Everyone
has their instrument and they play it. What’s the process of swapping instruments and rotating
roles and playing these massive songs like?
J: So this is something that we’ve done a lot of soul searching about recently, because
originally I didn’t wanna do any playing. I didn’t wanna perform live, not necessarily because I
didn’t want to just because I knew the amount of, effort it took to getting back into performable
shape. And I wanted to just put this out there as a studio work and move on to the next thing
because it better fit our our lives. But the rest of the guys in the band really want to perform live,
and in retrospect, it’s something that I also have really missed, but we wanted to do it in a way
that felt very organic to the four of us. And in the past, what we have done to support these wild
soundscapes (that aren’t really attainable fully live) is we brought a lot of equipment on the road.
We had a custom monitoring system, and a system for triggering, background layers and stuff
like that. So you get the full sonic experience of the album in a live setting. I mean, you know,
most of it was played live, but with supportive elements to try and get the the full palette. It was
very important to us this time around to have it feel more like a chamber group, more like the
four of us. And if there was a sound that we could not make in the room live and spontaneously,
it had no place there on stage. It’s very important for us to strip away all of the extra layers.
Inevitably, there will be certain songs in our set that we can’t play in their current form, just
because they lose a little bit. But I’ve been so thrilled at how the new material is translating to the
stage through some just slight rearrangements.There aren’t a ton of changes that we need to
make. But I four instruments, I feel like, is really all we need. I feel like that’s, at at a certain
point, there’s a lot of stuff that just winds up as sonic soup.
L: Finally, on the topic of live performance, is there anything else that we can expect
from you guys other than your newest album? Any performances or tours, or is that still a work
in progress?
J: We would love to line that up, yeah. I’ve purposely kept our engagements pretty light,
just because we’re just sort of dipping a toe back into releasing new music and getting back out
there. But we, thus far, have really been loving playing together and loving the live element especially. So that’s where my heart is right now, trying to line up some more shows and do some more short tours, and maybe hit some places that we’ve never been to before, and try to connect with new audiences. So we would love to do that, but it’s just a work in progress right now.
Edensong’s record, “Our Road to Dust” is out now and available on all streaming
platforms, and for purchase on Bandcamp.
PHOTO CREDITS: Promo Photos of Edensong taken by Kelly Robertson and live photo of Edensong onstage taken by Daniel Risdon courtesy of Earsplit Compound- Edensong Logo also courtesy Earsplit Compound – Used with Permission- All Rights Reserved