Allegaeon – interview met Greg Burgess (guitars)
Greg Burgess: “I wanted to hear aggressive music in my youth and you could not find it on our side of the world. With the internet I discovered European bands and Swedish Gothenburg sound was my thing”
De Amerikaanse technical progressive death metal band Allegaeon is actief sinds 2008, maar ze groeien en ontwikkelen zich nog steeds. Op hun zevende studioalbum ‘The Ossuary Lens’ hebben ze enkele verrassingen voor ons in petto. Leuke verrassingen die best wat ophef zullen maken. Stichtend lid en gitarist Greg Burgess is heel enthousiast om ons te woord te staan en maakt van zijn hart geen moordkuil als hij over zijn muzikale passie praat.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 30 april 2025
Allegaeon has been around for a while, but when you started the band, were you classical trained musicians?
I have a background in classical guitar, I have a degree. That was part of my plan, but I think I am the only one classically trained. Everybody was learning autodidact, but I think Michael (Stancel – guitarist – Vera) had jazz guitar lessons when he was a kid, for not very long, but I know he did extra lessons. I was in some local bands since I was a kid, but this is the first professional band.
Yes, it is quite a successful one, because how many times did you cross the ocean to Europe for touring until now?
I think we had been coming over for five times. We actually had a difficult time being over, but hopefully that will change here with the help of our new agency and I think we will be back this year hopefully.
Indeed, I hear from every European band that it is so difficult now to get the visas and that it is also much more expensive for a European band to make the trip to the US? Is it also that way the other way around, if you want to come to Europe or Australia or whatever?
Yes, with the present climate (laughs), I think it is getting worse for a good reason, but if you love it, you can find a way. We love playing in Europe. It is one of our favourite places to play. Obviously we like playing at home and all of North America, but Europe is really special for us, as we have a lot of influences that come from Europe. I know from myself, I feel very at home in Europe. I always feel like spoiled if we got this opportunity to come over there and we really cherish that.
When you start checking the album, the first striking point happens to be the return of your original singer Ezra Haynes. How did that happen?
Ezra and I kept in touch since his departure in 2015. His departure was like a necessary step forward for both of the band and himself, since he had some health problems that he needed get a handle on, so his leaving was not something that we ever wanted. It was just kind of like we were forced to make that decision and he has been healthy for a long while now, so our friendship was always there and even before he was in the band, I was kind of doing a little side project with him, because he is a really good friend and I like working with him. So when it came time that we needed a new singer, I think I called him and it was fifteen minutes and he was back, doing the next tour, which happened to be in Europe. By the time we hit Berlin by that run, we were like: ‘yes, this is where you really belong, you just should come back bro’ and he was very excited to do that, because he wasn’t given the opportunity to come back. It was just perfect and some things are just meant to be and it has been really a blessing to have him back with us.
He also sings clean now, that seems to be new…
We are all surprised, even him (chuckles). Riley (previous singer – Vera) is a very talented guy, his voice and what he is able to bring in metal, because he just has such a vast toolbox to draw from and I think that was a little bit overwhelming for Ezra to come back in. There are so many songs that we did with Riley and to me it was just: ‘hey man, I am not really concerned about it, we all have to work at our instrument, so that’s what you can do as well. When you are willing to work on your instrument, to me it is more important that you want to be here and you have a really good attitude and obviously a huge portion of the fan-base loves you already. So take it step by step, work on your craft and what he did with ‘Driftwood’, I think we were all astonished. Holy crap! It was a surprise to us and I think it was a surprise to him as well, because he really just rose the occasion. I couldn’t be more proud than being in a band with him.
The way of song-writing is always something special. For instance, for this album it took place during retreats. What can we imagine by that?
We call it writing’s retreats, because we all write songs by ourselves and then, when we go to this retreat, it is really cool to sort of just kind of shut out the world and all be together, since I live in Canada, our bass player lives in California, our drummer is in Boston. We are spread out over all North America, so it is really just a chance to hang out and go through all the songs together and find out what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, we can make songs better and just having perspective. We do that as a group and just make the songs better and figure out… usually at these writing retreats we figure out how the album is going to flow. We pick out the track order long before we hit the studio. Just to know how the album is going to be when listening to it. It is a relatively new thing, because the first time that we really did it was on the last album. People really enjoyed it, so we should keep it around.
You live in Canada now?
Yes, I have been living here for five years. My wife is Canadian, during the pandemic they shut the borders and I actually got trapped here, ending up spending a long time. It was supposed to be a quick visit but it was just great. We had such a good time. Well, bad things happened of course as well, being away from home. When I returned back to Colorado in the States, it was just… it was time to move. By that time, we had a border thing where you could only cross into Canada if it was for family reunification. Me and my wife had been talking about getting married for a while, so we thought: ‘Now is the perfect time’ (chuckles) or we could not see each other anymore. They forced us, but it has been great. It has been really nice.
That’s a good reason. The album is not a concept album, but in the lyrics there should be an over coupling theme such as different approaches to death….
That is rather a question posted to Ezra actually, I’ll tell you what I know. When we were searching for a title for the album, he just went through the lyrics and found out that a lot of the lyrics had to do with death. We still have some of our scientific lyrics, this is the Allegaeon brand, kind of what we have done throughout a lot of our career is singing about science, but on our last album we make a little departure from that and started to be a little bit more introspective. So in this album there is a lot of introspective stuff. It was like a third person viewpoint of specific things that had to do with death. It seems to be an over-aching theme, although they are not connected in a way.
In the song ‘Dark Matter Dynamics’ we have a guest called Adrian Bellue. Who is that?
I wouldn’t say we have known each other for a long time and we met during my classical guitar background. When I was in university, I also played a lot of steel guitar fingers stuff. When I saw Adrian play, I was drawn to his playing obviously. I think I found him on Instagram and he actually turned out to be a huge metalhead that loves the band. So we just had this mutual admiration for each other’s music. I think he somewhat mentioned that during our collaboration. That song is supposed to be a kind of duet between myself and Adrian, but then the writing took us into a piece with the whole group, which I am really proud of and the way it came together is ace.
Another song that stands out, at least for me, is ‘Wake Circling Above’. It illustrates that you are able to create slower songs as well…
Yes, it was really funny. Ezra said: ‘can we make like a kind of really slow, heavy, like almost ballady tune?’ and Michael ran with that. It was really crazy. I think he wrote the song within an hour. I guess he just needed a key phrase for something and it set Michael off. It is a really catchy song and Michael does the clean vocal for that song, so I think it really showcases his new grand vocal talent that we had to utilize in our live shows as well, doing some clean vocals. Just another weapon in the arsenal for us to draw on.
Indeed, it is mentioned that Michael and Brandon do some vocals…
Brandon Michael does a lot of vocals, one of his side jobs that he is in is a kind of cover band, they play a lot of top 40 stuff, so he is always singing harmonies and stuff which is on the radio here or in the States, he just has a natural gift for that. So live they all do the vocal harmonies together and it is really neat, because not a lot of times in death metal, we get to think about vocal harmonies. It is such a great thing to spread your wings as musician a little bit.
It is always exciting that you can add something new as musician…
Yes, it definitely keeps things interesting and it opens up variety possibilities too.
What were those influences from Europe you were talking about in the beginning of our conversation?
The Gothenburg scene is really huge for me. When I was growing up, I was kind of really into the grunge scene, it was just that time and not what I particularly liked at that time. I was listening to a lot of throwback bands, but then the internet became a little bit more privileged and I found out In Flames and Soilwork and Scar Symmetry and Dimmu Borgir, Children Of Bodom, Old Man’s Child and all this European style of metal which was such a discovery, because at that time, metal in the States seemed to be dumped down quite a bit and there was just not what I wanted to hear at all. So when I discovered all this great music coming from Europe, it was such a life altering thing I would say (chuckles).
I can imagine… the US was more into nu metal and core…
Yeah during that time it was a lot of nu metal. Megadeth was bringing out ‘Risk’. There is nothing wrong with ‘Risk’, I like ‘Risk’, but it is not the Megadeth I want to hear at that age. I mean, I wanted to hear aggressive music and you could not find it on our side of the world.
There should be coming a lot of singles and video clips in the near future. Can you lift a tip of the veil?
Well, what you mentioned, ‘Wake Circling Above’, that will be coming out on the day of release and we are working on that presently and I think the next single that we will drop is the song and the video for the song ‘The Swarm’ which is very different than ‘Driftwood’. There’s no clean vocals and it is very different. The video is more on the comic side, we don’t take ourselves too seriously and just have a good time. Some people will hate it (laughs). There are a lot of metal bands who are very serious, in a leather jacket looking very mean. We did that on photos, because we generally hate photo shoots, but it is not a true representation of who we are. We love music and that is kind of our primary focus, but us as people, we joke around. We have a good time, it is just more honest for us. I think if we would try to be like bad-asses all the time, it would be ingenious. We have parts of that, but that is already represented in the music, but not us as people. So when we do the funny videos, at least to us, sense of humour changes comparably with where you are in the world, but it is just us being silly and us having a real good time.
The song before ‘The Swarm’, ‘Driftwood’ is rather creepy…
Actually that song ‘Driftwood’ is very special for us, because that was the first song that Brendan presented to the band when he was new. So this will be around when we released ‘Apoptosis’. When you have this new element that comes into the band, you sometimes are not used to their writing style and I guess we were not ready for that song yet. So when we were getting songs together for this new album, I remembered that song and I remembered that I wiped it. I did not know if it fit with our music, so when I asked him if he still had it, it was more like ‘maybe I can rearrange it, so it sounds a little bit more like Allegaeonesque’, but we did not really need to do that. It was already sounding like Allegaeon and he did a fantastic job. We really weren’t ready, I think our ears weren’t ready at that moment in our lives to really hear what he was giving. So my hats off to Brendan, it is a really incredible piece of music that I really enjoy playing, but it is very difficult! He did such a great job. Sometimes songs just need to marinade a little bit in our record cycle before we are ready.
What about the artwork? To be honest, I don’t see the link with the lyrics…
There was an original concept for what the album would be supposed to be and this concept was driven by Ezra, like what he imagined it is. We originally were working with Travis Smith, we used Travis for many albums, but he went through his schedule and couldn’t do it, so it came down on a wish list of who we liked to work with. I always have wanted to work with Seth of Septicflesh, I absolutely love his style. When it came to communicate with Seth, he just went through his filter and it is quite beautiful and very clean. I really love having a type of clean album cover. We haven’t had that for a while. It is really Seth kind of thing now, it was a loose idea but it is his interpretation of that original concept.
I see that you are going to do a long US tour for one month…
Yes, we are about to leave here. I actually leave in a week. I have to go to a teaching course down in the States before I have the tour. And hopefully we can tour in Europe again later this year.
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