AE: Is this your first band ever?
O: This is my first band. I tooled around with musicians, but I was never formally trained. Equipment, timing, different time signatures, I didn’t know any of that stuff. I sat with musicians, learned a little bit by osmosis. It’s a completely different mental process from writing.
When I started the band I found a manager and I brought my books over, my journals and all my illustrations in this big pile. “This is what I want, I want to turn this into music”. And he looked at me and said “OK, let’s try it, let’s find some musicians.”

What we do is a little different, it’s not just your typical metal show. It’s not hair metal or glam or anything of that nature. It’s sort of a dissident cabaret, its theater and in the highest respect to someone like Antonin Artaud. It’s delivering the experience of the topic of the song versus just singing about it, we actually live every moment of the song onstage. Without fire or any sort of theatrics or anything. It’s all through the act of performance.

AE: How did Capitol [Records] find you guys?
O: We were doing local shows around LA and the buzz started and all of a sudden we start noticing suits in the corners watching us and on their phones and their little Blackberries. A friend of ours was our manager at the time and he started coming over and saying “Hey they want to showcase you.” It was a bunch of major labels which was really bizarre, because I never thought we’d get that.

AE: That’s exciting.
O: It was, it was really exciting to have that kind of recognition, especially for what we do. We’d only been a band about eight months by the time we got signed. It happened so quick. And Sharon Osbourne came with her son Jack to one of the shows, at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. Sure enough, right after the show, she came up and said “Hey, you guys are playing Ozzfest.” And she hugged me.

AE: What the hell was that like?
O: Yeah! You know what, Sharon’s great, man. She’s a really strong woman. And a lot of people give her a bad name, but that’s just typical for any woman that’s in power/charge. We said “Hey Sharon, we don’t have a record deal.” She said “I don’t care, make it happen.” I don’t know, the stars were in line or something for us that week. Not only did Sharon come out and offer us Ozzfest before we had a record deal, we had three showcases that same week. Capitol called us back for one more showcase, they said we’re gonna bring down somebody and we want you to do it one more time. And I said okay.