Black Tongue Reverend – Interview – Thanks for Asking

Black Tongue Reverend – Interview – Thanks for Asking – by Liam Sweeny.

We reached out to Eric Tulip, bassist and lead vocalist for Black Tongue Reverend. These are our sentiments.

RRX: Love is a big part of music. We’re talking first loves here. Lots of cool stories about first loves and the things we do for those loves. Can you (or, in the case of a band, one member) talk about your first love, especially if you did something cool to express it?

I’m not a very romantic guy, much to my wife’s annoyance. I did propose in Rome on the Spanish steps at sunset though…

RRX: One of the coolest things about music is that there’s a whole landscape of sound that interflows with the beats, harmonies, and melodies. Can you imagine the best background noise to play one of your songs over? Can you describe it for us?

That’s a tough question, maybe an old western movie. I feel like John Wayne saying tough guy stuff would work well.

RRX: My singer punched my drummer out. Memorable moment, though nothing to brag about. But we have these things that, when summing up the band, an incident comes to mind. What do you got?

We showed up to a gig to find the street that the venue was on was blocked off by the cops. Turns out somebody got stabbed just outside the place we were playing. The cops got things cleaned up and sorted out and we were able to load in. Then the sound guy/promoter’s mixer was broken. So we shared the other band’s bass amp, and we ended up jerry-rigging the vocals with some janky adapters through my bass head and into some passive PA speakers. I sing through one of those metal Elvis-style mics, and every time my lips touched the mic I got electrocuted. I think the show started an hour and a half late, and things got pretty heated between myself and the sound guy at one point over several things. All the tension and anger actually led to us playing a pretty great set in the end, and I did end up patching things up with the sound guy a couple days later.

RRX: It’s a lot of fun living in the present, but we all collect memories and give birth to dreams. We’re talking dreams here. Where you see yourself next year? In the next five years?

In the near term it’s all about having fun and continuing to do what we’ve been doing, writing music and playing shows and enjoying the reactions that we get from people, just hopefully on an incrementally larger scale as time goes on. We’ve made a lot of great friends in the 518 music community since we started this a couple years ago and we’re eternally grateful for the continued support we get from everyone. The depth and variety of talent in the 518 never ceases to surprise us, so we feel really lucky to have done as well as we have up to this point. At some point in the next 5 years I think we would really love to have the opportunity to play with some of the artists that have inspired us and influenced our music, bands like Clutch, Red Fang, All Them Witches, or The Sword (fingers crossed that they get back together…)

RRX: What historical era would you like to visit if the sole purpose was to put together a Battle of the Bands? How would you set it up?

The 70s. I’d love to see Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Stevie Ray and Rory Gallagher all battle it out.

RRX: Every band has a song that they really thought was going to blow up, but it didn’t. What was that song for you? Did you have a song blow up that you didn’t expect?

Judging by Spotify metrics, I’ll say Chewing Stones off our first EP Northern Burden is an underrated song. We wish that whole EP would have been recorded and mixed better but we do all our recording ourselves and we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time. It’s still one of our favorites to play live, and I think it’s one of the most dynamic and interesting songs we’ve written, but it’s the least listened to on that release. Even less than Double Vision, which is a song all three of us agree sucks and we’ve never played live. As for the second part, the reaction to our LP All Of Them Have Fangs really took us by surprise, we had no idea that whole record was going to do as well as it did. I never imagined I was going to be shipping CDs to places like Abu Dhabi and New Zealand and the Czech Republic. Whoever paid those outrageous international shipping fees, you are insane and we love you.

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