Music Review and Interview with Lightbearer – The Elixir
As soon as the music and the lead vocal of this track get going, it’s almost impossible not to turn it up loud. The opening riff, the spoken word at the start, then the beat, and the lead singing vocal – all with just the right amount of polish, production wise – the music sounds great. The solo guitar comes in sooner than your average rock track, which is great, and the melody has a lot to love about it – although very classic sounding, not massively new, but addictive and comforting in a number of ways.
https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/elixir-reboot-feat.-claud/id1112636736
https://www.amazon.com/Elixir-Reboot-feat-Claud-Etienne/dp/B01FGEB0GC
The vocal performance is confident and smooth, with just enough of that rock edge to really keep you listening. It’s refreshing, actually, to hear the vocal and the guitar solo played all at one time, towards the end. Unusual, but great – good to keep listeners and potential fans on their toes, always keeping it interesting, always holding the attention. The track never gets boring or repetitive. If anything, it ends far too suddenly. There’s much more room for experimental or instrumental play. Perhaps even a bridge section; a change in melody, some vocal harmonies, or a chorus of additional sounds and voices.
The main riff, the one that opens up the track, is so simple, but really effective. This and the vocal performance work so well together – the simplicity makes all the strong points of the sound really shine brightly. There is no need for overbearing effects or distortion, the levels are kept simple, the song itself works hard, and the performances back it up brilliantly. It’s the kind of track where you can get lost in the story and the melody, or alternatively, you can let it play out in the background, and start to feel really good about the night or weekend ahead. It’s highly effective rock music.
By Rebecca Cullen
Exclusive Interview:
Exposed Vocals: So tell us your story. Where did you grow up? What made you decide to become an artist?
Craig Rossiter: I grew up in a small country town in the Australian “bush” called Boggabri. It was where Ben Lexcen grew up, the inventor of the wind keel that won the America’s Cup for Australia in 1983, and was a town of about 1,000 people. My father died when I was young and the isolation and the unexpressed grief of that period turned me deeply inward. My imagination was my way of expressing emotions that I could not otherwise express. Being creative was a means of survival and a way to add colour and novelty to a life that was not easy. Of course I believed I had to keep my art quite hidden. The town was quite conservative, and artistic expression was not something really respected or encouraged. Basically, if you did anything creative you ran the risk of being called queer and when I was growing up that was the worst insult you could get. Writing poetry, stories, and music was something I just did. They were singular pursuits and safe, but they also stirred a passion and fulfilled a yearning inside me. With my music, I would often wake up with songs in my head. Sometimes I even dreamed them in lucid states.
Exposed Vocals: How did you come up with that name? What was your inspiration behind it?
Craig Rossiter: The album is called The Chronicle of Sammy Whitebrow. I love the music of the 1970’s, particularly the symphonic rock and progressive rock of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Queen. It was the bold musical theatrics, often built around a concept, a theme, or story that attracted me to their works. The biggest inspiration for Sammy was Tommy by The Who. The idea of telling of a story through rock greatly appealed to me, and I suppose you could add Sargent Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band by The Beatles to that list of influences. When I was 20 I formed a band with friend but we never moved beyond jamming in our bedrooms. It was all fantasy, although we started writing a few songs. Our first was called I don’t have a car because I didn’t have one. One day I dreamt a series of names for possible albums like Iron in the Soul, The Songs of Mrs Huan Ti, and The Chronicle of Sammy Whitebrow. They just sounded cool and at the time I didn’t have the songs to put in the albums, but Sammy was always a concept of a rock musical (a rock operetta) about this guy Sammy Whitebrow. Only later, as I started to hear the songs in my head, did I decide it was to be based on this rather dark short story I had written about a man who had tried to commit suicide and ended up in hospital. The songs were about his journey and how he ended up at that dark night of his soul. The song, Son of Mine, came to me as I was walking through Centennial Park in Sydney. It was about a twenty-minute walk and by the time I got to the end of the park, I had the melody all sorted. It’s one of my favourite songs from the album and Elan Noelle who is the vocal artist living in the USA sings it beautifully. Jennifer Pederson, a musician from Canada, did an amazing job on helping me produce the backing track and also sings the interlude. The guitar is by Claud Etienne from Germany.
Exposed Vocals: What do you think about online music sharing? Do you ever give your music away for free? Why?
Craig Rossiter: I hope the world is moving towards sharing everything but it’s not going to happen over night and so much else has to change in us as humans before we get to a point where sharing can actually be the norm. There is 2,000 years of human existence that has been built around the concept of exclusive ownership, which is weird when you think about it because we are born into a world owning nothing and rely on others in those early days, our parents mainly, to share what they have so we can survive. Very quickly we are taught the idea of personal entitlement and ownership. We’ve been sold this idea of scarcity as a fundamental economic truth, and yet digital technologies, the internet and renewable energies like solar, show us the potential for a new world paradigm of abundance. I love the ideal (as opposed to idea) of sharing but unfortunately we still live in world where creating art costs money and costs time, and money in particular is something that is not sharable because it is the means of exchange and a measure of value. So while I believe in the possibilities of online sharing I also believe in the ideal of a fair exchange. Sharing doesn’t necessarily pay the bills in this world we have created and the current system is quite one-sided against the artist. The audience enjoys art but, perhaps because there is so much of it, they don’t always value it enough to pay for it, and the middle-men tend to take all the cash exchanged with those who do and they take very little of risk. What I love about the online space though is that the artist can go direct to audience, avoiding the middle-men, and the costs to do so are quite small. What used to happen is that an artist would have to win the support of a gatekeeper (a record company or a film distributor) in order to reach a market bigger than their family and friends. Now, through digital and the internet, there is the potential to reach the whole world through a variety of smaller gatekeepers or enablers.
Exposed Vocals: Since everyone was a start-up once, can you give any smaller or local bands or artists looking to get gigs and airplay some tips?
Craig Rossiter: : I’m still a start up so when I find the answers to successful marketing and promotion I will let you know. I started the idea of The Chronicle of Sammy Whitebrow 20-years ago and therefore my only tip is don’t wait. Dive in and see what happens and have the confidence and trust in yourself to handle whatever you find waiting for you in the unknown. You will never find success in the safety of your bedroom and you just don’t know who you are going to touch and inspire. I just pulled out some old poetry I wrote from 20 years and posted it on Facebook. A rugby playing friend of mine told me he started writing poetry because of what he read of mine. That would never have happened if I had kept it all to myself.
Exposed Vocals: Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?
Craig Rossiter: My inspiration usually comes from getting in touch with an emotion – either an emotion that I am currently feeling or that I want to feel. Inspiration is either found in my actual mood or my desired mood. Sometimes it’s also about what I want or need to say. There is a song I wrote called Delicious. I wrote it to help sell a TV series I am writing called Genie-licious. The script is about drag queens with super powers and people kept having problems with the pronunciation of the title. So I started thinking of an opening number that might be performed by drag queens in the pilot episode that would also create verbal clues as to how to pronounce the name of the title. One morning in the shower, I started singing the chorus and a couple of showers later, I had a song so that was inspired by a marketing problem I needed to solve.
Since I am not huge on technical talent of musical composition, I have to enrol others to help me with the “how” of bringing my musical vision to life. For The Chronicle of Sammy Whitebrow, I used three different composers I found on fiverr.com to help me create the backing track and then different vocal artists to sing the songs. One of my favourite artists is Elan Noelle. She has an amazing voice and in addition to the song Son of Mine which I mentioned earlier. I also got her to sing vocals on Delicious. She produced an incredible 8 vocal tracks for that song and I am hoping to work with her again on my next song, Rise Up (also to form part of the soundtrack to Genie-Licious TV series). My fiverr.com process is to record a draft melody track, write the lyrics, and also provide any other materials like guitar riffs, ideas for instrumentation, or chord progressions. I would then send them to my composers via a fiverr.com gig and they would work with me to deliver a finished backing track for the melody. It can be a frustrating process at times, but it’s worked so far for me, and nothing is ever finished. I’ve just finished working with the amazing guitar God, Claud Etienne from Germany, and we just completed a re-write of the song The Elixir and it rocks. The link to this new version on iTunes is below.
I’m now re-working the final song from Sammy Whitebrow with him called The Lament of the Broken Heart.
Exposed Vocals: Do you have a band website? What online platforms do you use to share your music?
Craig Rossiter: I use Distrokid so The Chronicle of Sammy Whitebrow is available on iTunes, Google play, Spotify, Deezer, Amazon. The album is also on Soundcloud (see Link below)
Exposed Vocals: If you were given half a million dollars and a year off, what would you do? How would you spend it?
Craig Rossiter: I would put a large down-payment on a house with half the money, live in it for the first six months and continuing working my day job. I’d put another $150,000 in some form of investment, like blue chip shares or a managed fund. I would use the remaining cash and the year off and travel the world. Of course the more romantic answer would be to produce art with all of the money, but I have had a couple of decades suffering for my art financially, betting it all on a dream, and coming away with nothing. In most cases, the only people who have benefited from those bets have been someone other than me. I’ve learnt that money is money and art is art, and while profit does follow passion, many artists (me included) have placed passion for their art on the top of their list of values and profit as some dirty word, often not on their list of values at all. I’m trying a more healthier tactic of learning to honour and respect money, so if ever I was to get a gift of a large pile of it, I would transform a healthy portion of into something that can hold value and residual income over time. The money that is left over after being responsible, I would then use to invest in myself, my passion and my art. In the travel scenario above, I would be using that time to write my music and my TV and film scripts. Travelling has always been a great inspiration for me, to get in the flow, and be exposed to new ideas. I’d definitely use that time abroad to visit some of the composers I have worked with through fiver.com in Canada, the USA, Germany and in Croatia but mostly I would suck up the world and channel it back out in my artistic mediums of choice.
Exposed Vocals: How do you find ways to promote your music? What works best for you?
Craig Rossiter: I haven’t actually started promoting my music yet. This interview is really the first. Distrokid has provided me with the platform and I have the music for sale on iTunes. What spare time I have at the moment is spent on creating and producing. I suppose I am falling into the trap of most artists and concentrating on the sausage rather than the sizzle. I actually teach marketing at university so I am not really practising what I preach but it’s the creation that satisfies me at the moment and that’s what is worth the time and the money.
Exposed Vocals: So, what’s next? Any new upcoming projects that you want to talk about?
Craig Rossiter: I am writing a bit of disco called Rise Up and I have Elan Noelle in mind to do the vocals on that one. It’s coming along great. I am about to lay down some vocals for a song I wrote for my mother’s 80th birthday and also a rugby anthem called The Game they Play in Heaven which I came up with while living in London. Two other songs are in the works and at the end of the year I want to start work on writing a rock musical based on the legend of King Arthur called Of Sword and Stone.
Exposed Vocals: If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?
Craig Rossiter: Complaining how I am not making music. I’d also be writing film and TV scripts.
Exposed Vocals: How do you juggle the rest of your responsibilities while trying to stay ahead in your music life?
Craig Rossiter: It’s very hard. My music is secondary to my work, but primary in my days off. This means that housework often takes a back seat and so does my social life. I can honestly say I don’t miss it though. Creating is such a wonderful companion.
Exposed Vocals: What should fans look forward to in 2016?
Craig Rossiter: At least five more singles and a short film or two.
