Beyond The Eclipse With BILLY GOULD

Interview by Kris Peters
One of the most endearing aspects of music is its natural ability
to connect on so many levels. For the music lover one song can have
a profound effect on your mood or dictate your path to an extent,
but on the flip side, from a musician's perspective, music has so
much more to offer.
While many are content to stick to a limited scope in terms of
creative output, others need more plentiful and different outlets
to satiate their hunger.
Faith No More bass player Billy Gould is one such person.
Universally lauded and loved for his role in the band that has
helped shape the sonic direction of music on so many levels, Gould
also feels the pull of other sides of the musical landscape.
Desires that need to be fed but can't be satiated in a full band or
within hard rock/metal constraints.
These musical callings are far removed from the universal appeal
and acceptance afforded to Faith No More, but for Gould at least,
they are of equal, if not greater, importance.
He found that a number of years ago with the project Talking Book,
an outfit that relies more on musical textures and exploration to
paint an immersive sonic landscape more in touch with your inner
being than your impulsive urge to purge your sins.
Along with Talking Book bandmate Jared Blum, Gould is preparing to
release the soundtrack for The Eclipse on November 24, a film that
forced Gould to tap into a fresh side of his musical mentality and
express his creativity like never before.
HEAVY had the pleasure of talking with Billy Gould recently, and we
start by asking him how he is feeling on the cusp of the soundtrack
release.
"Good," he enthused. "We've never really worked on a full feature
film before like this. For the first time we didn't know if we were
doing it right (laughs), but it came out alright. The director was
really happy. I saw it on a big screen, and I was really happy with
the way it all came together. It was a little intimidating when we
first decided to take it on."
We ask how he came to be involved with the movie and director
Natasha Urban.
"I've known her for a decade and a half," he said. "She has made a
lot of other films that are interesting. She made a film in Nepal
following a young girl as she grew up in different stages of her
life and what happened with her family and I just kept in touch
with her. We had spoken earlier about Talking Book records and I
sent her a copy of that, and she liked them so she kind of knew the
stuff we did. She is really into visuals. Obviously, as a director
she is a visual person, and she sent me some photos when she was in
a place called The Valley Of The Moon in Uganda, and we almost used
that as a cover for an album back in 2011. So w kept in touch and
when she decided to do this film she said I was the first person
that she really wanted to do it. She knew the aesthetic that I take
into things like this, and we saw some clips from the film, and
they were very… evocative, with some stuff filmed in Super 8. Some
of it was very textured, some of it was very saturated and to me
her visuals are like what we do with sound, so I thought it would
be a good match."
In the full interview, Billy talks about the pressures of carrying
a whole soundtrack on their backs instead of contributing just one
song, the process of writing musical scores to a movie, creative
music with a cinematic feel to it, how different writing for a
movie is compared than with a band, how the writing process forced
him into a different headspace and how he coped with that, the
origins of Talking Book and future plans and more.