Brendon Small's career has taken him from music student and aspiring guitar hero to creator of some of the best animated comedies on TV. His first show, Home Movies, was part of the original lineup of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Although Brendon wrote the music for
Home Movies, he didn't find an outlet for his love of wicked guitar shredding until he created
Metalocalypse. Metalocalypse is the saga of Dethklok, the biggest and most brutal metal band in the world. When they're not fighting amongst themselves, the five members of Dethklok play absurd, elaborate concerts that usually result in death and carnage for the audience. Naturally, Brendon had to take this show on the road.
He put together an all-star metal lineup, with himself on guitar and doing the vocals of lead singer Nathan Explosion, to record full versions of songs like "
I Tamper with the Evidence at the Murder Site of Odin." Now Dethklok isn't just the world's most popular metal band on TV. Their latest album, The Dethalbum II, is the best-selling death metal record ever, and they've co-headlined a tour with
Mastodon.
Season 3 of Metalocalypse is currently airing on
Adult Swim, and Dethklok's song "Laser Cannon Deth Sentence" was just added to
Guitar Hero 5.
Jay Hathaway: How did you decide to get into TV instead of becoming a professional musician or joining a band?
Brendon Small: When I went through music school, I went to Berklee College of Music‚ I entered thinking I knew what I was doing or I knew what I wanted out of music school, and I left being very confused by what I wanted out of music. The music I cared about wasn't really being played. Guitar-driven music kind of wasn't cool anymore. In the meantime, I was being drawn toward this world of comedy, and I was hanging out with kids that were at Emerson College in Boston. Everything that they were doing sounded cooler, because you could still do music, you could score stuff, you could write it and you could act in it yourself. So, I think they had a better idea than what my music school was offering, which was basically, "Hey, here's a wedding gig. Learn some old standards and you might scrape by this month."
It wasn't a financial reason, it was because if I can do music and I can do all this other stuff, why wouldn't I do that? Also, somewhere in the middle of all of that, I interned at jingle houses in New York, where they do music for commercials and stuff like that. The musicians were the last people to have a say, creatively. You could come up with something great and have some dildo ad exec come in there and crush the whole thing. I thought, "Whatever I do, I don't want to be in post-production. I want to be in charge of the project." I was probably around 20 or 21 at the time.
JH: Do you find that it's easier to break into doing your own projects in music or in TV, in comedy?
BS: Well, first of all, to have a personality on the guitar is a very difficult thing. There are a handful of people, maybe seven people, where they play three notes and you go "Oh! That's Brian May from Queen," or "That's Jeff Beck," or whoever. But in comedy, your own personality and whatever makes you yourself, no one can actually compete with that. I just thought it made more sense to go with your personality first and add all of the other stuff later. People are looking for a person with a new comedic voice. Not a lot of people are looking for the next new guitar virtuoso. What would you rather hear: someone who's going to make you laugh, or the new guitar player who's going to break all the rules? Most people just want to laugh.
JH: Does that explain why Dethklok has outsold so many other metal bands? Because people just want to laugh?
BS: That may be part of the reason. The records, especially the second record, aren't necessarily funny records. I'm not going for jokes. There are a couple smart-ass and sarcastic things we do in there, but nothing too terribly funny. I think the reason is that it's got a TV show. That why it outsells other metal, because other metal doesn't have a TV show. I really believe that.
JH: When you were a kid, did you want to be in the biggest band in the world?
BS: When I was a kid ... for a while, I wanted to be a dentist. I thought it would be interesting to be a carpenter, for a while, and then I thought it would be interesting to be a toymaker. Then I thought it would be interesting to make monsters in movies. Then I discovered guitar, and thought it would be cool to be a guitarist. Then I went back to the dentist thing, and that's where I am now.
JH: That's your career aspiration at the moment?
BS: I am going to
DeVry.
JH: Wow, awesome.
BS: No, when I was 14 years old and I had a guitar, all I did was fantasize about being able to play like Eddie Van Halen or whatever. I didn't know that there was any reality attached to that. I knew that I could study guitar and trick people into letting me go and hang out with this guitar for a long time. Beyond that, I didn't know what the reality of putting a band together was. I was too naive.
JH: Have you run into any metal bands who don't get Metalocalypse or don't like it?
BS: No. I'm sure that there are plenty out there who think it's lame and horribly-written. I'm sure that there are people who don't get the joke, but I don't meet those guys. I think it's good that I don't. Why would we want to hang out with each other? Look at each other, have a weird, stilted conversation, get mad at each other.
JH: Yeah, for sure.
BS: Actually, now I want to do that. I want to have a fancy dinner with one of those guys who doesn't like the show. We'll probably end up going dutch, because they're not going to pick up the bill. I'm not going to pick up the bill. I mean, if they don't respect the show, why would I?
JH: You'd have no reason.
BS: No reason.
JH: Since one of the themes of the show is how bored and jaded the world's biggest celebrities are, what's your own attitude toward getting more well-known? Have you developed a casual disregard for human life?
BS: First of all, you have to understand I work in cartoons. I consider it to be pretend show business. My face isn't plastered everywhere, so I walk down the street and I'm not harmed by or accosted by people. Nobody gives me a better seat at a restaurant. At Starbucks, no one's like, "Hey man, this one's on me." I pay full price for things. Nobody bothers me. I like that I can walk past the line of people that are lining up to see the Dethklok show, and nobody stops their conversation or looks at me. Everything else is Internet bullshit, and that's all fake. That doesn't mean you're really popular. It means people have a lot of curiosity for stupid shit.
JH: I was just reading some of those sites, and people really get into the most minute bits of trivia about Metalocalypse. Did you see that coming at all when you started writing the show?
BS: No, I wasn't expecting that. I'm glad that people enjoy all that stuff, but it doesn't really affect what I end up doing too much. People try to make sense of a lot of the small things like, "Who are these characters all based on?" And the answer is, aside from the singer, nobody. They like to concoct all these thing themselves, but no one seems to be getting hurt, so let 'em do it.
JH: Including all the other voice acting that you've done outside of Metalocalypse, what's the toughest voice you've had to do?
BS: That's an interesting question, because voiceover is the easiest job in the world. The only time it's tough is when you have a director who's bad, who can't really get his point across, and uses absurd metaphors. "Ok, you just got back from Sunday School and you have a very vague notion about you, and you don't know whether you're excited or not. Go!" I've had a couple of bad direction sessions‚ I'm sure I've given them, as well. Doing voiceover is the easiest job in the world if you know how to read. Even if you don't know how to read, someone can tell you the words you should say. I had to create a TV show to get voiceover work, 'cause everyone else figured out it's the easiest thing in the world. I'll tell you the easiest job I ever did ...
JH: Okay.
BS: It was for the
Honda Fit campaign. I was like their voice for their car campaign, this big national ad thing. The guy who hired me was a super-nice guy who was a fan of the show, and hired me because of that. They put so many effects on my voice, there's no way you'd ever be able to tell it was me. They asked me to speak like Vicki from Small Wonder. Like a robot lady. [robot voice] But they asked. me. to. talk. like. this. [normal voice] I swear to God, that's exactly what I did. [robot voice] New. from. Honda. The. Honda. Fit. [normal voice] And that was it. The amount of money they pay for that kind of money is just stupid. It's like, the IRS is gonna come down on somebody here, 'cause this is bullshit. Sounding out words and saying them? Not too tough.
JH: What's the most brutal thing that you've done in your personal life?
BS: I know what the most brutal thing I've had to experience is, and that's taxes. I get the feeling of just flopping over and crying, you know? Taxes. Easy. Summer colds would be second. It's the little things.
JH: You're doing longer episodes for Season 3 of Metalocalypse. What was your plan for using the extra time?
BS: There's no one way to do that. If we have a story idea, we try to make it make sense within the thing. Sometimes concluding an episode is ... the Sopranos started doing it a lot time ago. They'd finish, they'd conclude, but they wouldn't totally bookend or stop. It would end in a precarious place. You don't need to know how it's going to finish in order for the episode to be done. You're going to assume that, yes, that thing's going to smash that guy and all those things are going to be released, you know? Aside from the last episode of last season, I think the audience knows what's going on. As far as what we use the time for, it's just trying to develop story. I think, past the first episode, you'll see that it's basically used for comedy.
That's what you're doing when you're working in TV, especially with half-hours. Just trying to make sure that you and the audience both know what your story's about. It's actually very tedious. What is this story about? What does this character want? Simple stuff they teach you in film school.
JH: Metalocalypse is nothing like your previous show, Home Movies. How did you decide to make something so completely different?
BS: Even if Home Movies was successful‚ we consider it a creative success, although it didn't get great numbers ‚ I don't understand why I would want to redo what I did already. Ultimately, I'm doing these weird, absurd little passion projects, and this one seems to have gotten popular. It's stuff that I care about, and if the audience likes it, hey, that's great, but ultimately it's for me. I understand that when networks put a lot of money behind something, they want to let everyone know that This is from the same guy that gave you That. That's fine, but I think it's more fun to be creative and do different stuff.
JH: What's your favorite Dethklok lyric? Is there a line you're particularly proud of writing?
BS: I honestly haven't been particularly proud of any of the lyrics I've written for Dethklok. But I do smirk every night when I sing the "
Fan Song" for the kids out there. It's just a direct insult, and they're singing along. I don't truly feel this way, but I think it's very funny to say this to them: "You're a bunch of banks that I'd like to rob / you're my online cash transaction / you're my future stocks." And there are other lyrics, like, "You punched and blinded eunuchs / living in chatrooms / you masturbate on the sheets / your mothers clean for you." I think that's fun. I don't necessarily mean any of that stuff, but I think it's funny to sing that to them, and have them sing it along with me, at the very end of of the night.
