I recently had the opportunity to talk with Oliver Philipps, the singer/guitarist/keyboardist of prog rock veterans Everon. Their new album, Shells, releases February 28th, and is their first in 17 years. Here’s what he had to say:
Matt: Hey, how’s it going?
Oliver: Good, how are you?
M: Good… I sort of came out of retirement for this, actually. I haven’t reviewed anything for these guys in a year or two, but I’ve been listening to Everon for 20 years or something.
O: Really?
M: Yeah, so I said, “somebody here has to cover this.”
O: But you look relatively young, from what I can see on this tiny screen. You were an early bird, for progressive rock.
M: Well, this was around when Flesh came out, maybe. We actually talked a bit on the old band forum, I was just some annoying teenager… I was asking you about songwriting at the time, and you said, “just do it in your brain, write it in 20 minutes…”
O: That’s true, it’s still what I do actually.
M: I don’t think that’s a normal ability.
O: Oh, ask Devin Townsend about it, he can do that every day and make five albums a year. Frankly, I believe that is the normal thing to do. I just think it is a mindset, and by the time you discover how it works, I actually think this is the natural way of composing. I don’t think that any of the Beethovens of the world, or whatever… They didn’t read any of the books that people wrote about them, right? Where it explains all their composition techniques, and all this stuff. Because frankly, I don’t think they had one.
M: That’s a good position to be in. For me, I’m happy with the results, but it’s still a grueling, months-long process.
O: Maybe you don’t trust yourself. I think that’s often where it goes wrong. I’ve been there myself, it’s not like it always works that way. But I learned that the less I put my brain into it, the better it seems to work. I believe that for the creative part – not the arranging and production, that takes tons of time – but for the actual song ideas, I think you have to let it happen and trust it, because sometimes you may not understand what it is. Don’t second guess yourself, just run with it, and at some point it will fall into place. The thoughts that are good to get out of your head are the expectations of what it is supposed to sound like, or what audience it’s supposed to appeal to. All these things just put you on the wrong track. Just see what comes out naturally, because that is your own voice. Nobody else is entitled to an opinion about it. Of course they all have opinions, but you shouldn’t bother. In the process, I believe you should let nothing between your inspiration and what you’re doing. Not even bandmates or anything. They’re not in your head. Afterwards, you can debate over everything, but I personally prefer not to show or present any idea before I’ve finished it the way I think it should be. Maybe it doesn’t work that way for everybody, but for me that’s how it goes.
Also, with this album, I wrote all the music in less than three months. I had nothing, no music collected. I had no intention to make an Everon album, so before signing a deal for it, I didn’t even think about it. And by the time I set my mind on it, it came like a charm, actually. I cannot explain how it goes, but it happens. And I think my part in this is to let it happen… To not get in the way and ruin it.
M: So with this album, you didn’t have any goals or preconceptions of what it should sound like compared to the old ones…
O: I haven’t heard any of the old ones, I have no idea. Before I agreed we should make an album, I had been thinking a bit… I wasn’t sure if I would be able to come up with anything that would sound like Everon. In all these years, I’ve made tons of songs, but nothing that was in this genre of music. So I didn’t know if what would come up would fit an Everon album. But I just jumped in at the deep end, let’s say, and it kind of worked. I don’t even know… does it sound similar to Everon albums before now? I have no opinion there.
M: It’s always going to sound somewhat like you, right? Whether you like it or not.
O: I guess so, in one way or another, but I had no intention that it should sound like a continuation of anything.
M: It definitely has a bigger mix, at least. More modern. I like it. I would definitely place this in the top two or three Everon albums, I think, based on the listens I’ve had.
O: What would be your number one?
M: Probably either Fantasma or Flesh.
O: Okay.
M: But there’s so many faces to it, right… Even within the same album, there’s three or four different kinds of song. So with all this diversity in the tracks… Who is the most likely Everon fan?
O: Maybe that’s why we don’t have so many, because it’s confusing people! I never had any intention of fitting a musical genre or anything. Honestly, I’m not making this up, before we signed a deal with a progressive rock label back then, I didn’t even know the term. It’s all just music, one song is as good as the other. There can be heavy things, small weird things, it can be a ten-minute piece, it doesn’t matter. I learned to embrace progressive rock as a term, in the sense that it apparently allows me to do whatever comes up, and nobody complains because “it’s progressive, you can do that.” Also, if I think about music that I like, it’s things from all different genres.
M: It sounds likely that you had at least heard Duke, or you know, 80s Genesis albums at that point, right?
O: I had, when I was a kid… I don’t even know which Genesis albums, but I had a five year older brother. I remember that at some point, I also had a bunch of cassette tapes that I found interesting. I was maybe ten, eleven or something, and I played many of them not even knowing what I was listening to. I don’t know if I’d be able to remember a song off that album, but I’m sure there’s songs on there that I’ve heard.
M: What’s your relationship to metal music, in particular? It sounds like you must listen to some, but it’s rare that a song is heavy the entire way through for you.
O: I’ve been producing a lot of heavy music. As a producer, most of the bands I work with are metal bands, a lot of symphonic metal, and I like doing that very much. I also had, I think when I was fourteen or fifteen – you know at that age, things change quickly – I had a time where I listened to stuff like Genesis and Saga, and then it was a year or two with just metal, and then it was fusion jazz… Could be whatever comes in. So I had a short metal period, but I have no particular relation to the metal genre. I do like heavy guitars. This is the element that I really like from it. I’m not a big fan of fast double bass drums or funny metal screams, though as a singer I’ve been guilty of trying some, which I’m terribly embarrassed with…! But in general, I find much of the singing in metal kind of over-acted. I prefer singing that is more raw or touching, although there are exceptions. But the element I like most is heavy guitars. And not even for fast riffing or anything, but I just like the epicness they bring. It’s a very powerful tool in an arrangement when you can throw in the super low-tuned heavy, fat guitars, I love that.
M: Do you have any favorite musicians right now, in any genre of music?
O: There’s so many, you find awesome musicians in all sorts of music… You’d really have to go by instrument or by genre or something, it wouldn’t be fair to just mention a few. I can think of musicians that have been super influential in my formative years… For guitar playing, I would have to think of somebody like Steve Lukather or Gary Moore. Those were kind of my role models for guitar tone. What appealed to me the most was not the fast stuff, but getting this beautiful tone. With drummers, it would be guys like Neil Peart or Manu Katché… Totally different style, but awesome musician. When you think of keyboards, mainly piano players, you cannot get past Billy Joel, or even Elton John, or later Tori Amos, the people that really defined how to play a piano in rock or pop music. Also, I’ve had the occasion to work with a lot of wonderful musicians myself over the years. You know, I do a lot myself, I play a lot of instruments, but for everything I’m doing, I’ve met others who are doing at least one of these things much better than I do. You learn a bit from everybody. Much of what I do, I really learned in the years after starting to be a producer, just working with a lot of other musicians. Most bands, you will have one guy or so who has something really “wow,” and then by working together… I hope they learn something from me, but it also goes the other direction. That just makes your toolkit bigger, and I appreciate that.
M: So your production career… I’ll hear an album sometimes and think “you know, that kinda sounds like Everon,” and then I’ll find out you did string arrangements on it or something. You’ve been doing consistent, full-time music work for the last however many years, right?
O: Yes, I have. I have never had a proper job in my entire life. So for some people, this has been presented as a comeback thing, but it doesn’t feel like that for me at all. Just, instead of working on somebody else’s album or writing film music or whatever, I’ve been working on an Everon album. But in a way, it’s my regular line of work, with the difference that here I’m of course doing entire compositions… The biggest difference is actually that I have to sing. That is the thing I normally avoid.
M: Is it working well for you though, compared to an office job?
O: Yeah, I’m not complaining. Of course, speaking financially or security-wise, I can guarantee you there’s more reasonable careers to put on than this one, but of course it also comes with privileges. So far, I’ve managed to make a living out of something I really love doing, so it doesn’t really feel like work. Of course, in production work there’s also things that are not fun. If you sit there for five days editing drums or vocals or whatever, that is just stuff that has to be done that comes with it. But for the most part it’s something I really enjoy doing. I also enjoy that it gave me the opportunity to explore a lot of different genres. It’s very inspiring to work with other artists that can bring their vision of things. They invite me to collaborate, and I love doing that.
M: Not a lot of people can claim to have succeeded at that.
O: Ehhh, succeeded, haha. Some say so. Something I’m terribly bad at is all the networking and things like that.
M: You’re a social media skeptic, right?
O: Ah, skeptic is the least you could say. Now I have to kind of do it, because Mascot Records convinced me it has to be done, but we have somebody at the record company helping with that. So I try my best to interact with people there, but I would never do that on my own initiative. For me this is really strange things in a strange land.
M: They tell you you have to put out five memes per day or something like that…
O: Sometimes I work with much younger artists, like recently two different ones from Berlin. Kind of an urban music scene, totally different stuff… One of them was using the same mix engineer that we used for the album, and this is how the connection came. They wanted some acoustic versions of songs, and asked Tom if he knew somebody who could do piano and strings, whatever. These young kids, they don’t even do music videos anymore. Music videos are out, and now you just do 30-second Tiktoks. Ok? I don’t know what will be ten years from now…
M: Maybe ten-second Tiktoks.
O: But yeah, if you think commercially, you have to kind of count that in. You have to make your point in 30 seconds, and the rest is just like, keep it rolling a bit, which is not exactly my approach to music.
M: Being asked to make a Tiktok, my soul would crumble…
O: No, I refuse that. I told the label right away, ok, we can do Facebook, and they convinced me to do Instagram, but I told them Tiktok is the limit. And they were fine with that.
M: So you’ve been working this whole time, it’s not that much of a change for you… What was the motivation, in this case, to make an album again? Is it a compulsion of sorts? Was it just convenient?
O: It came out of coincidence. I was in touch with the owner of Mascot Records after many years, about something totally else, and I really just made the joke that we still had an option in our record contract from 10-15 years ago. I didn’t mean it seriously, but I said “if you’re silly enough to take the option, maybe I’m silly enough to think of a record,” and he jumped on it right away. I thought he was just joking too, but he said “why don’t you think about it, I think that could be really interesting.” My thought was always that it would be interesting to absolutely nobody. So it’s not that I thought much about making an album or not with Everon… I was just convinced that nobody would care. It’s not like we were Iron Maiden or something.
M: When you posted that first single, a lot of people were very touched by it.
O: But nobody was more surprised than I was! I was happy with how the songwriting had gone, and how the album turned out, so I was feeling a sense of accomplishment that I didn’t make an idiot of myself here. But I was genuinely afraid that Mascot was sinking its money, investing in this production. Most of all, on their behalf, I was hoping that it would generate at least some decent kind of interest, but I didn’t expect much. So anything above complete indifference is already a positive surprise, and I was kind of shocked how many people reacted, and it sounded like it would really mean something to them. I wasn’t aware there were people missing us, actually.
M: This was the strangest album announcement… The last thing I ever expected to hear. But suddenly, wow, it’s like it’s the 2000s again.
O: Yeah, but also, you know the band never retired officially. We never talked about retiring… We just didn’t make an album. I didn’t think there was much point to it, and I kind of enjoyed all these other things I was doing… There was no space in my head for it. I got a bit of the taste back for doing albums of my own in 2015. I had a project then named Phantasma, with Georg Neuhauser (the singer of Serenity) and Charlotte Wessels from Delain. We wrote the music together, and I kind of liked that. I thought maybe it would be nice to make an album again, with just my own music… But I really thought I had no platform, because I didn’t think there would be any interest. If I would have asked Mascot Records in 2015, maybe they would have been even happier, only making an album seven years later instead of 17 years. They never asked either, in my defense…
M: The rerecording of Flesh on this album is interesting… That’s probably one of the band’s most noteworthy songs, just about as close to a perfect song as you could ask for. What made you want to rerecord it?
O: Ugh, I was so unhappy with it! But I understand it was one of your favorites. That was entirely my initiative. It was explicitly meant to be a bonus track, so I didn’t suggest it until I had all the new songs written. This one never sat right with me. What you cannot know, is how often we tried to mix it. I think we mixed that song 20 or 30 times, and it never fell into place. And the reason for that is that I fucked it up in the arrangement. It was my first real shot at orchestra together with the sound of a metal or rock band.
M: You mean the notes, or the editing of the instruments?
O: The notes. Of course, in the years after, one of the things I did most was orchestra for metal bands, so then I really learned that craft, and everything I had done wrong. The way I had arranged it, there was no way the guitars and the orchestra would ever separate. So the keys on their own sounded marvelous. Understand, back then, we didn’t have these orchestra libraries, so that was all made with hardware samplers. Not all of it aged super well, but back then it was state-of-the-art, so that wasn’t the concern. It sounded great on its own. Then, I did all the guitars, and it also sounded great on its own. Then, put it all together, and you hear nothing! You could always hear the guitars and the orchestra fighting with each other everywhere. You can try to find some remedy with funny EQ settings or levels to get things to the front where you want them, but this is all like damage reduction. It just wasn’t a good arrangement. And becoming known for doing that kind of work, it bugged me to have a song out there that I stand responsible for, that falls short. So, if there was one thing that was a compulsion, it was that. For the rest, I am totally at peace with whatever we’ve done in the past. I’m sure there are things I would do differently now, or that were terrible, but it was all the best I could do at the time. I let go, and it’s finished. But that one bugged me, because I have a certain reputation for doing orchestra, and I didn’t like that there was something out there so terribly made. But I’m happy to hear that you liked it!
M: Terrible, you say… I understand, though, you don’t have any control over how you feel about the stuff you’ve done.
O: Of course not. Speaking as a professional, I know the mistakes I’ve made. I can hear where it goes wrong, I know exactly what I need to change.
M: It doesn’t help when people say “it’s good, it’s good,” either.
O: No, not at all. Also not when they say “it’s bad.” This is what I meant earlier. Whatever it is, once you release something, you have to live with peoples’ opinions. And they will always be controversial. You have guys that love what you do, you have guys that think it’s horrible, you have guys that think they know better… And you shouldn’t listen to any of that. It doesn’t help. You can only really follow your own vision and hope that it resonates with somebody, but don’t expect that it resonates with everybody. It makes you insecure, it makes you second guess yourself, and you’re trying to kind of please other people… It makes no sense. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take advice. That’s something different. When I’m not certain or something goes wrong, I have people who I know and trust, and whose opinion I value, because they understand what I’m looking for. But you cannot throw something out in public and then try to filter all the opinions coming in, because it just will not help.
M: How much control do you really have over your musical output anyway? You can steer the ship a little bit, but it’s hard to force any particular thing to happen.
O: You can… I’m not saying you should. I’ve been also doing quite a lot of what you call “production music,” that is, music for film or TV or commercials. And there, you have to cater to a particular expectation. This is a totally different mindset. You can always do that, this is craftsmanship. I’ve done that a lot, and it can actually be fun. But when it is about, like you say, really writing your own original stuff which is supposed to as honestly as possible represent who you are at that point in your life, then I think you have to be true to yourself and nobody else. Also, live with whatever comes out. Sometimes, something may come out which makes it feel weird. Like often with lyrics, most of that comes very intuitively… I put some time into getting the language good, kind of like a poem, whatever… But for the actual content, it happens more often than not that I have no idea what I’m writing about when I start. There’s single lines that come already while working on the music, and then later it’s connecting the dots until it forms a picture… And sometimes it forms a picture that is not a picture you like. But it is apparently something that relates to me at that point in my life, and I roll with it.
M: They sound like they’re about real things more often than not.
O: Many of them are. There are many where I could exactly tell you – which I of course wouldn’t – what it is about… But still, it sometimes expresses the way I feel about things clearer than I would verbalize it when talking about it. In a way, there are less limitations. There are normally things you would hold back, or thoughts you don’t even want to have. You kind of just let it come out, like therapy sessions or something, and then you look it and say “that’s not nice.” But this comes from your head, and you have to accept that.
M: So, going forward with the band – and you don’t have to answer if you don’t know or want to – but with the passing of Moschus [Everon’s drummer since 1989], that’s a pretty big part of the band’s identity, right? Do you still have plans for the future of Everon?
O: First of all, this is of course a big bummer for potential live activity. We were never the most busy live band, but we were thinking about it. Doing that without Moschus… Of course nothing is impossible, but it’s difficult to imagine. Besides being the drummer, he was also the technical genius, kind of the MacGyver of the band, so there’s more to replace than just a drummer. There’s also much more there to replace as a friend than a band member, which is something nobody can replace. I’m not saying we’re not going to make an album. With the way we work, I could probably find another drummer, like we did with Jason [Gianni, drummer on three songs on Shells]. I honestly don’t know. In a way, we just finished this album because of him, because he would have come haunting us from the grave if we didn’t. He had recorded most of his parts already, and he was probably the most enthusiastic guy about all of it. To him, it meant a lot. Throwing all that away and not releasing it was not an option. Let me put it this way… I have no intention that we should end it here. If there is interest in the album when it comes out, and if there are people that want more, I will definitely consider the option of doing another one. But first, let this one come out and see what happens.
M: Thanks for doing the interview.
O: It was my pleasure. Take care.
Thank you to Oliver for giving us some of his time.
Shells releases on 28 February 2025.
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