Exclusive Interview: Jean-Paul Gaster from Clutch

Here's an exclusive interview with Jean-Paul Gaster of Clutch! Mike C got to talk to him about touring with Mastodon this year, the formation of the band, his drumming inspirations, words of wisdom for upcoming musicians, and more!

Below the excerpts is the full audio version.

On touring with Mastodon on the Missing Link Tour:

"Very Exciting, we are big fans of that band and we're looking forward to watching those guys play every night. I bet [collaborations] will happen at least a couple times on this tour. We did a festival with those guys in Australia last called soundwave and Neil did that song (Blood and Thunder) maybe three or four times during that."

On what inspired him to start drumming:

"My earliest memories of watching drummers was on public television. My father was a big advocate of stations like channel 26 and channel 32, mostly because he did not care for sitcoms at the time... And from that I remember seeing, firstly, the Buddy Rich Big band. I remember watching him on TV, and just being blown away by this guys super human strength, it was amazing to me. At that time I wasn't playing drums but the sound that was coming of the drums was really impressive. Then shortly after that I remember seeing Tony Williams on a similar program, and again just really knocking me out with his beautify playing and his technical ability... And shortly after that I got into Rock N Roll, and probably the most influential drummer in my first year or two of playing was Bill Ward from Black Sabbath..."

On the upcoming album:

"We are in the very final mixing stages of a brand new album... We're proud of this record, it does have a lot of stuff in common with Earth Rocker. A lot of the tunes are upbeat, and they all kind of fall in that same vein. I think we learned a lot about playing that style on the Earth Rocker tour. Previous to that, we used to have one or two fast songs on our album, but Earth Rocker was sort of consistantly upbeat all the way through. Consequently, I think that a lot of the new songs fall into that sort of mindset, but I think there are some things that we didn't do on Earth Rocker. There's some more funk based things, some blues based things that will give the album more diversity than Earth Rocker."

Posted in: Interviews, Metal, WSOU Exclusive