From Netherworld to Memphis, Part One

Found this great article on Bryan Reesman's Blog. It's the first part of a David Bryan interview that talks about the composing he did for Netherworld, his Broadway and off-Broadway shows, and more.

Bon Jovi is going strong after more than 25 years. It’s great to have that longevity, isn’t it?
You kidding me? Jon’s cousin and I went to high school together, so in 10th grade when I was 16 I got my permit, and that’s when we drove over the bridge and joined the band, as they say. Just a little band from Jersey.

Speaking of people who were there at the start, do you guys ever stay in touch with Aldo Nova?
Yeah, he’ll be at the show tonight. Aldo’s a good guy. He was living in Ireland, but I think he’s back here now.

I went to the Memphis hundredth performance, and at the afterparty I mentioned the film Netherworld to you, and you seem surprised.
It’s bad.

A lot of the Full Moon stuff is a guilty pleasure for me.
It was bad, and it was supposed to be bad. You could see the flying hand of Satan coming in and see the strings on the hand a little bit, and it was pretty much a music video because I remember I had done that around 1990 when the band took a break. That’s when I was throwing everything up on the wall. I wanted to do a solo record, so I wrote songs on that, then I did an instrumental version of it. I tried to do soundtracks, and you have to start somewhere. There wasn’t the Internet at the time, so you had to live in California. I live in Jersey, and I didn’t want to move to California to do this. I like to do it, I thought I was good at it. I took classical piano for 15 years. You can play Beethoven and there’s no lyric, and you can have every emotion in the emotional palette, more because lyrics limit you. The emotion of happy and sad and getting happy and sad and being pensive and every word that is in the dictionary can be played out with music as an emotion, so that was such a huge instructional for me. When do a movie like that, you see someone getting scared or happy or whatever, when you look at what the emotion is you match the underscore, and in a musical you’re kind of doing the same thing except you’re matching the emotion with the song.

The full article can be found here.

~ Hath