Project Description

Interview with

SKYND

Interview: Laura Hughes

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SKYND is no ordinary Industrial Gothic band. Their music is all about finding out how horrible humankind can be and putting those stories into songs for the world to hear. This band isn’t for the faint-hearted since true crime is their passion, and music just happens to be their creative outlet. Their music speaks volumes, and video clips visuals each story that is being told. We got a chance to delve underneath the surface of it all with SKYND, and learned more about the people behind the music. 

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What is your first memory of music?
Was my father singing lullabies to me when I go to sleep because I was afraid of sleeping alone. He was always singing music or lullabies to me. I wrote my first song when I was six, and it was about my grandfather’s death, because death and the bad stuff in the world always made me super creative, and that’s actually my first memory of making my own music.

So was that what influenced your music?
It did a bit, I just found out that I’m interested in death because of my imaginary friend. He showed me all the bad stuff in the world and he made me super interested in true crime. So when my grandfather died, he was like “oh look you should write about it, you should have to get it off your chest because it makes you feel better” and it did, and that’s why I started writing music about bad stuff so I can get it off my chest.

Have you always written about this stuff? Or has it evolved over the years into true crime?
Only true crime. Only death or true crime, that’s the only thing that makes me really creative. I think I can never write a song about love or being super happy, and going to parties, it just doesn’t make me creative. I mean if there are different artists that can write about it and it makes them happy, but I just cannot really get into that vibe.

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So your fascination with true crime stems from when you were younger?
Yeah, because of my imaginary friend, he came to me when I was three years old, and he whispered all these bad stories in my ear, that’s how I got interested, and he is still with me. He has been following my journey.

I read somewhere that’s where the name SKYND came from, am I correct?
Yeah, he introduced himself SKYND. So when you say SKYND, it’s like peeling off skin, and that was always the meaning. When I first met him he was a young boy, he was the same age as me, and when he got older his skin turned blue somehow, he looks sick sometimes because of his skin, and I think that was the name SKYND, like peeling off skin because my stories I read about go underneath your skin.

So each song is based on a person, how much research is done about them before you write a song about them?
It depends when I wrote Richard Ramirez for example, I know everything about him already, I didn’t have to do my research, I just knew that I wanted to write about him. But with Jim Jones, when we did the recordings, I had to do a bit more research because I was really happy with what I knew already, so I was listening to the audio tapes, and that was actually the trigger that made me creative. That was the part of the research that helped me get into the zone. I do a lot of research, to be honest, I want to know everything about the case because for me it’s really important to know all the facts, know all the details about it, because I think if you sing about you have to know what you’re singing about. So I do my research really well, and sometimes for a really long time, there were cases that I was researching for three-four months, just because I was so interested in, and I wanted to know all the details. It depends on the case and how much I know about the case already.

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Does it take a long time to perfect the songs? Or does it come more organically to you?
It depends if it’s organic or more of a research thing. It depends on the case.

What cases come more organically to you?
Richard Ramirez was one. Elisa Lam, because she was stuck in my head for a very long time and I wrote a lot about her in my diary. I was singing that for a really long time, and when I met Father, we were working on Elisa Lam, everything went so fast because everything was so organic, it just came out of me. I think that was the most organic writing I had.

How do you go about creating your music videos? Because they are really detailed.
For us, it’s really important to stay true to the facts, and stay true to the details. But with Jim Jones it was a bit of a different way of working because it’s such a brutal case, thousands of people died, three hundred children; and it was really hard to document that case because I was like no we can’t do that. I’m all about documenting cases, but Jim Jones is just a different case because of the kids. So I wanted more of an artsy feel, I want to speak in colours. When you watch Jim Jones there is red, white, and black. The red stands for the cyanide poisoning, the white is the all the victims who had to die or who got killed, or who are talked into suicide. The black is for the mass suicide and the crime itself. I tried to explain the story through a more artsy way, and I think we did pretty well.

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How do you manage to portray your onscreen persona into your live shows?
That’s actually a natural thing because that’s really who I am, it’s not like trying to be someone else. I mean SKYND is my alter-ego, SKYND is one hundred percent me, so I don’t have to practice that, it’s just me on stage.

How did you and father connect and write these songs together? Does he have much influence over the songwriting?
Yes, of course, we’re doing all of the songs together. He’s more the musical guy, he does all the instrumentals. I’m more the vocalist, I’m doing the vocal parts, and he is just creating the sound around SKYND. We’re a great team, we’re really really great, I’ve never worked with anyone as better as I have worked with him. We connected immediately when we met, and it was like a twin connection, and I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to me meeting him because he helped me get my music out there. I had all these song concepts of true crime stories, and he was the first one picking that idea off of me, he liked that, he likes true crime as well.

Has he helped you grow as a songwriter?
When we first met I was full of ideas, and I didn’t really found the way to get my lyrics and my vocal ideas into songs. He helped me create this music, and of course, I grew with him. I learn a lot from him, and he also learns a lot from me, I think that’s the twin flame connect thing. I can learn from him, he learns from me, we’re a great team together, we’re better together than alone.

I just want to touch on Jim Jones, which is about a religious cult leader, what made you go towards his case instead of others?
Why him I think that’s an easy answer, because of the mass suicide. There has never been any bigger mass suicide than what Jim Jones did with over nine hundred people. This case was especially fascinating because he manipulated people by being a religious leader or being in a religion. It’s really frightening how one man can easily manipulate people when it comes to religion, and that was really interesting to me because people who were following him, they ignored all of the facts and the contrary about who he truly was, because he was such a good actor, mind controller, and brainwasher. There was one example that kept me wondering, like he told all of his followers that you don’t need glasses to see, and all of the followers they listened to him, believing him to not wear glasses and at the end they ended up drinking flavoured cyanide, so that’s really interesting how one man can manipulate a whole group of people into suicide. He was the first one to introduce black people and white people into one church, so people looked up to him as a good man, when in fact he wasn’t.

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