The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets: An Interview With Toren Atkinson

Popshifter: Did you find that getting a song in Rock Band increased your fan base? Was it a measurable jump?

Toren Atkinson: I’ve certainly heard from a few fans who heard of us through Rock Band and wanted to get the rest of our albums and stuff like that. We’re not super millionaires yet, but it’s really cool. We’re really honored to have had that opportunity and it’s a lot of fun. I, for one, play Rock Band and until this happened a few of our more—I don’t want to say Luddite members—but they didn’t really understand. They were like, “What does it mean to have a song in Rock Band?” and I said, “It would be really cool and it’ll be good for us!” And the best part is that all the band members got a copy of the game including the full kit so now we’re fully immersed.

Popshifter: So do you enjoy playing the song in Rock Band?

Toren Atkinson: In Rock Band I usually play guitar. At parties I usually end up singing because everyone makes me sing ’cause I can do it.

Popshifter: Well you’ve got the same voice as the guy in the song, oddly enough!

Toren Atkinson: Exactly! But just in Rock Band I generally play the guitar. So yeah, it’s pretty fun! When it happened I was kind of amazed. That Rock Band culture—you go on YouTube and people post videos of them playing the song and getting like five stars and getting 100% and that just boggles my mind. It’s amazing to me and it was kind of surreal. It was cool. A lot of the feedback I view in the viewer feedback ranges from “Oh, this song is terrible” to “This song is amazing! I’m going to find out what this band’s about.” You also get this kind of critique that you wouldn’t get from anywhere else about the individual instruments on the track and how fun it is to play them.

Photo from thickets.net

For example in this song, the drums are really fun to play but the guitar is actually one of the more boring songs to play in Rock Band and in many ways, I don’t think this song we have in Rock Band (which is “Shhh. . . ” for those who don’t know) is not necessarily representative of the bulk of our music. With any song you’re going to have a lot of variation. Some of our songs are very guitar-heavy, some of our songs are very vocal-heavy. That sort of thing. I don’t think this was a particularly Thicket-y song for guitar, if that makes any sense. It was punchy, it was hard rock, but I do agree with a lot of the YouTube commenters that it has a really boring solo if you’re actually trying to play the solo. If you’re just hanging out and listening to it that’s perfectly fine. But it was definitely one of our favorite songs.

We recorded it when we recorded the rest of our album, The Shadow Out of Tim, along with another song called “Kill the Chupacabra.” Neither of those two songs were released on the album because they didn’t fit in with the narrative, and I thought it would be cool to hang onto those songs to do something special with them. Turned out it was a great idea because we got offered a place on Rock Band.

Ironically that song was not their first choice. They wanted to do “The Innsmouth Look,” which is an older song. Unfortunately we didn’t have that recorded in a format that they could use to separate all the elements. So we had to say, “We can get this older song to you but it’s going to take at least a couple of weeks.” But they were like, “Oh we need something right now, so we’ll use this other song that you have.”

Popshifter: How quickly did they turn it around, then?

Toren Atkinson: It was reasonably quick! I think they had it done before the Penny Arcade Expo but they didn’t want to announce it because it was part of the PAX experience and part of the Child’s Play benefit that Penny Arcade is involved with and it was part of the package with two other bands, Jonathan Coulton and MC Frontalot. So yeah, it was really cool!

Click to read more about. . .

New music and number of costumes
Wardrobe malfunctions
DVDs and PAX
Rock Band
Halloween

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