1. Why play music?
Well, I originally went in for arachnid real estate. And Daddy, did THAT venture have some long legs! All those abandoned webs, cluttering up an entire generation of musty attics! And the owners long dead, or off weaving retirement messages in Florida. I worked at Muffet, Curds, & Whey, a brokerage firm out of Tuscon. But along came an apocalyptic average, 4 customers eaten every night while we dream of things with only two legs, and frightened the business away. Music seemed the next logical step.
2. Who are your influences?
The Arthopods, Frank Zappa, Hexathelidae’s Heroes, & Roy Wood
3. What is success?
Success is winning the ability and room to weave your own uncharted web, without compromise. Even if the flies tend to smack more understandable patterns.
4. Why should people buy your music?
I have a fool-proof plan for bettering the music industry, from both a financial and creative standpoint. Simply: the more notes played, the more you charge. We could expand this to include royalties for certain modulations and hemiolas. And if your record includes at least forty seconds of yodeling, you’re given a gift certificate to the Hard Rock Cafe and a Moody Blues Box-Set.
5. Who do you love?
I love a lot of things: my barbed wire collection (47 miles in total), my cobra necktie, my brand new house on the road side, which I made out of rattlesnake hide. I put a brand new chimney on top, made out of a human skull! But I probably love Arlene the best. She took me by the hand one night and said, “Bo, you know I understand.”
6. What do you hope to achieve with your music?
Well, I want people to LIKE it! And LISTEN to it! And maybe feel MOVED by it! And MAYBE even feel COMPELLED, after listening to it, to TWEET ABOUT IT IN CAPITAL LETTERS! I TOUGHT I TAW A PUTTY CAT!
7. Who comes to your gigs?
A lot of my old clients, actually. You’d never know it – and promoters obviously refuse to count them among the heads, often underestimating our pull by the 100s – but they’re up there in the rafters, spinning silken “ENCORES” from their butts.
8. What is your favorite album?
ARTHUR, OR THE DECLINE & FALL OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Also, SPIDERS ON THE KEYS.
9. What is your favorite song?
A LOUSE IS NOT A HOME.
“Maybe I should de-louse this place;
Maybe I should de-place this louse;
Maybe I’ll maybe my life away
in the confines of this silent house.”
10. How did you get here?
I hopped the nocturnal lily pads that pimple our strangest swamps, grabbed onto a silken thread falling aglow from the Red Spider Nebula, swung across a shattered meadow of glass, or maybe it was a fat angry river, landed on the other side atop a blind ostrich who ran panicking for miles until stopping short and catapulting me through history, past the icy frontiers of all technology, until I’m transmogrified into letters, punctuation marks, my body twisting in ways unhealthy, techno-blacksmiths burning me and hammering me into the sentences you are reading right now, the words resonating sublimely in your brain, turning into meanings, and that’s how I got here, but what happens to me once you stop reading this sentence?
Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears’ Mad Valentines Ep is out now!