Celtic Grove: The first thing one notices with The Factory, is a bigger more polished studio sound. With new talent such as Scott Long on pipes and Dan Stacy on fiddle (and his feet), your sound has really progressed. Can you tell us a little about how this new sound, and this new iteration of the band came together?

Kirk McLeod: Well, it was pretty much thrown together (laughs)...when Neil left the band we really didn't have much time to do anything. My friend Jamie Holton came to play with us, and he couldn't really decide whether he wanted to stay with us or anything. Jamie then had to leave us without much warning as well, so I had to get on the phone pretty quickly. So, the first thing I did was called up a friend of mine who played with Ashley McIsaac's band in Canada.

Ashley McIsaac's band was the closest thing I'd ever heard to what we'd wanted to do...so I figured he'd be the natural guy to call. So I called Stewart who was with the band, and explained that not only did I want a piper but I wanted a fiddle player as well. So he recommended Dan Stacy who was working with his father at the time, performing up in Canada. And then he of course recommended Scott who was working with Ashley McIsaac at the time. Ashley wasn't touring too heavily, so we thought Scott would welcome the chance to work some more. I next called the fiddle player for Battlefield Band - John ... who was recommending himself for the fiddle player for us at the time - but he recommended Scott as well for the piper, so I thought well, that's two great recommendations right there. So I flew them down to Florida and we just sort of put it together on a whim. So we did that and we rehearsed for two weeks and we were on the road.

CG: Do you consider The Factory to be a turning point for Seven Nations - Is it an experimental phase for you or are you really trying to reshape the direction?

KM: It's funny, I was just doing an interview before this one, and was asked the same thing. It seems now that there are so many bands out there .... uhm, I don't want to say who are copying us, but who are really doing pretty much the same thing we were doing - at least about the time of the Big Dog album. I always wanted to be different and original. We started off rocking up the old traditional tunes - to be different. So now that some other folks were doing that, the only direction for us to go in I felt was to do more original material. So I wanted to do more of our own songs. You know, I love the traditional Celtic music and I love Rock and Roll, so probably my whole life I'll be swinging between the two. Now with the market being flooded with these sorts of bands, I wanted to concentrate on the original writing (and the Rock and Roll aspect) and the Factory is a first step towards that.

CG: We had a reader who is a new listener, who actually discovered you through the Celtic Grove broadcast. he emailed us and asked a lot of questions, but one got my attention and made its way into this interview. The question is; "Do you consider Seven Nations to be a live band or a studio band? Is the live performance what it is all about for you guys?"

KM: I'd have to say we're a better live band just because we've done it so much more. We have grown a lot in the past year in the studio however, and in fact we just did a song two weeks ago for a movie, with the same producer who did The Factory CD. We just did The Factory back in April, ...and so here we were in February working with this producer and he thought we'd grown quite a bit. He thought that we'd come a long way just in that short period of time, as far as being studio musicians is concerned. We do think this one song, production-wise, is better than anything that was on The Factory already .... so we're probably a better live band, but we're getting much better as a recording band as well.

CG: Your stature as a song writer continues to grow with each major release. We've seen very good commentaries on your song writing abilities in such major magazines as "Dirty Linen". There is a great personal touch to your songs and they seem to speak to something many Celtic music fans have in their hearts. "Can you tell us about the song writing experience and the drive you feel towards it?"

KM: My first major motivation with the song writing is to capture a feeling. I want to capture a feeling in a bottle almost, so I can carry it around and share it with everyone. It is a very personal thing , but I love my heritage so of course that is what I'm going to write about as well. Some songs have a historical content of course, which may relate to my heritage or not, but they are there because I may have heard a story along the way somewhere that affected me, such as Calvin Crozier for example; you know I was really touched by that story so I write that up, so I can really capture the feeling once again that I had when I heard the story, and I want to share it with someone. And again, it's typically something that relates to my heritage in some way, or some very personal experience.

CG: Your heritage obviously means a lot to you and has had a great influence on your song writing. The story of Calvin Crozier was one that particularly sparked my imagination, so much that we are reprinting an article concerning his life from a 1901 UCV magazine in its entirety accompanying this feature. The connection between Celtic culture and the culture of the American South, particularly the Appalachian Mountain region is well documented. "Is this connection something you try to be conscious of in your writing? Is there something in particular that you want people to get out of it or understand?"

KM: Well I think it's the same deal, you know, my heritage is not only Celtic but also Southern American culture. So, once again I'm writing in general, but maybe that story touched me in particular because I had a lot of family who fought for the South. I have a lot of sympathy for what all the Southern people suffered during the occupation. In history, in school it's called "Reconstruction" but it should also be called "Occupation" because the South was a conquered country at the time. If I have one mission for my writing, I'd like to expose some of the white-washed periods of our own history, and lend clarity if I can...even if I can only get through to a couple of people.

I'm no white-supremecist or anything at all like that .... but I do have a problem with the stigmatism that the South has, and I want to address that in my writing if I can. With that song, the thing I really wanted to focus on was the sacrifice of the guy's life. I wanted to focus on the sacrifice he made and not on any racial issue really. I think we have a lot of problems today related to race ... and I'm really heartbroken by that fact, because I think it stems from the way it was abolished in this violent way. In countries where it was abolished peacefully, like in some of the South American countries, there really isn't this racism based on color and I believe that's because they were released peacefully. We were really damned by those circumstances for the next 100 years and it really is a shame that we couldn't have brought about a peaceful end to slavery, but we have to work now of course towards a common understanding and everyone getting along.

*[ Editor's note: Calvin Crozier was a Confederate soldier who was executed 6 months after the end of the Civil War for protecting a group of women on a train from some licentious Union soldiers. Crozier's story is the subject of the "Ballad of Calvin Crozier" from Seven Nation's The Factory album. Crozier, was convicted by a kangaroo court and made to dig his own grave prior to being shot. The young soldier could have easily avoided death, because the soldiers were initially confused about who had confronted them, but he wouldn't allow another man to wrongfully die for what he had done and so he turned himself in, knowing he would be shot. The story is made all the more poignant because the Union Officer who tried the hardest, and argued the most effectively for Crozier's life to be spared was a black man. The full article from a 1901 edition of Confederate Veteran Magazine, has been re-printed here in this edition of Celtic Grove. The story is as touching as it is tragic, and we hope that our readers may glean some degree of insight from the account of Crozier and the officer who tried to save him.]

CG: "Daze of Grace" is kind of freaky and cool. It typifies some of the experimentation on the album." Were you nervous about that at all and how far did you want to take the experimentation?"

KM: Not at all, in fact I really just wanted to let it go as far as it would go. "Amazing Grace", as you know, is the most overplayed song in Celtic music and we've done it before,of course, but I really wanted to surprise some people. I wanted them to get to that point where they were going "what are these guys doing?...what are they thinking?..." That wasn't really for shock value alone, but I really wanted to stretch people's minds a little bit and get them ready for some bigger stuff on the next CD (laughs) Not that the next CD is going in that direction at all! (laughs again..) We just wanted to play around a little bit though, it's fun.

CG: Seven Nations has acquired a large and very dedicated cadre of followers, some of whom literally follow you around much like the followers of the Grateful Dead. "What do you feel it is about your music or performance that has attracted this group of followers and how do you think it has affected the music?"

KM: It's affected the music in a very divergent way than you'd probably expect. I think the first reason we started getting that following was the energy of the music on stage - and the honesty - and after that hopefully that we're just normal guys. It has affected the music because it would be really easy just to get up there and jam all the time, the same old stuff we used to - and part of the crowd would just be happy to have that .... but we actually about a year ago decided that we were going to focus on the songs.

We don't want to just rely on jamming, or just rely on the energy, we want to get people interested in the songs as well. We're probably not doing as much of the energetic jam-out sessions that we used to, the one's that originally attracted all those followers. Right now we are doing more songs. I'm not saying we won't get back to that - in fact it's very tempting to rely on that, to take the easy road and just jam, but we have to grow. We decided that we want to also focus on the music and focus on the songs.

CG: "How does that tie in with life on the road? After 5 or 6 years of this, is the road still enjoyable, do you feel like you are just getting started or is it a bit tiring?"

KM: Actually it's more enjoyable now. We used to go from festival to festival and in between, if we were close to home we might get back, but more likely than not, it would be two days in California, the next in Colorado, and a lot of holding up in hotel rooms in between like somewhere in Utah.

Now we pretty much do a lot of one nighters and we're reaching a little different town. It's a little better schedule and we're playing more of a Rock and Roll circuit now and it's a little more enjoyable than it used to be. The thing I really get off on now is to see all the people coming to shows who had nothing to do with Celtic music, they come to our shows now and discover it and really love it.

We just played in Puerto Rico recently. We played on the roof of this building right on the coast line and we had winds and rain, but still 500 people showed up. We all got soaking wet, but we all danced and played pipes and they loved us just because of the energy. It wasn't just because we played bagpipes, but they just loved the energy and it didn't matter whether we were Scottish or not but just that we were enjoying ourselves.

CG: "Heroes in Tennis Shoes" has a special place in my heart and in the hearts of geeks all over who couldn't play sports in high school. "What's the real message behind that song?"

KM: Well it sounds like you've got it. You got the idea. The message there is directed at high school society, which is where in this country we are instilling in our kids the idea of a class system. There is a class system that exists in high school society. First class citizens are football stars and cheerleaders and second class citizens come after...maybe wrestling and band...and then you get at the bottom kids who just wind up drinking beer in their cars in the parking lot or whatever. I love sports, you know and I played sports and it does offer a lot of opportunities to kids who otherwise for instance couldn't go to college, but I just hate to see kids put in a class system right off the bat.

I went to school in England and it wasn't like that at all there. Coming from an English school to an American school I went through a very tough time myself. I was popular at first and then it came time to go out for the football team .. I wasn't going out for it ... I came back in September and noboday wanted to know me.

CG: "This Season" and its reprise, are touching ballads. There are a couple of ballads on the CD but this one keeps a lot of people guessing (Kirk chuckles). "What is it about this song that we should get? What song do you think we should pay attention to on the album? Which one means the most to you?"

KM: I think "Sweet Orphan" is probably my favorite song on the CD. "This Season" I'd rather not talk about because it's very personal, but "Sweet Orphan" is about my father and is dedicated to my father. I sang it one time. I wasn't in the studio overdubbing and overdubbing. I just did it once on both of those, and that way I feel like I really captured the way I felt when I wrote them. And that's all I have to say about Viet Nam (laughs)

CG: "Do you have any intentions of doing collaborations a la Bono and the Chieftains type thing?"

KM: Oh wow, uh we've been approached by Roger McGuinn from the Byrds about working with him and also Pat Travers and we're considering that. If we do something like that it will probably be an add on track like Roger doing a mandolin track, or something, but other than that I don't have any near term plans. I feel like collaboration should come when one has accomplished quite a bit more than I have. But, I think we'll be working with Eric Rigler (From Braveheart and Titanic soundtracks) on the next CD.

CG: We have a lot of customers who ask us about the older releases."Do you have any plans for revisiting the older material ... the appropriate question here may be; When can we expect the boxed set?'

KM: Oh I see (laughter) I can honestly say I'm very proud of all the original material on the older CD's and I can honestly say that we will definietly revisit every one of those songs. Whether they make it on a studio CD or live CD I don't know, but they'll definitely be redone. And the reason we're discontinuing the older ones is we have a lot of new fans. We've grown so much over the last year and for many of the fans the band from The Factory is the only one they know, they order Big Dog off the internet and then get it home, listen to it and are disappointed. So we think it's the best thing to discontinue the older CD's and revisit the original songs in a new way.

CG: You guys have had an internet presence for a long time. A lot of bands it seems now are able to make it further without a label because of the opportunity the internet provides. "Do you think the internet has had a positive impact on Seven Nations?"

KM: Without us touring as heavily as we have, the internet site wouldn't have done as much, but it always helps. I'd like to see how many people find us because of the site without seeing us live first. The big thing with it is that the Internet makes it so much easier to get in touch with us, learn more about us, and order the products. As far as cold hits it doesn't have much of an impact though. The music is still like the old days - you just have to get out there and play.

CG:"What's the deal with alligators?"

KM: Alligators! Well, it's because of the Canadians (Dan and Scott). They'd never been to Florida before and they definitely weren't used to alligators. They thought it was very strange to come down from Canada and see that there were alligators walking around.

Now truckers call the re-treads that come off on the road - gators. So truckers will say on the radio, there's a gator at yardstick 221. And so one night we were driving down the road, and we hit one of those re-treads and for the longest time Scott was convinced that I had really ran over an alligator (laughs). The alligator tie-in has come in and we're a Florida based band so it's a natural for us.

CG: "Can you tell us a funny story that maybe you haven't ever told before?"

KM: Hmm. Well, we have lots of funny stories we <i>can't</i> talk about in an interview. The funniest thing I can think of though is when we hijacked a radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's funny, we were supposed to show up in this radio station for an interview and we were supposed to play that night so we had a very small window of time. We go inside and there is no one there. We waited around for a while but there was no receptionist or anything and we didn't really know what to do.

We waited for about 45 minutes and only had about 15 minutes left to spare when somebody had the idea that we should at least play one of our songs, since we came all this way. So, a couple guys went back in and figured out how to run the board. They made an announcement and put on The Factory CD and played it in it's entirety. We haven't heard anything bad from them since then, so I assume everything was ok!

CG: "Well, Kirk we certainly appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us here at the Grove, and I know the fans appreciateit as well.

KM: Not at all, it was my pleasure. Thanks a lot.

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