Page 32 - Black Velvet Issue 97

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deal with us being gone, the way we are,” Jon adds.
“But it is so nice to have technology now,” John Fred contin-
ues, “You can FaceTime. I don’t know how we could survive with-
out that but we did back in the day and before us. I remember
getting collect phone calls from my dad that would go, “Do you
accept calls from… Dad”. It does take a wonderful type of woman
and we have four of them and we’re very lucky.”
Having mentioned Chris’s five-year-old son Declan, he makes
a special appearance on ‘Family Tree’, providing some of the
backing vocals to ‘You Got The Blues’ and unsurprisingly this is
something the band is very excited about. With his broad smile
now maybe even a little wider, John Fred tells Black Velvet, “That
was pretty cool and he sang a perfect harmony without really
knowing what the note was.”
Trying hard, and ultimately unsuccessfully, not to laugh at his
memories of the experience, Jon recalls, “We had to hold him up
to get him to the mic because it didn’t come down low enough for
him! He sang blind because we didn’t play something for him and
say, “Hey, sing along with this”. We just hit record and said, “Sing
your favourite song” and he started singing “You got the bl-bl-bl-
blues thing”!”
And they haven’t ruled out this becoming something we might
see more of in the future. When asked if it’s something they would
like to do with their own children, Jon wastes no time in saying,
“It’s up to them,” before his drumming bandmate adds, “I think if
our kids want to do music, they will have great launching pads
with all of us helping them, individually or together. But if they
don’t want to that is totally fine,” which prompts Jon to share with
Black Velvet a line he says he tells his children all the time, which
is “Love music, play music, appreciate music - but don’t do it for
a living!” And once again laughter fills the room. Trying to be a
little more serious, Jon explains, “It’s hard, man. It’s a tough life
to lead. Our situation with the four of us is absolutely unheard of
because we have been fortunate enough to make friends with a
lot of different bands. We’ve met with and hung out with, at length,
a lot of people and finding a band that has the kind of relationship
that we have, you’re not going to do it.”
“We have a very special situation, we all grew up together”,
John Fred agrees. “We went to high school together, me and Chris
went to kindergarten together. I don’t know any band in the world
where any two members went to kindergarten with each other un-
less they were brothers and then you look at bands who are broth-
ers and they are the ones who break up!”

he album cover of ‘Family Tree’ at first glance appears to
Tsimply be a large tree, but there is much more behind it
than just that. Of course, the family theme is also present in the
picture.
Jon tells Black Velvet, “We were all trying to figure out an idea
for the cover. We knew tentatively what the title would be, but that
was going to hinge on what we could develop for artwork. So
John Fred knew where this tree was and he took pictures of it on
his iPhone during the day and he sent them to me and the rest of
the guys in the band and I said, “That tree is perfect, where it sits
is perfect, that’s the one!” Now I just need to find a day where the
weather is going to be kind to us so we can do it.
“It was December, January-ish time… well, maybe it was No-
vember, but it was cold and wet and nasty! So we needed to find
the chance to do it and while we were waiting for the weather to
work itself out I was digging deeper and deeper into long expo-
sure photography, which is nighttime photography. So it’s where
you take a picture and rather than just click, click, click, take a
picture, it’s click and then you wait forever and then click, it fin-
ishes, so it lets a lot of light into the camera and that’s how you
end up with a photo of moving water and it looks like glass and
so John Fred was like, “Let’s do this at night,” because I knew it
was going to be him who would be going with me because he
knew where the tree was.
“So we went out there, put a ladder on the back of my truck
and I climbed to the top of the ladder and duct-taped a tripod to
the ladder and positioned my camera to where it could see this
thing just right and we waiting for the sun to go down in full. We
scattered bones around the bottom of the tree and John Fred had
this old witch’s cauldron which we set up and he started a brush
fire in it so the light you can see at the bottom of the tree is a long
exposure of a fire, which is why it’s like a burst. It doesn’t have a
fire shape because it took 13 minutes to take the photo so it’s like
this big glowing light. And the drops which you can see in the
background, those are stars in the sky which have moved over
the 13 minutes.”
BLACK STONE CHERRY