By Fire and Sword Spill Their Guts on "Glory" (Interview)

What goes together as well as heavy metal and Conan? As Idaho upstarts By Fire and Sword have shown with their debut album Glory, it’s heavy metal and cults—and By Fire and Sword are the leaders of this show. Literally the leaders, at least from the perspective of the lyrics, which are all from the point of view of the band’s singer The Honorable Reverend Tim Tom Jones. 

That sardonic middle-American nearly Evangelist lyrical slant is something that could very easily have fallen apart if By Fire and Sword was even a little weaker, but fortunately that’s not the case: Glory is absolutely excellent from front to back, as unrepentantly catchy as it is clever and ambitious. From the first song, there’s a certain energy just oozing from each track, the manic preaching of The Reverend pulling everything together. The unusual and extremely charismatic vocal lines are really a standout for me in a time when great singers feel genuinely rare, and they’re what initially hooked me in. 

The next obvious catch after the driving, dynamic rhythms (with both the hard-to-nail-down riffs and drumming being totally on point) are the melodies. This is a band with a great feeling for melodicism, and not only in the parts where it’d be obvious-—There’s a ton of super layering throughout the album that keeps even the most simple instrumental parts from being stale. There is constant pop, be it from the ravings of The Reverend descending into preaching instead of singing, clever synth or organ parts, backing vocals, or just lovely guitar melodies coming in.  

Most modern heavy metal bands can’t even conceive of the daring that went into this record, more obsessed as they are with reliving the 1980s and spending all of their energy trying to look and sound the “right” way. Glory instead sounds only like itself, and though there are obvious comparisons that can be made both to classic rock and power metal bands in the turns of phrase of the vocals or in the riffing, I didn’t go into detail about the actual sound of the riffing when I mentioned it, and that’s not because it’s not a big part of the album, but rather because it’s genuinely sort of difficult to sum the riffing up. 

Band leader Brother Jeffrey (who played all of the guitars and bass) clearly listens to an eclectic mix of glorious heavy metal and just as clearly did not want to limit himself in the way of the aforementioned stodgy high top wearing lame-os; the riffs in a single song can very fluidly switch from pounding doom chords to awesome melodic leads to thrashing chromatic riffing to simpler backing for The Reverend to shine over, and the end result is a wide spectrum of the genre coming together all as one. 

Even more impressive than the amount of variety present is how it all ties together in a coherent way. This is not an album of frenetic changes that boggle the mind and sensibilities: Glory feels like a single whole, and it’s hard to put down in the middle because of how well it all flows together. The musicianship is top-notch, Jeff Black’s production job—both in the traditional sense, in terms of the changes he recommended and implemented and in the sense that he mixed and mastered the album—is absolutely stellar, and despite being fairly long the album never really drags. 

To celebrate this accomplishment, we’re here today with an interview with both The Honorable Reverend and with Brother Jeffrey. 

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Do any of you have a significant religious background? 

Thomas: No. I’m a philosophy nerd, but I wouldn’t call myself religious.

Jeff: Not particularly. When I was younger, I spent some years going to a Lutheran church with my Grandma and participating in some choir activities and the annual Christmas play, with the occasional Vacation Bible School in the summer. Some one-off visits with friends to their churches, etc, but we were not a devout family and certainly not to any particular denomination. I remember really liking the music and singing, but found the hymnal books very confusing to follow along with. It was a very old church with a much older congregation, not one of these ‘cool’ new churches that have 10-piece bands with stage lighting.

Given that, where did the fascination in cult leading come from? 

Thomas: I’m not 100% sure. Organized religion works its way into a lot of my creative work, though. I’m really interested in how religions work and why they work. It probably has something to do with growing up in Idaho. The culture is a weird mix of cowboy libertarianism and dogmatic religious conservatism.

Jeff: I’ve always found them fascinating in a humanistic way. I’m not interested so much in religion, but there’s something very interesting about group-think and how these leaders (more often than not) convince large groups of people to do terrible, terrible things to others and themselves. The psychology of it is bonkers. The Ant Hill Kids, Aum Shinrikyo, The Branch Davidians, all crazy examples of charisma gone awry.

There is quite a bit of subtle layering on Glory that I understand comes from collaborating with producer Jeff Black (Gatekeeper). Did any of the song structures have to change to accommodate new ideas that he presented? 

Thomas: He helped beef up some of the vocal arrangements but it wasn’t the kind of stuff that changed the structure of the songs. 

Jeff: Jeff was pretty in tune with what we were going for so I think he just found his place in the arrangements to add his sparkle when he added his synth parts. We worked on this record for so long it's hard to remember! I think it was very similar when he added his vocals as well, just finding his place in the harmonic structure that Tom had already laid down. They’re both such excellent musicians that when it came to the vocals I just stayed out of it other than giving my approval.

Had you ever had the experience of working with a “producer” that’s closer to the traditional meaning of the word before this record? 

Thomas: I don’t know about Jeff but I’ve never hired a separate producer for any previous projects. We’ve mainly self-produced in the past. And I’ve worked a bit as a music producer for live theater productions.

Jeff: It wasn’t even intentional this time. We initially hired Jeff to mix the album, but our working relationship was so good and he had such a great vision for what we were trying to do that it just came about kind of naturally. He had opinions, we listened, and the results were great. 

Was “A Moment of Silent Reflection” written as an instrumental right from the start? Why was it important to include this instrumental song on an album with such a strong narrative focus and in an album clearly mixed to show off the singing?

Thomas: The Reverend is a divisive character for some. I think my impulse to keep the song instrumental was about giving haters a break from my babbling so they could appreciate Jeff’s hard work without me talking over it. I think it also works nicely as advertised. If you’re listening to the album front to back it gives you a moment of silent reflection to process some of the ideas the Reverend has been pitching.

Jeff: ‘Moment’ wasn’t originally intended to be instrumental when I wrote it back in 2017, but it went through a couple of iterations and we decided that it worked better as an instrumental and found a clever way to fit into our live show at the time. When we would play that song early on, there was some funny stage banter and kind of a ‘bit’ that surrounded it. I won’t go into too much detail to avoid ruining it for future audiences, but it was a nice moment to literally take a moment to rest. At least for Tom. The rest of us had to play the song.

As with your original debut EP, </em>Freedom Will Flood All Things With Light</em>, there are several sections throughout <em>Glory</em> where The Honorable Reverend Tim Tom Jones chooses to exclaim to the band’s flock rather than to sing. How were these structured into the songs? 

Jeff: The way that it has worked in the past is that Tom and I kind of discuss the narrative structure of the album/song, what we want to achieve with it, and then I go and write all of the music. We don’t determine ahead of time which sections will be spoken and which will be sung; that arises organically as Tom flushes out the lyrics and the vocal parts. I make recommendations like ‘hey, this is a chorus, this part is a verse’ but sometimes that all goes out the window by the time the song is finished.

Thomas: With this band, Jeff writes the music first and then I write lyrics and vocals. I record the spoken word sections very last. By that time in the process, I have a really strong idea of the song’s meaning and I’ll oftentimes use those sections to clarify key points the Reverend is trying to get across. They sort of stitch everything together. For this album, the spoken word sections were improvised and self-recorded in isolation. (Thanks, COVID.) That’s definitely not my preferred way of working, but I’m really happy with the end results.

Do y’all anticipate maintaining a looser approach to the narrative structure with future recordings after having it work so well for this album, or is Tom’s preferred approach one that you’d like to explore more? 

Thomas: Rigid rules are made to be broken! We know the general thrust of the next By Fire and Sword album, but all the details are still up in the air.  One thing I can say is that we’re not planning on working in complete isolation like we had to with the last album.

Jeff: Hard to say how narratively focused the next album will be; we’ve only just released this one! But we’re writing songs and making music with a very specific message and point, so I would imagine we would maintain a similar focus. Production-wise, I definitely don’t want to have to record everything in isolation again. It produced some cool results and experimentation, but it was stressful and not schedule-friendly.

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Glory is out now via No Remorse Records.