THE WORKHORSE III (EN)

1- Hello, thanks for answering to our questions. What are you guys currently up to?
We are currently gearing up to release our new album CLOSER TO RELEVANCE so we’re in the middle of a bunch of promotion, booking, writing new material and plenty of practice for upcoming shows.

2- First off, could you make some history of the band?
Well, Lisa and Eric are married and not so long after the wedding it was kind of natural that we’d start a band together. We’ve actually known each other our whole lives and had played together various times throughout the years. We really to go way back, in fact we were born in the same hospital here in Philly only 3 hrs apart and pretty much grew up together. Their bands as well as Steve’s played together a bunch awhile back as well so we’ve all been close for years. It’s almost like we were destined to be in a band from the start! Eric and Steve have been playing in bands together since the 90’s so when our old bass player moved on it was a no brainer to bring Steve into the mix. We officially started The Workhorse III in 2008 and released the first album(self titled) in 2010. We released the second album Fortune Favors The Bold in 2014 and not too long after that our original bass player needed to leave the band for personal reasons and we all remain friends to this day, which is unusual when it comes to band members leaving. Steve came in shortly after and it was an immediate fit, he definitely added a whole other dimension with his bass style and could sing as well! We wanted to be more aggressive and Steve is certainly that! Eric and Steve have recorded and played together for years so between working up the older songs and writing new ones it was completely seemless. And now we’re here w/ a new album to promote and we are super stoked on it!

3- How could you describe your sound?
To us our sound is a combination of all our musical influences and killer riffs from when we were growing up and were excited by all of the new music that was coming out at the time. All 3 of us pretty much learned to walk and immediately after began playing a musical instrument so there’s a vast well of experience and influences to draw from when we’re writing songs. We are definitely a Hard Rock band but we’re more than that, I think when you listen to us you’l find hints of everything from Punk to Metal, to Classic Rock, Stoner, what have you. Basically we make music we’d actually want to listen to ourselves, we definitely aren’t trying to do a certain genre because it’s popular at a certain time, we want to be able to live w/ ourselves haha.

4- What are the band’s main musical influences?
There’s so damn many!! We all like so many different styles of music as well, from Blues, to Metal, to Prog Rock and everything inbetween. That’s the thing about music for us, we don’t really listen to one specific genre. I think you’d be bored as hell if you were stuck listening to one specific genre of music day in and day out. Whatever it is, if it’s great, it’ll always stand out no matter what the genre is, same goes if it’s shitty as well haha. One thing that I think that’s bothersome is when people say they hate a certain style of music, how can you base an opinion about a whole genre of music if you really only listened to a few things from that certain style, we’ve found that you can always find good music in any genre if you look hard enough. We all have our own personal favorite bands and musicians we are infuenced by though, Lisa is really into the Beatles, early Pretenders and Rollins band, Steve’s heavily influenced by Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, Motorhead and yes, once again, the Beatles, where Eric is into Maiden(as well) The Who, Sabbath, and a bunch of prog rock bands, and I think you’ll hear that in our music at times as well.

5- How is the feedback for your new album being?
We’ve only just begun to start promoting the new album, but we’ve managed to get a bunch of people to listen to the promo track we have streaming and there’s been a few people that have listened to the whole album and we’ve gotten a lot of really positive feedback to the point where they have the CD on constant rotation in their cars and at home as well as multiple plays from our Bandcamp site so we think that’s a pretty good sign so far!

6- And are your personally satisfied with the final outcome?
ABSOLUTELY!! We’d never even think of releasing any material that we weren’t personally satisfied with. We put our soul(not trying to sound like a hippy but we love what we do) into everything we do musically so we are always 100% behind anything we release.

7- How could you describe this opus in just 3 words?
PURE ROCK FURY!!

8- How has the production process for your new release been?
Super smooth! We’ve been working w/ these guys awhile now and at this point they know exactly what we’re shooting for.From start to finish it’s been a pleasure to do what we’re doing w/ these guys and they’re great at what they do. Most importantly, it’s fun! I think when it starts feeling like a regular job, it may be time to rethink what you’re doing. Making the music is the easy part, selling it is the hard part haha. Mike Radka(engineer) and Frank Phobia(producer) really make things run smooth in the studio and it doesn’t hurt that we’ve all known each other for awhile and are good friends.

9- And how do you use to work on the songwriting?
There’s a few ways we go about writing songs, a lot of the time each of us will either have riffs, parts of songs, lyrics, or even whole songs we’ll bring to song writing sessions(aka practice) and a good portion of the time we all add our own touches to the songs or eliminate things that aren’t working, there’s definitely not one of us that writes the bulk of the music, it’s completely a group effort. You’ll always see the 3 of our names on the credits for every song. There’s never a song that all 3 of us haven’t had a hand in writing. Lisa will often work a lot of material out on the acoustic guitar and bring a recording to us and we’ll add our touches, as I said before Eric and Lisa live together so they’re always bouncing song ideas off of each other almost daily. There’s other occasions when we’ll just start a jam w/ Eric starting a beat and everyone else coming in w/ different parts and beforte you know it you have a pretty powerful song musically and then you go back and add lyrics, so there’s a varie y of ways we go about coming up w/ new material. But in the end it’s a team effort for sure.

10 – Finally, what are you near-future plans?
Always writing new music! But right now and the near future it’s all about the new album CLOSER TO RELEVANCE, playing live, and plenty of practice. We want to concentrate on bringing our music to as many people as we possibly can so we can continue to do what we do best and that’s playing music every day! So keep an eye out for the new album and look for us in your town soon!