OVERKILL: Interview with Bobby "Blitz" Ellsworth

With no time to lose and building on the momentum achieved with critically acclaimed records such as “Ironbound” and “The Electric Age”, New Jersey’s Thrash Metal giants Overkill are once again back with their 17th record “White Devil Armory”. We had a chat with the veteran singer Bobby “Blitz” Ellsworth and discussed all things Overkill, beginning with their latest record “Armory”, going through recording, touring, the state of nowadays thrash metal scene and a look back through the making of some of their past records.

Let’s talk a little bit about the new record “White Devil Armory”. It’s a full-on assault to the senses and you guys managed to pull up the ante, making this probably one of Overkill’s heaviest records to date. Do you see it that way? What changed in comparison to your latest two releases, “Ironbound” and “The Electric Age”?
You know, it’s hard for me to be objective because it’s new. If it’s the heaviest, [or] the most aggressive, I don’t know that. I know that we have a formula; I know that we [always] try to increase our intensity. In every record we’re not afraid to learn new things and still be Overkill. So, all these characteristics mixed together will probably have different results [...] if I was to go back over the last three or four records, I think that probably the biggest change was Ron Lipnicki. He was something that we needed in this band that we didn’t realize, and since we had him in the band, we noticed that he could understand what kind of a jump we needed, what kind of a push…and he heard Overkill on the road, I mean, he went out and he toured with us for a year and a half before he even recorded the record, so I think that was the understanding, that was the main difference. And when you’re a guy like myself who’s been in the band for about, Jesus…almost twenty four or twenty five years, and the new guy comes in and starts kicking everyone else’s ass, you don’t want to be left behind and look like the old man. You have to get up to his level, and I think that that’s what everybody did. We started playing at a higher level based on his input to the band. I think it’s probably the main reason we have this type of change as of late.

So you guys have a new single out, “Armorist”. How do you think people are reacting to it?
I think ok! It was actually leaked, it wasn’t something that we had released officially and, it’s funny, we just started this interview and an e-mail came in that said “The video is up”, now an official release, wham! (laughs) So, just a couple of minutes ago. (laughs) I don’t know how it leaked, somebody got a hold of the Nuclear Blast lyric video and put it up on a Facebook page and from there it kind of spread out. But we wanted a simultaneous release. I think people are enjoying it, I mean, it’s not something I’m monitoring, I’m not going to check what the comments are, and people will see them on Youtube (…) [People] seem to have liked it. So far so good, positive, it’s only been 24 hours. But people are enjoying it and that’s the reason why we do this.

Well, it’s a great single, probably one of my new favorite Overkill songs, a great Thrash song, really heavy and pushy. About the record, overall, what are the record’s best moments to you? Which songs are your favorites?
Well I love diversity you know, and as soon as you can start getting diverse from song to song, that’s when it gets intersting, and I really think “Armorist” is kind of how you describe it, it jumps out of the box and it grabs you by the throat, it’s really a face melting. By the time you get to “Pig” or “Bitter Pill” you hear that mysterious Overkill II and III feel. Sure we’re a thrash band, and that sets the bar with “Armorist”, but by the time you get to “Bitter Pill” you realize that there’s some rock n’ roll going on, (…) there’s a pounding, there’s some old bluesy Sabbath-y head grips that show up here and there, so I think that the high moments for me are “Armorist”, “Bitter Pill”, “Pig” and “In The Name”. These are probably the most diverse songs from each other.

“White Devil Armory”…why that name, what are the overall themes and what’s behind the lyrics in most songs?
You know, we always look for a thread. In “The Electric Age” we went with “electric”, and in the studio, in my office, it was written down, it was made into a stamp. I made it into stickers, I’ve put it in my car, it’s one of those things that you need a thread to start somewhere. And D.D. was writing these tunes thinking of the word “Armory”, thinking about those type of buildings, thinking about that kind of structure and that type of power, something that had an historical value, that had a great weight to it and magnitude, and something really ominous and dangerous. I’ve been over that, but it’s gotta have war, and that’s where the whole “white devil” thing came. We’ve started messing around with that, putting in colors and numbers and adjectives and situations, and it came down to “white devil”. D.D. seemed to like it and said, “ok let’s write that”. I could now start writing some stuff using that as the base to write it on, and then writing short stories, you know, [whatever] goes on in my head. I don’t make social comments, I write based on emotion. I write songs in terms of story. It’s not like something that says “ok, this is what it is, and there’s nothing else”. I’m not ever doing that. I’m never capable to write a word in one of our tunes that would take away the right to interpretation, and that’s a big part of our music. One of the things I loved as when I was a kid, was that I could interpret lyrics my own way. So, the idea is to get that thread, and that’s where “Armory” came from. So it was a creation based on imagery and the feel of the music as it was starting to come together.

You were talking about you and D.D. writing the record, so how did the songwriting process went? Was it just the both of you or did everyone contributed with riffs and ideas?
Well, it starts with D.D. He’s really a riff collector, he’s continuously recording, and he has recording devices all over in his car, inside his vest, in his jacket, in his studio and nothing ever gets by with that. It’s like a trap when it comes to the riffs. But, it starts developing there and then when it goes into demos…when we’re demoing we do it with a drum machine, so that the rest of us have an idea where [D.D.] is going, and then the song starts taking shape when he and Dave Linsk start to play it, and we’re not telling Rob Lipnicki how to play. Whatever he brings to the table it’s a good thing. So we’re not telling him “play it this way”, we tell him to interpret what D.D. is thinking, so the writing process becomes wider after that first step out, and then they start demoing and re-demoing. By this point I’m involved, and I start hearing the direction of the songs. Dave Linsk for sure, all the way through will be changing riffs, adding parts, the leading parts. So, it starts with D.D., then it gets through the other guys and then D.D. and I finish it with our lyrical stamp. But all through to the end, Dave and Rob also help with lyrics and melody wise, so it is kind of a good approach. We all like each other’s objective opinion.


You guys always had a very characteristic sound, but you’ve also developed a new kind of toughness in the past few years with your latest records, having gained more muscle and punch through the production work. Would you say your latest records, including “White Devil Armory” are better now in comparison to your old releases?
Well, you know, I wouldn’t say that. For sure, we’re trying to progress like we talked earlier, and of course in regards to production also. You have to keep working, you have to be able to keep your mind at bay to new ideas. We’re a band that we were born when 2-inch tapes were rolling. We were born when cutting and pasting actually meant tape and a razor blade. But the reality is that kind of mentality of working hard from where you’re coming from, you use that as a guide to where you’re going, and what I mean by that is to incorporate new technology in and I think that’s where, let’s say, the progress of production comes in. So I don’t think the modern day records sound much better that the earlier records based on experience, based on technological advancements and based on the knowledge you acquire going through it all.

In other records such as “I Hear Black”, Overkill went through a different phase. It was noticeable that you’ve brought some different influences into your sound back then, but nowadays what other kind of sounds or bands are an influence to you?
It’s funny, I don’t think we’re specifically influenced by other metal bands, you know, we really like metal and we listen to it, and what gets through your ears probably comes back to you at some degree even if it’s in a subliminal basis. But I think the idea is that you go to what you know first of all, and then you go where you don’t know. What I want is to hear other singers, and not specifically metal singers, just to be able to hear what they’re doing. Obviously, at the end of the day, it’s me singing an Overkill song. But if I can take current steps to low to an all rounder when I bring my voice down, if I can understand that the harmony will work, if I can change the texture of the song, if I can reach that high of a note, if I can make that lower note rounder…these are some of the things I personally look for. I went through an experience over the last year and a half, when I gave up tobacco, and it’s a huge difference. It seems like I have a third lung! I’m so proud of the fact that we’re able to do this at a high level and not being recognized for “Ironbound”, “Years of Decay” or “Horrorscope” but being recognized for “White Devil Armory” and having inherent value in the current day as opposed to, what we were.

You were talking about your voice, most singers usually change their voices over time, and I’m thinking of singers like Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford, great singers. but their voice has changed over the years. However, your voice has been always remained untouched. How have you managed to maintain your voice during all these years?
Well, I think part of it is genetics! My mom, she’s in her mid eighties and she can sing like a bird! It’s obviously some kind of a genetic trait. I mean, she doesn’t sound like an old lady, she sings in church and her voice had force enough to break glass, but she can still sing popular tunes and she can still sing classic songs and she wants do to it. When I was growing up, I grew up with a lot of singing, I mean, my mother, she didn’t tell me to come to dinner, she sang it to me! (laughs) She didn’t said “BOBBY, I CALLED YOU TEN MINUTES AGO!!!”, she sang like “Come on Bobby!!”, and I think that’s probably part of my genetics you know, I’m just lucky! I’m not worried, obviously I smoked for forty fucking years, so I’m not worrying about what I was doing, I was just doing it! So, I really think that it’s genetics, not worrying about it, and obviously trying to improve from year to year.

Talking about live performances, I saw you guys on Vagos Open Air festival in Portugal, and you were running around like there was no tomorrow, from one side of the stage to the other. All of us in the audience were like “wow, look at that”. How do you guys manage to stay fit during tour?
Well, I remember that festival, and it was a great energy there, a cool night! Arch Enemy went on after us and I remember seeing Coroner, I’m a very big fan of Coroner, and I remember thinking that it was a cool place to make a festival, in the back of a neighborhood, in a park, small field, and there was just enough people to really make it happen, and I think that’s what works for us, it makes you excited about what’s going on, and at Vagos Open Air, we had two days off in the local town after that and I had a great time and I’m looking forward to this [tour]. If I look at touring as being a problem, it probably means it’s a problem, but if I think of touring as “hey, it’s gonna be fucking great”, I think that’s what keeps you in shape and excited…It’s like a drug high. I mean, it’s not work…of course, work and effort comes into it but the reality in the end of the day is that this is a fun fuckin’ life! “What do you do for a living?”, well…I bang my head, that’s what I do for my living! (laughs) and let me tell you, things could be much worse! (laughs)

That’s a dream job!
It is a dream job, and that’s the idea, and surely, if I can think of it that way…this has been a career, I mean, I’m in this for life! If I stopped recording tomorrow it would have been my entire life, my entire life if was in Overkill! That was my work! So what would I be doing if I stopped touring…I’d be dead in six months! (laughs) There’s nothing else for me to do! So, I love it! I think that’s one of the reasons that we can stay in that high level!

You guys are sounding great live, that’s for sure! Another question Bobby…nowadays it seems like a lot of the bands who’ve started in the 80’s always keep delaying their album releases even going as far as 4 or 5 years between albums, and I’m talking bands like Slayer or Anthrax, but two years don’t go by that Overkill won’t release a record. What’s the motivation to keep releasing records with this frequency and why do you think others take so long to do it?
Well, I think the key for this success is that we don’t pay attention to what other people are doing, we are on our schedule, and not on other people’s. And I think that’s the bottom line, you know…if I’m telling you how dirty your house is, probably my house is dirty too (laughs). For each finger I point, there’s three fingers pointing back at me…So, I choose not to point a finger…we choose not to point a finger. We choose to say “Hey…It’s time for another record”. We work good in a system. We work good on the clock, we have a good work ethic! We all in this band have relatively the same background, we’re relatively from the same area (…) and I think we’re the kind of guys who take this seriously, and instead of making this a fucking problem, we make this…kind of…the joy of being in the journey. Why not do a record every two years? This is what we do, you know? “What do you do?” “I make records every two fuckin’ years!” If it’s necessary or not, I’m doing it! I think that’s kind of a cool way of looking at it, because it kind of keeps us fresh! Nothing is ever old, we know that Overkill is Overkill, we know it’s gonna sound like Overkill at the end of the day, but getting there [finishing the record], it’s always such an exciting experience, that it always seems fresh from record to record.

How do you see the thrash metal scene nowadays? Overkill has been doing great in the last few years, but do you think in the whole thrash is now bigger than ever, even than the 80’s where all of the bands appeared?
I think it’s very healthy now! You can see it and you can feel it out there! I’ve been feeling it since 2008, 2009, so the Thrash scene has been very healthy now for a six to an eight year period, I think that’s great! There’s people out there like myself, D.D. Verni and Dave Linsk and Ron [Lipnicki] and Derek Tailor who want to take advantage of it (laughs), we want to be able to take advantage of that healthy scene, to explore it, but I think in the end of the day, the people who win with it are the people who’ve made that scene healthy, the people who are into it, whether they go to Wacken [Open Air], Heavy MTL on Montreal or Rocklahoma in the States, they’re the ones that win from this healthy scene…So, yeah, sure, it’s been an healthy scene for that amount of time and I think Overkill have been rising within that health and grabbing energy from that health.

You and a few other bands are still, and rightly so, seen as the flag carriers of the thrash genre nowadays, but doesn’t it worry you sometimes that some of the newer bands might be having a tough time having that break? How of you see the future of thrash metal?
Well, you know that’s hard to say, because this came out of nowhere in my opinion. If I look in hindsight now, I think that some of the newer bands were directly responsible for some of the older bands getting back together and making reunions, because newer bands are showing that there’s still a great value in this music, so I think that a lot of the younger bands who are on their second and third and fourth records now are directly responsible for helping this scene come back, so how cool is that? I think it’s fantastic. I also feel that the other bands also helped to bring that competitor feeling you know? It should be a young man’s game, but for some reason experience still talks here. Experience has come into the play and the older bands are saying “hey man, that’s a nice thing that you have there, nice sound, I understand where the riffs are going, but this is how it’s really supposed to sound like!”, and I think that’s kind of cool, because that becomes competitive and again, the [ones in the] scene are the ones who win because you have these young fresh bands and then you have Exodus and then you have Death Angel releasing really top quality records. “The Dream Calls for Blood” is a fantastic record, maybe the best Death Angel record I’ve heard since the beginning and I’m thinking to myself “What is this?” and I think it’s the motivation of an healthy scene and great competition with the younger bands.

Looking back, imagine that someone who’s reading this interview only read now about Overkill for the first time, which is highly unlikely…but, if that was the case, what other records from your career would you recommend for someone to get started into your sound?
Well, I think that Overkill is made of chapters. I think the first chapter is the first four records and the album I would recommend would be “Years of Decay” and then from the second four records I would either take “Horrorscope” or “W.F.O.” and after that I would go to “The Underground and Below” and after that I would go to “Ironbound” and then our newest record “White Devil Armory”.

From those records what were the best recording experiences for you, the ones who remember most fondly?Great experiences we had all the way through…I really enjoyed doing “Years of Decay” with Terry Date, that was fantastic, he was a really fun guy to work with. We were normally working with a guy named Alex Perialas. Alex is a great guy, but Terry was a different guy, everything was relaxed. I remember, I think we did something like sixty cases of beer in thirty days (laughs)…

That was a marathon!
It’s a young man’s dream! (laughs), but then we went to record with Colin Richardson which was a great experience in “The Underground and Below”. We had a bad experience with a record we did called “Bloodletting”, we got hooked up with an engineer that really knew nothing about the band, he was very acoustic and modernist as opposed to electric and progressively heavy. He was kind of “neat” when it came to engineering and it took us forever to get that record done. We had bad experiences recording “Relix”…we had some fantastic experiences recording the last three records, because it was very easy! We used D.D.’s studio and Dave Linsk has matched D.D.’s studio identically with the same type of gear, so it’s great to have two studios at our disposal (…) I think the last records have been a great experience based on that.

So talking about touring plans for the promotion of “White Devil Armory” where are you going to play in the next few months?
I think we’re going to be on Portugal in late October, November…We’re going to start an European tour and we’ll bring Enforcer, Prong and Mythology with us, so we’ll start on the 30th of October in Spain. (…) We’re putting aside some secondary dates for both America and Europe, we also have another tour being worked on to go to Australia and the Pacific Rim, Central America, Mexico…It’s gonna be a busy year, I mean, this is as usual, and it’s not a tiring experience for us, it’s more like “Hey, this is what’s next on the plate, this is the way this works best”. So we’ll go out there now and promote that record, getting it live out there and off the cage.

Any last words for Overkill fans?
We’ll see you in October!

Originally published on Music & Riots Magazine on July 22, 2014.