Mike Martin: Mammoth interview with Agent Cooper s lead guitar player.

B#: And as far as your next record, how far along are you with that as far as the songwriting itself?

MM: The songwriting is ongoing. With me, I've always been a writer. Ever since I was a kid, I've always liked writing themes. I've got so much on my audio drive of demos and snippets of stuff. Lately, since I've been an iPhone user, there's a really cool voice recorder where, a lot of times you just need to record an idea. And when I was younger, I didn't have ways of recording my ideas, so I would just memorize them or write them down. I've got stacks of notebooks and folders with themes that I've written out. Some are orchestrated, some are not. Some are just verbalized. Some are very sketchy where notes aren't even specific, but I can see the gesture of the musicality on the page. And then there's just stuff that I've whistled into my iPhone. I used to, before I had an iPhone, I would call myself and leave myself a voice message while I was driving and sing an idea into my voicemail. So I've got all of that crap. It's funny! By any means necessary, when you have an idea, you've just got to get it out. So I have tons and tons of that stuff.

Without getting into too much...what "2 Of 5" was initially supposed to be. It was originally supposed to be very different. And it became "2 Of 5", largely because of me having this bold new audience and this opportunity being in Fozzy, where I needed to do a more aggressive record. So the record went that way. But it was originally going to be more sequential...maybe not necessarily concept record, but kind of concept record, where there was definite themes. Opening themes, things were going to tie in, and even if they didn't have themes that stayed together from song to song to song, but even by song title referenced each other. So, I still have a lot of that stuff that didn't make it onto "2 Of 5", so that's getting pulled forward. There's songs like "Lavender", which I wrote when I was 18, and never really had a way to get that out until I...I could write out the parts, but I didn't have a way for anybody else to hear it unless I hired an ensemble to play all of those different parts. A lot of those orchestrated guitars were initially written out for this big string symphony. There's stuff like that that's still around, that I've had forever, but has never had the light of day. There's one thing that I've got there, a longer piece called "The Redemption Of Purity and Innocence", which, just by the ostentatious nature of its title...it's like, it's taken me a long time to even grapple with that. Because I really want to go into a thing where it's not just the song idea and the guitar idea for the sake of the guitar idea.

full mammoth interview http://betterbsharp.weebly.com/3/post/2012/09/interview-with-mike-martin-agent-cooperex-fozzyex-stuck-mojo.html