Phil Soussan is back with Cosmo Fighter Part One set for release on 13 November. The first part in a trilogy of EPs, this is not the story of running through England’s sunny meadows with the sun on your back. Indeed, the themes may be at times dark, but Phil does give us a message of hope, and Part One is backed with four awesome songs that have you thinking on many levels.
In other interviews, Phil Soussan has explained Cosmo Fighter as a story of someone from the near future who has come back to warn us. “I don’t think it was intended to be some kind of science fiction thing at all,” he told MetalTalk Editor Steve Ritchie. “I wanted to put it on a timeline. It was probably during the period of that awful shutdown of the pandemic that we had.
“I remember thinking at the time, certain things that we considered to be just wonderful and full of hope also have a possible law of unintended consequences. So, for me, I was thinking, around 2021/22, we were very grateful for social media. It was the only way we could stay in touch with each other. It was really a wonderful thing.
“Then I thought, well, what if somebody comes along from 2025/26, and was like, just hang on a second. There’s a couple of other things you might want to watch here, and we’ve got to be careful. A knife is a wonderful implement, but it can be used in lots of other ways as well. So that was really the concept.”
The elements of science fiction are a flashback to Phil’s love of that genre. “Writers like the Asimovs and Arthur C. Clarke had an unbelievable imagination. Imagine if you had a flip phone. I think that’s been used as the basis for people’s design goals. That’s where they got their ideas from, their inspiration.
“However, at the end of every single science fiction book, there’s always a little bit of a cautionary tale.”
On Cosmo Fighter, Phil Soussan covers instruments, vocals, production, mixing and mastering. Which role gives him the hardest time? “Oh gosh, all of them,” he smiles. “There’s nothing that is just easy, and probably I’m a bit of a perfectionist.
“It’s difficult working on your own because you tend to lose objective perspective. So you start not seeing the forest for the trees. You get so close to it that you find yourself questioning and going over and over every single aspect, whether it’s performance, the recording or mixing and mastering.
“That’s the difficulty. The difficulty isn’t any particular process. It’s just doing something on your own is the difficulty.”
Phil says he was absolutely able to recognise when a song maybe needed a different pair of ears. “I count on that heavily,” he says. “I have a trusty group of friends, and I like to think they feel the same about me. I’m often sending things and saying, ‘Here, have a listen. Don’t pull any punches. Let me know what you think.’ I know what I think. I’m not gonna tell you, but if you come back with something that I’m already questioning, I think that’s going to be a validation for me that I need to do a bit more work.”
Part One of Cosmo Fighter is four excellent tracks that really hold up well to multiple listens. These are no throwaway three-minute songs, and the layers you pick up show a great songwriting style and really great production.
In Fading Out, I love the changes in style between the verse and the pre-chorus. To me, it’s like the verse is punching out the dire current situation, while the chorus is almost saying, well, yes, but there is hope.
“Generally speaking, I don’t like to talk about what my songs are about,” Phil Soussan says. “Not for any other reason than sometimes you want people to hear it with fresh ears and then maybe relate to it through their own work.
“But that would also apply to a personal song. So for example, if I was writing a song about something that happened to me, I would write the song, and then I would strip out all of myself and leave it so that when somebody hears it, they would find a way that connects it to something they’re going through and experiencing. Maybe that gives them some closure or makes them feel good.
“When I’m bummed out, I love to listen to music. It makes me feel better. That’s what I would want other people to do. So that’s the only reason I’m usually reticent about it.
“But in this particular case, this is about a group of people who have established themselves based upon a division. With the division, they create a problem and will turn up to fix it. But when there is no division, they basically fade away. They become meaningless. There is no purpose.
“I think that people are fundamentally very, very smart, and we’ve opened ourselves to various different platforms which people can use to divide. Sometimes people don’t know why they’re divided. ‘Well, I don’t really relate to that person.’ Why? ‘Well, I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it.’
“So you need to think about it and realise, hold on a second, we’re not being played here. We’re fundamentally smart people.”
This is where the “Watching your kingdom come crumbling down” lyric comes in. What I love about these tracks is the depth of everything going on.
On the first listen of Fading Out, I did not appreciate the middle leading to the great guitar solo. But, I say that is what I want from music. Something that you can listen to repeatedly over a period of time and really get into. This came across really well in this track.
Of course, as a bassist, Phil Soussan gets to finish the track with solo bass rolls.
“You try,” he smiles. “It’s funny, Steve. When I mix projects for other people, usually the first comment that comes back is it’s great, but can you turn the bass up a bit? It’s probably because I’m a bass player, so I already hear it. So I tend to downplay it, because I think everyone else can hear it.”
Fading Out is the polar opposite of the throwaway three-minute song. It must have been a journey to assemble this song in particular.
“It was really tough, actually,” He says. “That was the song that took me the longest to write, and it was the one which I actually discarded probably two or three times. It came from that bass part. I was just noodling around with this bass part for ages and ages. I just couldn’t find some way to make it work.
“The way it is, you play with it and then say, OK, I’ll do something else. I kept coming back to it, and after about three times I just said this is not gonna work. Then I was messing around with it, in another room, and, all of a sudden, I came up with this melody that went over into the chorus. OK, I got it. Sometimes songs take a long time, and sometimes they don’t take quite as long.”
The lesson is perseverance.
The More You Take was the second single. I love the simplicity of the opening electric guitar and the underlying acoustic. The “Where your demons and sycophants crawl” lyric and the vocals across that song are really good. Does Phil have to work a lot on layering the vocals?
“Not really,” he says. “The song itself is about people who take advantage. I think we can all relate to that. I’m sure we’ve all had a situation where someone has taken advantage, whether it’s personally or whether it’s in business. The message is that people who do that tend to isolate themselves.”
The More You Take, stylistically, was pulled from the music that Phil Soussan loved growing up in England. “It was Free, or even a little bit Bowie. That kind of style of writing and that style of putting a song across. There was an Ozzy song that I remember thinking that was a throwback to that era for me. So that’s the sound I wanted to capture.”
Again, there are plenty of elements to the song. I love the drum pattern building up to the guitar solo. “There’s a way that I play [drums], and there’s a way that I do it in the studio. I basically play, but I will embellish the main drums with samples.
“Everybody does that, but don’t tell, don’t tell anyone,” Phil whispers. “I play well. It’s all the cymbals and everything is all played, and that’s predominantly most of what is kept. So it’s a sort of hybrid system. I wish I was a better drummer. I’d love to be.
“Listen, the way I did this album, I would have preferred to have done it with a group of live musicians. When I started writing the record, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing it towards and then was very pleasantly surprised when the songs came out the way that they did. Once I started sending them around, well, they were already recorded. In a way, that was just the way the cookie crumbled.”
It is great how the track was put together. The More You Take has three parts to the guitar solo. The first part is melodic, over those great guitar chords, then Phil flips the pickup for the second part, and then the twin guitar melody completes it. The process of putting that all together must have been quite fascinating.
“It was very granular,” Phil says. “When I write parts, honestly, I try to sing them. Because to me that’s the easiest way to connect what I’m feeling. Then I work it out, and then I might embellish stuff.”
The More You Take is the epic track on the EP. “I was torn between the two songs as to which one I wanted to release first,” Phil says. “I decided to go with Fading Out because I think it had an immediate impact and a relationship that most people would have to the type of music that they know me best for.”
The English humour is still there, as Phil Soussan notes he made a probably grammatically incorrect sentence by ending it with a preposition. I say I am from Norfolk, so we are fine to continue.
Fallen From Grace finds Phil Soussan killing the bass at the start, and you immediately feel this will be an angry song. The guitar riff is great, and there is a wonderful simplicity in parts that really complements the bass well.
“This track did come from the bass,” Phil says. “I’ve been inspired recently because, to me, music is an evolving thing. It’s not like this was my style, this was what I did, and this is what I’m gonna do forever. I think it evolves.
“A good example would be when I first saw Metallica back in England. One of my childhood friends was Cliff Burton’s bass tech, so I went to see him playing, and I was thinking, wow, it’s very heavy, but it’s sort of limited. They’re just doing the same kind of diminished fifth chords and this, that and the other.
“To see how the music that they created has evolved to the present day is absolutely remarkable. I think it’s wonderful, and it spawned so many incredible artists, and I love listening to that stuff. So, to me, music is an evolution in style. Styles develop, styles evolve.
“One style that I’ve really loved has been this sequenced bass that you start hearing a lot of bands have built an entire career on. Muse, they’re playing the bass almost like a sequence, and it’s a pattern that’s going on. I was really drawn to this, and I was like, wow, that’s kind of really cool.
“I don’t really know too many people who have done that, so I started messing around with ideas, and that’s really where the inception of that song came from.”
The lyric “There is no salvation, now that you’ve fallen from grace” hits. The song breaks into a brief guitar solo, but then the elements all come together as the song builds. The “Heroes of a time and place disappear without a trace” hits with an almost prog styling.
“I played it for my dear friend Chris Kimsey, who I’ve worked with for years and years on lots of different projects. He worked a lot with Jaz [Coleman] and Killing Joke. This was his favourite track, and he said the same sort of thing. I took that very much as a compliment because I’m a big Killing Joke fan anyway. But it was nice to hear somebody pick up on that.”
Please Don’t Make Me Wait features a guest, and you know it did not take long to get Richie Kotzen on board. Phil Soussan laughs. “We’re best friends, have been for years. To be honest with you, this is one of the songs that was not written at this time. It was written a little earlier. I had started writing it before the pandemic, and it was written about something completely unrelated.
“Then when we got into that [pandemic], I thought this is sort of what’s going on as well. Don’t make me wait, I was saying. I mean, it could be applied to anything.”
A casual conversation led to Phil sending the track over, and Richie adding the solo and some other parts. “He put some great stuff on there,” Phil says. “Richie is one of the people I use as a sounding board as well. I like to think he uses me as a sounding board from time to time. We think alike, but we think differently. Which is always good.”
The vocal harmonies are great in this track, and Phil nails the high “Please…” spot on. I ask if vocal layering is something he has to work on, or if he has in mind the composition of the harmonies.
When a song is finished, Phil gives it what he called the Old Grey Whistle Test test. “I pick up an acoustic guitar and see if I can sing it through and see if it carries,” he says. “If it doesn’t carry, then there’s something wrong and needs some more work. So, I pretty much have the idea of what I’m doing melodically for a song at that point.
“As far as harmonies and vocals, that’s something I find very easy to do. I don’t know if it’s my classical background. I studied classical music for my entire childhood. I would do background vocals and arrangements for Toto and for other bands. I sang a lot of the other things you would never imagine, like Damn Yankees albums. That’s always been something I’ve enjoyed doing. I love doing harmonies and cross harmonies and textures. That to me is the icing on the cake. That’s the fun part.”
There is a trailer video on YouTube that features clips from all four songs on Cosmo Fighter Part One, but that does not really do the EP justice. The EP stems from a “reservoir of unfinished ideas,” as Phil, like many musicians, makes the most of the audio recording features of modern technology.
“It’s like opening a box in the attic and going through and saying, well, what’s this? What’s that? When you get away from something, you get a very good perspective on it the next time you hear it. It becomes very evident which things are interesting versus the things that are just like, nah.
As for any other business, Phil Soussan was on stage recently with William Shatner, who is not your traditional Heavy Metal singer. The shows looked like fun to take part in. “It was a bucket list thing for me,” he says.
“I was a big Star Trek fan. I did everything in my power to not keep resorting to Star Trek quotes [laughs]. But Bill is an amazing person and an inspirational person. You don’t see him as that age. He’s very inquisitive, and he’s very knowledgeable. I asked him, where did you get your inspiration? He said he just wants to know everything about everything. I thought that’s an incredible thing.
“I relate to that because I’m very inquisitive as well. Some people take a retirement, and then they just run out of things to be involved with or interested in. That was an incredibly inspiring experience for me, and we’re gonna be doing more shows. He loved it. He had a great time.
“He wasn’t really sure what to expect. But once he started, you could see a beaming, big smile. Afterwards I said, it was great, wasn’t it? ‘Yeah, it was cool.’ You had two mosh pits in front of you. He goes, ‘Yeah, great. What’s a mosh pit?’.”
As for Last In Line, Phil says they are working with somebody, but we have to wait and see how that evolves. “Def Leppard have been announcing a whole bunch of upcoming work, so that’s presented a little bit of a maze that we have to work around. We’re gonna see how that evolves in the short term, and I’m sure there’ll be an announcement that will be made very, very soon. We’re very excited about it. New chapter in the band.”
The first time I spoke to Phil Soussan was at KK’s Steel Mill, and the conversation was about his autobiography, so I always throw that back as a question. “I was gonna put it out,” he says, “and then I just thought, as I was starting to do this record, maybe I should hold this off and then release it in the new year.”
The book is finished. “You would ask me that because now I have to go back and read it,” he smiles. “I keep having to add things to it. That’s the problem. It’s an ongoing story.”
The next chapter will be Cosmo Fighter Part One, and that is an impressive chapter around the new EP. The EP is out on Bravewords Records on 13 November, with an album listening party tonight over on Bandcamp.
Four well-thought-out tracks, well written and well performed. There is plenty of earworm, and it makes me excited for the next two episodes.
“Part Two and Part Three are finished,” Phil Soussan says. “It’s really, really cool that I can say this to you, and I think you might get what I’m saying. Each of the songs on this can stand up on their own, meaning they have their own stylistic personality.
“I’ve never really appreciated projects where it just sounds like a needle drop from one track to the next. It’s the same recording process. I’ve always loved an album where every single track sounds a little different. A Queen album, a Bowie album, whatever it happens to be. Each one has its own spirit. So I tried to preserve that.
“So as the song came up, I’d sit back and say, well, forgetting what the other songs sound like, how would I approach this if it was the only song? That seemed to work really well for me. The people who’ve heard it have commented that way. They say each song stands out.”
Phil Soussan says he misses England and the fans. “If it wasn’t for our fans, we wouldn’t have anything. I consider us to be all part of a big happy family. I miss our fans very much. I miss coming to England and playing. We had so much stuff planned around the awful pandemic with Last In Line, and we lost all of that stuff and lost those opportunities. I’m feeling like it’s been way too long.”
The call is for fans to stay in touch, and tonight’s Bandcamp get-together is a good place to start.
Then we wait for Part Two. “I’m planning for two singles from each of the EPs,” Phil says. “Let’s call it two featured tracks. How about that?”
That does sound good to me, and we make a plan to do this all again next year.
You can RSVP to tonight’s free listening party at Bandcamp. Cosmo Fighter Part One is available to pre-order here.
