Interview with Derek Reeder from Cobra Cobra

The spirit of hurricane sized guitar riffs and hard hitting cuts of glass shattering rock 'n' roll lives on through the music of Cobra Cobra! This band knows a thing or two about laying down some killer sounding hard rock/heavy metal riffs for listeners to sink their teeth right into. The band's debut album, "Life After Poison," is a tremendous display of passionate rock and metal fury that comes bursting out onto the scene like a renegade hammerhead shark going in for the kill. I caught up with the band's guitarist Derek Reeder to discuss the new album and some other topics of interest. Check out the full interview below: 

Hello Derek! Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. With the recent release of Cobra Cobra’s debut album“Life After Poison” how has the feedback been so far? How pleased are you with the album’s overall sound? 

Derek: Hey man! back atcha! Feedback regarding our debut Cobra Cobra album “Life After Poison” has been pretty rock solid I must admit. It's almost to the point of where, for example, when I ask someone about it their response is “there are no bad songs, every song is good”, that it’s kinda becoming just a cop out at this point LOL! But I find the more specific the listener gets the better the feedback is, as you know. Maybe I should ask, what’s your favorite guitar solo on the album, or whats your favorite most “well produced song", if you could point to one, etc. Did you like a chorus on a certain song? Did the lyrics touch you in any way? How about all the “hey’s” in our gang vocals LOL! We love to talk about this stuff all day long!

In terms of the production of the album, I’m pretty pleased to be honest. I love huge sounding albums that sound expensive. But let’s face it, we don’t live in the glory days of the 250k album budgets. If we did, it would be a night and day difference, and better overall from what we have now. When you think about it, what we had to play with budget wise was probably about the same amount as one of those expensive lunch’s for one of those older artists enjoying the huge record company budget back in the day, LOL. But that being said it’s very important for me to have a really prominent drum sound, specifically at the minimum a pounding kick drum and heavy toms. Even though I’m a guitarist, and that's my main instrument, 90% of the time if I have a favorite metal band, chances are it’s not because they have a shredding lead guitarist, but rather it’s the drummer in the group who establishes the whole attitude and spirit behind the band. And if you don’t have the right guy, it can be pretty challenging just to feel good about an album, or your project in general. If you don’t have that in place you are just phoning it in, so to speak, in my opinion. Not only am I lucky to have my brother behind the kit, but we both tend to agree on the same things musically for this style and know how important “playing for the song” is. And we more than put our hearts into every aspect of it, from choices in fills to specific crashes, double bass work, and never abusing the ride cymbal! LOL. It’s all real specific stuff. So we went as hard as we could with that, crafting each song. I’m hoping for even bigger and better production on our next album. The razor tight big production layers and sound is a staple of a lot of my favorite 80’s/early 90’s bands.

I was wondering if maybe you could give readers a little insight into the album and discuss the recording process. How long did it take to record the album and what was the writing process like? Did you go in before hand with all the songs already written, or did you come up with any new ideas while recording? 

Derek: Yeah definitely! The album took about a month to record at home once I had all the songs worked out. Then the vocals came second, all of which took a lot of time in trying to find the ideas that we felt worked best. And after the vocal demos and sketches were tracked to our liking, we then had to re-record all 12 songs with full vocals. But the backstory is that the writing, as usual, takes the most time. 

As far as the process goes, I start out every day with a scheduled time to come up with new riffs and ideas, record them, and then starting piecing songs together. Then my brother comes in and we work to create the ideal drum parts, and then finally add bass and vocals. Probably what you’re used to hearing in terms of an approach, perhaps not, but it's what works for us. At times we moved at glacier like speed, perhaps compared to other artists, since we really go through the arrangements over and over with a fine toothed comb. So the truth is this album is really a product of 3 long years. I mean there’s so much to go over - do we have all day? LOL.  

And as to songwriting, early on as a songwriter I tried writing along the lines of what was the most tempting at the time for my tastes, generally 80’s shred metal lead guitar and sledgehammer 80’s riffs, which were the main elements of the entire album. I mean who wouldn’t want an album with killer riffs and runs through the whole thing, right?

Well, after a couple albums worth of that stuff, and you slay every dragon LOL, you really start to look into what direction you ultimately want to head in. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to take a stab at writing a complete album of 3 minute songs that would fit into the classic radio AOR pop format, only to realize later that all my favorite bands threw away the rule book a long time ago! They were writing 6 and 7 minute epic songs (Cemetery Gates for example) and having success. So, along with the fact that I was getting tired of just being the lead guitarist that can shred, I came to the point of just wanting to be a band guy. A band guy who contributes to the entire process of writing great songs with my band mates. 

My tastes have always kind of leaned towards upbeat (obscenely) melodic commercial hard rock and metal songs. You know, the days of the record company filter and those million dollar budgets. Everything was on the line and you needed that sugar chorus or money riff that was gonna get the party started. It's fun to put yourself in that position, and that was definitely a template going in to this album. Verse-chorus traditional structure, but with less of a rule book, more freedom and experimenting with writing longer songs. Often I’ll put on a song to test out a PA system and then a couple minutes later have to walk back over and put another song on etc. There’s something about the longer approach!

Anyways, back to the writing, once I was flush with riffs the beginning of the album began. Recorded at home (Cobra Cobra studios), I tabbed out all my solos and parts and got to work. For drums, we booked 3 studio days over an 8 month stretch, 4 songs each day, at Tone Lab Studios in Portland, home of a fantastic engineer, Justin Abel. We really turned it on creatively there, and with Justin being a song writer himself, we got a couple of last minute nudges, especially with drum ideas before hitting record. That was actually my first time in a professional grade "home" studio. But after the first 4 tunes were dialed in I got really comfortable in that environment, which inspired me to spend even more time fine tuning the next 4 songs at home to prepare for our next session. I spent a lot of time at home perfecting the various parts and arrangements before our next studio session because, as you know, that’s when you get stuff done! The pressure hits and you really have to knuckle down and make it happen by the deadline. 

While preparing for the final session's deadline, June 1st 2018, my monitors at home (Infinity Infinitesimal) blew up at the last minute. So I had to scramble to mix my demo parts for the next day in the studio with a couple of sketch throw away boom box speakers I ended up finding in the garage. There's always something! 

Once I was up and running again I went from being ahead of the game to running behind. By the time I finished the solos and mixes it was 11am the next morning. But I showed up to the studio to critique parts for another 8 hrs after that! LOL, Let’s just say I slept like a baby that night. After that final date, for me the album on my end was done and we had the instrumental side locked down. We sent the tunes off to our vocalist and he got to work. This project was night and day, from a style standpoint, then anything he’s done. He went through hundreds of ideas before finalizing all his vocal performances. That took quite awhile, but he did an amazing job, and I couldn't be happier with his contribution.

I read a bit of your bio from another article and found out that you and your brother give music lessons. I was wondering if you could talk about that and how it eventually led to the formation of Cobra Cobra? Also, as a music teacher and guitarist what are some of your musical philosophies when teaching people? 

Derek: The lessons side of things actually started at a local music store here in Oregon City. Adrian Music was a main stay for local players and students, then it became Blue Dot Guitars after one of the repair techs, also a teacher, bought the business. I managed to get hired on, thanks to my good friend Brandon Cook (The Loyal Order, Black n’ Blue) who was also teaching there at the time. From then, for a period of time, I taught guitar lessons during the day and then would mind the shop at night when the owner went home to try to sell guitars. 

As far as musical philosophies go, I'd say I am a foundational type of teacher. I mean I didn't approach lessons based on who was popular at the time. I understood that the key to being a great guitar player was to learn from the best, all the classic rock guitar heroes along with some worthy blues guys. I mean, those cats were the ones who inspired all of us to want to play right? LOL. But, just as importantly, along with the proper foundation it's all about the work you are willing to put in. I am a stickler about establishing a regular and consistent personal practice regimen. It's like a bank account, no deposit made - no withdrawal available, LOL.

As for the creative side, I’ve usually written an album's worth of songs every 2 years, just on my own in order to have something to show for my efforts for my guitar students and friends and family. As things progressed my brother and I would spend time having fun just jamming and doing the instrumental thing for awhile, building our chops and carving out song ideas from our jam sessions. Whenever you have a sound proofed 7-day-a-week rehearsal spot, in our case the guitar store, plus with all it's nice gear, it’s hard for the wheels to not start turning LOL! So from there we just started utilizing that space at night and eventually we wanted to form a proper band.

So, we’d show up every night and run through tunes I’d put together at home. Then we recruited our first bassist and vocalist and next thing you know we played our first few shows which went quite well. But then the music store went down due to the recession, it was a pretty major setback. We felt like we kinda lost everything and so we had to re-group and build back up to what we had before the crash. We ended up renting smaller rooms in a commercial office space building in town till we got a bigger room, once we were back up and running I started renting the space out to local bands, which helped offset our cost to rent the space for our project. That’s actually how our we found Chris, our vocalist. His band Fallstar rented the space for rehearsals for awhile. But lately it’s been great to keep the current practice spot we have now. It’s not an every day thing like the old days, but the idea is to have at the bare minimum, a jam room with no noise ordinances which is what we have now. 

But back to teaching guitar, my whole thing before a student signs up is to make sure they understand that our lessons program is a membership agreement. It is designed for the serious student who’s really interested in improving their skills. So with that in mind, we get started getting our skills up and running from a technique stand point, almost like a guitar gym. As I mentioned previously, I try to expose them to as many of the greats as I can, which in many cases are not the players that they are super familiar with. From there we get into listening to music on a deeper level. For a new student, just to get them excited about learning, I help them get started by learning a lot of hit song 'signature' riffs from every genre including 80's rock-Nu Metal where the riff can be as basic as 2 or 3 notes. Once I show them how basic some of it can be l usually get a “wow almost anyone can do this!” kind of response. And from there they begin to get inspired to start creating some of their own ideas. And no matter how basic it may be in the beginning, it’s always a lot of fun. 

For advanced players there’s no shortage of scale based lessons/workouts that I utilize. I encourage consistent improvising over a wide variety of styles, until they start to shoot for a goal - i.e. "I have to be stage ready by January 1st"!, LOL. Once they’re there and they’re feeling pretty good, it's at that point that they want me to record them, LOL. I have to admit I’m still learning my engineering chops, but eventually I think it would be nice to eventually transition into an audio engineering role, while still accepting the serious student. Nothing I do is too mind-blowingly different from other teachers out there. But since I’ve been doing it so long it’s turned into something that is not just focusing on guitar lessons, but a music career training facility and launch pad! 

Returning to the debut album, I wanted to know if there are any songs off of the album that standout the most to you? For me I really enjoy those triumphant chorus sections on songs like, “Free in My Head” and “Life After Poison.” There are plenty of catchy chord structures and tasty rhythms, which I think gives the album a very fierce and raw edge. 

Derek: Nice! I really appreciate that - that was the desired effect with both of those. That’s actually usually my question to the listener! Typically it’s the songs that I struggled with that stand out to me personally because just getting them across the finish line was quite the arduous task. Starting out, say you have an intro riff/a verse riff, but no chorus riff and figure you can just finish the song easily after that.. it’ll be perfect 3/4’s of the way through, then it’s like holy (bleep) - now where do we go?  for rest of the song. It really felt like that for the whole album, other than track one, “The Conquering." For some reason that one just came together but some examples for that were actually “Life After Poison” the title track and “The Overtaker”. Obscene amounts of time writing/scraping/rewriting etc. But truth be told I’d never worked harder on a song then on the song “A Little Dark, A Little Sick…”  

The very first incarnation of the song had a completely different chorus section in the arrangement which when I thought it was a done deal, I realized that it just, in no way shape or form, cut it. So to find something I was happy with ended up taking weeks and months of day-in-day-out working to come up with the right build and parts. The exit riff at the end took like 6 hours one night as an example. But then again, when we were tracking drums and got to the end of the song, my brother nailed the ending drum lick in one take, our engineer Justin jumped up and said “you guys are freaks!” LOL. We’re so used to bands doing predictable endings, like a fade ending or an abrupt ending that is kinda awkward. It’s hard to come up with great endings but it’s something we work hard on since it translates live. All that to say though, you forget the all the time you slaved on a track later, and it seems like a life time ago, but I still remember all the hard fought stuff. 

Another high point of that song to me is that it just so happens to be the song that really showcases Chris’ vocal abilities, it's the best one in my opinion for that. But I've been getting a lot of positive feedback on that one lately as the favorite song on the album, so I know there's something special going on there. 

As a guitarist and songwriter, I was wondering if you could talk about some of your musical influences. Growing up what bands or musicians played a role in your development as a musician? 

Derek: Haha, well I grew up in church where my dad would put a church band together and play on Saturday nights. It was his way of reaching out to the younger crowd who thought church people were really square, can I use that term nowadays? LOL. It was actually pretty cool how they’d cover Judas Priest songs, but change the lyrics to Christian lyrics, etc. He would also do some of his original songs with extended solos as well, so that was always a thing early on. 

My uncle played guitar too and was a pretty big Eddie Van Halen fanatic. So when I learned my first couple of riffs it was nice to bounce those off him. He was someone I could call up and name any player and he would know who it was: BB King, Hendrix, Brian May, Steve Vai, SRV, Robert Cray, Eric Johnson, George Lynch etc. 

In the very beginning I was kinda into the Eric Clapton 24 Nights era, where he had that kinda long haired skater haircut. I just thought he was so badass looking! Around that time my uncle was sending us Joe Satriani album samplers. He sent Flying In A Blue Dream, which had 3 songs on the album; The Forgotten Part 1 and 2, and of course Big Bad Moon. If I really think back hard enough, that may of been my first real introduction to guitar music. I knew Satriani ripped, I just had no clue what techniques I was hearing so I played that thing to death. 

I kinda worked my way up, Clapton, a massive Led Zeppelin phase, then into early 80’s Priest. Even though I was into the older sound I started warming up to 80’s production sound and some of the Van Halen stuff I was hearing. Then from all the guitar and music mags around I discovered Pantera and that pretty much checked all the boxes for me: drum sound, production, the energy they brought to the table and how they incorporated that Van Halen excitement into a really aggressive Metallica based style. I ended up seeing Metallica live twice so got into them heavily for awhile, and of course Megadeth and Yngwie, and well you name it! 

After I exhausted all that stuff I was turned on to King’s X from a drummer friend of mine, which took a little bit of getting used to but once it grew on me it really turned into 'the thing' - my new favorite band. You had the sledgehammer riffs but incorporated into a Hard Rock Pop sound, if you will, with crystal clear vocals you could actually hear. After learning 15-plus albums worth of that stuff I started to get into the big production of bands like T-Ride. Eric Valentine, and a band I heard about through him 'Scritti Politti', continue to be massive influences, the way they construct bass lines and all the studio wizardry. So that’s basically “the” style for where I’m at now..the Pantera rhythm section, Joe Satriani solos, and King’s X cleaner vocals no matter how heavy we get. Some of the classic death metal bands were a huge influence as well so it’s pretty across the board, from guitar hero to extreme heavy metal.  

I wanted to get a little more information about your local music scene, as I am always interested in hearing about local music scenes and how the bands in those areas go about trying to book shows to perform their music live. Before this pandemic, what was the music scene like for rock and metal? 

Derek: Thriving! Our scene here in Portland, OR was growing leaps and bounds. For starters we have probably the biggest tribute band circuit in the country. Every year during the summer they put on a massive tribute band festival called “Harefest”. And if you’ve never heard of it definitely see if you can catch some of the show's previous videos on YouTube. There’s been 8 or 9 of them in a row every summer so far, with the exception of this year. But often a typical year for that specific scene, for example, is they’ll start off with an 80’s Weekend in January, a big Spring Break Show, a pre-Harefest show and then Harefest over the summer. Then, they will put on a big labor day show, followed by a show around Halloween then finally a big New Years Eve Show. So that’s basically what it was like before Covid-19 hit. 

Most of us have been in a tribute band, some just as a side gig to help pay the bills, but also while working on our original projects. A lot of original bands book local shows all year. Some bands pay to play, to gain exposure. It's like renting a club with a ready made audience haha. But some of the venues will pay unbelievably well for the tribute shows. I like to think eventually they will pay just as well for an original band like us once they see us start to get the same draw, or even better, as a good tribute band does. That would be the ultimate, to be able to transition to “The Real Thing”. So for us, at this point we’re just pushing through this current down time by writing, demoing material and doing music videos etc. 

I’ve asked this question to other guitarists before during interviews and with the recent passing of Eddie Van Halen I feel like it is extremely relevant. Do you think we will see another Eddie Van Halen come along and inspire the next generation of rock and metal guitarists? Also, you fear that people will become less interested in playing an instrument due to the increase in the popularity of electronic music? 

Derek: Wow. Yeah man, that’s tricky. As a guitar instructor over the years, I've found that upwards of 80% of the new student base coming in the door (young kids) don’t even have a handle on who EVH is. I’ve got to really hound them!  It's an interesting phenomenon nowadays, but I've noticed that none of the new players out there attempting to shred like the 'greats' seem to be able to command anything close to the attention span of the listener that the players of the 70's did. Along with that, most of the time they pass on any influence an Eddie Van Halen could have by chalking it up as “Dad rock”. Never mind going even further into the actual influences Eddie had like Clapton, etc.  

There’s a great saying I’ve heard kicked around over the years. That is "all the best guitarists were born in 54”. Interestingly, that is the year the Fender Strat was born too. Anywhere from within that 54-56 era you've got Pat Travers, George Lynch, Joe Satriani, Michael Schenker, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Eric Johnson, to name a few.  It's hard to list off all of them without looking it up. Something about being that age and processing music the way they did without all the modern distractions, already makes Eddie or any of those guys way cooler than any of us, LOL! 

What we can do, though, is encourage new players to develop an intense appreciation and passion for players like Eddie Van Halen, or Randy Rhoads for example. Instruct them that if they would just set a personal goal, if they would dedicate 6 months to digest that music and get into that mindset of taking the world by storm and imagine living in that 1979 world. If a student is willing to do that, then by all means there could very likely be some really scary players coming out of the woodwork in the near future. You can't build an Empire State building on a shaky and shallow foundation. You have to dig down to the bedrock of rock and roll. I always have it in the back of my mind to take my entire music collection and throw it off the proverbial cliff, and only listen to early Deep Purple, Hendrix, and Cream, LOL, and that kind of stuff!

As far as the electronic thing goes, I feel like it’s not quite the hit to the guitar community like I’ve heard over the years. I’ve recently rethought of the electronic scene as a new community of dedicated engineers and producers who’ve learned their DAW’s inside and out. A lot of them would gladly love to record a kick ass solo, or tell you "If I had to do some of your solos I’d be so F'd!”. So if anything, they’re very encouraging and still appreciate great guitar playing, they just can’t do it themselves. As much as that scene has come into prominence, kind of taken over, it’s still up to us true believers to keep finding the treasure there is to find in the metal and rock world and ultimately get it back on top, and to keep it on top!

Looking to the future what does Cobra Cobra have planned? I believe you had talked to me about doing a music video. 

Derek: The future is an unwavering commitment to new music and continuing to push the envelope with all things musical with the freedom to explore, that is without any predetermined constraints. We definitely plan on letting things unfold naturally. Sometimes that feels like years of waiting around for someone to finish their part, or for the writing/mixing/mastering to be done. It's years upon years of slogging it out without a paycheck, i.e. “paying the price” up front, in full, in advance without any guarantees of success. 

Mostly we do our music for ourselves, even if no one else gets to hear it, which I can’t imagine that happening. But even though we strive to make music that will have a world-wide impact, at the same time we kind of keep our expectations low, but we keep going for the gold each and every time we do an album. Our focus is on quality and being happy with the direction we’re headed in. We know we can stand back and let the 'word of mouth' do it’s thing at that point.

We’re actually all trying to get more motivated to promote ourselves on social media, when we’d rather be working on tunes. Our bass player is really good at it at the moment. As you mentioned, a Cobra Cobra music video is next. And with that there’s some serious option anxiety on the table of which song to choose. So that should be quite a surprise! In the mean time we’re 4 songs deep into new stuff, and of course have a couple instrumental albums already in the can, just in case ‘gun-to-our-head' we have to turn out a record under contract - we could do it, haha. But that’s all wishful thinking at the moment. 

With our the student base we’ve already recouped the cost for our CD’s and shirts so at this point it’s just continuing to get exposure with that new listener out there, wherever that may be. So far we’ve had some pretty good luck in the UK with radio play and some of our connections over there. They’re loving it! Those people already seem like our closest friends. But between our CD release show, as soon as that’s an option, and the new video along with new material, we’re seriously pumped for the future and everything to come! 

Check out the song "Life After Poison" below:

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