There Will Be Blood - Journey to the End of the Blues

Since 2009, the trio from Varese made up of Mattia Castiglioni (drums), Riccardo Giacomin (guitar and keyboards) and Davide Paccioretti (vocals, keyboards and guitar) has been exploring the roots of blues and grafting them onto structures as skeletal as they are powerful. Now that the trilogy formed by the albums “Wherever You Go”, “Without” and “Horns” has come to an end, it's time to get to know There Will Be Blood better, by handing the floor over to the band themselves.

Horns sits at the far end of a trilogy revolving around blues-rock and the figure of an imaginary lone traveler. When you started writing the songs for the first album, did you already have this whole arc in mind, or did it take shape along the way?

Our very first work was titled “prologue”. And it was already conceived as the prologue to the concept album that would follow: “Wherever You Go – There Will Be Blood”. By the end of “Wherever You Go” it was clear to us that the story wasn't over, and it was implied that the second album would carry it forward. When we started working on “Horns”, it felt right to bring the story to a close. Three is the perfect number: we ourselves are a trio, and the greatest film sagas have been told in trilogies. Honestly, we could have kept moving endlessly within the universe we'd created, telling stories about characters other than the protagonist, or using more flashbacks and flashforwards. But the allure of the trilogy won us over, and now we feel like starting a new story.

I think that nowadays the term “blues”, like many other labels applied to music, has lost part of its original meaning. What does “playing blues” mean to you? And what have your sources of inspiration been, both inside and outside that world?

The beauty of the blues is that it can never truly lose its meaning. It's at the root of everything, it transforms and takes on a thousand forms, but it still keeps its core, its lifeblood, its essence. It's like distilling alcohol. You can start from different sources. You can do it by fermenting grapes, distilling potato peels, you can extract it from sugar cane, or from cactus, but in the end everyone is searching for and arrives at the same thing; depending on one's origins, habitat and culture, each person uses a different method and gets a result with different flavors and shades, but the substance everyone is after is the same. The most classic blues, delta blues, played with just voice and an out-of-tune guitar, is like drinking some gut-punching moonshine: not everyone likes it, and not everyone would drink it every day, but it goes straight to your head because it's pure and raw. Then you can filter it, you can mix it, you can do whatever you want with it and serve it even to the most demanding palates, but you can never strip it out of the ingredients.

So you're definitely right in saying that blues can no longer be pinned down to one precise genre - you need to add an adjective to zero in on the "type" of blues. But that's an exercise we're happy to leave to journalists, who are certainly better at it than we are. We like to call ourselves raw blues, just to make it clear that we play distorted and loud, but even by "Horns" the adjective raw was already feeling too narrow.

You can hear our blues in Riky's fingerpicking, in the way he always keeps the bassline going with his thumb, or in the very present toms in Mattia's drumming... underneath it all, it's always there.

On that note, how do your songs come together? And what's the ingredient, or the touch, that acts as the glue and comes back in every one of your tracks?

Over the years a certain process has become established, one that now applies to the vast majority of our songs: Riky comes into rehearsal with a new chord progression, a rough idea, and plays it for a bit to see if "it works"... usually within a few minutes Mattia finds a drum groove that convinces us, at which point we add some reinforcement with the second guitar to underline certain dynamics, and meanwhile Davide starts humming whatever comes to mind - sometimes certain phrases or words seem tailor-made to sit in that exact spot in the song, and they stay there until the end. As we keep working on the track, Davide fine-tunes the vocal melody and then writes the rest of the lyrics separately. Some songs change completely as rehearsals go on, to the point of becoming unrecognizable - maybe while trying to come up with an ending, something so good comes out that it makes us rewrite everything from scratch... Our songs are all very different from one another, yet we think our style is very recognizable: our sound, the way Riky plays guitar and Mattia plays drums, Davide's voice - somehow, even when we play covers we always manage to make them our own, almost as if we'd written them ourselves. Our philosophy has always been: "Less is more". If it doesn't convince you, you can do without it. That can mean a song is already finished with just vocals and claps, or that you can build an entire track around a single repeating guitar riff.

With "Horns" you bring in some notable featured guests, like Marco Pandolfi and Massimo Marcer. How do these collaborations come about, and what pushed you to seek out new "outside" collaborations?

If you're getting to the point of recording a third album, you necessarily have to show that you've grown. And for us that meant introducing new contaminations, showing new influences from genres far removed from our own, or making use of typical blues instruments that we're simply not able to play ourselves.

When we were writing the track "Fire" it was clear to us that we wanted to get a soul-funk song, and right from the start we were imagining horn sounds in our heads. When we were about to go into the recording studio (Andrea Cajelli's Sauna Recording Studio) we asked Andrea (the studio's owner as well as its sound engineer) if he had any contacts, some trumpet or sax player who had recorded with him and who he thought could help us out. That's how we got in touch with Massimo Marcer - luckily his extreme skill and professionalism made up for our obvious technical shortcomings: we sent him the pre-production audio with just the guitars and a few verbal pointers, and he showed up with a saxophonist, a trombonist, and written charts for all three of them. Whatever we asked for, they delivered it by improvising on the spot. Including the entire trumpet part in "Till Death Do Us Part". For us it was wonderful to watch them at work and hear how the track changed thanks to them.

We met Marco Pandolfi at the Mojo Blues Festival in Rome - we saw him play on the same stage we'd be playing on the following day. We asked him if he was up for doing something with us, and a few months later we got back in touch with him to come and record directly in the studio. We're talking about thoroughbreds, true virtuosos, who after listening to the track a few times start improvising and you end up with a "good on the first take" and goosebumps. Marco also played piano on "Undertow" - he simply saw the piano, sat down in front of it and started noodling around; we were trying to get a simple riff to put in the verse, and since he was much better at it than we are, we seized the opportunity. It was the first time a piano played by Marco had ever been recorded.

Recording with such great professionals was an important milestone for us - it fits into that idea of growth we mentioned earlier, and it made the album more complete. Better.

Now that the trilogy is finished, how will There Will Be Blood move forward from here, both in terms of releases and style?

Who can say? We'll certainly pick up right where we left off last time, hoping to push even further in our search for a sound that's fresh yet powerful, always staying true to the roots of blues. In general we never know exactly where we'll end up or what we'll do - it's something that takes shape along the way... We might have some rough ideas, starting points, stylistic whims we want to get out of our system. But we've never sat down and thought "what will we do next"... We wait for it to happen naturally, to grow out of new experiences and the people we meet, just as we've always done and always will.

Ride the wave of great music

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