Kobra And The Lotus Frontwoman Talks ‘High Priestess’, Touring & Artwork

By Andrew Bansal

Canadian female-fronted heavy metal band Kobra And The Lotus have followed up and success of last year’s self-titled album with their highly impressive new LP ‘High Priestess’ which saw its North America release on June 24th, and is undoubtedly one of the finest albums of pure metal to have come out this year, once again featuring the soaring vocals of Kobra Paige along with the scorching musicianship of her band mates. Currently, the band is on the road for a massive North American summer tour with KISS and Def Leppard, which is scheduled to hit LA/OC for two shows, 7/05 at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine and 7/08 at the Forum in Los Angeles. Yesterday, I spoke to Kobra Paige over the phone to talk about the tour, the new album, its artwork and more. Enjoy the conversation below and catch KATL on tour this summer.

Kobra, it’s good to have you again on Metal Assault. First of all, how has everything been going for the band on this tour?

It’s been really fantastic! Everything has been positive, we’ve had a wicked crew and production with the Def Leppard and KISS guys. So it has made for an overall very enjoyable experience so far.

Awesome! On this tour, you’ve obviously playing in front of KISS and Def Leppard fans which I’m sure takes you a little bit out of your comfort zone. Does that motivate you to put on an even better show?

Yeah, it’s a very different environment! Everyone is seated, and they’re expecting something very different. They don’t know what’s coming at them, and we have to go out there and convince them of our music and warm them up.

Right, so your new album ‘High Priestess’ came out last week, and it sounds great. For this one, what was the working process like, and was it any different from the previous album?

Thank you! Yeah, we always have a different process, and there’s several processes on one album. Coming into the studio, we had a lot of material prepared but sometimes you’re missing music that you don’t feel is there yet, so once we got in there, we wrote a couple of songs. Songs come in different ways. Sometimes a whole song will come out and it will be fairly complete in one try of writing, and then another song will take chunks from different people to put it together. There’s ton of collaboration on the album, which I think is great because more brains is usually a good thing.

Exactly. The focus is obviously on you and you’re the frontwoman and everything, but in terms of the songwriting, how much do the other members usually contribute? 

There’s other people that contribute as well, definitely. I co-write every single song and some songs I write by myself, but on this album there was a lot of co-writing with Jasio Kulakowski, and there’s also co-writing with other guitar players as well. So it just depends on whichever and whose riff gets used, and we build around that. But yeah, we’re all involved in every song.

I feel that musically on this album you’ve come up with more variation. There’s some darker and slower stuff as well. How has that impacted your singing and how have you adjusted to all these changes?

Well, I didn’t have to adjust but I decided to just show more aspects of my voice on the album, just to add more texture inside the songs, to add to the theme of each topic inside the song. We were finding that vocal dynamics were making a big difference in how the song came across. You’re right though, there’s a lot of versatility on the album.

On this tour you must be playing songs from this album and the previous one. When you play them one after the other, how different do the new songs feel from the old ones?

You know, we actually haven’t been playing very many songs off of the old album and we’ve been really pushing the new album. So far on the tour we’ve only played one set where we added ’50 Shades Of Evil’, otherwise we’ve been playing all new material every single show. But when we did add that song it wasn’t really a big deal. It’s still our material and it’s still in the same vein with each other, but it does sound different which I think is a good thing. The songs don’t sound the same as each other. It’s not one of those things where a song on the new album resembles something on the old album.

Yeah, exactly. So, the cover artwork that you went with for the previous album is simple because it’s self-titled and it’s just the Kobra And The Lotus logo. But with this new album ‘High Priestess’, you obviously had more scope to work with on the cover, and you have. Who came up with that design for the artwork and what was your contribution to that?

I did, actually, and I was working one on one with an artist I found in Chicago. When we were in the studio, I went and had some tattoo work done on my body, and I met this tattoo artist who also did great album art that I was very interested in. I wanted to work with him on building this album cover, so I told him what I wanted and we just worked on it from there. I wanted a ‘High Priestess’ tarot card but it’s obviously a Kobra And The Lotus album, so I told him that I wanted to have in it some aspects that would represent that. There’s the sacred blue skin, she’s a shaman with a trishul in her hand and a cobra wrapped around her neck and there’s other cobras inside the picture. She has a Canadian falcon on her shoulder, a Canadian ranger hammer on her head, and a third eye for viewing the divine in people. There are trees crushing through the temples in Cambodia, and that’s taken from those pictures. There’s just tons of aspects from all around the world inside the High Priestess. That was something really important for me, because to me she’s a global symbol. She’s there to represent the future, and that’s what the tarot card refers to. She represents the future and holds all the knowledge but doesn’t give it to any of us. We have to go on our own life journey to achieve that knowledge, because only we can create our own path.

That’s great. So there’s a lot more detail in the cover artwork than what meets the eye. What I saw was  just the priestess. I didn’t notice all these things!

(Laughs) Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of detail, and a lot of little intricacies inside that picture.

And finally, after this tour what plans do you have? Will you keep touring and come back around here for another run?

Yeah, that’s the plan, to keep touring. We have a lot of work to do still on getting this album out to the rest of the territories, and then also coming through again. I think it’s important to bring this album thoroughly through the territories, at least twice. So that’s the plan, to keep touring!

Related: 2014 Mid-Year Recap: Best Albums

Kobra And The Lotus links:
KobraAndTheLotus.com
facebook.com/KobraAndTheLotus
twitter.com/KATLofficial

KISS/Def Leppard/Kobra And The Lotus remaining tour dates:

JULY
02        Concord, CA               Sleep Train Pavilion
03        Wheatland, CA            Sleep Train Amphitheater
05        Irvine, CA                    Verizon Wireless Amphitheater
06        Chula Vista, CA          Sleep Train Amphitheatre
08        Los Angeles, CA         The Forum
09        Phoenix, AZ                Ak-Chin Pavilion
12        Austin, TX                   Austin360 Amphitheatre
13        Dallas, TX                   Gexa Energy Pavilion
15        Cincinnati, OH             Riverbend Music Center
16        Nashville, TN              Bridgestone Arena
18        Atlanta, GA                 Aaron’s Amphitheater At Lakewood
19        Charlotte, NC              PNC Music Pavilion
20        Raleigh, NC                Walnut Creek Amphitheater
22        West Palm Beach, FL Cruzan Amphitheatre
23        Tampa, FL                  MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheater
25        Bristow, VA                 Jiffy Lube Live
26        Holmdel, NJ                PNC Bank Arts Center
30        New York, NY             The Studio At Webster Hall – headlining date

AUGUST
01        Mansfield, MA             Xfinity Center
02        Watertown, NY           The Flashback Lounge
03        Rochester, NY            The Montage Music Hall – headlining date
04        Pittsburgh, PA             Smiling Moose – headlining date
12        Toronto, ON                Molson Canadian Amphitheatre

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