BW&BK; recently caught up with HELIX frontman / founder Brian Vollmer to discuss the band's longevity and their forthcoming album. An excerpt from the story is available below.

Making music for over three decades, Vollmer has experienced the change from analog to digital recording. Was it daunting at all to realize analog was on its way to becoming an antiquated form of recording when technology started to invade the studio?

“Not really, because I’m not the guy twisting the nobs. I hire people to do that because being a good engineer or producer is an around the clock job that requires you to do it every day all day long and be at the top of your field, so I don’t go there. I never had the time to learn that stuff because I’d rather be writing songs and hire people that have the expertise in that field. I just let them go for it. I listen to the finished results and I know what I want to hear at the end of the day.”
“I found back in the day there were too many cooks in the kitchen,” he continues. “I always tell this story about when we were in England doing the Wild In The Streets album. We used to have this habit of always listening to the mix, the whole band, and then we’d go back down to the studio where our producer Mike Stone was waiting for us, and we’d say ‘We want you to change this and that.’ After about the 10th take of this one song – and of course the bassist wants the bass louder, the guitarist wants the guitar louder – I said I couldn’t tell a damn difference between it and the last mix, I didn’t know what the hell the guys were talking about. They told me I was being lazy and didn’t want to take the time to get the best mix, so we took it back down and Stone played the new mix. The guys thought it sounded so much better, and Stone turned around and said ‘I fooled ya; it’s the exact same mix you heard the last time. The exact friggin’ same.’”

The new album, due for release later this year, features the addition of Crash Kelly frontman Sean Kelly as Helix’ new bassist and songwriting partner for Vollmer. On top of that, singer/guitarist Moe Berg from Toronto’s AOR rock act The Pursuit Of Happiness has contributed song ideas to the next record.

“We try to stick close to the Helix sound, obviously, because I don’t want to make a right hand turn, but whenever you write with different people you’re going to get a different perspective,” Vollmer offers. “There are bound to be some differences in the sound. Sean’s influences are more along the T-Rex and David Bowie line, and you can hear that in his Crash Kelly stuff. Moe Berg… I don’t even know what his influences are. When we write we come up with something totally different, and when I throw my influences into the mix it comes out sounding like Helix, but it might be a little bit different from the last time around. We’ve done two tracks together; one of them sounds like it could have come off of Walkin’ The Razor’s Edge, the other is a shuffle, so we’ll see how it comes out. We clicked right off the bat when we wrote together and that’s a special thing.”
“Brent’s now back in the band,” he adds, referring to long time Helix guitarist Brent Doerner, who was on board from 1975 – 1990, “and the way we’ve been writing we’ve taken things to a new level as a band. Brent was largely responsible for that, especially on the one song we wrote with Moe Berg.”

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