Behind The Scenes: GOATFATHER - Stoner Dream (Official Video)

Yann “Olaf” S. (guitar/vocals): It’s quite a coincidence that you asked us to talk about this particular song, because Stoner Dream appears to be an exception in our discography. It’s a song that was not supposed to exist. Initially, House of the Rising Smoke was meant to be a 4-track EP. But when we got out of the studio, we realized that the production prices of vinyl discs had increased a lot and the 4 songs being quite long, we just had to add 2 more to make a full-length album, which would be way more rational economically speaking.

The problem was that, usually, the writing process in Goatfather is very slow. We tend to try a lot of things, create a lot of alternative versions of each song, and test everything in rehearsal sessions, and it can take months or even years to reach the final version. But with the necessity of finishing the album quickly, we had to adapt, and to create in a short period of time 2 songs that would fit in the 3-4 minutes we had to fill on each side of the disc, whereas the 4 initial songs were twice that length.

So a few days after we made the decision, I came up  with an idea. I had had this very simple and hypnotic riff turning in my head for a while, and I was thinking of making a song of it for our next album. I was playing it at home and having fun by doing some “stop and start”, like my car says. I was playing the riff, then stopping and singing in a Neil Fallon-ish voice, and playing again, like Clutch used to do in some of their early albums. And just after that, I opened Facebook and Instagram and saw this famous meme about stoner songs (picture) that says that it’s just a hypnotic riff, a pause, a guy yelling “I smoke weed atop a mountain”, and then the riff coming back heavier.

And so I tried it with my riff, and it worked. So I took a pen and paper, and I started to write some lyrics, trying to include all the clichés about stoner rock. Then I opened Guitar Pro and I improvised a structure for the song, and I sent it to the guys and told them, “OK, I’ve got our song, it’s just one riff and the most stupid lyrics I ever wrote”. And that was it.

In the next practice, we tried it live. Pierre had written a better solo than the basic licks I had put on the test file. Raph added the drums and also this very cool break before the last chorus. And Violeine came up with the idea of simpler guitars on the second verse to introduce some nuance, which led to this very Tarantino-Rodriguez vibe I really love. There’s this very aerial guitar chord, with the palm mute riff and the drums and bass growling like the sea on a cliff, and after just a fraction of a second, my voice saying “I’m on a motorbike in the desert”, which is an absolute cliché, and it makes me think about this scene in Machete with the ads for the contract killer Osiris Amanpour, and he’s on a motorbike doing crazy things, and that’s what I see at this time of the song. And it’s exactly what I wanted to feel listening to it.

And so, this is Stoner Dream. Just one very stoner riff with very stoner lyrics that make no sense at all. Elephants, motorbikes, a lot of drugs – I love singing about drugs while being certainly one of the most straight edge stoner singers in the scene – and last but not least, considering Tony Iommi as our true god. And that’s certainly a dream world for many stonerheads.