Eric Knight’s Out of This World: A Stellar Musical Revelation [Rock Today UK]

Across the USA, the Great North American Eclipse has just captivated the entire nation and understandably created waves across the rest of the globe. It’s an entirely rare event where the moon passes between the sun and Earth resulting in light being completely obscured and for a few minutes, there is complete darkness. It will be 12th August 2024 before there’s an opportunity to experience this again. However, there is something else stellar building in the US that has the potential to be stratospheric: the release of Out of This World, the incredible new solo single from former Disciples of Babylon frontman Eric Knight. We catch up with Eric in North Carolina on what is proving to be a very busy press day. Wearing a simple black T shirt, Eric holds a real presence and displays a strong air of confidence. We make ourselves comfortable and our conversation begins…

I want to talk about your new solo single ‘Out of This World’ but before I do, I have to ask you about Disciples of Babylon. As you know, Rock Today was a massive supporter of the band, going as far as to say that you were perhaps ‘one of the most important bands, daring to take on strong subjects’. It was a huge surprise when the band split up in 2021. What happened?

It was as tough as a loss for me as you can imagine. There is a bigger story in terms of what came to that conclusion but I just decided to leave the project. I decided to leave because you get to a certain point in time where you feel you can take things as far as they can go, and there were a lot of different factors going on. They are lovely people and all the guys in the band I love dearly so it wasn’t necessarily one of these things where it was something to do with anybody in particular. It was just something that kind of came to a head and I felt to some degree, just my own personal thing, I was being held back and I’m a person who likes to move forward. So I felt like I needed to move on on my own, and actually the song (Out of This World) was one that I originally presented to the band believe it or not. When I did the original demos for this my bass player at the time Gui Bodi, from Disciples Of Babylon, was so lovely to help me with putting together the demo and everything when I had already decided that I was going to leave the project. We were kind of knee-deep in the pandemic and just getting to the point of coming out slowly. When we did the original demo I knew immediately that I felt so strongly about this song that I said “You know what? Since nothing is happening with this now I’m going to take this song and use it to relaunch my solo stuff” because I was a solo artist many, many years ago. I’ve had a couple of releases out. It’s almost like coming full circle as a solo artist. It was just something that kind of came to its conclusion and I felt like I needed to move on to the next step.

Well, it’s absolutely fantastic news that you, Eric, are back with a new solo single ‘Out Of This World’, and can I just say what an absolutely incredible track this is on so many levels, and I’d like to explore these. It’s clear that this is a deeply personal song and it’s one that admirably focuses on the issue of mental health and depression. I think that the world has learned a lot about the struggles that people with mental health problems can go through but I don’t think we are there yet. So when an artist such as yourself steps up, it a hugely powerful thing. You mentioned that you felt strongly about this song. Why did you choose to focus on this subject?

There’s a metaphor in the song where on the surface we’re talking about abduction and aliens and wanting to be taken away and a lot of that is a metaphor for what I was really feeling. Again, this song came about knee-deep into the pandemic and there was a lot of struggling that I was going through. I tend to be a very nomadic person in my real life. I have very few people that I can call dear, dear friends and I’m running very small circles, and that’s just been my nature. That’s just been me and I guess being an only child up until a certain point in my life probably contributed to that. But this song is deeply personal to me because of my own personal struggles of what I go through. Sometimes on a day-to-day basis it comes and goes and it happens in waves. I think we are in a period of time in history where mental health, thank God, has become more part of the conversation so anything I’m saying now isn’t anything new and I’m not reinventing the wheel here. This has already been out there for a while now which obviously I’m happy about but I felt the deeper issue that I see happening, and this happens with me myself – luckily I’ve been in therapy now for many years and dealing with a lot of the personal struggles that I go through – but I think one of the things that scares me about what’s happening is that there are a lot of people who are not speaking out and that are staying silent in their own pain and their own struggle of what they are going through. They don’t have an outlet to speak to somebody and they don’t have a way to be able to lean on somebody. And so my hope with this song is to champion this because I’m dealing with the struggle too. My goal is to start a bigger conversation and align myself with organisations that can help get the word out. I think a lot of people are scared to speak out about what’s going on because they are going to be see perceived as being crazy or damaged goods. My whole thing is that a lot of us are dealing with this and I can’t tell you how many people just in the media that I’ve spoken to who have told me “My God, your song has resonated with me because my daughter or my son or somebody else that I deal with is dealing with the exact same thing that you’re talking about’. The song really has multiple meanings behind it. The people who were involved in putting this together, Shawn Zuzek who produced the track is just a master who built this track up from what was the original demo, and there was another gentleman Josh Buma that helped a lot with the instrumentation, and Joe Bozzi was the gentleman who mastered. He is one of the great, great mastering engineers who’s done U2, Van Halen and some of the biggest rock bands in the world. So I felt so fortunate to be able to be working with these people because they definitely put the vision of what I was trying to express across with this song and took it to another completely higher level than I could ever have imagined. I really have them to thank as well, but my whole goal with this is really just to stir up the conversation with people. This song is for all the loners and for all the outcasts and for all the people that don’t fit in. I’ve never fit in in my life and I think a lot of musicians will agree with that – that they to never fit in with that mould of what should be. So I feel like this song is for them. I’m speaking this for them and for those people who don’t have a voice. Again it’s along the lines of almost what we were doing with the band previously. We’re trying to give a voice to the voiceless.

When I hear the lyrics ‘take me out of this world’, it seems like a real cry for help. Also, the line ‘I’m ready, willing and able to conform, assimilate and comply’. That for me really paints a picture of how helpless people with depression can feel and that sense of ‘I will do anything to help me feel better. Is this how it can feel for someone with depression?

Depression is a kind of a very insidious thing. It happens at the weirdest, strangest times. It happens to me a lot when I can be in the best of moods, I can be happy and be watching something that’s making me laugh but then all of a sudden, at least for me, something will trigger a thought and then it just goes down from there, a downward spiral, and it’s the strangest thing. So for me, those thoughts and the words that I put into the song were almost an escape, almost like ‘take me away from this and let me see if there is something better’. There is a theory – and I do believe that there is life on other planets and whoever doesn’t think that seems to be more naive than I think because we can’t be the only ones in this universe, that would be so narcissistic of us – but I do feel there is a theory about aliens that they found them at nuclear plants and whatnot and they’re almost trying to keep us from our own destruction to a certain degree. There is that theory and that line of thought, so my thought was maybe things could be better over there with them? That whole idea of conform, assimilate and complying is with what they are. So again, many things are going on through this song. It’s also my whole love as well for sci-fi and science fiction. I thought that it was a unique way to build the story about this whole thing and what the deeper meanings were.

Well what’s really interesting is that despite the complex and important subject matter, this is actually a very uplifting song. There’s also a huge, arena-ready sound. From a production perspective – and you’ve mentioned working with Shawn, Joe and Josh – what brief did you give yourself and what were you looking to achieve?

Well it was Joe that I have to thank for introducing me to Shawn and Josh. Shawn the producer, when I approached him, we had an original demo pretty much fully arranged. Everything was pretty much done, the ideas were there but the quality wasn’t and that’s why I went to them. My brief to them was ‘Here’s the song, the full arrangement, this is what I’m trying to go after’. I gave them a bunch of different points of references that I wanted to achieve. Ironically enough, I do have to credit Shawn on making the song more of lifting because the original demo is incredibly sad. This song is not really about a happy ending but it turns out to be beautiful in a kind of serendipitous way. A couple of things that he did in the production changed it to be more uplifting which I ended up loving in the end. But the original demo is very, very sad. It’s very, very sad, dark and depressing and it was conveying that emotive thing that I was going through, but I do love that it ended up uplifting because even the stuff I was doing with the band, our message was always to kind of shine a light on what’s happening but always try to give a message of hope. So in a weird way it ended up working out in my favour that the song became uplifting, with huge big chorus and, like you said, arena-ready kind of material because that’s the way I’ve always envisioned music. I always want to be able to have people singing that music back to me. It was all of those things that took place within the production that ended up making it sound more uplifting and I’m very thankful for that.

I think there is a very interesting characteristic about the way you have approached this latest release, this being that it has been a closely guarded secret for some time, even from family. Why was it important for you to keep this under wraps?

Well, there were a number of reasons. Number one, I wanted it to be a surprise for everybody first and foremost because it was from one day to the next that I announced I was leaving the band. So everybody was kind of shocked about that and there were several things that I still needed to work out. I had already started pretty much as soon as I left the band. I had already started this project and started getting the song together, and I already knew that I was going to do this. There are some videos that were going to come out so I told all my family because I didn’t want people to think I was going crazy and I didn’t want to cause concerns, but they had no idea that this was leading to the whole idea of this song. So that’s what that was all about.

I can see the excitement for Out of This World and generally your next step as an artist beginning to snowball, and of course snowballing leads to anticipation. What plans do you have to release more new music? Can we expect a full album?

Yes, there’s definitely more music coming. I already have a bunch of material already written and I’m gonna be working on the next song right now. I think the idea behind this, and obviously I’m a huge fan of releasing full albums or EPs, but we are kind of more in a singles-driven market now. So I’m trying to post these as pieces of art. It’s like this is my first piece of art that I’m doing and I want to give it all the love and attention that I can and really get it out there. I feel it helps with people getting more familiar with your material. So my approach is going to be releasing singles for the time being and it will eventually lead to some bigger release of some sort. It’s just as much work putting out a single as it is a full record so I want to try and give it the attention and love that it deserves and then move onto the next one. But I think eventually this will come into some release. I just don’t know where or when. I’m just trying to experiment with different approaches right now.

Finally, as an artist, you have created something very special indeed with Out Of This World, and when you talk about how the song has evolved from it’s initial demo form it’s clear to see that this has been nurtured over time. With this in mind, how does it feel to see the track being released in only a few days time and what thoughts are going through your mind?

Well there’s a part of me that’s really excited and the other half of me that’s completely terrified! We are artists, most of us are already insecure as it is as musicians. I am really pouring my heart out here and really going out on a limb with this whole notion of things that I’m struggling with. That was a big thing for me to do because I’m such a private person but I felt it necessary because I felt that this song could have impact. I don’t want to make this a vanity think about me. I want to try and help people with my music. I’ve said it before but music is the most powerful thing over politics, over religion and over any medium. It has the power to unite people. I’m definitely coming from that idea that things are so divided and I just want to bring that unity. So there is a part of me that’s terrified and a part of me that’s excited because it’s kind of coming full circle for me to step out again on my own. But at the same time it’s going to be interesting. I’m really interested to see the feedback on the song because again, you’re putting yourself out there. It’s like you’re giving birth to a baby and this is your pride and joy. I hope that the people who like it really come along for the ride with me.