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What came first: the content or the title? When a title - Snakes on a Plane, for example - is the genesis for a creative work, you can safely assume that the resulting product will not be worth the price of admission. I’m guessing Thee More Shallows’ Night at the Knight School is one of those title-first projects, but if it is, it’s the exception that proves the rule, because it’s superb enough to be Required Listening.
Who are Thee More Shallows?
Makers of ear movies.
Why do you create?
We’re compelled to aurally represent our moods. Usually our bad moods.
Not being a speed metal aficionado or a music critic, I had to research the Yngwie Malmsteen reference in your bio. I read on Answers.com that during his musical career:
…Critics charged him with showing little artistic progression. He was also reviled as an egotist whose emphasis on blazing technique ultimately made for boring, mechanical, masturbatory music with no room for subtlety or emotion. Malmsteen responded by insisting that since he was already playing music he loved, he had no desire to develop any further, and that his love did come through in his playing.
As an artist, would you rather continually progress through varied musical styles or find a style that you loved and stay with it?
We don’t have much choice in the matter, but it does seem that we progress through a lot of different styles. Largely, this is due to us letting a particular song pick its most suitable arrangement and arc. And also, unlike Yngwie, we tend to view a song as a strictly emotional entity, rather than a performance.
Some people are accountants, some are gym teachers, and you’re a in a rock band touring Europe. How do you feel about where you are in your life at this moment, and where do you hope to go?
Some days we’d rather be accountants. But as I mentioned, we’re compelled to do what we do. We’re driven to make things, and then we go out looking for the people who like what we make. Sometimes it seems like they’re few and far between, and we’re engaged in a futile and irrelevant endeavor.
And sometimes we feel like the luckiest people in the world. But again, we don’t have much choice in the matter. We’re made to make stuff, so we just hope people like it.
Looking over the artist roster of your label, anticon. records, I imagine you are surrounded by a group of similarly talented and determined friends and artists. How do they influence you as an artist, and what impact do you have upon their work?
The boom in home recording has been a bust for collaboration — a lot of people get trapped by themselves, trying to reinvent the wheel and extract inspiration from a vacuum. I certainly did for a while. And though you can argue that the initial idea for a song or a part might be personal, it’s so important for artists, especially musicians, to feed off of what other people are doing. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, a lot of the greatest music came from people learning from, competing with, and stealing from each other. That’s what anticon artists get to do, and that’s why their body of work is so inspired. So yeah, the greatest part of signing to anticon is being able to work with other uncompromising, focused, and creative people — and steal from them.
Thanks to Thee More Shallows for sharing Night at the Knight School from their album Book of Bad Breaks with us here on Required Listening. You can purchase music by Thee More Shallows on 
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