By Carl Begai
“Take these words home and think them through,
‘Cuz the next song I write might be about you.”
Project Wyze – ‘Only Time Will Tell’
Nobody in their right mind wants the publicity Tiefdruck Musik label boss Daniel Heerdmann is getting these days. Granted, it’s small scale recognition that likely won’t make it to a CNN news reel, but his so-called business practices have been yanked out into the open by My Ruin. A tale of band vs label conflict turning ugly is hardly unique, but My Ruin’s recent test of will is one for the books; or in this case, an album. Their new outing, A Southern Revelation, is a response to a record deal gone painfully awry, which saw the band’s 2010 album Ghosts And Good Stories die a premature death at the hands of Tiefdruck Musik. Not ones to go meekly into the night, vocalist/founder Tairrie B. Murphy and guitarist-turned-multi-intrumentalist/husband Mick Murphy chose to call Heerdmann out directly in response, first in a press release, and then in the lyrics on the new album. The attack is direct and leaves no question as to who’s leaving the ring with a bloody nose, metaphors be damned, and Tairrie is quite content being the one doing the damage.
Tairrie: “At this point I really don’t give a fuck. This man conned us; he snowed us big time. Calling him ‘The Soulless Beast’… it’s really true. He led us to believe that he was going to do all these things for us. When he approached us about the record deal – and we had a lot of conversations with him on Skype – he was cool. He told us that the reason we weren’t bigger is because nobody had ever promoted us properly because they didn’t know what to do with the band, but he could do the job. We were thinking ‘Wow, this guy really gets it.’ He told me that he’d been a fan since my Manhole days, that he saw me on tour supporting Fear Factory on the Demanufacture tour in 1996. I felt that we had a connection with this guy, which was amazing.”
“We got the deal going, and it was almost like a friend thing with this guy. We announced the signing while we were in the studio recording Ghosts And Good Stories, and soon after we got this really weird email from an old friend, Shaun Glass from Soil, who is now with Dirge Within. He told us we had to be really fucking careful because Daniel Heerdmann is a lying sack of shit. We wanted to know where that was coming from, and we told Shaun we were going to confront Daniel about it. I’m very open and forward when I want to know something.”
“So, I went to Daniel right after that and told him what Shaun had said, and Daniel had a comeback for everything, which was fine. At this point we’d signed the deal; what were we going to do? Daniel tried to really explain himself, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt because God knows people have had run-ins with My Ruin. There have been altercations, and I know some people out there talk shit about me and my husband. It did worry me a little in the back of my mind, but we decided to walk our own path, and as we got deeper into the record Daniel became even more supportive. He wanted to hear what we were doing and how the songs were coming along, and we’d never had that experience before. It was great. But, as soon as we got done with the record and we delivered it – and it was something we were so proud of – this guy did the Jeckyll and Hyde thing overnight.” Continue reading MY RUIN – Taste Revenge
