Behind the Music: A Conversation with Daniel Godfrey from 'I Am The Icarus'

It was a pleasure to connect with Daniel Godfrey, an author and musician from the band "I Am the Icarus." We hope you find the insights and stories he shared about his creative journey both enlightening and enjoyable.

AA: I'm eager to learn about your background. Can you share your origin story with me? Where were you born and raised, and what experiences have shaped who you are today?

DG: I’m from San Diego, California and was raised there but I’ve lived all over the country from Seattle to Texas. I also spent about a year in Guadalajara, Mexico when I was about 13 which actually led to me eventually being a musician. I think simply being from San Diego has shaped a lot of who I am today. Mostly that I can’t handle weather that’s much below or above 74 degrees.

AA: "Let's dive into your musical journey! How did it all begin and what obstacles did you encounter along the way?"

DG: My dad played guitar and sang, so he always had a guitar around the house, but I was never really interested in playing it until I heard Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins. My dad took a job in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1994 and living in another country where I didn’t speak the language created a lot of downtime for me where I taught myself to play. My dad taught me my first 3 or 4 chords and I just figured it out from there.

AA: How long have you been pursuing your passion as an independent artist, and what are the biggest challenges you've encountered along the way?

DG: I’ve been doing this since 1996 when I started my first band. I wouldn’t really call it a passion though, it’s really more of a compulsion. I’m compelled to create, or I’d probably go crazy.

DG: The biggest challenge is really just getting heard without going the normal route of playing live, it’s extremely difficult doing it without a label. I’ve been self-releasing everything on my own label, No Value, for a decade now. I feel like the band tends to get lost in the noise because there’s just so much music out there now available instantly. I have the feeling sometimes that if, especially for the last record, if there had been a larger release and I toured, it could have been more “successful.”

AA: I'd love to hear more about your band, I am the Icarus. Please share the story or meaning behind the band's name and how this band was formed.

DG: The name wasn’t my idea, that was Shaun Lopez (Far, Crosses) who produced the first EP. I had a list of a bunch of random band names, and one was “I Am Icarus.” He said, “What about I Am The Icarus.” We were coming up on being done with the EP and I really needed a name, so I just said “ok” out of laziness. So, it doesn’t really mean anything. I hate the name now, but it is what it is.

DG: The band was formed to just be my studio project, something I was hoping could be successful without touring. It’s really more like Nine Inch Nails because it’s really just me, I’ve had a few drummers play on the records records. I have a steadier “line-up” (if you want to call it that) now than I did in the beginning. My buddy Heath Ripplinger has played drums on the last two records and will be playing on the next one. The longest consistent collaborator is Pete Charell (Trapt) who has produced and/or mixed all my music since 2012. If it’s not me playing bass on my records, it’s Pete.

AA: Tell me about your creative process.

DG: I don’t really have one that’s consistent. I just sort of sit down and play guitar riffs until I get to something that sounds halfway original or cool to me.

AA: When it comes to songwriting where do you get inspiration from?

DG: Depends on where I’m at in my life I guess. The first couple of releases were about my divorce and a sort of existential crisis I was having. The last two were a little less internalized and more external and writing about how fucked up the world around me is.

DG: As a guitar player, how do you decide on the type of instrumental guitar riff to include in a song?

DG: It’s just whatever comes out, I don’t really plan it. Just whatever serves the song or sounds cool. It’s just haphazard and chaos really.

AA: "Let's delve into the themes behind your album "Postmodern Bore." How do the songs "Born to Lose" and "Wrongthink" personally resonate with you and what do they represent in your artistic journey?"

DG: Postmodern Bore is really just about this specific moment of time we’re all living in. I feel like the last four or five years I’ve just found everything modern increasingly boring. TV is boring, movies are boring, video games are boring, etc. It’s not just a culture thing either. Yes, the politically correct or woke or whatever you want to call it, this non-existent “modern audience” has a lot to do with it, but it’s more than that. Everything feels sanitized, digital, clean and bland. It’s a production value thing with a lot of music and same goes for film. Nothing feels real or raw anymore, although some try to fake it. It’s all a deconstructed postmodern bore.

DG: People have been conditioned to expect less and as a result I’ve noticed people get excited over the worst shit, it’s disheartening.

DG: “Born to Lose” is just about how the whole left/right political argument has become pointless when it’s really a class thing where we’re all being pitted against each other when the elites who lord over us are the real enemy. The bridge of the song, “you are, I am, he is, she is, we are born to lose” was written to sound like a high school cheer, but a dystopian one.

DG: “Wrongthink” is simply just about the sort of intellectual police state that the internet (and world) is becoming.

AA: I'd like to know if there was a specific moment in your life when you realized you wanted to pursue a music career. Additionally, I'm curious to learn about the musicians or artists who have significantly impacted your musical style and direction.

DG: I don’t know if there was a specific moment where I wanted to pursue a career in music but there was a moment where I decided I didn’t want to play ball. When I started, I Am The Icarus I had been in various bands for a decade, and I was feeling burnt out. It was 2007 and the music business was rapidly changing, and I had come to the realization that I didn’t want to do the typical “put out a record, tour, rinse/repeat” thing. Mostly I just preferred being in the studio writing and recording over touring and playing live.

DG: As far as bands that have impacted me, you only need to listen to a couple songs of mine to know that Nirvana was a big one. Aside from them I’d say Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Black Sabbath, Dokken, Type O Negative, The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey and Marilyn Manson.

AA: What other songs have you written, and what do they mean to you?

DG: I mean I’ve written so many songs that I couldn’t even name them all if you put a gun to my head. To be honest once I’m done with one that’s sort of it, I get it out of my system. I’m currently writing the next record so that’s my focus.

DG: I did take a break from writing this year for a bit to record a 5 song covers EP that’ll be out in October. Which stemmed from me really wanting to cover Human Nature by Madonna but not wanting a cover song on one of my records. It was originally going to be an entire Madonna cover song EP because I thought it was funny.

AA: Where do you find inspiration for your lyrics?

DG: When I’m writing a song it’s usually the music first and I just sing gibberish over the music, lines that don’t mean anything or bits of unused poetry. Just lyrical word vomit. It’s more about the melody and getting the emotion right, lyrics come secondary. That part isn’t hard because I don’t care about clever rhymes or anything, so I just write what I feel in a way that sounds natural when I sing it, I don’t really second guess it much.

DG: If I ever have a line in a song that’s provocative, you can rest assured I put almost zero thought into it other than phrasing. Kurt Cobain was really good at phrasing and being able to make words that sound almost meaningless on paper, sound deep when he’d sing them. I’m pretty good at that as well.

AA: What themes or concepts are you focusing on in your upcoming work?

DG: The next record is going to sound a lot like PJ Harvey and the pre “Dizzy Up the Girl” Goo Goo Dolls. Considering the world around me is still fucked up, I expect my lyrical themes to continue to be similar to the last record. Although I can also see myself getting more abstract and metaphorical. There are a few songs I’ve written in the past where the lyrics are nonsense and it’s always funny to me, I might do that a bit more.

DG: The next record is actually going to be two, not just one. Every time I write a record, I always write enough material for like 3 records, so I’m going to just record two this time around because fuck it. Why not?

AA: What's the most important message or feeling you want to convey through your music?

DG: I just hope people enjoy it, whatever that means to them individually. If you get anything out of it, then I did my job.

AA: What is the story behind your book, "Wizards & Warriors"?

DG: I was originally going to create a monthly 'zine where I wrote about all kinds of stuff from video games to horror and metal music. I was writing the first article about Wizards & Warriors and as I was getting close to finishing it, I realized how much more I had to say. It just accidentally turned into a book.

AA: What inspired you to write it?

DG: In that article I was writing about my father and my childhood and it just brought back a lot of memories. Part of it was wanting to write down those memories so they aren't lost to time and my kid can read them later. The other part was realizing how big of a part video games have played in the story of my life.

AA: Are you planning to publish a second book? If so, what will be the theme of the book this time?"

DG: I'm actually writing a second book right now; it's going to be similar but this time it's covering the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series. I'm also working on a book about LJN video games but that's going to be a massive undertaking because it's over 60 games, that might be a couple years before that comes out.

AA: Which era of gaming, the '90s or '80s, do you look back on most fondly, and what made it so special to you?

DG: It's tough, I'd say maybe the '90s just a bit more because I was a kid and a teenager in that decade and it spanned console gaming and PC. The '90s in general were special to me since those were big formative years for me. A lot of my all-time favorite games or series came out in the '90s. Quake, Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Doom, Mortal Kombat, etc.

AA: What are your thoughts on the recent developments in the gaming industry over the last few months? Do you believe there is a need for a reset or a significant directional change in the industry?

DG: I think the industry is getting almost exactly what they deserve. I say almost because what they really deserve is total collapse. I predicted in my book that we were entering a new video game crash and it would be worse than the crash of '83 and it looks like I was correct. The industry needs a major course correction. Just today news came out that Ubisoft is internally investigating why they are bleeding cash and no one is pre-ordering their upcoming shitty games. All this DEI stuff is bound to fail eventually because you can't cater to the smallest possible demographic of players, alienate your main consumers and then expect to survive. It's also not really "go woke, get broke" it's something more like, "go broke, get woke" for that ESG money and have cashflow for a while but it obviously can't maintain itself. The casual audience they gained over the pandemic isn't the loyal base that's going to keep the industry alive, they're gone and all that's left are the loud activist weirdos and tourists on social media. They need to weed these people out of the industry and get back to making entertaining and fun games, period.

AA: If you had the opportunity to live in a video game world for one year, which one would you choose and why?

DG: If I had the opportunity I'd probably pass. Gun to my head? Street Fighter II and I'd just hang in the crowd and watch all the fights for a year.

AA: What are your thoughts on in-game options, microtransactions, and downloadable content (DLC) in modern games?"

DG: I discuss this in my book, and I think they've ruined video games. All this stuff was introduced in the 7th generation of consoles, the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii era. There were still some really great games from this era, but all those things you mentioned have remained with us to this day and have made video games worse. Now we have games that are never complete on day one or even downright broken. Now people pay $70 for a game and then another $30 or more on DLC and just get nickeled and dimed. To make it worse, many of these games are made by the very people who hate them and, in many cases, hate video games in general. They admit it, look into it.

AA: Could you tell me more about the gaming sessions you host on your YouTube channel? What exciting games do you showcase to your audience?

DG: Yeah, I'm about 35 episodes into that now, it's called The NPC Show on my band's YouTube channel. I started it just for fun since I was playing video games sometimes in the evenings anyway. It's been a cool way to hang out with a few of my buddies who live in other states since they can hang out in the chat. I've done everything from Contra to Street Fighter to Zelda.

DG: I just did the new Lollipop Chainsaw remaster. I was doing it twice a week, but I've cut it back to once a week since I'm writing this next book. I plan on releasing more content that's not live, like retrospectives and commentary type videos, I just need to make the time. But between the band and writing this new book, plus being a father and husband, I'm a little busy. If you like video games come check it out subscribe, so I can get fucking paid.

AA: When it comes to movies, what are some of your all-time favorites? What is it about these particular movies that resonate with you? Is it the storytelling, the characters, the cinematography, or something else?

DG: Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Burbs, the entire Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, Possession, Martyrs, Hereditary, Monster Squad, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. That’s just off the top of my head, if you ask me tomorrow, I might have a different answer.

AA: As for TV shows, which ones do you find yourself eagerly tuning in to? What about these shows captivates you—could it be the plot twists, character development, or the overall production quality?

DG: I don’t watch modern television at all. I like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the X-Files a lot. King of the Hill, Rosanne, Married with Children, Family Ties. I just watch old shit because it’s comforting and because almost everything modern is horrible.

AA: Regarding books, which ones are at the top of your list? What makes these books stand out to you? Is it the writing style, the themes, or the emotions they evoke?

DG: Marilyn Manson’s autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell is really good. The Final Fantasy III Player’s Guide by Peter Olafson. The Bible. First Blood by David Morell. Every single Calvin & Hobbes book. Berserk by Kentaro Miura. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Technological Slavery by John Kacynski. American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions by Arno J. Mayer. Again, ask me tomorrow and I’ll give you a different answer. I’ve read so many.

AA: Which podcasts do you highly recommend and why? What sets these podcasts apart from others, in your opinion? Do they offer valuable insights, entertaining content, or something else that keeps you hooked?

DG: Side Scrollers Podcast. It’s a gaming podcast that sort of just makes fun of and laughs at the state of modern video games and pop culture, which is needed in a world that takes itself far too seriously. Also Stuttering Craig is a standup guy who had me on to talk about my book even though it was my first one and he didn’t even know who I was. He’s real

people and a good dude.

AA: What bands or artists do you love listening to? I would also love to know about your favorite concert experience!

DG: All the bands and artists I’ve mentioned in this interview so far. I’ve really just been listening to the same shit since the ‘80s, ‘90s and early ‘00s. I listen to a lot of music. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Prefab Sprout.

AA: Picking a favorite concert experience is tough one because I’ve been lucky enough to have seen so many of my favorite bands and in their height no less.

DG: Honestly, one of my favorite experiences was in 1999 seeing a band called Switchblade Symphony in a small club in El Paso TX. I had never heard them before and I bought their record, “The Three Calamities” at the show and it remains one of my favorite records. I think they broke up that same year.

AA: What does success look like for you as an artist?

DG: Creatively doing exactly what I want to do with no compromises. In that sense, I am successful.

AA: How do you handle the ups and downs of your music career?

DG: I don’t take it seriously.

AA: If you weren't pursuing music, what would you be doing?

DG: Pursuing pizza.