Into The Glory Metaldays of Celtic Hills

Into The Glory Metaldays of Celtic Hills

Celtic Hills is a metal band from Italy ready to break through to genre fans all over the world.  With the successful third album Huldufólk, they were able to inspire many fans with their powerful and independent sound in 2022.  Now mastermind Jonathan Vanderbilt returns with Celtic Hills in the current line-up and presents the promising new single Metaldays, taken from the upcoming album Övervinna En Förlust!  Highwire Daze recently interview the Celtic Hills band leader to find out more about their absolutely exhilarating Metaldays!  Read on…

Introduce yourself, tell me what you do in Celtic Hills, and how long the band has been together. Where is the band based out of and what is your local music scene like there?
My name is Jonathan Vanderbilt and I’m an old 80’s metalhead! After many years of inactivity, I decided to get back into playing music and put together the Celtic Hills project named after the transposition in English of the place where I live today. An area that lies in northeastern Italy between Austria and Slovenia. This is a suburban, agricultural area and the music scene is rather poor even though Rhapsody was born here but has since moved elsewhere!

Is there any overall story or concept behind the Metaldays single?
Metaldays was the name of the international festival held in Tolmin, Slovenia a half hour drive from my home. At first it was called Metalkamp and drew metalheads from all over the world! 2 years have failed and MetalDays no longer exists

Is there any overall inspiration behind the title of the upcoming Övervinna En Förlust album?
We use each record a different language to title an album.  This time we chose Swedish. The concept of the record is to tell about ended stories and how life has to go on.  So in the new record we talk about Carlotta who lived in Trieste and after the death of Maximilian of Habsburg, who was killed in Mexico as Emperor she became insane, or Napoleon Bonaparte who, also in this area, buried his White Horse in 1797 in Kanal location in Slovenia with 3 days of national mourning

What could one expect from a live Celtic Hills show?
Power and spectacle! Live I have a much more fun way of playing guitar than the studio way! Maybe less precise, but very expressive! I like to use all those techniques that were used in the 80’s, but are rarely used today: harmonics, tapping, ultra bending, dive bombs…

If Celtic Hills could open for any band either now or from the past, who would it be and why?
Past bands to Thin Lizzy! Their music was full of influences and yet they came across as unique and original

When you look back on the first Celtic Hills album from 2020 entitled Blood Over Intents, what do you think of it now in retrospect?
Sounded terrible! Hà ha I had been stopped for many years, and the hands were rusty! Live we play almost all the songs, but really played much better and with more modern arrangements!

And what was it like to release that album right at the beginning of a worldwide pandemic?
Paradoxically, it was lucky! While all the other bands had stopped, we were still going, and so many magazines gave us considerable coverage because there was no one else to talk about! That’s why, just a few months later, we released an EP that we recorded in a single day.

When you look back on the Horns Helmet Fighters demo from 2010, what do you think of them now?
If the first Album sounded bad, the demo is terrible! Some songs we took back and put on subsequent albums and they had the success they deserved

Are you involved with any other bands or projects outside of Celtic Hills?
I write and arrange songs for many friends and bands, who call me to sing in backing vocals or who ask me for a solo. I enjoy working with other musicians

What’s up next for Celtic Hills?
We’ve got Luka Stone on drums who is from Tampa, Florida, and that involves us playing in the U.S. as well, although I think only in small clubs, because we’re good, but not famous!

Any final words of wisdom?
Life is a great adventure, we tell it through music, but each of us has to imagine our life as a great movie where each of us is the director.

Thank you to Markus Eck of Metal Message ᴳᴸᴼᴮᴬᴸ • 𝐸𝓈𝓉. 2001 for setting this up!

(Interview by Ken Morton)

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