{"id":11479,"date":"2013-07-08T01:00:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T05:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/southeastofheaven.com\/?p=11479"},"modified":"2013-07-03T11:40:21","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T15:40:21","slug":"blowin-wind-with-christian-mistress-christine-davis-satan-is-a-concept-of-christianity-and-that-holds-no-interest-to-me-at-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/?p=11479","title":{"rendered":"Blowin’ Wind with Christian Mistress’ Christine Davis: “Satan is a concept of Christianity and that holds no interest to me at all. “"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"67990_507256185999229_2018642977_n\"<\/a>Since first hearing their album Possession last year, Portland, Oregon’s Christian Mistress quickly became one of my new favorite bands. With only one full length album, an EP, and a demo, Christian Mistress sounds like a band of seasoned veterans who have been at this for twice as long as they’ve actually been doing it. Christian Mistress is so much more than just a “throwback” band. While their sound is definitely that of the classic metals ghosts of old, they have managed to take that same sound and energy and put it all into something that is all their own creating a unique sound that allows them to stand out from the pack.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you go online and try to find anything on Christian Mistress, you will find that this band is shrouded in mystique as their online presence is very minimal. This alone is something that really had me wanting to know more about what goes in within this band. After putting on my Scooby Doo goggles and putting some work into it, I finally managed to track down lead singer Christine Davis. Christine is a really sweet, soft spoken person with a lot to say. We talked about the challenges of being a rising band, the future of Christian Mistress, and the dark place within from where the lyrics come from. This was a really intriguing and eye opening interview with one of the most fascinating people I have yet to meet. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know Christine Davis of Christian Mistress as much as I did.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Christine, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview tonight.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hey Don, no problem.<\/p>\n

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I hope I\u2019m not catching you a bad time or anything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not at all. I\u2019m just happy to be here and drinking a beer in the sun.<\/p>\n

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It was so great to hear that Christian Mistress is still active and looking to move forward. I know my readers as well as I would love to hear more about what\u2019s been going on.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh yeah. Well, I think we kind of dropped off the face of the map for a minute but it\u2019s partly because we were going back to where we had been before [laughs]. It wasn\u2019t anything weird about it for us. When our 2nd record (Possession) came out we got a lot of attention. We were doing tons and tons of interviews, way more than we even wanted to and we just got exhausted from all the work that had to go into it. We\u2019re a hard working band but all the extra administrative type stuff that we ended up having to do to put out a record on a major label exhausted us. We just needed to take a step back and reassess the music itself. I think it\u2019s a pretty classic story and bands go through this a lot.<\/p>\n

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My buddies in Gypsyhawk turned me on to Christian Mistress and by the time I got head on into the band, you all disappeared. I was like, \u201cHow can this be??\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laughs] Oh no! Yeah, well we put out a good amount of music really fast and we just really want to make sure that our next record is exactly what we want it to be. We don\u2019t want to rush it.<\/p>\n

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Christian Mistress has a pretty minimal online presence which I feel adds some mystique to the band. Was that kind of an intentional thing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, we\u2019ve read this time and again but none of us really had any concept that our internet presence was minimal. We were just focusing on other things. Maybe a lot of metal bands have like one person who is really into computers and the technical side of posting things but we just didn\u2019t happen to have anyone in our band that\u2019s into that. It\u2019s not a matter of being lazy or anything. It\u2019s just a matter of focusing our energies elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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I feel like some bands can really overdo it with the social media aspect of things to \"christinedavis\"<\/a>where it can get annoying whereas with Christian Mistress, there was this kind of thrill of the hunt in trying to find out what was going on with the band.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laughs] That\u2019s cool and interesting to hear. I don\u2019t really get on the internet all that much. It\u2019s just not the generation I\u2019m from. I\u2019m 35 and I\u2019m sure there are a lot of 30 year olds who are computer savvy and like using the internet but it\u2019s just not something that I\u2019m interested in . I would rather be outside, standing around a fire and drinking beer with my friends [laughs].<\/p>\n

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Christian Mistress\u2019 music totally appeals to my generation of people who grew up with classic heavy metal before it was so over produced and auto tuned to death. So thank you for the great music you’ve given us so far but I want more!<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laughs] That\u2019s rad. Thanks. It\u2019s pretty catchy stuff huh? [laughs]<\/p>\n

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So do you have an update as to how things are going so far.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oscar is teaching our new guitar player the songs and that\u2019s pretty much where we\u2019re at. It\u2019s going really well though.<\/p>\n

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Are there plans to do some more touring before recording any new material?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, definitely. We at least want to do a West coast down to the South kind of loop but I don\u2019t know when we\u2019ll actually do this. It might be pretty ambitious to say that we\u2019ll do it this year but definitely by early next year.<\/p>\n

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Well I hope Christian Mistress makes it to Atlanta so I can bring y\u2019all some good beer and hang.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh definitely. My little brother lives and works there. He\u2019s great. He actually called me really excited about a year ago or so and said, \u201cChristine! I heard some people in a bar talking about you your band and they were really excited! I can\u2019t believe it!\u201d [laughs] He\u2019s my biggest fan [laughs].<\/p>\n

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The lyrics to a lot of Christian Mistress’ songs seem to come from this much darker yet very real place and I was curious as to where that comes from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It really comes from the depths of the soul. It\u2019s something that I have tried to access for years and never was fully able to do until Christian Mistress. It\u2019s really a special place and a really special thing but yet it\u2019s so potent and so freaky that even I am scared of it. This break that Christian Mistress has taken has been really good for me because it\u2019s been helping me to kind of balance out my mental world. That\u2019s kind of a big answer but it\u2019s a big topic [laughs]. Not that your question was big but the topic of how to get to those depths is vague and hard to pinpoint. It\u2019s beyond words actually.<\/p>\n

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You said it was a scary place. What was it that is scary about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, when I was first trying to understand how I wanted to write lyrics years and years ago while in other bands, I had this visual image of like the very core of your body but in a physical sense turned completely inside out. That\u2019s a really dramatic image but that\u2019s a metaphor for really getting to the truth. For me, if I\u2019m writing about those dark places that are truth, then that means every day I\u2019m facing the truth and every day I have to explain the truth when I\u2019m doing something that most people would never have the guts to do because that\u2019s too hard. I\u2019m constantly in this place of truth and accessing darkness and that\u2019s a really difficult thing to daily and that\u2019s why it\u2019s scary.<\/p>\n

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And when you\u2019re talking about this darkness, you\u2019re really talking about this inner depth of your own being, not some sort of satanic references for just shock value.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, exactly. Well, Satan is a concept of Christianity and that holds no interest to me at all.<\/p>\n

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I read in a past interview that you grew up in a pretty strict household. How much of that bleeds into your songwriting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really sure. I mean, my songwriting directly reflects my life but it\u2019s not reactionary against my childhood or anything like that. My past isn\u2019t something that I feel like is a special entity in itself. I had a good childhood even though it was really strict.<\/p>\n

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When you have written something new, do you just bring it to the band and say, \u201cThis is it\u201d or is there a lot of poking, prodding, and dissecting of the song?<\/strong><\/p>\n

[laughs] Yeah, it\u2019s different for every band member but I bring in the song as is and I say, \u201cThis is the song.\u201d I don\u2019t really give them the chance to say \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno.\u201d That could be a problem that I have and I know that I have a pretty commanding presence when it comes to that kind of stuff [laughs]. If they have a total problem with anything they will say so but that hasn\u2019t really come up.<\/p>\n