James Alredge – You’ve mentioned and featured your family in a few of your videos, especially your nephews Jackson and Evan, you even released a more appropriate “G-rated” version of your first CD so that they and other kids could enjoy what you do. With this said can you elaborate a little more on what your family means to you and your career?
Brent Black – I come from a big family that all live in the same general area, so with me living far away one thing I miss is family get togethers and everybody just being able to casually hang out. For some people that is only a once a year family reunion type of thing, but for me anytime I’m in town the whole family gets together. So I take that for granted and the idea of a big, healthy, extended family interaction is really important.
The way my family works is a reflection on the way I work. When I’m trying to get somewhere at these conventions I can’t always stop and say hi and high five everybody, but as a person I’m pretty inclusive until somebody is a jerk, and it is the same way with my family. We’ve had a couple of bumps in the road as far as like unintentional children who turn into unintentional grandchildren and the question is how to do involve certain elements of this family and the answer is alway with open arms. As much as the character “brentalfloss” can sometimes come off as a jerk, in real life I’m much more of a person that wants to make people feel comfortable and that all started with the way my family interacts.
JA -You worked with The Megas and The Konami Kode on your first CD. Are there any other bands that you want to collaborate with in the future?
BB – I would like to start off by saying that I actually didn’t do a video with The Protomen that was all people pretending to be The Protomen.
JA -Was it really?!
BB – Yeah, but I sort of feel like a Million bucks cause we were hoping to fool a few people. Later on we got The Protomen’s blessing for that video.
As far as other bands go; I like Mega Ran and I like The 1Ups. The thing about collaborations with me is that it isn’t about coming together to make a video with another artist it is more about me liking one of their tracks and asking to additively collaborate or add stuff to it to make it a different beast. For instance, Gotta Run/Be The One was a song called “I Want To Be The One” by The Megas before I ever got to it, but because we had both done our own versions of that theme from Mega Man 2 and they fit so well together, that was sort of my first band collab. With the Konami Code, they were all friends of mine. They had broken up at that point and there was all this music left behind and I thought to myself “I gotta do something with this library of music if they will let me.”
On my new CD (Bits of Me) there is a collaborative track with the band Year 200X. I’m basically doing the Mega Man 2 Title Theme over their version of it. I would like to do something for real with The Protomen, I would like to do something with Power Glove, and Arm Cannon. There are tons of band I would like to collaborate with.
It really comes down of whether or not there is an idea that truly sparks both of our interests enough to really make us care about it and make it great, so it is less limited to the actual band and more about the idea itself.
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