Jeff Wagner is a music industry veteran, working as both a writer and on the record label side over the years. He has written a few books, including biographies of Peter Steele and Fates Warning along with the prog music history Mean Deviation. His latest book is Always Moving: The Strange Multiverse Of Voivod. Jeff and I had a wide-ranging conversation about the book, Voivod, his podcast, Rush’s reunion tour and other topics.
Chad Bowar: How did you first discover Voivod?
Jeff Wagner: I’m 56, so in 1984, I was 14, 15 years old and had already been seduced by Iron Maiden and Judas Priest and the gateway even before that was KISS. I was in small-town Iowa, but any trip that my family made to the mall I was going to the Record Bar or I was going to Co-op Records in the Quad Cities and I would just try to find any excuse to go, because these these places had import sections, and that’s where I was finding Exciter records and Anvil records and Loudness records. All of that is incredibly seductive to a 14, 15 year old that is really getting into heavy metal.
Didn’t have a lot of Income at the time, but I’d saved up my allowance and all I bought was imports and I would start to read what were at the time hard to get a hold of magazines like Kerrang and early Metal Forces issues and I would hear about what was going on in the quote-unquote underground and Voivod was a name that I remember coming up. It was it was a name I read in a particular article in Kerrang and as I tell in the intro, there was a little bit on them and a picture and just something about the band name and the picture that they ran. I don’t recall ever being so seduced by something I’ve never even heard yet. I was just like, I want to know what this Voivod thing is. And then, one of my friends picked up War And Pain and that’s it, that’s the Big Bang moment for me with Voivod.
You were obviously a longtime fan and then eventually you were able to work with the band. Was that combination of fandom and being a peer the reason you decided you wanted to write a book about Voivod?
Yeah, for sure. It’s about access. When I decided to write the Fates Warning book, the book I put out previous to this one, I had been working with them as well and been a fan. I had a very parallel existence with Fates Warning as I did Voivod. And for me the Fates Warning thing was like, Oh, well, I have access. I know Jim and he’s down with the idea. The same idea crossed my mind when I thought well, Voivod needs a book. And it made it a bit easier and I knew they liked what I’d done in the past with other writing, either about them or my previous books or whatever they’ve read of mine. I just thought, well I’m gonna approach him and see what they think and in both cases, the Fates Warning case and Voivod case, was an easy yes. Having that foot in the door really helps and I always try to stress that I’m a fan first. I’ve been in the business side of things for a long long time, but it’s always going to be about listening to music for me and conveying that through the writing. I think it’s by far the most important work I’ve ever done, just turning people on to music through my writing.
Was it always going to be an oral history or did you land on that when you were in the process?
Great question. No, it was never going to be an oral history because I’ve read very few oral histories that I loved. In the intro I kind of make light of the oral history thing because this is my first book that’s an oral history and I think those are becoming more common. I’ve also heard people slag the oral history or the people that write them as oh, that’s pretty lazy. I don’t totally agree with that as long as it’s done really effectively. There is a book on Saturday Night Live called Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live. I read that thing 15 years ago and it was the first time I really read an oral history and it certainly had an impact in terms of that really told the story. That was excellent.
In terms of music books that have done oral histories, I think less have been successful. I never really wanted to do an oral history, but then I got hired to write the Arcturus box set Stars and Oblivion. I’m a huge fan of that band and I thought, I’m gonna try an oral history with this, and I thought it worked really well. I was really happy with the results. And so when I was writing the Voivod book, it was about six months in and I thought this might work really well as an oral history. But I want to put a lot of narrative in there because I think that really helps to get an author’s voice in there. I set it up as a challenge for myself. Could I make a narration heavy oral history? So that was basically the idea and it was a challenge in and of itself to try to line up quotes so that it flows like any good well-told story. So that was a challenge and I had a lot of talking heads in the book. But I thought it worked pretty well.
You didn’t get Blacky to talk to you for the book. Is there anybody else that you wanted to interview that you weren’t able to?
Dave Grohl. He’s a big fan of Voivod, and Voivod management told me we can get Dave. By the time I really started pressing them to get Dave he was in that unfortunate period of what was going on in his personal life. So I was like, I can see why management probably doesn’t want to approach him right now. So I just let it go. His quotes are in there, but they’re just from another source and I cited that source. Other than that, Jello Biafra, who is a fan and put out the To The Death demo on Alternative Tentacles, his label. I made a couple of approaches to him, but they didn’t get back to me.
Do you think the Jason Newsted era would have lasted longer if Piggy wouldn’t have gotten sick?
That’s a great question. I’m one of those people that loves the self-titled album, loved where they were going. I think it would have been interesting to see where they would have gone with Newsted had Piggy lived. However, I don’t think that would have lasted that long. I don’t think we’d be listening to a Jason Newsted Voivod today because he did have physical issues that were real with his shoulder and some other things. He talks about the shoulder issue in the book that wouldn’t allow him to even strap on a bass for more than 20 minutes. That’s going to be very debilitating for a touring band and a recording band like Voivod. I think he might have had to bow out.
Do you think Voivod would exist today if they hadn’t selected Chewy as their new guitarist?
My first answer is a quick no. Not only the fans but the band themselves, being able to play as well and have the chemistry that they do with anybody else. Who knows if that other person’s out there? Chewy is the only guy that could have done it. I just don’t see anybody else out there. There may be people that can play the stuff backwards and forwards; that’s fine. But I think when you have a French Canadian like he is, Chewy having been a kid going to the Nothingface tour and Piggy was his hero and all these things that are ingredients of his story, I feel like there’s nobody else that could really have navigated all that. It’s a very precarious thing to replace somebody like Piggy in a band.
How would you evaluate the Eric “E-Force” Forrest years?
It was a lineup in an era that nobody wanted to see Blacky leave, much less Snake. That’s kind of like Paul and George leaving the Beatles and them carrying on. It just seems impossible. But KISS did it and remained KISS. Paul and Gene kept the essence of it but changed with the times. I think Voivod did that pretty well. I’m not the biggest Negatron fan. I think it’s okay. Eric was a little bit green on it. But I think Phobos is an amazing album, for me one of their best albums no matter the lineup. It’s a story about survival, that era. Surviving the two key members leaving, making two records that a lot of people really don’t like. It was ’96, ’97, ’98. These were times when a band of Voivod’s stature had a lot less visibility. They persevered and they toured and they would have had a third album out were it not for Eric’s accident which is detailed in the book more than it probably ever has been.
Now that I look back on it, I like the era because it gave them an excuse to just keep going. They’ve gone from War And Pain to Outer Limits. That’s quite a span in seven records. Where do you go? They may have hit a wall but the membership change forced them to reinvent. A lot of bands don’t do well with reinventing, but Voivod I think they’re really excellent at it. So I think them being forced to do it made for a really interesting era that they were forced to be creative in some different ways. So I look back even more fondly on it than I did then.
It’s obvious that Voivod’s low point was Piggy’s death. What do you think their high point was?
I often won’t equate commercial high points with creative ones because I think the creative ones are always going to be more important. That’s why I never or rarely cite chart positions in my writing. I say that to you because I think that Voivod’s high point creatively and commercially are the same, which is the Nothingface era. They had the visibility back then, the Faith No More/Soundgarden tour and then shortly after that they got a few dates opening for Rush in Canada. They had the “Astronomy Domine” video that was getting a lot of play and it was getting a lot of play on college radio as well. Despite it being a Pink Floyd song, they really made it their own and I just feel like that was a certain peak creatively and commercially.
They have a visibility now that is comparable to how it was in the Nothingface days. They’re a legacy band now and I hate that term, but it’s what they are. There are kids getting into the new albums that are just as excited about the new albums as some of us old fans are, and they’re discovering this band for the first time. So I feel like they’re appealing to a new generation and this is their second big wave. Certainly winning the Juno award was huge for them.
The book is available to order on your website.
I’m basically keeping this book under my roof right now for the pre-order stage and after that I’ll release it on a wholesale level to a bunch of other people that are interested both in the U.S. and overseas. So that’s just me trying to get the most out of it that I can in the initial phase. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The one real issue with getting it overseas, and I tried to get a printer over there, but I’m really exacting and very picky about how my books come out, which is why I do them myself. But I’m so much so that if they can’t have it look and feel exactly as I want it to, like the printer does here in the U.S. that I use, then I don’t want to do it. And I was getting quotes that were just way too high or they couldn’t do certain materials, they couldn’t do paper quality or cover quality the way I wanted it.
So I didn’t get a printer over there, which means I have to ship books over there to have a distributor take them. But the problem with that is shipping has become so ridiculous for things that are three pounds. And this is a three-pound book. I made a 540-page, three-pound book. It’s a little larger in size than my previous books. I don’t think I would have changed that just to make it easier for people to get it over there at less cost, because it’s simply the book I wanted to make. But it is biting me in the ass, and it’s been harder for people over there to get it at a reasonable rate. I’m not making any money on the shipping. I have to charge what the U.S. Postal Service charges. But I am going to try to find a way to get it overseas.
Let’s talk about your podcast. What was the origin of Radical Research?
It started with a friend of mine, Hunter Ginn, who is now drumming in Agalloch, and he was also in a band called Canvas Solaris, and he’s in a band with the Canvas Solaris guys called Gorging Shade. He’s also got an experimental thing called Plague Psalm. He’s been a great friend since 2001, and he and I love the post-black metal weirdness that comes out of Norway. Arcturus, Solefald, In the Woods, Beyond Dawn. We love that stuff. It’s very niche, and we love it. We were talking about in about 2018 or so, about maybe co-writing a book on that movement. It’s never been done, and we thought maybe we should do it. That just evolved into a podcast, partly because I’m a big fan of Seinfeld. I was listening to a podcast called Seincast, and they were going through every episode and just nerding out completely. The geekiness of that and the things I was learning and the insights I was getting and just the entertainment I was getting, that was the first podcast I really ever listened to, certainly with any degree of regularity. So I thought, well, I’d like to do a podcast.
I talked about it with Hunter, and we decided, let’s just do a podcast on this Norwegian shit we like. Our tastes are so diverse and also so parallel that we decided, let’s not just keep it at Norway. Let’s just do it about anything, which means that Radical Research is basically about either the forgotten bands or the left-field bands or the things we think were overlooked that should be looked at again. And I don’t consider it a metal podcast. Of course, there’s a lot of metal, because we are really into a lot of metal, but we’re also into a lot of different things. So we just want to try to cover things that none of the other music podcasts out there are doing. And I think I read a stat when I started Radical Research that of all the podcasts out there, there are 30,000 podcasts about music.
And I wanted to do a podcast that was not covering anything that those other 30,000 were doing. I wanted it to be unique in some way. So we developed this idea of just doing the left-field stuff or doing the obscure shit that we still love and still think is worth a look. And we thought we’d be really in a vacuum doing it for ourselves. And pretty quickly, we had people from Estonia and Romania and Japan and other places all over the world just checking in and saying, man, I fucking love this podcast, this is so great. And we’ve got a lot of followers now, and it’s wonderful. I just released episode 136 on a German band called Dark Millennium. It’s been a lot of fun and the community behind it’s been just so great, so supportive.
Is it just you two, or are you able to locate any of these band members from some of these obscure bands and talk to them?
We’ve been really close to the vest in just doing it just him and I. We feel like it’s our thing to do, and we want to be critical. Not in a nasty way, but we want to be critical when we need to be. And if we have somebody on that we admire, but we get into a critique, we want to be as honest as we can. And some people, some musicians that we love may not take that well. The other reason is just, I think it’s just selfishness, because it just built up. And I have enough contacts in this world that I can have a ton of people on. We’ve done a few shows that have something to do with Kristoffer Rygg, aka Garm from Ulver and other bands. I can probably have him on, but I just don’t. And there’s so many podcasts out there that do the guest thing and the many talking heads thing, where you have three, four, five people talking at once. We just wanted to keep it sort of chill and just keep it Hunter and I.
Out of the 136 episodes, there have been two where we had other people with us. Those were just exceptions. And one of them was John Haughm from Agalloch talking with us about a Norwegian band called Thule. We weren’t even talking about Agalloch, really. And the other one was episode 99, where we just had two friends with us, just a roundtable discussion. We each brought questions to the table, and it seemed like a fun thing to do. And it’s also an outgrowth of our friendship. Hunter and I have never lived in the same town, yet we’re very, very close. And we look forward to this, just having time with him and I together to ourselves and talk about music and listen to music the way we do when we get together for real. And maybe we will start doing guests in the future, but right now we just have so many other ideas for crazy, silly little subjects that appeal to us that I think we’re just going to keep going as it is. And it’s been successful, so why not?
It has been quite a few years since you wrote Mean Deviation. Have you ever been approached or considered doing a revised edition from what’s been going on since the original book?
You’re definitely not the first person to ask. I wanted to revise it about six months after it came out, because that’s when Mike Portnoy quit Dream Theater. Now all that Dream Theater stuff in the book is dated. I’ve never actually approached Ian Christe about it, who runs Bazillion Points and who published the book. I probably should. You’re putting that bug in my ear, and you’re not the only one that’s done it recently. So I think there would be a little bit of demand for that. I think it would be fun to do. Maybe even like a small digest edition or addendum to it would be fun, and I could self-publish it with Ian’s permission.
Soul on Fire, the Peter Steele book, that history is done. The book is closed on that, no pun intended. There’s nothing more that one can really write about it. I think other people could write their own story or their own view of it. But that’s not a history that’s ongoing, whereas progressive metal as a thing or as an idea is constantly evolving. So that’s why that’s a good question, and that’s why it’s probably a good idea to maybe try that. Same thing with Fates Warning. Fates Warning is pretty much done and dealt with. There’s nothing else to write. Voivod might be a book that in five years I might want to do a short digest type addendum.
Who is on your Mount Rushmore of prog?
If I had to choose a favorite band, it would be Rush. And they’re clearly progressive giants. I just can’t deny all the greatness that they have produced over the years. King Crimson are massive in my world. Voivod, Fates Warning, Genesis. I’m going to throw in Opeth. Not only am I a big fan and I really liked everything they’ve done, I’m not one of these people that jumped ship when they stopped with the death metal vocals. To me, that was just a maturity thing and something I saw coming. I’m surprised most people didn’t seem to see that coming. But I love Opeth. I think they’re progressive gods. That’s five or six for you of a list of hundreds.
Were you surprised when Rush recently announced their tour?
Yes, I was. They kept it pretty well under wraps until they announced it. And I was also surprised that I was one of the few who was not totally on board with it. I thought for sure that people would be like, how can they possibly go on without Neil? But everybody’s really embraced it. And you know what? I’m happy for Geddy and Alex. I’m happy for all of them. I think it’s going to be great for people that want to go see them. I think Geddy and Alex have absolutely earned their right to do anything they want. And look, if it’s two-thirds of the classic Rush lineup, I guess it’s still Rush. And if they call it Rush, that’s great. I’m not that excited about it. I won’t go. But I love them all the same. It doesn’t really affect my fandom. But yeah, I was completely surprised.
Who are some younger, newer bands that are catching your ear these days?
There’s a band from Canada called Atsuko Chiba who are not metal in any way. I hesitate to even compare them to Mars Volta, but they do have some elements of Mars Volta that I love so much about that initial Mars Volta phase because I’m a huge, huge Mars Volta fan. And Atsuko Chiba are fantastic. They have three albums out. They release singles here and there. They’re pretty new.
There’s a band that’s been around. They put out demos in the early 90s. They’re from Long Island. They’re called Afterbirth. They came up in that pig grunt, brutal death slam world, which is not the kind of death metal I tend to like at all. But they’ve become so interesting and so experimental within that mold that their album from a few years ago called In But Not Of is just fantastic. It’s on Willowtip Records. I cannot recommend that enough. And they’re kind of a new band because they only started making full length albums maybe about eight, nine years ago at most. So I consider them new.
In your decades in the music industry, you’ve seen all the ebbs and flows of the popularity and the viability and the quality of metal. How would you characterize the state of metal in 2025?
A lot of nostalgia, a lot of legacy bands playing albums in full at festivals. I think that’s interesting. I’m all for it. I think it’s fine. I’m not going to be too curmudgeonly about that. But it looks backward a little too much for my own liking. Although, having said that, I have enjoyed seeing some of these bands playing full albums in concert. And then there’s a lot of the young bands, and I’ve been saying this for 20, 25 years simply because I do feel that it is a pattern, they’re playing on themes that have already been played. We’re talking about a lot of variations on themes right now. You take somebody like Rivers of Nihil, who I think are doing something really interesting. This is not a criticism, but I think a lot of younger listeners are grasping onto them because they don’t have as many reference points for something like Rivers of Nihil. I can listen to a band like that, and I’m not picking on them, I think they’re actually quite talented, and I hear the references, I hear the influences. And to me, it’s not anything new because I’m well-versed decades long into these bands that they are referencing. And they’re putting it together in their own stew, and I think that’s cool.
I don’t want to age myself out here, but I think I’m a little too old to have that sound fresh to me. Which is why that Afterbirth album blew me away, because I’d never really heard anything like it. And it was also just simply, you know how an album or a song becomes a friend to you and you can’t wait to hear it the next day? You keep orbiting around it because you’re just getting to know it even better. That happened to me with that album, and it happens to me less and less. But man, there’s so many bands out there that to me are treading no new ground. But again, I’ve been bitching about that for 25 years. So it’s in an interesting place. I do think its popularity is, in a way, more massive than ever. It’s not unusual now for me to see somebody in my town of Greensboro, North Carolina, walking around with a vest. They’ve got an Archgoat shirt on, and I stop them and I want to talk about Archgoat. And they look at me like, what’s this old fart talking to me about? I’m not cool enough. I still have long hair and I still wear metal shirts. But I feel like they’re like, who is this guy? And to them it’s not unusual. And I’m still that old guy. I think it’s great. We live in a pretty vibrant community, metal-wise.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
I’m just happy to finally have this out. It’s by far the longest gestation period of any book I’ve had. It’s going to feel good to send it all over the world and just share this. I think the last thing I’ll say is that I’m really serious when I say in the intro that I want other people to write their own Voivod books. This is not the first Voivod book. Martin Popoff did Worlds Away about 15 years ago now. And yes, it was more about Away’s art and served as sort of a secondary motive. There was just a little bit of Voivod bio as a band, but it was more about Away’s art, and that was great. And this is the second one now. And I hope that there will be a third one, I hope there will be a fourth one. How many Beatles books are out there? How many KISS books are out there? Any great band, you can tell that story a number of ways and we’re all different fans. We process this music differently. I’d love to see other people do it. I’m never going to sit on top of the mountain and go, I’m the only one, my book is the only one. So this is just my contribution to their legacy, I guess.
(interview published November 24, 2025)
Always Moving: The Strange Multiverse Of Voivod is available to order at this location.
