I caught up with Persephone guitarist Rowen Poole on October 3, 2002 to talk about Perephone’s direction and the role that chance has played in their career. Watch for a new PD release sometime this year. For all the latest information on the band, visit,

Jedd Beaudoin: Can you bring me, very quickly, from your earliest musical memories to the seminal moment of the band?

Rowen Poole: Music was 34-35 years ago. I can’t remember exactly what it was but it might have been Sly and the Family Stone. I think it was the drumming. After that, I went to high school and had various ideas about being in a band and all that other stuff you do when you’re in high school. I kept playing and eventually met Chris [Siegle], our bass player, in 1993 and that’s when we started Persephone’s Dream. He wasn’t a bass player at that time. He wanted to learn. I’d been playing bass for about 15 years before I started playing guitar, so I told him that if he got a bass I’d teach him how to play. The rest is history.

JB: So you started on bass and switched to guitar?

RP: Actually, I was a drummer. I played drums for about five years. When I was in high school a bunch of my friends had a band together and they already had a drummer but needed a bass player. I wanted to be in the band, so I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” I ended up playing for 15 years before I became a guitar player.

JB: That’s unusual because it usually goes the other way: some bassists, as I’m sure you’re aware, start on guitar and then switch over. What was it that made you wanted to jump from one to the other?

RP: Actually, there wasn’t any one thing. I played in a band in the late ’70s and early ’80s that was trying to do a lot of Rush-influenced progressive stuff. We were writing all this wild stuff but needed another guitar player. We couldn’t find one, so I ended up playing a double neck guitar, bass and six-string, I learned from there and it evolved until I ended up playing guitar quite a bit and then, when we formed Persephone’s Dream, guitar ended up being my main instrument.

JB: How did the band fall into place once you and Chris started working together?

RP: Chris is just one of those people who learns quickly and he did that with the bass, he was just kind of a natural at it. We started writing music probably four-five months after he started learning and by the end of the first year, we have five-six songs together and started wondering, “What do we want to do with this?” So, we bought some recording equipment and started recording some of the songs. As that was happening, we started talking and we said, “You know, it would be really cool to have a female singer singing over progressive music. You don’t hear that that often.” That was in ’94, before the explosion of female-fronted bands.

But it took us four years to find Karin [Nicely]. We searched through a lot of singers, had a lot of auditions. There was a woman on our first album, who was an opera singer, she came in and did the recordings, though she wasn’t really part of the band. After we put out our first album, we took a couple of months off, deciding what we wanted to do. Of course, at some point, you say, “Okay, we’ve got to write more music.” We had written three songs, two of which were “Millennium Moon” and “Worry Beads,” which are on Moonspell, but “Worry Beads” was originally an instrumental. We’d gone to a local studio to mix them and during a break in the mixing sessions, I was talking to Chris in the hallway, when I noticed this little piece of blue paper sticking out of it. I pulled it out. It read, “Vocalist available: Call Karin Nicely.” That’s how we met Karin: I pulled her out of a wall.

JB: The band has expanded since Moonspell.

RP: John [Tallent], our percussionist, is actually on the album, on one track but it was right after we’d finished the album that we decided to do live shows. We thought that it would be nice to have the percussion as well as the drumming. But with the keyboard/synthesizer things, it was more practical because I’d played a lot of those parts on the album and that would be tough to do live. Basically we didn’t know how to do it and actually Kim [Finney] had been a friend of ours for a couple of years but I didn’t know that she played. She came over one night and the rest of us were sitting there having a band meeting and this friend said, “I’m bored, can I play your piano?” I turned it on and she started playing Mozart. We all looked at her and said, “Can we show you something?”

JB: It sounds like chance has played a huge factor in your career.

RP: It’s been weird.

JB: Has that carried over into the creative process as well?

RP: Pretty much everything that we’ve written as a band has come out of the whole band being together. It’s not a situation where I’ll write something and bring it to the band. We just get together three or four nights a week, have jam sessions and record them. Whatever we like, we condense that into a song.

JB: What’s that like, to be in a room where you’ve got all those people in one room, creating at the same time? Is it nerve-wracking, amazing, what?

RP: It’s just a lot of fun. It’s never nerve-wracking. Sometimes we experience something close to writer’s block. We just stand there, saying, “I don’t know what to do.” But most of the time we’re all together and stuff just happens. We have our own studio and so we just record everything. Of course one of the reasons we do that is so that we can remember it all [laughs]. We were actually thinking, with the “Opposition” album, that we’d make it a double CD. One would be the finished CD and the other would be the live studio recordings of each song as we were writing it. Some of them are vastly different.

JB: Is that something you think might still come out at some point?

RP: With us, anything’s possible. We’ve talked about it.

JB: Well, I guess you just have to leave it up to chance.