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yeah, professionally, I'd say I was a professional musician as of, I think about five years now and
this is a career for me now. It's not just a hobby anymore, it's how I'm making my living and I'm
still loving it, so that's great.

BiTS: That was presumably when you started playing with Catfish. Would that be right?

ML: Catfish started out as a covers band, so I would say we weren't like a professional band at the
very beginning. We were playing in pubs, just having some fun and making a little bit of money, but
as far as like this is my job on the tax returns and all that kind of thing [chuckling], yeah, it's been
about five years now since I've been like this is my job. This is what I want to do with my life.

BiTS: We'll come back to Catfish in just a minute. Tell me about your own band, The Revenant
Ones. Getting pretty successful, I think, before COVID came along.

ML: Yeah, COVID's kind of put a stop to everything, really. It started out I'd been playing with
Catfish for so long and doing a lot of blues-rock stuff which I love, but at that point, I wasn't doing
any heavy rock things which I had been doing throughout college. I had a few bands doing that kind
of thing and then all of a sudden, at the same time, they all kind of folded for their own reasons,
which is fair enough. I was focusing on Catfish because that was getting more and more popular
and we were becoming more of an originals band, so I was kind of dedicating my time to that, but I

kind of realised one day that I had written a whole bunch of heavy rock songs, or even metal songs
that weren't getting played because I
didn't have a band for it, so I wanted
to start up a solo project, in essence,
to kind of get all that out, which was

literally just going to be called Matt
Long at the time, but then when I got
together with Adam and Kev on the
first rehearsal, everyone just nailed it
and I was like this is a band. This isn't
a solo thing. This is a band. This
works together pretty well, so later on

we evolved into Matt Long and The
Revenant Ones. It's still my solo stuff
in essence. I do the majority of the
writing, but Adam and Kev lend a lot
to the band like their sound, and they contribute to a couple of writing aspects here and there, so

it's definitely a full band thing rather than a solo kind of ego project.

BiTS: Matt, in what sense are you "revenants"? Why the name, in other words?

ML: It came about because of our story, because of how I wasn't really doing a lot of rock stuff for
a long time and revenant means, in essence, coming back to life or undead, things like that. It was,
in essence, bringing back to life a side of me that I hadn't really been paying attention to for a long
time, so The Revenant Ones actually seemed really fitting and also, I just think it's kind of cool.
There's no such thing as a good band name [chuckling]. That's the hardest part of being in a band,

is actually giving it a name, in my opinion.