Crown of Thorns Infuse ‘Faith’ with Voodoo

For his first record in seven years, Crown of Thorns frontman Jean Beauvoir tapped into his Voodoo heritage and brought the symbolism and meaning behind the religion into his band's album 'Faith,' due in stores June 9.

"I grew up as a kid having a very strange kind of summer every year," Beauvoir said during an interview with Noisecreep. "I'd spend a month in France, where my mom's sister was married to a diplomat who was the head of the United Nations in Paris. That was the straightest, most conservative side of my family you could imagine. So we'd go there and have to be proper. That's one way of living."

"Then we'd go to spend the rest of the summer in Haiti with my uncle who's a Voodoo priest. He'd have Voodoo ceremonies while we were down there. His house is a Voodoo temple. They'd have initiations going on. That just became a part of our life. We did that every year as kids. So it's something that stays with you. Voodoo's a religion. A lot of people, from watching movies, think that Voodoo is all about little dolls, sticking pins in dolls. It's deeper than that. For one thing, my uncle uses it for healing. It's a belief in gods, mind over matter, power over your own mind, how you can change things, you control things to a certain extent. I touched on it a little bit on this record."

'Faith' will be released through Little Steven Van Zandt's new imprint Lost Cathedral, sister label to Wicked Cool Records, focusing on the hard rock genre. (Beauvoir is CEO of both labels' parent company, Renegade Nation.) The imprint was launched specifically for the release of this album. The disc marks the first time U.S. fans will have the opportunity to buy a Crown of Thorns album in the states other than as an import since the beginning of the band's career.

"It's a good thing," Beauvoir said of the U.S. deal. "The band was originally signed to Interscope. We went through some problems, blah blah, blah, music changed a bit, etc. The record didn't come out.

"Then the band got pretty big abroad. We spent all our time over there. To tell you the truth, I never really shopped another deal in the U.S. I thought about it. It's just one of those things where you got used to going over there all the time. You just kept making records and never really shopped anything. People could buy (our albums) as an import, but the fans were starting to bitch about it. 'We're paying $50 for a record,' or 'We can't find it.' This was a good opportunity to release something on our label for one thing, with pretty good distribution with Sony Red. We're excited about it."