Richard Patrik commentary for new Filter album...

The following is commentary from Richard Patrick on Filter's new album Anthem's for the Damned. I've modified what he said only slightly (didn't write down every "um", etc).

You can listen to his commentary (for a limited time?) here along with the album (don't worry this is legit, straight from Filter's homepage):
http://www.imeem.com/dialogs/standaloneplaylist/?k=UD8bNggsmK

Album is out tomorrow (05/13/08), so go buy it =)

Personally I think this Album is great. It's a bit cleaner than The Amalgamut, but is still harder than his Army Of Anyone record. One song is a George Bush bashing fest, and overall I think I only don't like one song.


What’s Next. A song that was written about the Bush administrator's failure to do really doing anything right. The Iraq war was a huge big mistake, he had also tried to give away our ports, Dubai wanted to buy our ports and everyone didn't understand that one. And then of course his failure in Katrina, handling that natural disaster….he didn’t really, he said "Brownie, you did a heck of a job". So it's a little attack on the bush administration's failures, and there is a “what’s next?”, “what more could possibly happen?”. Kind of a sarcastic title.

The Wake is the closes song to, almost a return to Hey Man Nice Shot. I definitely wanted something that was reminiscent from Short Bus on this record, so I definitely tried to bring back the Short Bus sound within the song The Wake.

Cold (Anthem For the Damned), is one of these anthems, but it's not a happy anthem. It's not an anthem for something grand., it's an anthem for people that are so embarrassed about being a human. When you see what’s going on in the world, when you see the amount of wars that are going on, the terrorisms, what we are doing to the environment, what we are doing to the animal life on the planet. It's just really hard to want to be part of this rat race, called the human species. It's about a guy who goes to the desert and contemplates leaving everything, leaving everything behind. I don’t know if it’s a suicide, or if its not. He just goes to desert to escape, but he realizes that he depends on civilization and has to return.

Hatred is Contagious: I really like the vocal performance in this song. I'm proud of that, and I'm proud of Josh Freese, he did an amazing job of very simply laying out the drums for this record. He did it in one take, he's an amazing drummer, he's one of these virtuoso incredible genius types, and it was an honor to work with him.

Lie After Lie, was actually written about a month before we recorded the record Anthems For the Damned. It came together pretty quickly. I remember I played it too fast, and everybody had a look around and said "lets re-track this thing because it felt too fast". So, we took a breath, we slowed down. We just chilled this song out a little bit, and it was very fun to do....chillin’ out.

Kill the Day was the first song that I wrote about my recovery as an alcoholic. You know, when you are in the disease of alcoholism and you are drinking like a fish, like a gun fighter, like a wild man….you really do get a sense of happiness and pleasure out of destroying your life. You know it’s wrong, you know it’s terrible, but it’s fun to kill the day when you are an alcoholic. That's the insanity of alcoholism. I wanted to include that on this album, because part of humanities problems are its diseases, especially mental illness. I think that I wanted to examine that on this record, this anthems for the damned.

The Take is one of the songs written by John 5. He actually came in and played guitar on three songs; he played on The Take, wrote The Take, he wrote What’s Next, and played guitar on Hatred is Contagious. This song is a total tip of the hat, unabashedly. I'm recognizing where my old band Nine In Nails is coming from, and recognizing where Filter's first record is coming from, and it’s industrial. It's a tip of the hat to Ministry, one of the world’s greatest bands ever. I wanted to do something that was like when the Rolling Stones do a song that’s very reminiscent of Johnny be Good by chuck berry. It's a nod; it's a tip of the hat. So that’s what we did with The Take.

I Keep the Flowers Around is essentially one of the songs that Ray Deliao shines on. Ray is someone I’ve worked with for ten years. He is an amazing sound designer, and he comes up with the coolest sounds and noises in I Keep the Flowers Around…very, very well programmed song.

Only You, is the one spot on the record where I actually remind us that it’s not all doom and gloom, it’s not all just pain and suffering, but there is a little bit of future. We can do amazing, wonderful, incredible things as the human species. We point a telescope at the center of our galaxy and we see this huge black hole for the fist time in the last 5 years, this gigantic black hole. Things like that, discoveries. There are 400 billion suns in our galaxy alone, and there’re trillions of galaxies. So, there are more stars in the universe then there are grains of sand in the all the beaches, in all the world. So we are special; humans are conscious, humans are aware, we know what we are doing. War – bad…love - good. Help people, help animals, help atmosphere, help the planet - good...kill each other - bad. If we can lock onto that idea, it would be amazing and I think that we might have a fighting chance to continue and to survive, and maybe even be a space faring species.

Anthems for the Damned is a record that, to sum it all up, is a pessimistic view on where we are at now, but hopefully an optimistic view on where we can go. Can Stop This is the accompanying song for Only You. Just an ambient track that settles the nerve after a big long record. I view this as a 12 song book, I don’t look at it like a single, "ah, we got a single" no no no, it’s an entire album, it’s to viewed as one big huge piece of work. You don’t watch a DVD by watching one scene. When you watch a movie, you go in you sit down, you watch the movie, you don’t get up in the middle. That’s how I view a record, the perfect record is something you start in the beginning, it takes you on a journey, it gets you from A to B. At least I would hope that’s what it’s about.