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W.A.S.P.
has aimed to please, dedicating fourteen months to the creation of their
thought-provoking album, Unholy Terror (Metal-Is).
The April 2001 release features Blackie Lawless (vocals, guitar), along
with Chris Holmes (lead guitar), Mike Duda (bass), and Stet Howland
(drums), a line-up that has been maintained consistently for almost
six years now.
According
to Lawless, “That’s fourteen nonstop months.”
He says, “This was a very intense record to make.
It was quite draining.”
“We
work really hard at little minute things that a lot of people might not notice,
but if it wasn’t right they would notice it…a lot of times it seems like it
can be an unrewarding process because of that, but ultimately at the end of the
day, you’re not making records for other people, your making them for
yourself.”
As the album confronts
social, religious, and political hypocrisy, it reminds Lawless of a cross
between two of the bands older albums, namely Headless Children and their
first self-titled album. In fact, he compares the opening track "Let
it Roar" to "I Wanna Be Somebody," and says that the second
track "Hate to Love Me" could have easily been on the band's
first album. Like any artist, he would like to think that his band's
latest effort is just as good as anything else they have ever done, and
thus far reactions to the album have confirmed that assumption.
"You don't premeditate these things before
you do them, you just kind of start going for it, and usually about two-thirds
of a way through a record, it starts reveal itself - what it's going to be. And
it was a refreshing combination when it was done I looked at it and thought,
'wow, this feels a little like both of those'," explained Lawless. But the album isn't exactly all that
predictable...
“There’s a song called
“Evermore” on the album, which is looking at the idea of the possibility
that maybe we've lived before -- past lives. And I'm not saying that I believe
in it. I'd like to. Its something that I'm exploring, and I don't know what I'm
going to find if anything, but I've had some interesting experiences with it,
and "Euphoria" kind of came out of that, because "Euphoria"
was something that I had done when I cleared my head…you can channel creative
energy.
I had gotten into the state where I had done
that, and I wrote that song in one take. I'd never done that with any song
before. Usually, songwriting is a building block process, where you put one on
top of another, and you kind of just go from there. And like I said, I wrote it
just in one take, and I looked at it when I was done and I was really astonished
at the chord progression, because it was something, consciously, I would have
never thought of."
Lawless says that the song was a unique little
thing, and while it has almost nothing to do with the album, it is
"completely totally artistic self-indulgence." He explained that
grouping the song between two fairly intense songs added contrast.
"You can't have black without white, that's
artistic contrast, a lot of artists might not do that. Like I said, from my
point of view, it was artistic self-indulgence, but when I was done with it, I
just loved that little piece to death. And it felt that like the title, it felt
euphoric, it felt like a drug, and that's when I came up with the idea, 'hey
this is music to get high by', whatever that may be for the individual."
Though he left room for his indulgence, the whole moral behind Unholy Terror is:
think for yourself, seek out your own answers, come to your own conclusions, and
don't accept prepackaged beliefs or ideals from anybody else. However, it is in no way
intended to be blasphemous. It is simply meant to show that it can be dangerous
when people don't necessarily want to or have to think for themselves and
unquestionably accept the ideal of organized social, religious, and government
organizations.
Furthermore,
Lawless says that he always writes what he is feeling at the time,
because "That’s
the only way to make it real.”
He
says, "I felt conviction to talk about some of the things on this record that I
did...I’m doing what I feel convicted by at the moment..."
"I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm
not hear to knock anybody's religion. All I'm trying to say is think for
yourself, don't necessarily swallow everything that's handed to you -- seek out
your own answers," he emphasized.
Lawless says if you go back to
albums like Headless Children or the Crimson Idle, and other things that W.A.S.P.
has done through the present, you will find that there are common threads that
run through those albums, and a lot of what they are saying is that there are
kids standing there saying ‘hey, pay attention to me, show me some love, and
maybe I won’t blow up on you’. And now, that same issue is
raised again on a new track called "Loco Motive Man."
"When you’ve got kids
that are taking guns to school or making bombs in their basements, God knows
we’ve seen too many examples of that in the last few years,
that’s something that didn’t happen when I was going to school. Somebody
got mad, you had a fist fight, and that was pretty much it. But now, they’re
playing for keeps," explained Lawless
He believes that the method
behind this madness lies in a child's upbringing, and recalls how he could have
never put something over on his own mother, because she had eyes in the back of
her head, always knowing exactly what he was doing, even before he did it.
He asks "How can
somebody’s parents not know their kids are building weapons and mass
destruction in their basement?"
"I
just don’t get it. And it takes me back to the whole Judas Priest/Ozzy
Osbourne thing when they got sued for writing lyrics that supposedly led
somebody to commit suicide. I hate
to sound cruel, but really, in all honesty what that is, is the parents
continuing in death, the same thing that they did when the kid was alive.
They’re
refusing to take responsibility for what they did -- So in death they still
don’t want to accept the idea that they didn’t give the kid what they needed
when they were here. And I’m sorry, I know the kids are gone and I feel bad
about that, but you can not turn around and point the accusing finger at
somebody else for something you did not do,” he exclaimed.
After breaking away from the
studio and these issues just a few weeks ago, W.A.S.P. is in the midst of
determining their tour plans for the spring and summer, which are scheduled to
kick-off on May 1. To keep his
voice up to the task, Lawless says it is more about what he doesn’t do.
“I just do maintenance pretty
good, and just try not to abuse it. And
when I say abuse it, I’m talking about how there’s a limit sometimes to the
amount of fun you can have, and I got the crap scared out of me a long time ago
by abusing it. So, I’ve learned
my lesson, because, hey, I’m never going to be remembered as a guitar player.
My immortality lies in my throat, so I’ve got to take care of it.”
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