"I'm going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy," says Filter founder and frontman Richard Patrick during our interview. It's not that he's going to do either, it's just that he understands what anger combined with a sense of hopeless can do to a person's psyche.
In 2008 he released Anthems For The Damned, which served both as a protest against the Iraq war and a tribute to a friend it had claimed. (Anti-war, but very much pro-troops, Patrick has traveled to the Middle East twice to play concerts for those who risk their lives to serve our country.) Two years on, though our president may have changed, the status quo (or lack thereof) remains the same in the Middle East. After too many years listening to grim reports from the frontlines of a war that was misguided from the start, both the troops on the ground and the masses here at home are suffering from a severe case of fuck up fatigue. With dissent now largely falling on deaf ears, and, even worse, serving to remind the proletariat of their powerlessness, Patrick gets why it's therapeutic to embrace indifference, shrug your shoulders and say "fuck it" to the world.
Thus, at least on the surface, the latest Filter release, The Trouble With Angels, channels the middle finger up attitude of Patrick's drug and alcohol dependant youth - and of his band's 1995 breakthrough debut, Short Bus. Featuring songs with titles such as "Down With Me," "Drug Boy" and "The Inevitable Relapse," the new Filter full-length which is undoubtedly one of the bands best explores topics such as addiction, murder and suicide. Inspired by the music, but puzzled by the message, SG checked in with Patrick to find out where his head was at.
NP: I have to say I fucking love this album. I really, honesty do. I was blown away by it.
RP: That's awesome. I'm really happy about that. Thank you.
NP: Last time we spoke was a few months after the release of Anthems for the Damned. Even back then, you spoke about how this album was going to go in a very different direction. What was the overall inspiration for this album?
RP: The overall inspiration for this album was the meaning behind the title, The Trouble With Angels. It just seems that religion has kind of left its mark on the land. [For example], a guy like Galileo - you know the guy who invented the telescope and discovered [the four largest satellites of] Jupiter and Saturn - 400 years ago they imprisoned him because he was going against the teachings of the church...Superstition imprisoned a man because he made an incredible scientific discovery. [Galileo challenged the belief rigidly held by the church that all heavenly bodies circled the earth.] He was answering questions about the universe, and doing us a favor, and he was imprisoned for it.
I don't think it's as overt as "end the Iraq war, my friend's dead." It's not as on-the-nose, but yet, if I'm going to put out music, I'm going to always try to have a statement. That's my one little scream in the night that I'm allowed to do. I just kind of drew attention to the imprisonment of Galileo, and I pay tribute to him a little bit.
I'm just leaving hidden messages all over the record - and maybe some not so hidden. I got to say the packaging on our record is absolutely amazing. It's so cool. You open it up and there's this pop up angel that's either swimming or drowning, just kind of symbolically surrounded by science. There's enough [left] to the imagination that most people wouldn't get it, which is cool, because I don't want to smack them in the face, I just want them to be inspired to think about things.
NP: Right. On a surface level the tracks are totally satisfying. They're raging, with monster choruses.
RP: Yeah, I'm kind of famous for my choruses. I really want them soaring.
NP: Which is interesting because there are others in that circle where you came from roots-wise, Nine Inch Nails and that industrial camp, that are almost anti-melody.
RP: I cut my teeth in industrial. I was more inspired by the Ministry end of things, beyond the Skinny Puppy end of things, and that's exactly what Trent did. Trent went for the sound design kind of craziness of Skinny Puppy and I went for the more guitar-driven stuff of Ministry. But after the first record, Short Bus, I was fully, OK, I'm going more rock. That's where this record picks up because it's definitely more of just a rock record. This is actually the record I probably should have made ten years ago, but, you know, it comes out now. It comes out when it comes out.
NP: I understand on "Fades Like A Photograph" you worked with your old Short Bus collaborator Brian Liesegang.
RP: He did a little sound design. He colors things. He puts some textures on things. I kind of [enlisted] some of these guys because I really didn't want it to be the Richard Patrick band, because I felt like I really wanted to distance myself from my former boss. But the reality is, I've been the only main original member the whole time. So as much as I love Brian, he didn't write anything. He never wrote anything. He just added some keyboard type stuff on the top of the songs that I'd written. I don't mean to diminish what he is, because he's really great - he's got a great band called Ashtar Command. Truth be told it was actually [screenwriter and producer] Harald Kloser [and] his friend [film composer] Tom [Wander] who was working on the movie 2012, they called me and wanted to work on this song. I grabbed their music and rearranged it, and then I wrote vocals and put it on top. I pretty much did the melody and wrote most of the lyrics with a couple of little changes from Harold. This is the song I wrote for 2012 and I just reworked it [for the album].
NP: Another track that really stands out is "No Love." That has some interesting lyrics: "Twenty years ago you tried to take my eyes..."
RP: Yeah, "Twenty years ago you tried to take my eyes. Thought you loved the world, and I believed your lies." Very specific. [laughs]
NP: It's very specific, twenty years...
RP: Twenty years, I wonder what I'm talking about? I mean, I had a lot of amazing things [happen to me back then]. We were so young, and there's so many great things when you're younger. It's tough looking back sometimes because hindsight is obviously 20/20. It's kind of sad, you know, we should have had more fun. As twenty-year olds, we should have had more fun.
NP: I was talking with Steven Adler from Guns N' Roses recently, and he was talking about that same thing. How you don't realize what you have until you don't have it anymore. Especially because when you're that age, and it comes so easily, you don't stop and smell the roses because you don't even realize there's anything special to stop and smell.
RP: Yeah. It's bizarre. Like all my twenties were drenched with alcohol and drugs, and it made things just so hard. You just go through life and you're like, well, I made pretty much every mistake I could make, and you just start writing lyrics: You crossed a million miles, and you lost a million times, and the disrespect you've earned is the disrespect you've learned. I really love that song. Mitch Marlowe really brought his A-game. Mitch is the Asian kid that was in my live band a couple of years ago. He brought such an amazing originality and he just really brought his A-game on that song. It was the first song that [producer] Bob Marlette and I and Mitch really wrote together, and I got to say, if I'm allowed to make another record, I would love to have Mitch come out for a month or two and just write with me and Bob, because I think it would be insane. I think it'd be really great. I hope I get that next chance.
NP: Were there any other tracks on the album that Mitch and you collaborated on?
RP: Yeah, he wrote the music to "Clouds" with Bob.
NP: That's another track I have written down to talk about. I loved that one too.
RP: Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm really diggin' it. This record, to be honest, it wrote itself. Bob Marlette just accentuated everything that was good and just really helped to finish it properly, and re-wrote stuff. I call him "The Finisher." Mitch wrote the chorus to "Drug Boy," Mitch wrote the beginnings of "Down With Me" - I love the lyrics on that. It's like it literally just paints a scene, a crime scene, and you find out it was a murder suicide. The last thing you hear, he goes, I found a note and it said "If I can't have her, then no one will." It just sounds like a short story come to life or something.
NP: And we should talk about the first single, "The Inevitable Relapse."
RP: I really struck a nerve with "Drug Boy," and I've struck a nerve with "The Inevitable Relapse." I think a lot of people are confused. I think they think I'm saying I'm going down, and I'm going down in a ball of flames. People don't understand it's a song. It can be fiction. There's no method behind it other than the phenomenon. It's like, "Hey Man, Nice Shot." A guy held a press conference, blew his head off, I wrote a song, and there's no judgment. It is what it is. It's a song describing a suicide scene.
So "The Inevitable Relapse," before I got sober this last seven years, this last time I got sober, I relapsed every other day. Like I quit drinking, and then a day later I was out getting wasted. When you're in the disease of alcoholism or drug dependency, it's a fight. The song is about losing that battle. And the video, I'm so proud of that video. It summed it up perfectly. Have you seen the video?
NP: Yes.
RP: You see this guy getting his ass kicked by someone beautiful and hot. He escapes and then he comes back for more abuse. That's it. That's drug addiction. In that case it's like a love addiction. Again, I was really not trying to make this huge message. I mean, I used to chant, "Drink it, drink it, snort it, smoke it. Drink it, drink it..." At my studio back in Chicago, I'd call a drug dealer and I'd get in touch with him, and he would be like, "I'm on my way." And I'm like, "Yes!" That was the best I was going to feel all month, knowing that the drug dealer was on his way...I'd binge for an entire three or four days. It was terrible. It was horrible. But in that song, I'm not saying I'm relapsing, come and join me. I'm just talking about the phenomenon of losing - losing the battle, fucking up, that kind of thing.
NP: I know you have "September 28th, 2002" tattooed on your arm, which is the day you finally got sober. What changed for you?
RP: When I went into rehab I knew in my heart and soul that I am just incapable of drinking. I just can't do it. I was so obvious. I cancelled a tour, I lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars - there was just no getting around it. I couldn't go on stage and sing anymore, it was horrible. So when I walked into rehab, I was done. I was like, take a good look around, because this is the first and last time you're ever going to go to a place like this and check yourself in.
On the confines of my record, in the imaginary world of lyrics on my record, some of the people relapse and some of the people are still on drugs. "Drug Boy," it's all based on the early years of my life. I used to drop acid and run around the streets of Cleveland with this pack, I don't want to say gang, but a pack of twenty-year olds [who were] totally disenfranchised, loser, falling through the cracks [types]. Some of them died, some of them got arrested, but no one ended up doing anything really great except for what happened with my career.
We would break into an abandoned jail, and go into the basement and read the files of criminals that had lived entire criminal lives in the 1920s. And there was this whole thing where we went into a cemetery and inevitably someone would break into a mausoleum and grab a skull and just walk out with it - just bizarre behavior.
Bob Marlette, our producer, was just like, "You really should talk about that stuff." Because you know, on Army of Anyone I talk about growing up, and I became kind of mature. He was like, "You know what dude? That's cool. I'm glad you're growing up and you're maturing, but at the same time, we all miss that knucklehead, that crazy man from your youth - you as a youngster." And he goes, "Remember that, let's talk about that, and then let's put that into these songs, these first couple of songs on the record so that it really embodies our original work, Short Bus." So we did that, and people are freaking out because they're like, "Wow! Is Richard back on drugs?"
I just don't want to be the guy that's mellowing with age. Because I don't feel mellow. I mean Anthems was this big tribute record to a friend of ours that had been killed in the Iraq War Part Deux, and I just was like, I really want to make sure that I tap into my craziness as well because that was a fun thing to listen to...I kind of wanted to sound reckless again. I wanted to not try and do anything with my record. I didn't want my record to have an agenda. I wanted my record to reflect the darkness in life. It sounds cheesy, but at the end day we walk around and it's so confusing. The world is so confusing and it's so insane. It's fucking insane.
Sarah Palin and the conservative right wing is just [Richard puts on his best crazy Palin voice], "This country should be way more Christian. We can't have a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero. And we got to build a wall up between us and all them Mexicans." It's so far away from what Jesus Christ was teaching, and it's just so astounding that someone would impose their beliefs. And at the same time they're like, "I ain't got no charity for no Mexicans." It's unbelievable.
NP: Right, the level of hate they spew in the name of Jesus is spectacularly inappropriate to what he would have wanted, and they have no concept of the irony.
RP: You just walk around and you're like, am I the only one who gets this? So as opposed to trying to do anything, it's almost like I am recognizing the chaos, and, without any judgment, I'm just going, I understand that chaos. I understand wanting entertainment.
When I went to Iraq I was shocked. The soldiers were like, "Hey, we really appreciate you saying what you want to say about the war. We really appreciate you coming out here and we really appreciate that your friend has been killed out here. Same with us. Let's fucking rock. Let's have a fucking great time and sing that song about that guy fucking killing himself."
And it's kind of like, I guess you're right. 'Cause honestly, if you take a broom and you try and sweep back the ocean, it's impossible. So as well as the confusion and the chaos, there's a certain amount of apathy on this record. At some points in this record I'm literally like, "Oh well, whatever, nevermind" - straight out of Kurt Cobain's mouth. It's literally at that point with me in so many ways, so I am throwing up my hands in the air and going, "You're right! Fuck it! There's nothing that can be done. I'm going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy, and who gives a shit. Let's turn up the amps and fucking play loud rock music." There has to be that too.
NP: I completely get that. If I think about things too much I get so angry at the world, and trying to change it is like pissing in the wind, so sometimes you've just got to say "fuck it."
RP: Yeah. I mean, I think what people loved about Filter in the early days, and that's literally what I'm figuring out, is they were like, "Please take yourself seriously but at the same time just try and break it. Just try and destroy it. Have fun destroying it." And I get that. I understand that...Sometimes it's better to just destroy a guitar and fucking trash a stage and fucking break shit and not care so much about something because that's exactly how the audience feels.
When we played in Corpus Christi [see video from Filter's July 25th, 2010 show], we were literally over it and we kind of tore down the stage and threw shit around, and broke cymbals and laughed. It was funny because the audience had never seen anything like that. Nowadays musicians don't have gobs of money. They're like, "That guitar cost five hundred dollars." Most bands, they see it in terms of you have to sell 500 CDs to pay for that guitar - and selling 500 CDs is a fucking hard task these days. Back in the day they'd give us $500,000 checks every couple of months. But we destroyed the stage and we were throwing shit around and the audience was like, I understand that. I'm in my cubicle and in my construction worker job, and we hate the world too.
So I've kind of come full circle. I'm like, "Yeah I've relapsed, and yeah, I fucking don't care, and yeah, I fucking want to blow my head off, and yeah, I fucking hate god. I'm with you. Fuck this world. Fuck this shit." It's come back to that. I'm with you. Fuck reality.
And it's fun to have that again. On "Absentee Father" I play a 32 bar solo and there's not even one approach at trying to play a guitar with any musical rules or whatever. I literally took a screwdriver and fucking started breaking strings. It was the most amazing thing I had done in ten years. It was the most fun I ever had, and it's way up at the beginning of the record. The third song on the record is my avant-garde guitar solo that fucking flips off every guitar hero on the planet because I'm totally just taking a shit on the guitar and handing it to the public like, "What do you think of that?"
I just had so much fun on this record destroying and being crazy and being a nut. And, within the lyrics, relapsing and killing people. That's what rock & roll was all about, and that's what I realized I needed to get back to.
NP: Well that's a basic function of music. It helps people escape from their daily lives.
RP: That's the thing, there's my hidden meaning in the record. If you get it - great. If you don't - I don't care either. Fuck it. Who cares? Let's smash a fucking guitar, and, at the end of the day, let's have that cathartic release that we need.
The Trouble With Angels is available now via Rocket Science Ventures. For more information go to OfficialFilter.com.
In 2008 he released Anthems For The Damned, which served both as a protest against the Iraq war and a tribute to a friend it had claimed. (Anti-war, but very much pro-troops, Patrick has traveled to the Middle East twice to play concerts for those who risk their lives to serve our country.) Two years on, though our president may have changed, the status quo (or lack thereof) remains the same in the Middle East. After too many years listening to grim reports from the frontlines of a war that was misguided from the start, both the troops on the ground and the masses here at home are suffering from a severe case of fuck up fatigue. With dissent now largely falling on deaf ears, and, even worse, serving to remind the proletariat of their powerlessness, Patrick gets why it's therapeutic to embrace indifference, shrug your shoulders and say "fuck it" to the world.
Thus, at least on the surface, the latest Filter release, The Trouble With Angels, channels the middle finger up attitude of Patrick's drug and alcohol dependant youth - and of his band's 1995 breakthrough debut, Short Bus. Featuring songs with titles such as "Down With Me," "Drug Boy" and "The Inevitable Relapse," the new Filter full-length which is undoubtedly one of the bands best explores topics such as addiction, murder and suicide. Inspired by the music, but puzzled by the message, SG checked in with Patrick to find out where his head was at.
NP: I have to say I fucking love this album. I really, honesty do. I was blown away by it.
RP: That's awesome. I'm really happy about that. Thank you.
NP: Last time we spoke was a few months after the release of Anthems for the Damned. Even back then, you spoke about how this album was going to go in a very different direction. What was the overall inspiration for this album?
RP: The overall inspiration for this album was the meaning behind the title, The Trouble With Angels. It just seems that religion has kind of left its mark on the land. [For example], a guy like Galileo - you know the guy who invented the telescope and discovered [the four largest satellites of] Jupiter and Saturn - 400 years ago they imprisoned him because he was going against the teachings of the church...Superstition imprisoned a man because he made an incredible scientific discovery. [Galileo challenged the belief rigidly held by the church that all heavenly bodies circled the earth.] He was answering questions about the universe, and doing us a favor, and he was imprisoned for it.
I don't think it's as overt as "end the Iraq war, my friend's dead." It's not as on-the-nose, but yet, if I'm going to put out music, I'm going to always try to have a statement. That's my one little scream in the night that I'm allowed to do. I just kind of drew attention to the imprisonment of Galileo, and I pay tribute to him a little bit.
I'm just leaving hidden messages all over the record - and maybe some not so hidden. I got to say the packaging on our record is absolutely amazing. It's so cool. You open it up and there's this pop up angel that's either swimming or drowning, just kind of symbolically surrounded by science. There's enough [left] to the imagination that most people wouldn't get it, which is cool, because I don't want to smack them in the face, I just want them to be inspired to think about things.
NP: Right. On a surface level the tracks are totally satisfying. They're raging, with monster choruses.
RP: Yeah, I'm kind of famous for my choruses. I really want them soaring.
NP: Which is interesting because there are others in that circle where you came from roots-wise, Nine Inch Nails and that industrial camp, that are almost anti-melody.
RP: I cut my teeth in industrial. I was more inspired by the Ministry end of things, beyond the Skinny Puppy end of things, and that's exactly what Trent did. Trent went for the sound design kind of craziness of Skinny Puppy and I went for the more guitar-driven stuff of Ministry. But after the first record, Short Bus, I was fully, OK, I'm going more rock. That's where this record picks up because it's definitely more of just a rock record. This is actually the record I probably should have made ten years ago, but, you know, it comes out now. It comes out when it comes out.
NP: I understand on "Fades Like A Photograph" you worked with your old Short Bus collaborator Brian Liesegang.
RP: He did a little sound design. He colors things. He puts some textures on things. I kind of [enlisted] some of these guys because I really didn't want it to be the Richard Patrick band, because I felt like I really wanted to distance myself from my former boss. But the reality is, I've been the only main original member the whole time. So as much as I love Brian, he didn't write anything. He never wrote anything. He just added some keyboard type stuff on the top of the songs that I'd written. I don't mean to diminish what he is, because he's really great - he's got a great band called Ashtar Command. Truth be told it was actually [screenwriter and producer] Harald Kloser [and] his friend [film composer] Tom [Wander] who was working on the movie 2012, they called me and wanted to work on this song. I grabbed their music and rearranged it, and then I wrote vocals and put it on top. I pretty much did the melody and wrote most of the lyrics with a couple of little changes from Harold. This is the song I wrote for 2012 and I just reworked it [for the album].
NP: Another track that really stands out is "No Love." That has some interesting lyrics: "Twenty years ago you tried to take my eyes..."
RP: Yeah, "Twenty years ago you tried to take my eyes. Thought you loved the world, and I believed your lies." Very specific. [laughs]
NP: It's very specific, twenty years...
RP: Twenty years, I wonder what I'm talking about? I mean, I had a lot of amazing things [happen to me back then]. We were so young, and there's so many great things when you're younger. It's tough looking back sometimes because hindsight is obviously 20/20. It's kind of sad, you know, we should have had more fun. As twenty-year olds, we should have had more fun.
NP: I was talking with Steven Adler from Guns N' Roses recently, and he was talking about that same thing. How you don't realize what you have until you don't have it anymore. Especially because when you're that age, and it comes so easily, you don't stop and smell the roses because you don't even realize there's anything special to stop and smell.
RP: Yeah. It's bizarre. Like all my twenties were drenched with alcohol and drugs, and it made things just so hard. You just go through life and you're like, well, I made pretty much every mistake I could make, and you just start writing lyrics: You crossed a million miles, and you lost a million times, and the disrespect you've earned is the disrespect you've learned. I really love that song. Mitch Marlowe really brought his A-game. Mitch is the Asian kid that was in my live band a couple of years ago. He brought such an amazing originality and he just really brought his A-game on that song. It was the first song that [producer] Bob Marlette and I and Mitch really wrote together, and I got to say, if I'm allowed to make another record, I would love to have Mitch come out for a month or two and just write with me and Bob, because I think it would be insane. I think it'd be really great. I hope I get that next chance.
NP: Were there any other tracks on the album that Mitch and you collaborated on?
RP: Yeah, he wrote the music to "Clouds" with Bob.
NP: That's another track I have written down to talk about. I loved that one too.
RP: Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm really diggin' it. This record, to be honest, it wrote itself. Bob Marlette just accentuated everything that was good and just really helped to finish it properly, and re-wrote stuff. I call him "The Finisher." Mitch wrote the chorus to "Drug Boy," Mitch wrote the beginnings of "Down With Me" - I love the lyrics on that. It's like it literally just paints a scene, a crime scene, and you find out it was a murder suicide. The last thing you hear, he goes, I found a note and it said "If I can't have her, then no one will." It just sounds like a short story come to life or something.
NP: And we should talk about the first single, "The Inevitable Relapse."
RP: I really struck a nerve with "Drug Boy," and I've struck a nerve with "The Inevitable Relapse." I think a lot of people are confused. I think they think I'm saying I'm going down, and I'm going down in a ball of flames. People don't understand it's a song. It can be fiction. There's no method behind it other than the phenomenon. It's like, "Hey Man, Nice Shot." A guy held a press conference, blew his head off, I wrote a song, and there's no judgment. It is what it is. It's a song describing a suicide scene.
So "The Inevitable Relapse," before I got sober this last seven years, this last time I got sober, I relapsed every other day. Like I quit drinking, and then a day later I was out getting wasted. When you're in the disease of alcoholism or drug dependency, it's a fight. The song is about losing that battle. And the video, I'm so proud of that video. It summed it up perfectly. Have you seen the video?
NP: Yes.
RP: You see this guy getting his ass kicked by someone beautiful and hot. He escapes and then he comes back for more abuse. That's it. That's drug addiction. In that case it's like a love addiction. Again, I was really not trying to make this huge message. I mean, I used to chant, "Drink it, drink it, snort it, smoke it. Drink it, drink it..." At my studio back in Chicago, I'd call a drug dealer and I'd get in touch with him, and he would be like, "I'm on my way." And I'm like, "Yes!" That was the best I was going to feel all month, knowing that the drug dealer was on his way...I'd binge for an entire three or four days. It was terrible. It was horrible. But in that song, I'm not saying I'm relapsing, come and join me. I'm just talking about the phenomenon of losing - losing the battle, fucking up, that kind of thing.
NP: I know you have "September 28th, 2002" tattooed on your arm, which is the day you finally got sober. What changed for you?
RP: When I went into rehab I knew in my heart and soul that I am just incapable of drinking. I just can't do it. I was so obvious. I cancelled a tour, I lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars - there was just no getting around it. I couldn't go on stage and sing anymore, it was horrible. So when I walked into rehab, I was done. I was like, take a good look around, because this is the first and last time you're ever going to go to a place like this and check yourself in.
On the confines of my record, in the imaginary world of lyrics on my record, some of the people relapse and some of the people are still on drugs. "Drug Boy," it's all based on the early years of my life. I used to drop acid and run around the streets of Cleveland with this pack, I don't want to say gang, but a pack of twenty-year olds [who were] totally disenfranchised, loser, falling through the cracks [types]. Some of them died, some of them got arrested, but no one ended up doing anything really great except for what happened with my career.
We would break into an abandoned jail, and go into the basement and read the files of criminals that had lived entire criminal lives in the 1920s. And there was this whole thing where we went into a cemetery and inevitably someone would break into a mausoleum and grab a skull and just walk out with it - just bizarre behavior.
Bob Marlette, our producer, was just like, "You really should talk about that stuff." Because you know, on Army of Anyone I talk about growing up, and I became kind of mature. He was like, "You know what dude? That's cool. I'm glad you're growing up and you're maturing, but at the same time, we all miss that knucklehead, that crazy man from your youth - you as a youngster." And he goes, "Remember that, let's talk about that, and then let's put that into these songs, these first couple of songs on the record so that it really embodies our original work, Short Bus." So we did that, and people are freaking out because they're like, "Wow! Is Richard back on drugs?"
I just don't want to be the guy that's mellowing with age. Because I don't feel mellow. I mean Anthems was this big tribute record to a friend of ours that had been killed in the Iraq War Part Deux, and I just was like, I really want to make sure that I tap into my craziness as well because that was a fun thing to listen to...I kind of wanted to sound reckless again. I wanted to not try and do anything with my record. I didn't want my record to have an agenda. I wanted my record to reflect the darkness in life. It sounds cheesy, but at the end day we walk around and it's so confusing. The world is so confusing and it's so insane. It's fucking insane.
Sarah Palin and the conservative right wing is just [Richard puts on his best crazy Palin voice], "This country should be way more Christian. We can't have a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero. And we got to build a wall up between us and all them Mexicans." It's so far away from what Jesus Christ was teaching, and it's just so astounding that someone would impose their beliefs. And at the same time they're like, "I ain't got no charity for no Mexicans." It's unbelievable.
NP: Right, the level of hate they spew in the name of Jesus is spectacularly inappropriate to what he would have wanted, and they have no concept of the irony.
RP: You just walk around and you're like, am I the only one who gets this? So as opposed to trying to do anything, it's almost like I am recognizing the chaos, and, without any judgment, I'm just going, I understand that chaos. I understand wanting entertainment.
When I went to Iraq I was shocked. The soldiers were like, "Hey, we really appreciate you saying what you want to say about the war. We really appreciate you coming out here and we really appreciate that your friend has been killed out here. Same with us. Let's fucking rock. Let's have a fucking great time and sing that song about that guy fucking killing himself."
And it's kind of like, I guess you're right. 'Cause honestly, if you take a broom and you try and sweep back the ocean, it's impossible. So as well as the confusion and the chaos, there's a certain amount of apathy on this record. At some points in this record I'm literally like, "Oh well, whatever, nevermind" - straight out of Kurt Cobain's mouth. It's literally at that point with me in so many ways, so I am throwing up my hands in the air and going, "You're right! Fuck it! There's nothing that can be done. I'm going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy, and who gives a shit. Let's turn up the amps and fucking play loud rock music." There has to be that too.
NP: I completely get that. If I think about things too much I get so angry at the world, and trying to change it is like pissing in the wind, so sometimes you've just got to say "fuck it."
RP: Yeah. I mean, I think what people loved about Filter in the early days, and that's literally what I'm figuring out, is they were like, "Please take yourself seriously but at the same time just try and break it. Just try and destroy it. Have fun destroying it." And I get that. I understand that...Sometimes it's better to just destroy a guitar and fucking trash a stage and fucking break shit and not care so much about something because that's exactly how the audience feels.
When we played in Corpus Christi [see video from Filter's July 25th, 2010 show], we were literally over it and we kind of tore down the stage and threw shit around, and broke cymbals and laughed. It was funny because the audience had never seen anything like that. Nowadays musicians don't have gobs of money. They're like, "That guitar cost five hundred dollars." Most bands, they see it in terms of you have to sell 500 CDs to pay for that guitar - and selling 500 CDs is a fucking hard task these days. Back in the day they'd give us $500,000 checks every couple of months. But we destroyed the stage and we were throwing shit around and the audience was like, I understand that. I'm in my cubicle and in my construction worker job, and we hate the world too.
So I've kind of come full circle. I'm like, "Yeah I've relapsed, and yeah, I fucking don't care, and yeah, I fucking want to blow my head off, and yeah, I fucking hate god. I'm with you. Fuck this world. Fuck this shit." It's come back to that. I'm with you. Fuck reality.
And it's fun to have that again. On "Absentee Father" I play a 32 bar solo and there's not even one approach at trying to play a guitar with any musical rules or whatever. I literally took a screwdriver and fucking started breaking strings. It was the most amazing thing I had done in ten years. It was the most fun I ever had, and it's way up at the beginning of the record. The third song on the record is my avant-garde guitar solo that fucking flips off every guitar hero on the planet because I'm totally just taking a shit on the guitar and handing it to the public like, "What do you think of that?"
I just had so much fun on this record destroying and being crazy and being a nut. And, within the lyrics, relapsing and killing people. That's what rock & roll was all about, and that's what I realized I needed to get back to.
NP: Well that's a basic function of music. It helps people escape from their daily lives.
RP: That's the thing, there's my hidden meaning in the record. If you get it - great. If you don't - I don't care either. Fuck it. Who cares? Let's smash a fucking guitar, and, at the end of the day, let's have that cathartic release that we need.
The Trouble With Angels is available now via Rocket Science Ventures. For more information go to OfficialFilter.com.