ANTHRAX Singer Is Looking Forward To Writing New Music

ANTHRAX singer John Bush recently spoke to Abrasive Rock about the group's newly released "The Greater of Two Evils" CD and the band's future plans, among other topics. A couple of excerpts from the interview follow:

Abrasive Rock: On your last studio album of new material, "We've Come For You All", to me, as an ANTHRAX fan, I have to say that was the best Bush-era ANTHRAX album so far. But it seemed to get a little bit lost in the shuffle of the hype over the name. Do you think that the next album might have a much more stronger push, or how do you think that that affected the album?

John Bush: "Obviously you hope that the record label will do the best thing they can for a record. As a musician I've come to a place in my life where, as soon as a record is completely done and mastered, I have to let go of it, because I have to believe in what I did. I can never let what the record sells determine how I feel about that album, because that's the nature of this business. Oh, it didn't sell well, so it must not be good. And that's not true. So I think that in our case with that record, especially at that stage we had Sanctuary come on board kind of late. They kind of rescued us out of a shitty record contract that we had of a label that was basically defunked. So they got us out of that, and we were grateful for that, but I don't think they prepared themselves for the record as best as they could have, because of that. Some of it was out of our control. This record was almost coming out shortly after they signed the contract with us in Europe and Japan, and these days with downloading and such, we don't want to put out records with different release dates. It kind of works against you. And also in Europe and Japan, those are two places that our record company did an outstanding job, and we reaped the benefits of that, because the record did really well there, especially in Europe. I'm hoping that things will be different on this upcoming record. I hope things are different on this record, actually, with the way they handle the album."

Abrasive Rock: Right. So, now with this album, this album is kind of a best of. Are there any plans for new material being released?

John Bush: "We need to get on that. We need to start working, and really continue with the momentum that we built up with 'We've Come For You All'. We got a lot of momentum with that album. The last thing we want to do is take a long time to put out a new record. Obviously there was five years between 'Volume 8' and 'We've Come For You All'. We cannot do that again. So, we need to get on it. But other than the writing new material, I think we've built up a lot of excitement with the last record within ourselves, and I think it will be cool to start working on new songs."

Read John Bush's entire interview with Abrasive Rock at this location.