CLAWFINGER Frontman Discusses New Album 'Life Will Kill You'

Metalhead.ro recently conducted an interview with CLAWFINGER frontman Zak Tell. An excerpt follows:

Metalhead.ro: Tell me please how long did you work on [the new CLAWFINGER album "Life Will Kill You"]? And where did you record it?

Zak: Well it's all written, recorded and produced by us in our Fear & Loathing studio that we own together with MESHUGGAH. I think we started writing the songs in September/October 2006 but I honestly can't remember exactly! We spent a month or so just trying to get into the right mood and as always things were pretty slow in the beginning when we had to find out if we still had what it took to write songs. After a bit of not really knowing what we were doing we realized that we were totally free to do whatever we felt like doing and decided to just let all the ideas we came up with get a chance, I think that's why this album is alot more varied than most of our past releases!

Metalhead.ro: The production is really impressive! Did you produce the album yourselves (like you sometimes do) 100% or did you get some help?

Zak: It's all us man, well maybe not so much me, I'm fairly useless at the technical side of things but Jocke is a damn studio wizard and Bard ain't so bad either! The only thing we got help with was the mastering which is a must to get all the final balances and frequencies right! After 14 years of releasing albums and 15-16 years together it would be strange if we didn't master things more than in the beginning.

Metalhead.ro: Why did you pick "Little Baby" [as the first single/video] to promote your current record?

Zak: Well, we're actually making videos for four of the tracks so "Little Baby" is just one of the four chosen songs! It just seemed like a smart idea to make quite a few in this time and age when people watch YouTube more than they watch MTV! As for choosing "Little Baby" as one of those four, well, the reason is simple! It's a very unhappy song about a father who is sexually abusing his little daughter. It's a concerned song about a problem that is immense and it hurts me so deeply to think about the children out there who have to live through an awful experience like that! Children don't know what's right from wrong and therefore have no chance of defending themselves in this kind of situation. Grown-ups, on the contrary, know exactly what they can and cannot do unless they have some serious defect, are sick individuals or have been through so much pain themselves that they don't have the ability to tell what is right from what is wrong!

Read the entire interview at Metalhead.ro.