FEAR FACTORY Drummer Talks About Collaboration With FAITH NO MORE Bassist

Greece's Metal Temple magazine recently conducted an interview with FEAR FACTORY drummer Raymond Herrera. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Metal Temple: There's a list of all star musician cameos who contributed to the new album and a couple of cover songs. How did you get the idea for that?

Raymond Herrera: "The only real person we got was Billy Gould from FAITH NO MORE. It was my idea to bring Billy in. We've been friends for like eight years now. We had a side project for a few years and we have a record label too. I keep in touch with him all the time. When Christian [Olde Wolbers; guitarist] said he wanted to bring, in his words, 'a real bass player in,' and I was like, 'Uh, OK, a real bass player huh?' I mean, that just sounded funny, it's like me saying I want to bring a real drummer in. But he didn't mean it like that, he meant someone that would maybe flow a little bit differently around songs and that are maybe a little bit more open. So Christian wanted Billy to play on 'Supernova' and this other song maybe if there was enough time called 'Echoes of My Scream'. So I called Billy up and I told him, 'Hey, I'm gonna send you some of these mp3s and I want you to check these songs out, but they're really, really rough.' So he was like, 'Yeah send me the tracks.' So we did, and a couple of days later he already put bass tracks onto ProTools and sent it back and we were like, 'Yeah this sounds great.' So, he flew in and he did rehearsals with us for like two or three days and then he came back to the studio to nail the tracks out. Then Phil Demmel [guitarist] from MACHINE HEAD came in to kind of tutor Christian a little bit on the solos and stuff because Christian was like, 'I gotta play a solo on this record'. He did a couple of them and then that was it."

Metal Temple: What's your opinion on today's music industry?

Raymond Herrera: "Wow, that's a hard question. I guess the whole piracy comes up. I think that for too long the price of CDs was too high and it was way too easy to get them for free. I just think that the other side of that is there isn't as much money anymore to make albums sound as good as they could. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter anyway, 'cause you're gonna download them into your mp3 player and it kind of compresses the whole thing, which kind of goes against the whole reason on spending a lot of money to make a good recording. So it's kind of funny but at the same time I think the positive side of that is bands have to do something extra to make the fans buy the CD. Like with the DualDisc, it's kind of cool, I like that. But the DualDisc itself, because it's a new technology, it's like 19 dollars, which goes back to the original idea to where it's too expensive. But I think it all got convoluted a little bit because there was a little short time there where every album had this little DVD content and it really didn't cost you extra. Now it's this DualDisc thing and technology thing and it costs more. It's almost like kind of a step backwards, I mean, we did a DualDisc on this record, we also did a regular version but the regular version doesn't offer as much as the DualDisc version but obviously it costs a little more. It's like which one would you want, the premium one or the other, it's almost like shopping for gas now. [Laughs] So I think the cool thing about it is that the music industry realizes that it's been doing things maybe not so right, so in a sense we're trying to figure out the best kind of way to still be able to sell albums but give something to people that they can download on iTunes or whatever. I think it's getting there, I think the idea of giving more to the fan is really what the point is. I think slowly but surely it's getting there. Which I really like what we did with 'Archetype', we added that DVD and we didn't charge more for it; I think that's the way to go. It's like, 'I could download the record but I won't have the DVD and I won't have the making of it,' and that's gonna make people want to buy the actual record."

Read the entire interview at www.metal-temple.com.