HATE ETERNAL's ERIK RUTAN: 'This Record Was The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done'

Metal Sucks recently conducted an interview with HATE ETERNAL mainman Erik Rutan. An excerpt from the chat follows:

Metal Sucks: Did you have a vision for the new album "Fury and Flames" going into it?

Erik Rutan: I wanted to really make the stand-out album amongst the trilogy I guess. It had a lot of meaning behind it, had a lot of important people involved… Shaune [Kelley], a friend of mine for over twenty years, is now playing guitar with me, and [CANNIBAL CORPSE's] Alex [Webster] is one of my best friends, he's playing the bass, and a new drummer [Jade Simonetto] that's just devoted every Goddamn second to making sure that this is the best record it could possibly be. I've never had this type of situation before… my old bass player, Jared [Anderson]… when he passed away it really effected my whole outlook on the band and how I was gonna approach the record [Anderson died in October of 2006 - Ed.]. That's how I made decisions to get who I got involved in the band, too. Before Jared passed away, y'know we were talking about him potentially coming back to the band and when he passed away it really kind of… he was one of my best friends and if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't still be doing HATE ETERNAL. He stuck with me in the early time when I first started the band, and… I wanted to dedicate the record to him. I just had that shit going on in me when I was writing this record, I guess, a lot of personal shit. But I had the people around me to make the record exactly what I wanted it to be, which was awesome. They worked so hard, and every one of them, they just killed themselves on this record, due to my… y'know, drill sergeant type of mentality that I have in the studio (laughs),already, but… doing this record was the hardest thing I've ever done, for so many reasons. And that's why the end result, man, it's got so much more power to it. I mean, I love all the records we've done, I'm really happy with them, but this one has something underlying to it that just makes it so much more important to me.

Metal Sucks: As you pointed out, you're a notorious perfectionist… at what point do you know that it's okay to walk away?

Erik Rutan: I didn't with this one, actually.

Metal Sucks: You didn't?

Erik Rutan: No. I kind of let it go…

Metal Sucks: Isn't there a temptation to become the death metal Brian Wilson or whatever?

Erik Rutan: Well, with this one… man, I couldn't let it go. The only way I let it go is because I had to. It was hard. And actually when I did let it go, I went through like a week, maybe even two weeks, where I was just lost for awhile. 'Cause I'd worked on this thing for so long and put so much into it and was so focused on this record because of the other shit going on in my life that really made me just wanna make this just the most epic album I've done, and the meaning behind it… it just totally took over. So actually, we just finished it like a month ago, and it was like "Holy shit!" It was hard, it was hard to let this one go. If it wasn't for deadlines, thank God (laughs)… I need deadlines. And Metal Blade, they wanna promote the record right, but I worked on it 'til the last second. And I worked these guys to the last brink… as far as I could push 'em.

Read the entire chat transcript at www.metalsucks.net.