ANTHRAX Guitarist: I'm Really Happy With The Connection People Have Made To 'Worship Music'

ARTISTdirect.com editor-in-chief Rick Florino recently conducted an interview with ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ARTISTdirect.com: Was the process behind [the covers EP] "Anthems" fun and quick?

Scott: We only play cover songs, basically, to get away from our day jobs. They're songs we play at soundcheck to stave off the boredom of having to do our own songs two hours prior to playing them. That's generally where most cover songs come from in the context of what we do with them. It was recorded over a period of three years, but the actual time spent wasn't very long. Solos were literally done in dressing rooms and on tour buses. Bass was done in hotel rooms. It was recorded all over the place throughout a long time period. If you quantize all of that time together though, I think we could've done the record in about a week. All of the songs were equally fun in my brain.

ARTISTdirect.com: How did you go about curating "Anthems"?

Scott: We only recorded these six songs. It's all material we've been fucking around with over the past three years. For our own pleasure, we decided to record them. We didn't really know what we were going to do with them. At some point, we thought they would come out on a bonus edition of "Worship Music", but we weren't finished. That idea got thrown out. Eventually, we finished them. We handed them over to the label and said, "We love these. What do you want to do with them?" There wasn't much more thought than that.

ARTISTdirect.com: Have you already begun writing the next record?

Scott: There are just ideas floating around. We need to get into a room and start working on it. That will happen in September when all of the touring is done. We finish in August. We'll take a couple of weeks off. Then we'll get together and start writing. Everybody has got ideas. I know that for sure because we talk about it, and we've already started making a plan of when we want that to happen. I'm looking forward to it. I'm hoping all of this work we've done over the past two years will allow us to get in and some stuff will come together pretty quickly. I think we're all pretty hungry to get back in and do it again. I'm really happy with the connection people have made to "Worship Music" overall all around the planet. They say it's "a comeback" or whatever. They can call it whatever they want. All I know is that for some reason on this record fans have connected, and it means a lot to them. It's always awesome for us when that happens.

Read the entire interview from ARTISTdirect.com.