ANTHRAX Guitarist: 'It's Great When People Respect You And Like The Work You've Created'

Roger Lotring of ESPN.com recently conducted an interview with ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ESPN.com: Anyone following the tumultuous progression of "Worship Music" couldn't help regarding it with a certain amount of skepticism. Is it vindicating that some people are already regarding it as the band's best album to date?

Ian: You know, I take all of that the same way, good and bad. Look, of course I'm not going to sit here and say I don't like it when people say they think our record's great. Of course I do. I feel great about that, and I feel privileged that people take the time to listen. I'm just really happy that people hear it the way I hear it. But I think since we made "Fistful Of Metal" [in 1983], basically we've just learned to take the good and the bad, really, the same way. One way or another it's not going to affect what we do as a band. It's not going to affect our songwriting, it's not going to affect what we do onstage. That's still just going to come from us. It's great when people respect you and like the work you've created. Of course, it makes us feel good. But, in the end, [laughs] no pun intended, it's not going to change how we operate.

ESPN.com: Looking at a band like a sports team, if you're a fan, you take the same feeling of ownership. When your band hits one out of the park, as a fan, you're excited. That's the feeling a lot of people might get with this record.

Ian: Sure. No, I agree because I feel that way about the bands I love. They put out a new record and it just crushes you, yeah, it's super exciting. I was just going to make a sports analogy, too: They say a team is only as good as its ninth-place hitter. I kind of feel that way about making records, that the last track on the record has to be as strong as your No. 3 slot, which is usually the so-called hit or something like that. I feel like our record, our 10th track is as strong as our first track.

ESPN.com: Making the album was something that started several years ago, literally. What point in that time frame was the most discouraging? Also, within that time frame, when did you realize what you had, in terms of how good it is?

Ian: As far as how good it is, we realized immediately once we had three or four things together. It just felt great, and it felt I don't know any other way to explain it, but it was the music that kept us moving forward and kept us focused up until [this] June, when the record finally got finished. It really was the power of the music. When [drummer] Charlie [Benante] and I literally first started writing, and had a couple of things together, we couldn't wait to get [bassist] Frankie [Bello] and [guitarist] Rob [Caggiano] in the mix because we were just like, this stuff is killing. It just felt awesome, all the way through, even when we walked away from it for a year. We knew we had this amazing thing sitting up on the shelf. It just wasn't time to take it down yet. And once [vocalist] Joey [Belladonna] was back in the mix, that's when we knew, OK, it's time to open up this rad box of songs and now make it even better. Truthfully, we've never had the luxury of hindsight before, or actually living with a record for a year then going back and making sure you're still in love with everything, then being able to fix stuff and change stuff and re-record stuff. It's not something we're going to do with every album, obviously, finish then put it away for a year, then go back to it. It would be awesome to have that luxury, but this one was a happy accident that it just worked out like that. We were able to go back in and really hone it down from the 13 or 14 songs in some state of being done, to these 10 that just really nail it.

ESPN.com: Because of the scenario where the music sat for that period of time, did that make the band determined that the finished album had to be perfect?

Ian: Yeah, you could say that. We had spent so much time that we certainly weren't going to rush anything. And being in the situation where we were able to basically go back and open the books on the record again, that was all done last fall when we were out on tour with SLAYER and MEGADETH. It was on that tour when we would pretty much spend almost every day in the dressing room with a bunch of amps set up. We'd just pick a song, and we would all sit around for a couple of hours and listen to it, play it. Some songs: great, awesome, we don't need to touch this. Then, other songs: OK, this one needs a ton of work; this one needs to go in the garbage; this one, maybe the chorus just needs to be better. There was stuff that was "finished" back in 2009, but we didn't even know what was going to make the record. We didn't get to the point where everything was mixed, then sequenced, and we actually knew what the record was going to be. "In The End", which was a different song back then, might not even have made the record because the chorus at that point still was never there. It took that year away [from it], I think, when Charlie had this idea for it, where things started to move forward on that song again and it became what it is.

Read the entire interview at ESPN.com.