ANTHRAX's SCOTT IAN Was 'Very Excited' About Contributing Song To Upcoming 'Game Of Thrones' Mixtape

Kaaos TV conducted an interview with ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian before his January 9 "Speaking Words" appearance at Bio Rex in Helsinki, Finland. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On whether the new ANTHRAX album is already finished:

Scott: "No, it's not even close to being finished. We're just tracking the record right now. We have… Some drums are done and some guitars [are] done. They're working on bass guitar right now and leads. But we haven't even started vocals yet. And this is only on the first batch of songs. We have a whole second batch of songs that we're gonna start working on when the first batch is done. So we still have kind of a long ways to go."

On new ANTHRAX guitarist Jon Donais's role in the songwriting process for the band's upcoming album:

Scott: "He's been writing his leads. We've been sending him music and he's been coming up with ideas for the lead-break sections and other overdubs and things like that. They sent me two songs yesterday of lead breaks that he recorded yesterday, and I'm really happy with it. So it's going really well."

On whether ANTHRAX's musical direction has changed because of the addition of a new lead guitarist:

Scott: "Nope. It's ANTHRAX."

On ANTHRAX's contribution to the mixtape for HBO's hit fantasy series "Game Of Thrones":

Scott: "It was a song we had already written. We didn't have time to start writing something brand new from scratch. We listened to all the material we had and made the decision. That one just… We all thought the same thing. Everybody listened to the demos and we all had the same idea that this one demo just sounded like that should be the song for 'Game Of Thrones', so it was a pretty easy decision. The lyrics weren't written yet, though — we only had the music — so then [the show producers] said you have to pick something about the show to write about. And, I'm not give it away now, but I got to write about exactly what I wanted to write about, so I was very happy about that. It was a really fun thing for me to do, because I'm such a massive fan of the show. So are Charlie [Benante, drums] and Frankie [Bello, bass] — they're really big fans. So it was just something really exciting that we got the call to do that. And we were, like, 'Yeah!' A lot of times you get calls for things, and it's kind of, like, 'Naaahhh. Just say no.' But this we were very excited about."