CORROSION OF CONFORMITY Guitarist Talks About 'In The Arms Of God'

CORROSION OF CONFORMITY guitarist Woody Weatherman recently spoke to VWAB about the group's new album, "In the Arms of God" and their upcoming tour with MOTÖRHEAD, among other topics. Several excerpts from the interview follow:

VWAB: You recorded the last [album] pretty fast, how long did this new one take to record?

Woody Weatherman: "It was actually an easy record to make. Everything just kind of flowed out. We started writing it a while back. Everybody was kinda writing on their own. Mike [Dean, bassist/vocalist] had written stuff, I had written stuff, Keenan [Pepper, guitarist/vocalist] shows up with stuff. We wound up demoing pretty much the whole thing and just rolled down to damn New Orleans and knocked it out with Stanton [Moore, drummer on 'In the Arms of God' and a member of jazz-funk combo GALACTIC] in about eight days, as far as the drum tracks. Busted back up here and spent another few weeks layin' down guitar tracks and bass tracks, and Pepper was barkin' and I kinda sing about three quarters of a song and Mike sings a little bit."

VWAB: Is it a little heavier?

Woody Weatherman: "It's heavier… 'Heavy' is such a strange word. What's heavy these days? Is 'Vol. 4' heavy or is LAMB OF GOD heavy? For us, it's a heavier-feeling record. It doesn't have… 'America's Volume Dealer' [2000] had a much different vibe. This is a much angrier album. It's much more brutal, in my opinion. This album, I can see us playing pretty much any of the 12 songs live, more or less. We're off to a good start. Last night, we were doing some rehearsing, Mike and myself and Jason (Paterson),he's going to be touring with us — who by the way is phenomenal. He's great. He's just a cool guy, Carolina guy. He's from the area, he's an old buddy of ours. He can jam, man, it's crazy. So last night we were doing some crazy riffs, we got this one song called 'Paranoid Opioid', half of these songs are like six minutes or longer. There's one song that’s like eight, eight-plus minutes long…It's pretty pummeling stuff for the most part."

VWAB: Is Stanton going to join the fold again once this MOTÖRHEAD tour is over?

Woody Weatherman: "Stanton? Man, he wanted to do this tour so bad, and it cropped up out of nowhere. And he could've done a week and a half of it, but he had a GALACTIC thing already rolling. He wanted to do it so bad. He had bought this drum set and everything, special for doing some stuff with us. He didn't have it for the recording, but after we recorded and stuff he found out what was going on and he got a whole thing set up. It just didn't work out for this deal. He wanted… He's one of those guys that will bend over backwards to play and do these things, that's all he's about. Stanton is an amazing musician and just — he lives for it. He never stops. He's always doing something. During that time, during those eight or nine days Mike and I were in New Orleans doing the record, after we'd get done doing our sessions (Stanton) would go and show up at clubs and sit in with people. It was just crazy, man! He didn't stop! I was like, 'How do you know all these songs in the first place? How can you do it?'"

VWAB: Do you ever feel like these side projects that you guys have going, they get out of hand and take away from the band?

Woody Weatherman: "Not really man, because the majority of stuff that is going on, you're probably referring to something like DOWN or something like that, really those guys would do things whenever there’s downtime with everybody else. And it was never a big deal to anybody, and it was always known what was going on, it wasn't like any kind of backslidin' kind of thing. 'We're going to do this DOWN thing.' Okay, cool. As far as Pepper and us go, he was straightforward with us. That stuff me and Mike would do, that was out of sheer boredom. We had a practice pad, we're sitting around, 'Well, what are we going to do?' 'Well, let's chill out and make some music. We wound up doing a few shows with the LET 'LONES guys. We never really finished up that album completely and before we jumped back into the C.O.C. stuff we were on the verge of being able to get done with it, and we kept re-cutting stuff, and we never got done with it. I don't know if it'll ever see the light of day."

Read the entire interview at this location.