DOWN Guitarist: 'We Just Want To Make Killer Music'

Aedan Siebert of Australia's The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with DOWN guitarist Pepper Keenan. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

On DOWN's upcoming third album:

"We started working on it (the new album) right before Hurricane Katrina — we'd talked about it, and started getting together right before then. Then when the storm came, we all got separated for a series of months. After that, it took awhile for us to get together, and once we got everything organized back down here in New Orleans, we really started focusing on the record."

"We started out in the barn, we write everything over there you know? But a lot of studios in the Louisiana, New Orleans area where we live at are gone, or were destroyed or damaged, so we ended up recording the record in Los Angeles. It was cool for us to get out of town for awhile, you know? 'Cause it's been kinda hard down here sometimes. We got out of town, and we could really focus on the music, and that's what we did. And we're almost finished! We've got like two more songs to mix. I think it comes out around the end of September — that's what we're shootin' for."

On DOWN's songwriting approach:

"Well, it's a super-honest thing, you know? We've known each other for years and we don't have anything to prove, because we've all proven it in our own bands, in our way so getting together here allows us to take off all the bullshit you know? We just go straight for the throat and play music. Everyone knows us and we've got a lot more freedom to exercise and just play music from the heart, you know? We're not out there to make a product, you know what I mean? We just want to make killer music and I think a lot of people appreciate the fact that we do that."

On being billed as a metal "supergroup":

"Well, I don't look at it like that 'cause we all grew up together! We knew everyone in the band before we were even in a band, you know what I mean? So it's kind of like a bunch of school yard kids who still hang out. We're just fanatics about music. We've all been in other bands, which I guess helps us to a degree, but basically DOWN is just a band that we created because that type of band didn't exist in our generation, you know? So we wanted to create something that was real and not based on trends or anything like that, you know?"

Read the entire interview at www.themetalforge.com.