GLENN DANZIG On Songwriting Inspiration

Daniel Brockman of The Portland Phoenix recently conducted an interview with Glenn Danzig. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Portland Phoenix: When you work on a new album, do you feel like you have a lot of expectations? Is it a challenge?
Danzig: I've been doing it so long that it's a challenge just to write something exciting and try and top what you did before. Especially coming from the whole punk thing, which is like, you know, you don't want to do the same record over and over. And you want to keep it exciting, keep it interesting, but you still want to improve what you do — yeah, after this many records, it's a challenge, but I think I'm up for the challenge.

The Portland Phoenix: I imagine that once you've been around for a while, it must be a pain because people want the new stuff to sound like this old song or that old song--

Danzig: I don't want it to sound like one of the old records, that's for sure. I want it to be better, so I'm actually kind of happy. When this record came out, I didn't know how people would — well, I knew the fans would be digging it, but of course the press are so weird anyway, what they're gonna like and all. And I don't really care, so much, but I'm just curious to see, and so far everyone's really digging it, so maybe I did what I was supposed to do. [Laughs]

The Portland Phoenix: I'm curious what inspires you, song-wise — because I think a lot of people don't realize that you're a songwriter, right?

Danzig: Yeah, totally. I get questions all the time, like, "Why don't you let other people write the songs?" Uh, because it's my fucking band and I've written all the songs since the MISFITS, you know, and I'm not going to change now. And it's — I dunno, I lost my train of thought …

The Portland Phoenix: What inspires you as a songwriter...

Danzig: Right. It's always just frustration with people, the government, all that kind of stuff. All those things but on a sociological level -- all the things that our fucked up government makes happen, and how people then react to each other because they're so frustrated with the government. I don't think anyone thought it could be any worse than Bush, and yet here we are, 10 times worse than Bush! An oil spill that no one has clogged up in a month and a half, right? Just sitting there spewing jillions of gallons of oil a day, and people are just sitting there going, "Oh no, what do we do?" But the bigger thing — and I don't want to get too political — but all these people's lives are now destroyed who rely on that coast, you know what I mean? That, and it's probably just some ploy to raise the price of gas. "Oh, we can't rely on offshore drilling," and that now that all this oil is wasted now, they're going to jack the price of oil up. So, you know, it's probably the Bilderbergs are making tons of money now, and Obama wants to get in with them — and there you go, he's in!

Read more from The Portland Phoenix.