MACHINE HEAD Frontman Is 'Super-Excited' About Writing Next Record

Chad Bowar of About.com recently conducted an interview with vocalist/guitarist Robb Flynn of San Francisco Bay Area metallers MACHINE HEAD. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

About.com: When you're done touring early next year, are you going to take some time off, or jump right back in and start the next album?

Flynn: We're going to jump right into it. We just had three months off, which was the first big break we've had for this album. We have a month off after this before the Europe stuff. We're ready to get into it. We took those three months off and started writing a little bit at the end. I totally got the bug. "The Blackening" cycle has been such an amazing moment for the band, and it was cool to say we're moving on from this. When we started writing it was on to bigger and better things. As much as this moment meant, it's cool to see what we can accomplish next. I'm super-excited about writing this new record.

About.com: Will you produce the next album again, or have you considered bringing in somebody from outside the band?

Flynn: I don't know. We haven't discussed it. I know that they are happy with the production and I'm happy with the production. I'm not set in the idea that I'm doing it, but I know everybody's had a good experience with it.

About.com: Are you going to release a DVD or live CD to document "The Blackening" tours?

Flynn: We're doing a DVD. We've been filming this whole four-year period. It will come out next year, probably at the end of the summer. It's going to be the four-year journey of the band, from writing the record to recording to touring to all the ups and downs and everything in between.

About.com: You recently did a remix of a song for RAMMSTEIN's new album. How did they find you?

Flynn: I think our old publicity person in Germany is now their publicity person. They offered me a lot of money, and I was like, "All right!" Over there they are massive. It's ridiculous how big they are. I'm stoked. It was fun. They told me to go crazy. They wanted it as brutal as possible. It had some cool riffs, and I added some thrash beats and blast beats. I love a lot of old school hip-hop, so I threw in some of those beats. I had a blast with it.

About.com: Are there any bands from [the '80s thrash] era that you thought would be huge, but never really made it?

Flynn: I never thought any of them would be huge. It was so brand new and heavy, and so different. When I was in high school everybody was into DEF LEPPARD and POISON. I thought it sucked. I hated it. I liked MÖTLEY CRÜE because they had an edge and you'd read these crazy stories about them. It just seemed so unlikely that any of them would be huge. The Bay Area thrash scene back then was brutal. It was violent, it was dangerous. There has been a romanticizing that has happened, where thrash was fun, and some bands played that up a little more. But when the real stuff was starting, with EXODUS and METALLICA and SLAYER, those shows were dangerous. It was super violent. I came out of pits with broken ribs and sprained arms. It was intense. To think that would go big or mainstream, seemed absurd. The fact it did was amazing. It connected with people on so many different levels.

I've been thinking about where to go with the new record, and the mindset. I was talking to [METALLICA's] Lars [Ulrich] and James [Hetfield] about their mindset when they were writing "Master Of Puppets". Who were your rivals? Who did you have to be better than? What was driving you to write this insane music? There wasn't a template to follow. They had their influences, but what they did was take it and making it 10 times more extreme. I'm trying to put my headspace into what it would have been like for SLAYER or METALLICA or RUSH or BLACK SABBATH, people who created a style of music out of something that wasn't there. That's the mindset that I want to get in. Having this incredible opportunity to open for METALLICA and play arena shows and watch our music take an arena full of 15,000 people who have no idea who we are and watch it ignite in little pockets, until at the end of the show we've captured this arena crowd.

Read the entire interview at About.com.

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