MOTIONLESS IN WHITE Frontman: 'We Don't Necessarily Care About Confining Ourselves To One Specific Style'

Cutter and Kaytie of Green Bay, Wisconsin radio station Razor 94.7/104.7 recently conducted an interview with MOTIONLESS IN WHITE frontman Chris "Motionless" Cerulli. You can listen to the entire chat via the Spreaker widget below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On MOTIONLESS IN WHITE's mindset heading into the writing process for their forthcoming new studio album, "Disguise":

Chris: "I think it's pretty evident that we like to just do what we want to do. We don't necessarily care about confining ourselves to one specific style; we always like to have a lot of variety and diverse influences going into a record. I think that by now, if people don't get that and are still thrown off by the [fact that the] songs are different from one another, they're just never going to get it. For us, it's just go in there and write songs we want to write and have a good time with it and not worry about those limitations or those rules, so to speak, and just do what we want to do. It's funny how it ends up coming out where we'll go to write a song that we just think we want to have fun and have a high-energy song and then it becomes a single without actually intending to. Yet maybe one of the songs we thought, 'Oh, this could have a good shot at becoming a single. Let's really give this one the proper time and care,' it might not ever be a single. It's very bizarre how it works. But we try to just put the fact that we write cool songs and good songs ahead of everything else."

On the underlying theme of "Disguise":

Chris: "The most common thread across the record is just kind of letting people into different things that I've been experiencing in my life. For a very long time, but more specifically within the past two years, there's been a lot of things that have gone on behind the scenes in my head or in my personal life outside of the band, even within the band, that I don't really ever talk about or bring up. I usually only use lyrics to write about those kind of things. I don't think anything fans are going to hear will be completely new to them as far as like who I am or what I experience, but it's way more open-heart surgery, like, you get everything. You get open heart and the deepest brain surgery I could give the fans to really give them some insight as to what I've been going through the past two years. To me, music that was always that brutally honest were the lyrics I always clung to the most, so I felt a little more comfortable to do that on this record considering how fans received our song 'Voices'. It's a pretty personal song. The lyrics are a little broader because they weren't centered on just myself, they were centered on a group of people and myself. To see fans receptive to that type of lyrical material, I thought, 'Okay, I could finally use this outlet to get these things out there.' I would say it's 80 percent very personal, very much about the different aspects that come along with this lifestyle and what it's like to just constantly be a workaholic, gone all the time, always away from your family, away from your loved ones, battling to keep a relationship going, all those different things you experience when you do this kind of stuff. Yeah, that's 80 percent of the lyrical thread across [the album]. And we have fun songs as always. 'Brand New Numb' is a fun one; then there are two or three ones that are fun, fictional that are there to give you a change of pace."

On whether it's "scary" for him to open himself up so much lyrically:

Chris: "I think thankfully, music has always been that outlet so it's not a foreign concept to me that I can write about deeper things in the songs. That's what it's been for me for a while, but when it comes to criticism of people who are just, like… They, for some reason, they want honesty, but they don't want honesty when it's in the form of emotional content or deep-seated feelings. You're constantly fighting it, like, 'Am I giving away too much? Should I not say this? Is this too gnarly? Too personal? Am I not saying enough? Am I not being honest enough? Is there not enough heart in these songs?' It's a constant battle, but as I said, with the reception of our song 'Voices', it's like 'Okay, I have the green light here to feel more comfortable to do this.' As of that song and that music video that we put out, I'm fully onboard with 'Let's do this' and give the fans some more stuff they can possibly listen to and relate to and maybe even help them out in a tough time with stuff they may be struggling with."

"Disguise" is due on June 7 via Roadrunner Records. The album was recorded with producer Drew Fulk (a.k.a. WZRD BLD) in Los Angeles, California. "Disguise" follows MOTIONLESS IN WHITE's chart-topping Roadrunner debut, "Graveyard Shift".