PHILIP ANSELMO: 'People Are Just An Instant Away From Doing Something Drastic'

Former PANTERA and current SUPERJOINT and DOWN frontman Philip Anselmo was interviewed on recent episode of the "Metal Magdalene With Jet" show on Metal Messiah Radio. You can now listen to the chat below.

Speaking about the lyrical themes covered on the recently released second album from his PHILIP H. ANSELMO & THE ILLEGALS solo project, "Choosing Mental Illness As A Virtue", Philip said: "What this album is, really, is an examination of myself, my childhood — what makes me me, what makes me tick. And that definitely goes from my childhood on. And it also made me look at my parents and the bloodlines and relatives, etcetera etcetera etcetera, and where my heredity comes from. You know, I have clues — very, very loud and screaming clues — in certain relatives of where I get depression and where I get moodswings and certain things like that. Little things, and it doesn't even have to be negative things, but just personal traits. I can see both sides of my family in me. So it's an interesting study. But also looking at the earth over, there's always an illness, there's always a stirring of the spirit out there. And within that stirring of the spirit, there's many people out there that do feel alone with their depression and they feel they are very uniquely depressed.

"I think that we are the ultimate imperfection, because we have — and I do mean this in a human way — we have this thing called reason, and that makes us dangerous, so to speak," he continued. "But it also gives us the ability to make choices, and a lot of times when somebody is depressed, or chemically imbalanced, more accurately, you've gotta wonder about their responsibility for something that might happen, or might have happened, that caused harm or something like that to somebody else.

"I think that everybody, put in a situation, has that primordial gel still in them that cannot predict how they will react put in a certain situation of stress. People are just an instant away from doing something drastic. And that's just true. It's just up to us to harness all this shit. And at the end of the day, it's up to us who do struggle with depression to take this cloud of negative energy, this negativity, and to morph it into something positive."

Anselmo added: "I know there's a lot of people that do not have music or sports or something chosen as a target or as a goal or as a way to vent this frustration in a positive way instead of a negative way. So it's something that is always fascinating to examine."

"Choosing Mental Illness As A Virtue" was released last month via Anselmo's Housecore Records in the U.S. and Season Of Mist in other parts of the world. The disc is the follow-up to PHILIP H. ANSELMO & THE ILLEGALS' debut, "Walk Through Exits Only", which came out in 2013 to mostly positive reviews.