SOIL Guitarist Is 'Haunted' By Band's Former Singer

East Coast Romper recently conducted an interview with SOIL guitarist Shaun Glass. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

East Coast Romper: AJ [Cavalier, vocals] has been with you guys for a while but I haven't really talked to you, so you found him through Wayne Static?

Shaun: Yeah, when we split with our old singer, there was a couple of local guys that tried out in Chicago that we wanted to check out. They were all right but we didn't think that they were up to par yet. Wayne called me and was like, "Hey man, you should check out AJ from DIESEL MACHINE," and I was like, I knew DIESEL MACHINE because they actually opened up a couple of shows for STATIC-X/SOIL tours on "Scars" and we were like yeah, ya know, we remember that guy but we knew DIESEL MACHINE was really heavy, really wow they're more like MESHUGGAH, FEAR FACTORY.... we're like...."Can AJ sing?" We wanted to make sure if we did old songs like "Redefine" and shit, so there was a little hesitation and then I talked to him over the phone and he was really cool, he said he had learned a couple of the old songs just by listening to them. We were all right we wanted to hear how you sounded writing to our songs, we were already writing the new SOIL album and we gave him music to a couple of songs without any lyrics or melodies and we said, "Hey ya know, go in the studio and write something and we'll see what it sounds like." We wanted to make sure it still sounded like SOIL, ya know. We really didn't want to change the name

East Coast Romper: So you didn't want a full departure of what Ryan brought in?

Shaun: No, no, no we wanted to still sound like SOIL. One of the first songs AJ wrote was "Give It Up" which ended up being the video and the single for this album. It's kind of funny that that song was the very first song that AJ ever wrote with us here, so like he did the demo version of "Give It Up" and sent it back to me and I was like Wow, I got the CD in the morning and ran out to put it in my car to listen to. I was like, "Oh, man." I was like blown away. I called the guys because we were having practice that night. I was like... "Wait until you guys hear, I'm not going to exaggerate but this is the guy, I know it." Ya know when you have a gut feeling about something, you hear something or like something or whatever, something that's very natural and is real and I think when I first heard AJ's voice on our song, I was like "Great."

East Coast Romper: Working with your producer, Ulrich Wild, what do you think was the biggest help he gave you?

Shaun: To be ourselves. He heard in preproduction rehearsals and demos of the songs. He was like I just want to enhance what you guys do, he took out a little bit of fat, ya know, maybe like don't play that part five times, bring down to two, real minimal stuff that the producer did but he more engineered what we did. A producer nowadays is there to elaborate on your songs but Ulrich kind of like engineered like make sure your guitar sounds as good as it can sound, AJ's voice might sounds as great as it can, the drums sound as great as they can, bass or whatever. He really enhanced our sound after hearing us in our practice spot and live, just elaborated on it and I think that his skills were great and I don't know maybe we want to work with him on the next album, we haven't decided yet.

East Coast Romper: Now you're writing new stuff?

Shaun: Yeah and we got about three songs in the works. Yeah, we've already started, we had a break for about two months at home from Europe and we took about two weeks off. All right, everybody gets a break to chill out and hang out with your old ladies, do whatever and then we started writing, so

East Coast Romper: Anything different from what you've been doing?

Shaun: I think there is going to be some stuff that is very melodic, me and Adam have talked about that and then there will be some that is very heavy. I kind of want to fuse all three albums, have the melodic from "Redefine" and the primal from "Scars" and the musicianship from "True Self". I think the new album is going to have everything. Try to blend it all.

East Coast Romper: Who is your biggest influence who has passed on?

Shaun: Influences, I lost three friends influences here in the last few years. I would say Dimebag, a really good friend of ours and we toured together in Europe and I stayed at his house about three months before he was murdered, that was a big one. And Piggy, he was a guitar player for VOIVOD, as a kid I was a huge fan of VOIVOD because they were one of my favorite thrash metal bands, he passed away last year of cancer and Chuck from the legendary death metal band DEATH, I really really loved him as a kid. He grew up playing a lot of heavy stuff.Those three guys were friends, I knew them all but also they were very influential musicians in the world. For me, I'm lucky that I got to know these people and call them my friends but also losing some of my heroes. When I play guitar I was so influenced by those cats, it sucks, ya know, but that's life. That's why you have to take every day and enjoy it while your here.

East Coast Romper: If you could let go of something in your past that haunts you, what would it be?

Shaun: Haunts me....my old singer. I wish that would just go away that people would just not think about it, ya know what I mean. I understand people wanted to know and obviously with all the drama, we definitely said stuff in the press and were pretty harsh words but I'm just so sick of people asking about it, to me he's already nonexistent. So I wish that would just go away or he would just go away.

Read the entire interview at this location.