SOULFLY's MAX CAVALERA: 'I Like Writing Riffs All The Time'

Spotlight Report recently conducted an interview with Max Cavalera (SOULFLY, SEPULTURA, CAVALERA CONSPIRACY). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Spotlight Report: It's great to see you've come full circle. First you were a musician, and then a father, and now able to work with three of your sons who are extremely talented. How does that make you feel?

Max: Yeah, proud and excited. I mean, they're getting good, you know. I was not nearly that good when I was that age. You gotta give them time, you know, to get better and better, but they're already doing an excellent job — especially Zyon on the drums. He's doing amazing. We're on tour right now. Zyon and Igor are playing with me. Now Igor's playing bass and he's doing 110 percent every night. It makes me proud to be able to jam with my sons like that and to be able to put them in the band for a while and to get to jam with them. It's really a dream come true, you know, for any metal dad.

Spotlight Report: I was lucky enough to get a little bit of a sneak listen to [the new SOULFLY album "Archangel"] and I found it amazing, like your whole career that I've found amazing. It was very harmonic at the same time as having an industrial feel. All the sounds that you put into one song just blended so beautifully. I've never heard anything like it.

Max: It took a lot of work, you know. It was an album that we worked on for a long time. I worked for a couple of months last year writing and then jamming with Zyon in Phoenix. And then we entered the studio with Matt Hyde and made the songs all into real songs. And then we had production on top of it. Matt Hyde is an amazing producer and he created all of these great vibes, kinda biblical vibes in the songs, and choirs and angelic voices and things like that. So yeah, you know, when you work for that long on something and it comes out as exciting as this project does, everybody feels excited about it. And everybody is really thrilled to be having this album coming out and be ready to work and hopefully tour for it for a very long time.

Spotlight Report: Can you give us a rundown of your songwriting process? I also loved the comment from your wife saying that you shit riffs — you actually shit riffs. [Laughs]

Max: Yeah, that's because there have been some times when she's caught me off guard and told me I had two weeks to make some records. And even though I did not like that very much because it's a lot of pressure, the albums did come out really good. I like writing riffs all the time. I just sit down with the guitar and write riffs. It's a little bit of a hobby of mine, you know, even when I don't have to make anything for an album; but, most of the time when I'm sitting with a guitar with my drum machines, I'm writing for something. So it's very driven and very based on the album that I'm working on. And it's all pretty much the same. It's very old equipment. I've had this equipment for about 15 years. It's really just for the lines, you know, it's just for the riffs. We don't use anything that I record. None of that's going to go on the record because we redo everything anyway in the studio, so it doesn't really matter. It doesn't need to be a high-quality recording, just as long as it's a good guideline for the riffs for us to hear in the studio.

Read the entire interview at Spotlight Report.