STATIC-X Frontman Talks About Songwriting Process For 'Cannibal'

Patrick Douglas of The Culture Shock recently conducted an interview with STATIC-X frontman Wayne Static. A couple of excerpts follow:

The Culture Shock: You've got a pretty extensive tour coming up. What do you do in the days leading up to a tour like this to kind of prepare yourself for a few months on the road?

Wayne: It's a long tour for sure, so I've got a lot of stuff to take care of at home. Making sure things are taken care of while I'm gone. Especially the first tour for the new album, getting all our gear together. Got a new guitar company and making sure everything's working and getting all the wireless systems, bringing everything together. So I've been busy doing that. I just picked up all my new ESP guitars, so I was setting those up yesterday. Getting the setlist together. I start rehearsing by myself this week to get my voice going and then the whole band starts on Sunday. We've got a lot to do.

The Culture Shock: What kind of process is that when you rehearse by yourself? Do you just sit in a room and sing and play guitar?

Wayne: Yeah. I play through the songs to a click track, just to kind of refamiliarize myself with songs I haven't played in awhile, and get my voice warmed up a little bit, so I'm not embarrassing when the whole band gets together. Nick, our drummer, does the same thing. He practices all week by himself too. For singers and drummers, you've really gotta have your chops together just to do a rehearsal.

The Culture Shock: How did you approach this record ["Cannibal"] from a lyrical standpoint?

Wayne: There's nothing personal on this record at all. I went back to … on the first album, I was using a lot of metaphors and things like that. On this album, I chose the title first, before I even wrote the song. If you're watching TV or you're reading, you'll see a word that pops off the page and I'm like "That'd be an awesome song title." So I'd jot down some titles. Then when I was actually going to write music and lyrics, I'd come up with some cool music and go, "This music sounds like that word right there.' Let's see if we can make a song out of this. Sort of take it a step further. Something like "Reptile", I was imagining what it'd be like being eaten by a giant reptile. It just kind of expounded on that. Something like "Electric Pulse", I was like, what would it be like getting electrocuted and the process of sitting down in the electric chair. "Chromamatic" is actually about changing the strings on my guitar and tuning my guitar. Turning it up.

The Culture Shock: I know you said you recorded this album in different places, but describe for me a typical day in the studio with you guys as you're forming these tunes.

Wayne: Well, everything was completely rehearsed before we went into the studio. We spent two weeks working out every little thing, so we knew what we were gonna do. The process from there, we went into a real studio, a cheap one, but a real studio in Hollywood and recorded the drums and the bass and the rhythm guitars and the basic tracks. From there, we went to somebody's house and spent a couple of months working on vocals and guitar solos and extra keyboard things. We worked six days a week, 12 hours a day for many, many months (laughs). You just get into that kind of lifestyle. You get up and start around noon, or 1 o'clock or something and work 'til 10 or midnight. Take some breaks here and there, get some food. I don't know. You just let everything else go and making the record becomes your life for those few months.

The Culture Shock: It seems a lot of times, you'll hear about bands that'll release a groundbreaking album, like you guys did with "Death Trip". Then they end up going in a different direction on subsequent albums before ultimately returning back to that original formula. What was the trigger for you that sparked you to say "I wanna go back to that."

Wayne: It just felt like the right thing to do. On the last couple of albums, we explored some more melodic directions and this time around, I don't know, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I wouldn't say we went back to the old formula, because I went back and in some respects simplified things like in the old days, but then I really wanted to push it and make it more metallic. A lot of the drum beats and guitar solos and all that kind of stuff, just pushed it in more of a metal direction.

The Culture Shock: If you could share the stage with any bands, past or present, which ones would you choose?

Wayne: The band that I always wanted to tour with was PANTERA, and we got to tour with them twice. There was a couple of bands that we haven't gotten to tour with yet, which I'd love to, but I don't know if it's gonna happen or not. But, I'd love to tour with MINISTRY. I'd still love to tour with SKINNY PUPPY. I think it'd be fun to tour with KISS just because KISS is the reason I got into playing in a band. Those are probably three of 'em right there, probably not very possible at this point in time (laughs). The SKINNY PUPPY one's probably the most possible.

Read the entire interview at www.thecultureshock.com.