WAYNE STATIC: 'Pighammer' Is My Pure Vision Of What I Want To Do

Jeffrey Easton of Metal Exiles recently conducted an interview with STATIC-X frontman Wayne Static. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Exiles: So what made you finally commit to a Wayne Static solo album?

Wayne Static: The decision to do a solo thing made a lot of sense at the time. STATIC-X had a long run, we did a lot of great stuff and had a great time, but towards the end the guys had other things going on and the band just fell apart; nobody wanted to be there anymore. It was time to do it and I was ready to do it.

Metal Exiles: Fans that pick this up will be expecting STATIC-X which is not completely true. What will they hear that they would not have heard on a STATIC-X record?

Wayne: It's very similar to STATIC-X, because I wrote all of the material, but the biggest difference is I did everything myself; there was no compromise. It is true evil disco from my perspective. "Pighammer" is what I envisioned the first STATIC-X record to be; trancier, a bigger electronic vibe with more keyboards. I also think my guitar tone on "Pighammer" is crushing. So you have all of these things that I wanted, but when you are in a band situation you have to compromise and when you work with a bunch of different producers things tend to shift away from what you really want. "Pighammer" is my pure vision of what I want to do, but at the same time, if you like STATIC-X, you will love "Pighammer".

Metal Exiles: You said when other people do your records, it tends to go in the direction of what the producer wants. Why does that seem to always happen?

Wayne: I still co-produced everything, but you have to compromise with other people for the greater good. Everyone needs to be happy with the end results or everyone is going to be pissed off and you do not want that. It is just the process, so going into the process of recording "Pighammer", I knew I had to do it on my own because I had not yet had the chance to do so.

Metal Exiles: Your artwork on this record was inspired by your wife [Tera]. What else does she inspire?

Wayne: We are absolutely inseparable, and I believe if you are going to get married, you should be together all of the time. I just do not understand all of these guys that get married and then want to go spend all of their time with their buddies. We have this compound out in the desert and we never leave the house. She was a big part of the artwork and the theme of the art is transition. Transition into my solo project, moving to the desert and sobering up. We wanted to think of a way to portray transition in an interesting but dark and comical way so Tera came up with this idea for me to be a plastic surgeon using a hammer to make beautiful chicks into pigs. That was the whole genesis of the idea. We got this great artist, Nelly Recchia, who did all of the art and photography. It was her idea to make it clean and not gory or comical.

Read the entire interview from Metal Exiles.