New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ RoadRunner Records) Machine Head drummer Dave McClain was recently interviewed by Sweden's Metal Shrine blog. During the conversation, he discussed the songwriting process behind the group's latest album, Unto the Locust (out September 27) as well as their relationship with Roadrunner and much more.
Says McClain, "We always start off with a clean slate. Once we're in the writing process, we'll kind of remember riffs more, like on my laptop I've got from the time we started writing Through the Ashes of Empires, probably literally 150-200 riffs on there that never were used. We'll go back sometimes, and I always listen to stuff and I'll go back and listen to some of my old riffs and see if there's anything that could do something for us now that it didn't back then or if it fits something that we're doing, so we'll bring the stuff back, but we usually always start with a clean slate."
Regarding the business side of making music, he says, "There was a time in our career when Roadrunner was wanting to take stuff to the radio, but it's not gonna happen now. The cool thing was when we were doing this record, they were saying that, 'If we hear anything that we think could work on the radio, we'd love to take it!' I think that's cool! It's not forced and it was cool to hear, but it wasn't anything that made us write anything different for the radio. That's a bad thing about� having that aspect in your mindset, if you do something for radio and it fails, it's like putting all your eggs in one basket as far as that goes. I think a lot of the times with radio, radio bands have like one song on the radio and next time nothing and you're getting fans just for that one song. The way we look at it, we would rather build our following by being a great live band and touring and really work hard to make more lifelong fans."
Read the whole interview here.
Unto the Locust will be in stores September 27; you can pre-order the CD/DVD version of the album (which includes three bonus tracks and a documentary about the recording process), plus an exclusive T-shirt.
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