MORGAN Y. EVANS: Killer new record, Richard. I love it and top to bottom there’s some great content. “Soldiers of Misfortune”. I really like the song “The Wake”. I like the lyric from that one where you sing, “Aint nobody that’s clean”. You talk about war a lot on this new Filter record and I was thinking about perpetual violence through history, like in the Middle East now, and I took a history class once about different ethnic groups coming to America. The truth is everyone has done some good things and some bad to one another, no one has clean hands. It’s kind of like, where does it stop? The song on your new record “Hatred Is Contagious” totally nails and summarizes that idea also.

RICHARD PATRICK: Yeah. The reality is that we are an incredible species and capable of such amazing things. We point the Hubble telescope at nearby stars and we find planets around these stars and there are so many different opportunities to learn. We’re conscious of our place in the galaxy and yet there’s a bunch of us that live out in the world and we worship an invisible man in the sky and he wrote a book three thousand years ago and people think that book says that women should wear Burqas and not vote or drive…

MYE: Well, there are a lot of bad woman drivers. [Sorry, bad joke.]

RP: Well, we’re so close to being amazing but there’s a missing link. We’re still sort of superstitious and I get a little miffed when I think of the amazing things that we’re capable of, but we’re still dragging our knuckles a little bit, so…The record talks about war and hatred being contagious. I’m right there. I wake up everyday and have a piece of bacon, I’ve killed a pig somewhere. I start my car and exhaust comes out. I’m polluting the planet like everyone else. I’m swept up in this big ocean of humanity as well. I’m just wondering how we’re gonna fare.

MYE: Definitely. It’s complicated. Back in the song “Cancer” from Title Of Record, you talked about how humanity can be like a virus some times.

RP: We’re the scum of the Earth sometimes. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s flown into Los Angeles on an airplane who hasn’t seen that it just isn’t healthy. Even astronauts talk about how you can see over major cities how they have their own atmospheres because of all this crap that’s in the air. So that’s what we’re doing. I see a lot of hip hop on the TV. and mostly they certainly aren’t done talking about bling or rims or posturing and ego and money, and I feel like rock is the perfect platform to actually try and say something. I think rock is well suited for it.

MYE: The song “Only You” from Anthems For The Damned is another of my new favorites. The lyrics are really to the point, but gripping, and underscore the stark message. It sounds pretty but makes you contemplate the gift of living on this world. We’re all connected.

RP: When you watch a polar bear swim for sixty miles only to drown from looking for an ice flow to fish off of, we’re the only ones who can stop this change we’re putting the planet through. We’re smart enough to see it coming and realize we should do something. Let’s see if we do it. It’s only by reminding each other, even in a rock song. I bought a Prius. It’s not perfect but it’s half electric. I changed my light bulbs. If every family changed one light bulb in their house to fluorescent you’d be taking 60,000 cars off the road as far as the carbon footprint.

MYE: That’s staggering!

RP: Even if it is in a rock song, to remind each other that it’s one planet. A tiny little special jewel that sits out in space and we’re living on it. Let’s get over the stupid shit and imaginary friends in the sky and what we’ve been bickering over, the religious shit. Let’s really do this.

MYE: It’s complicated because some things are so entrenched as spiritual beliefs.

RP: It’s one thing to be spiritual and another to fucking walk around with an AK-47 and kill people because they aren’t just like you or pray just like you.

MYE: I was just reading today how Bush was saying that if Obama tries diplomacy with Iran, for example, talking despite the differences, that Bush equates it with being like the Nazis. It’s ironic since Bush did a pre-emptive strike of another country (like Hitler) which wasn’t responsible for 9/11 and also I am pretty sure Grandpa Bush sold tanks to everyone, including the Germans back in the day.

RP: Yeah. To be honest with you, a six day old corpse would be better in the White House than this guy. Both McCain and fucking Obama…Obama could really unite this country and make it better and honestly anything is better than what we have. This guy is an oil nut, he’s Daniel Day Lewis! [Doing a spot on impersonation of Daniel Day Lewis’s character Daniel Plainview from the film There Will Be Blood] “Ladies and gentleman, when I say I am an oil man…This is my son and partner H.W…Dick Cheney…” Even, McCain is saying right things. He’s been a hug critic of the Iraq war this entire time. You’re fucking it up, you’re fucking it up, you’re fucking it up. And then there’s Obama. Either one is going to be better than what we’ve got and thank God it is gonna be over soon.

MYE: Yeah. As far as the song “Soldiers of Misfortune” goes, I know that song is about a Filter fan who joined the army after college, right?

RP: Well, he was a reservist and y’know, in 1998 things were good. We were all fine and then came 9/11 and the Iraq War, so they pulled him out of his senior year of college, which is why he joined the Army in the first place because he wanted to get educated. He was studying computer science. They put him in Baghdad and ten days later he’s fucking dead. Killed by small arms fire and a grenade launcher. That’s the Iraq War for you. A twenty two year old boy. He’s dead. You could build a fucking solar farm in the Mohabi Desert and supply thirty percent of the country’s energy.

MYE: I find it hard to believe we can clone a fucking mouse with a human ear on its’ back but companies want us to think we can’t have light bulbs that last more than thirty days.

RP: Exactly. The reality is it is big business. “What do you mean, the sun is for free? Who’s gonna make money on that?” That’s who is running this country.

MYE: No one will make money when we’re all dead. It’s a short sighted business model.

RP: Daniel Plainview, drinking problem and all. In the White House making decisions for you. It serves America right for picking a President that they wanna have a beer with. I want Carl Sagan, if he were still alive. I’d beg him to run. Al Gore was a nerd and they picked on him. Serves us right for picking a President by that criteria.

MYE: I don’t wanna have a beer with Bush. He has no taste and probably only likes shitty Budweiser.

RP: Dude, it’s the kind of thing…please America, get your shit together. It’s like the guy that did the Civil War documentary, Ken Burns. He’s standing on a pile of rubble after 9/11 and he tells everyone “consume, buy more stuff, we need to stimulate the economy.” He should have said to stop consuming, to cut back, to stop demanding more energy. Let’s start cutting back. We’re in bed with the Saudis. That’s why we got bombed. We have ten thousand troops sitting in Saudi Arabia left over from the first war. That’s why they’re mad. If you were to put ten thousand Saudi troops in Texas with tanks and helicopters you can believe similar things would happen to the Saudis. A bunch of pissed off Texans looking at a Saudi Arabian fort in the middle of Texas! You’d see some pretty pissed off rednecks not understanding why they are there. I’m not justifying 9/11 but that was their reason. That’s what they said. Nothing is right when it comes to killing 4,000 innocent people on 9/11, but that’s why they did it. American Soldiers left in Mecca for Christ’s sake, which has supernatural meaning for these guys. I’ve got a rock record where thousands if not millions will hear it. Maybe they’ll be inspired and say “Richard Patrick made me think”. That’s kind of what Bono and John Lennon and Sting…we used to pick on Sting for literally talking about the rain forests. Everyone made fun of it. Who’s laughing now? When my daughter is ten years old, and right now she’s ten weeks old…

MYE: Congrats!

RP: Thanks. She’ll ask what I did. “What did you do?” My business is to put out music and to bring up the conversation with my audience that maybe we should participate more in current events. Most people don’t know who Dick Cheney is or half of the shit going on in Congress or the White House. People don’t care. That apathy is gonna come back to bite us.

MYE: What do you say to critics that say soldiers know the risks when they sign up and that it’s a part of war?

RP: I think that’s a true fact. Frank Cavanaugh, the former bassist of Filter is now serving in Iraq. He comes from the military and you join the military in his family. He loves the military and considers it his family. His brothers and sisters in the military are the most important thing in the world to him, right next to his wife and daughter. That’s the way people feel so they are taking the risk but for God’s sake, the only thing they ask is that you put them in harm’s way for the right reason.

MYE: People are being misled. It’s not just about 9/11, it’s about a military take over labor force for real estate interests half the time.

RP: Exactly.

MYE: After doing the band Army of Anyone with some of the Stone Temple Pilots dudes, how did you get back into the Filter headspace?

RP: You know what? It was onstage with Army of Anyone! I looked in the audiences’ eyes when I started singing “Hey Man, Nice Shot” and I saw the passionate love they had for that song. I just felt like I’m just so not done with Filter. I called the guys around this time last year and asked if they minded if I went off and did a new Filter record finally, and they said they were totally behind it. I called up my buddy Josh Abraham and asked if he’d be interested in being involved someway and he said , “ Yeah. Let’s put this out on my label and start a company and get this thing going!” Sure enough we finished it in November and it was done. John Freese played drums on it, and John 5 and Wes Borland played guitar. It was very collaborative, but at the same time a lot of the songs were written by me. It was a very wonderful experience.

MYE: The production builds on Filter’s legacy but also seems more expansive. Atmospheric parts are even more so and there are still the great trademark Filter good, solid bass lines. I’ve always thought it must be so fun to be the bassist in your band getting to play “Hey Man, Nice Shot” or ‘It’s Gonna Kill Me” or now “I Keep Flowers Around.”

RP: People are saying ‘Wow, there’s a lot of songs on this record that could be singles” and I can only say "Thank you”. You never think about that when you are writing, you just try and be tuneful and in the music and hope it conveys your message. It’s cool that people hear it and say “This should be on the radio” though.

MYE: There’s a message, not so subtle but still subtle enough that it doesn’t clobber you.

RP: You wanna be careful because you don’t want to sound preachy. I’m very political when I talk in my interviews, but I want people to discover the meaning of the song and to kind of look for it, not be spoon fed the meaning.

MYE: They could resent it, otherwise.

RP: Yeah. I don’t want that. It’s like John Lennon. [Richard starts singing], “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” It’s such a pleasant way to hear such a great message.

MYE: Some other thoughts: Vocally you sound more confident with melody than ever. You’ve always had that patented Filter scream/sing thing going.

RP: Yep.

MYE: And also a sort of speaking/singing thing that is sort of an earmark of the industrial/pop/rock blend, but how did you approach this one vocally?

RP: You know what? I’m a healthy, healthy man. I’m healthy so my voice is clean. I love screaming and I love the anger, but in all honesty, singing seems the challenge, to melodically prove my point. Melody is the first and last frontier in music, in my opinion.

MYE: Some heavy bands say people don’t know how hard it is to sing, but at the same time, a lot of strictly hard core bands for example don’t know how hard it can be to really sing!

RP: Yeah, I can cup a mic and growl and run my shit through a distortion pedal and it can be fun but…it was really interesting, we played this acoustic thing and I don’t like doing that but when KROQ asks you to do one you’ve got to take it into consideration because they’ve broken a lot of bands like that or re-broken.

MYE: Everyone loves when Dave Grohl did “Everlong” acoustic on Howard Stern one time.

RP: You think, let me try this and you break down “Welcome to the Fold” or “The Take” acoustic and it’s very fascinating. If you write a decent song you can break it down into that simple way of performing it and it was very interesting for us. “Lie After Lie”, any of these songs. It’s important to utilize melody. You really do need the parts to work. If a chorus is a chorus it has to musically have the impact because one day you might have to tear it all down on acoustic, you know what I mean?

MYE: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of “Welcome to the Fold”, this is sort of a stupid question, but I know you are sober now and so wondered about that song because you sing about drinking in it?

RP: I was fighting alcoholism during Title Of Record. We needed lyrics quick, and for “Take a Picture” I had blacked out drunk and taken my clothes off on an airplane. It was a very embarrassing moment.

MYE: It’s pretty rock star though, man.

RP: It’s where I was at at the time in my life, so I sang about it to kind of relieve the strain of this horrible fight that I was having. When I sing “Awake on my airplane, my skin is bare, my skin is theirs” and “I feel like a newborn, just helpless and alone” and “Could you take a picture ‘cuz I won’t remember” and “Hey Dad, what do you think about your son now?”… This public fight for my life is in that song, being horribly addicted to alcohol, and I had this one little opportunity to beg people for mercy in my family and to have a cry for help, and here I go on and make a million dollars off that thing.

MYE: Amazing.

RP: Here I am going through rehearsals four months ago and I’m going through those old lyrics and thinking Jesus Christ, that poor soul that wrote these lyrics! So it’s very endearing for me to go back as a sober, 40-year-old sober man and look at the ramblings of a mad man in some of these songs. “I’m Not The Only One”, that was all just singing into the mic. I didn’t even write anything down and was destroyed over this girl leaving me and just drunk in front of the mic. [Richard singing]“ What did you say girl? I’m not the only one.” You know what I mean, I just…to hear the sad soul at the other end of when those songs were written. The handwriting on some pages are drunken and sad and there’s tear drops on some pages from when I was writing. Singing the stuff now means so much more now to me than it did then. Maybe it’s because I’m getting sentimental, but I was a troubled guy back then, a sweet person that was in the battle of his life.

MYE: Well, you documented it, you know. There’s something now to be learned from it.

RP: Yeah. Everyday I sing it it is more important.

MYE: It’s really interesting to hear that. I’ve wondered about “Take a Picture” and never knew it was so literal. It seemed like metaphors to me and people I know, like levels of awareness or once I even thought maybe the “skin” part was about like, hooking up with groupies on a rock star Led Zeppelin type jet [laughing]…I don’t know.

RP: No, it’s really just a horribly sad song about nearly dying.

MYE: It’s a beautiful song and means a lot to many, many people.

RP: Thank you.

MYE: As far as the new records, the album title Anthems For The Damned is an intense album title. It almost sounds like a Black Metal album title or something. Do you mean that humanity is damned or could it be like people who are unfairly accused of being damned by the religious right or radical Muslims? I mean, what happened to “Thou Shalt Not Kill”?

RP: If we don’t get off our asses we will blow ourselves up. There’s no doubt about it. We’ve got to get over ourselves. North Korea, Syria, Pakistan, America…America! Russia! We’ve really got to get over ourselves. There’s some villains out there. I mean, fuckin’ Hitler was not too far in the past. Sixty years is nothing. We’re tearing up the environment. These songs are anthems of the damned if we aren’t careful. It’s just the other day that people were slaves!

MYE: It’s only been like, thirty years since the civil rights movement.

RP: There’s still slavery going on all over the world and in America. There’s people that bring relatives to this country and enslave them to work in their own houses.

MYE: That crazy guy in Austria or whatever. It sucks because Austria is amazing.

RP: Yeah. But there are crazy people out there in the world. If we fuck it up… “Soldiers of Misfortune” is an anthem for people who are being fucked over and have to clean up after a war they didn’t start.

MYE: A few more questions, I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now.

RP: I certainly do. [laughing]

MYE: Video wise, how did you decide how to balance content for material like this? In the past with a song like “Where Do We Go From Here?” it was interpretive with you sort of walking through a party like an outsider or the viewer not being sure if you were crashing it. This time you have heavier world issues involved. How did you decide on video visuals?

RP: The “Soldiers of Misfortune” video is on Officialfilter.com and at the end of the video the American Flag is being consumed in a pool of oil and there’s similar imagery the whole time so it’s very blunt.

MYE: Do you regret that some of your songs were used by the HUMMER corporation?

RP: Yes and no. After what we’ve gone through in the music industry…I have to put milk in my baby’s bottle. If it wasn’t my song it would have been someone else’s. That paid very well and paid for my rehab. When Neil Young sits around and sings “This note’s for you” and makes fun of everyone for what we’ve gone through in the music industry, I mean, if someone hands me an opportunity and says we’re gonna put your song in our commercial, at that point in time I had to say yes. At least I have an opportunity now to release this. My lyrics now, I mean…does that make any sense? Ultimately I have to make a living.

MYE: Hey, Elvis Costello got sponsored by Visa, you know. It used to be Fugazi could still make a lot of money by selling hundreds of thousands of CDs, well below millions like a major label band, but enough to sustain it…Now, not that that is so easy then, but how do you even do that?

RP: Dude, people don’t fucking pay for music! Do you know how much it costs to make and properly promote a record?

MYE: Or support a fucking lighting crew or stage crew for a bigger band! Not everyone is a smaller punk band, that’s just a reality.

RP: It’s not all two turn tables and a microphone.

MYE: [laughing]

RP: It’s not shaking your ass and rhyming. We’re talking about years and years of people going to school to play drums the best they possibly can.

MYE: Not everyone can do that double kick break on “It’s Gonna Kill Me”.

RP: Not everyone can do that shit.

MYE: Dude, it was really great talking to you. The record is awesome, one of the best Filter records and it is good to have Filter back after 6 years.

RP: Thank you. That means a lot. I appreciate it and thanks for the interest. We’ll see you soon.

MYE: Take care.

RP: I’ll talk to you soon.