PIG DESTROYER
By: John Gnesin
They say it's 'always the quiet ones' and I am beginning to think they might be right. Polite, thoughtful and calm, one would, upon meeting or speaking with J.R. Hayes, never suspect him of being responsible for the lyrical and vocal violence, which permeates every facet of Pig Destroyer's sound. On the eve of the long anticipated release of 'Terrifyer,' I spoke to J.R. on a great many topics from music and lyrics to literature and art.
RESOUND: The 'Terrifyer' album was first announced for release in Fall of 2003, and it seemed at the time that most of the components in terms of the concept of the release, art and content were in place. Why the extreme delay?
J.R. Hayes: I'm a big believer in a record taking as long as it takes and we're a very detail-oriented band. Actually most of the main work, the writing and the recording is accomplished pretty quickly in comparison to how long it takes us to get the mix that we want; the particular drum sound or guitar sound we want. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get the vocal just right. The thing is, we don't do a record very often, we want to make sure that record is as good as it can possibly be at that point in time and that's a very time-consuming process.
Then we had the long song that we were doing, which was a completely new experience for us on almost every level. The way we recorded, I still don't totally understand that (laughs). It was a lot of different facets of the project, and we wanted to make sure that instead of doing a bunch of shit and making it all kind of average, we wanted to make sure that each individual part reached its full potential, we wanted to make sure the songs were all strong and with the artwork, I didn't want a layout, I wanted a design.
On the artwork, why the change from Matthew Barney's Cremaster stuff to Chris Martin, was it due to any trouble getting Barney's stuff?
No, it wasn't that. Matthew Barney and Scott were in contact and obviously we are mutual admirers of each other's art. Barney is functioning on a completely different level, dealing with million dollar projects and he's got crews, etc. It's a huge undertaking for him to do what he has to do. Also, I wanted to deal with Chris from the beginning, but it is only after he did 'Painter of Dead Girls' that was when I was saying this is what we wanted for the album, it was kind of like a test run. I had been a friend and an admirer of Chris's art for many, many years and it was very important to me that he would do our record. It turned out even better than I thought it would.
We're talking about using Barney for the next album and hopefully doing an original. The original idea is that we were going to use stills from the Cremaster films that Matthew Barney had already done, and I kind of wanted the artwork to be an original piece for this album. It's like samples, when you take something out of a movie and put it on your album, it brings the movie with it, it brings the association with it, and our album should be a separate entity, so if we were going to use Matthew Barney, I'd want him to do a special set of stills or special project just for the album.
Tell me about the writing process for 'Terrifyer' and for P.D. in general, do you guys write individual and then bring the parts together, or do the songs come out of jamming?
We're not much of a jam band, although we like to try to capture the spontaneity of the song. I'm a firm believer that you can kill a song, there are a couple songs on our old records that are good songs, but during the writing process we'd spend too much time trying to perfect the songs and then none of us ever want to hear them again. It's almost like you're over-writing songs and taking it apart too much and part of what I think makes grindcore so good, so fucking ferocious: I was just listening to the first Benumb album, 'Soul of the Martyr.' The songs on that record feel like they were made up on the spot and that they can fall apart any second and it's got a really dangerous quality to it, and I think that's what we go for. Usually Scott has a pretty good idea, like a potential song, and he knows where he wants to go, he's got a couple riffs or something. He'll bring it to practice, the three of us will talk about the arrangement and Brian will come up with the drums. We've been playing together for many years, so we kind of know each other's instincts, our chemistry is already built that we can read each other's minds, know which way the song should go.
And with "Natasha" (the doom song), was the same process used?
That song, I don't think we could do another song like that if we tried. We actually crashed our computer on that song; there was so much information! The ambient parts were Scott completely concocting them on his own, and then the individual music parts he brought to Brian and me. We recorded it in one weekend straight up with Scott playing bass and Brian playing drums, they hashed out the rhythms and the guitars got piled on. It was like building a house, it was very clear how it was going to have to be done, and there were so many tracks and so many layers. Then for me to put the vocals on top and do something special for that song, but how do you go from doing one to two-minute songs and now you have 37 minutes. Instead of having too little space to do what you want to do and having to cram, now you have this vast horizon, you can do anything, you can go anywhere. It took me a long time to get it where I wanted it, but once I hit it, I remember going in and doing one take...it's easy to become intimidated by something like that, where it's something you haven't done before, but singing is, to me, 80 percent confidence. You just gotta be feeling it, and I wasn't feeling it, but then you get into the song and I just kind of let it go and cut the vocals on that and then when it's done, you just know: "That was the take." Then I was happy, I think I smoked like seven cigarettes or something.
(Note: at this point I asked J.R. several questions about his lyrics in terms of interpretation and inspiration. Since, with his answers, he covered even more topics than I asked him about, I decided in the interest of space to leave the questions out in order to represent the full response he gave me to the topic of lyrics.)
I'm don't really think of the characters as gender-ed, it is more like they are just dolls, just actors, they are playing a certain part and whether they are male or female doesn't really matter all that much. The key is that the emotional context transcends all race and gender. Hopelessness and hope, desperation is desperation. The important thing is the root of it, I am not trying to tell a story, I am just trying to create a mood. I want the audience to feel alone and completely devoid of hope, frightened and cowering in self-loathing. All the negative energy that a human being can possibly manufacture is what I want to come out, whether its through the lyrics or my vocals, that's what I'm trying to project, all that negativity.
With 'Prowler...,' yeah it's an obsessive record, but its not about like 'bitch done me wrong' type of stuff. It's not that this woman is evil and she deserves to die, it's the guy who has the problem. It is the reality you manufacture in your head, this hollow one-sided love affair that doesn't exist except in one person's mind. The other person just happens to be a byproduct or bystander. There are definitely different levels to it.
With this record, the story doesn't even really make any sense to me when I read it. As I wrote it, it just seemed that, that is what the characters wanted to do to each other. I don't really know what to make of it; I am more interested to see what other people pull out of it. With me, it's more about the imagery, the emotional context that's there.
I love the fatalistic romance aspect of Romeo and Juliet, that has always fascinated me. The purity of it fascinates me and then there is also the mean streak of also loving horror movies. When I originally came up with the idea it had nothing to do with what it looks like now. I'm not interested in telling a coherent story. Dennis Cooper's stuff is very much like that, his books don't follow the traditional build-climax, his books just kind of wander in any different places he can fit, and that's the kind of writing I like.
"Natasha" is a totally separate entity and could have been released as a separate record, it kind of had the same theme, it's a totally different story but it has all of the same kind of ideas and all the crap I write comes from the same place. It may be about different things on a surface level but in general it's pretty much the same. I think it's fun just to pile on as much as possible, let people go nuts trying to figure it out.
It's not an album to be figured out, you just feel it. It is whatever you want it to be. It's about banging your head man; it's a thrash record. Really all the trimmings aside, its just a fucking grindcore album and we wanted something like Brutal Truth 'Need to Control' or a Megadeth 'Peace Sells...' that you throw on and just say fuck yeah! Every time you throw on 'Reign in Blood' or 'Beneath the Remains' its like an old friend, that's the kind of album we wanted to make, something that was fun. Scott and Brian can do some technical stuff and they do on this record, but I think the main concern was to write the best most memorable songs we could write.
People always tell me that I have really weird rhythms with the way I put my vocals down, but it is natural for me. I try to listen to the song, and do what the song wants me to do. With grindcore it's more like you just do it and you have four measures and you are just filling up this time so go nuts. There's nothing wrong with that, that's great kind of like Benumb or Crossed Out. On this record I wanted something more along the lines of D.R.I. or Accused or some of those old thrash bands where the vocals are right on the money, and you are really following the music. I just wanted to make them as intense and raw as possible. I don't think I write lyrics the way people think I write lyrics. My songs aren't necessarily 'written,' they just kind of fall together. I have several notebooks of random lines and random thoughts. 'Terrifyer' is a good example; you get that first image, the girl coming over the rose garden. Some of the stuff I could have written six months ago, some of it two years ago, but when it comes time to arrange the song, certain lines just jump out at me.
For me, all lyrics have to be tied down of the heart, when I try to write about other stuff, it just doesn't mean anything to me, whether its political lyrics or whatever. I have to write about something I really, really have feelings about otherwise, what am I screaming about?
Is 'Terrifyer' a concept album?
I think I was probably the one who said concept album, probably because I was drunk. That word has so many negative connotations; it makes it sound like there is something there that is supposed to be something more than what it is. Like I'm supposed to be telling everyone about the tectonic plates or how ancient Neanderthal man progressed into modern human. With me I'm just taking everything I got, this is my entire creative outlet for the last two years. One way or another, for better or for worse, here it is -- this is as much feeling I can possibly package in one place, and it's not about what's going on or how does this connect with this, or is this what you're talking about type thing, it is what you bring. Everyone brings their own set of values, their own thoughts and beliefs and they'll read it and some people will think its terrible and some people will think its misogynist, but that to me is what art is supposed to do. It's supposed to get a reaction, even if its anger. Even if I piss some one off, I think that's great. The worse thing that can possibly happen is if someone listens to your record and they are like 'eh, that's alright.' It's like the phrase 'damning something with faint praise.' I want people to either obsess over our record or run screaming away from it. No fucking middle ground that's not what its about, that's not what art is about. Good art is supposed to make you think and feel something, even if it's something bad, even if these people want to kill me, I think that's awesome, I think they should try. I could use a little excitement in my life.
'Terrifyer' was released on October 12th, 2004. Pig Destroyer also be contributed an exclusive track to the Relapse-released companion CD to the book 'Choosing Death' (to be released November 9th), as well as a CD of artists paying tribute to the works of author Dennis Cooper.
PIG DESTROYER's website: www.pigdestroyer.net
|
|
|