Travis Ryan of CATTLE DECAPITATION Interview Page 4
By Greg Nalbandian

SW: It kinda exposes you, yeah.
TR: Yeah, it felt weird but, whatever.

SW: So your new album, "To Serve Man", is this your most successful one to date?
TR: It's lookin' that way. Um, the other ones sold pretty well. But with this one we're getting exactly what we wanted--signing with a bigger label, the promotion, being able to jump on bigger tours. Just having a label with more contacts--more of a push.

SW: For those who haven't heard you before, can you describe your sound on this album and the overall lyrical theme?
TR: The music is pretty uh...It's very melodic for being this kind of gory, really fast paced...Lyrics have a lot of gore theme to them. It's pretty melodic for that kind of music. And it's very fast; it's brutal, to the point; kinda just like a whirlwind to me. The lyrics are pretty much just a new take, a new look at cannibalism even vegetarianism. Check it out, read the lyrics it's pretty disturbing.

SW: The overall theme to me seems to be a hatred for humanity.
TR: Yeah, definitely. That's definitely the overall theme.

SW: The album cover is great. Did you guys have any creative input there?
TR: Well, we had this one idea. We told Wes Benscoter, who's the artist...We told him what it was. He said it was going to be too chaotic. He had some of his own ideas. We almost had a good piece and he said, "Give me a few days to think about it." And then I was talkin' to the guys about it and I said, "Do we really want this thing?" So we started thinkin' about it and I said, "How about a guy standin' there; he's got his guts emptied out onto a platter," and everyone looked at each other and said, "Hey, you know what? That sounds pretty cool." We kinda elaborated all together on that. Then we told him [Wes]; we asked him what he thought and he said, "That sounds totally doable." So exactly what we told him we wanted is exactly what he gave us-it was amazing. The guy can do anything.

SW: In some of your songs, you use a lot of what most of us would consider "big" words. Some of them actually look like they are out of a medical dictionary. How do you find these terms and have you taken college courses in biological sciences?
TR: Yeah. Yeah, I took all sorts of...I started in my senior year of high school. I took physiology, then I went into anatomy. After that I went to college for about 3 years. I changed my major and started doing anatomy and physiological psychology. I learned a lot about the human body. I like incorporating that kinda stuff into lyrics. A lot of people like to put us in the Carcass clone genre and I think that might be one good reason, because of the terminology that I use. There have been tons and tons of Carcass clone bands and nobody's ever gotten it right really, not yet. There's one band that did, that's "The County Medical Examiners". I don't know if you've heard of them.

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