ANTHRAX - Worth Its Weight? Page 2
By Martin Popoff

How much of the writing is Charlie this time? Have the roles changed at all?

"Maybe slightly, although in different ways. I did contribute more music this time than I had in the past. At the same time Charlie was more involved definitely on the vocal end of things, not specifically the lyrics but coming up with ideas for vocal melodies and stuff like that. Which I always thought would make sense. You know, if he's coming up with riffs, he'd probably come up with good ideas of cool vocal melodies. And John and I really pushed him this time to come through with some of those ideas. We just wanted to see where his head was at. And I would say about 90% of the lyrics is me. John wrote Any Place But Here, that whole song, as well as lots of verses and choruses. But I would say the bulk of it is coming from me."

I asked Scott what the two biggest departures or stretches on the album were.

"Well, Cadillac Rock Box, that came out of a riff that Charlie had just been screwing around with throughout the writing and pretty much the whole recording of the record. He used to f**k around with it all the time and he had shown it to me. Whenever we had been writing and maybe getting stuck on something and wanted to take a break, we always started jamming on the riff of that song and towards the end of the whole writing process, Charlie had said, 'What about that riff? That jam riff? Why don't we try make a song out of that?' So we started jamming on it again and we had the main riff to the song and I came up with the D section part and it was done. All of a sudden, it was like yeah! Okay, that kind of works, it's got a great groove, and it's definitely different from the rest of the stuff we've been coming up with. But it just feels great to play so f**k it, why not? So that one was definitely different for us."

"Safe Home would be my favourite lyrically," continues Scott, "just because it's the most personal for me. It's about my relationship and how happy I am about it and how great it is. And I think I was able to express that without it sounding like some kind of cheap or cheesy or lame, you know, for lack of a better title, love song. I think it just comes across as a really strong, emotional statement musically and lyrically that people really seem to be connecting to, just because it was so easy for me to write. It's something I didn't even have to think about. So that would definitely be my favourite. What else? The rest of the record, I mean a lot of it, it was different for me in a way that, a lot of the times I had what I thought was a specific idea for where a song was going to go, or what it was going to be about, based on what the music was making me feel when I listened to it. And it would take off in like six different directions. So there are a lot of songs on the record where there isn't one specific thing it's about. A song like What Doesn't Die, for instance, started out where I had the chorus written for that and then, based on a couple of different ideas, one of the main ones being, okay, well, no matter how many times I get pushed, it doesn't matter."

ANTHRAX - Worth Its Weight? Page 3