Wow, yeah. I haven't thought about that but yeah.

And here it is 2006.

Yeah, I was four when we started.

What do you think has kept you guys around for so long?

The passion for our music. We've been through the wringer time and time again and had a lot of shit thrown at us. A lot of knives. A lot of roses. We weathered every storm. Good and bad, we rose above all the crap and remembered what we did it for. It was always the music for me. It was never about any of the other good or bad things. All of that stuff, I think you can balance them out. It's easier to brush off. Many times we've had things happen to us and I think any other mere mortals would have just broke up or just feel like this ain't worth it, but I think keeping our foundation solid and having our foundation solid. Remembering where we came from made it a lot easier to deal with everything.

Besides that, all of the bad shit just makes you stronger.

Yeah, what doesn't kill you, right?

Right. You guys had a Spinal Tap thing with guitarists.

Yeah, that's always been a thorn in my side.

Is the dude you have now new?

Not really, actually. It's a funny thing. Scott was a friend of ours for years and he played in a band called The Spud Monsters but he's been with us for about a couple of years now so I wouldn't consider him new. Even when he first joined the band, he probably should have been the guy that replaced Bobby who was our first guitar player.

You guys formed Biohazard for the purposes of expressing political views and discussing problems facing urban youth.

I guess that's what somebody said we formed Biohazard for. That's obviously a bio you're reading. That's always been one of the things about the "industry" I've never really liked. To me, in retrospect I wish that we would have had, Angela, a situation where people could have just said "you know what, I've got a question. Let me email the band." Obviously there wasn't email back in '88 or even until '98. We weren't really connected to the Internet. The real deal, we really didn't have any kind of reason to form the band. We didn't sit down and say "hey, let's just form a band that deals with these issues." Things evolved out of us being together. We grew into a band that really didn't have any other purpose other than just wanting to jam together. What eventually came of Biohazard was, we found the music pulling ourselves away from the bullshit in Brooklyn. The drugs, the violence, and the gangs we were running with and the people we would hang out with. We were living fucked up lifestyles that mostly these days, 90 percent of the fucking people out there are living. The path that we were on would have destroyed us and we found ourselves more focused and more interested in jamming together and making music. Then we found out that we had an ability to express ourselves. Once we found out that we weren't going to have eggs thrown at us, it became easier to flow those feelings outside and it became therapy for us. Talking about shit helps you. We realized that but then all of a sudden when you have somebody come up and say "thanks for this lyric or this song because it helped me realize that I wasn't the only one who was going through it because I went through the same situation." That's way more valuable to me than the cover of a magazine or a gold record hanging on your wall. That stuff is monetary and it doesn't mean dick. Having someone really identify with your art is the most beautiful thing in the world and that's the biggest reward. That's something that I'm very proud of. I never would have thought that would happen back in '88 but soon after we started making records, people started identifying with us. I think more because we were more realistic and not necessarily about bells and whistles.

Anytime you grow up in an area that is financially strapped, somehow that tends to bring about a rather unpleasant environment and you find that anywhere. Talking to friends of mine who are from New York and hail from Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, they all had that stuff to deal with. I think it's good when people can voice that through music because I think music is what unites people anyway. It's what brings people together and it's so much easier to get your message across that way.

It was very easy for us to do that and I think maybe because like you said, coming from that culture and maybe lack thereof, it's all we knew. I had my old man when I was a kid. I was this punk rock kid who hated everything and fucking would lash out against everything in society. This sucks. That sucks. You suck. Everybody sucks. Blah, blah, blah. I had all these fucking opinions and views and spitting venom everywhere I looked. My old man sat me down and said to me "you know, take what you want to take but let me just tell you something. Everything you're against, you're trying to fight from the outside. No one's ever going to let you in. No one's going to pay attention to you. You have a Mohawk or you have a shaved head or you’re screaming about this band or you’re walking around with a leather jacket that’s got this American flag on it.” All these punk rock things to me were my ideals. To me those were my values that I wore on my sleeve literally. At the time I was like “yeah, yeah. Whatever.” But he made a point. His point was that nobody was going to listen to me. The louder I screamed nobody listened. I was just this kid who had an opinion like everybody else in the world. All of a sudden I found myself in Biohazard and maybe I had a bigger soapbox to stand on or maybe there was a lot to say with a microphone or maybe the fact that all of a sudden it just seemed like I got more attention. All of a sudden I realized that I was able to reach more people with my ideas and my views and whether I was talking about something that happened to me or talking about how I feel about the government or whatever. As much respect as I have for my father, he was right. At the time I swore that he was just out to get me.

Isn’t it something when we all sit down and realize that you know what, my parents were right about some things.

It comes from love but when you’re getting it, you think they’re just out to get you. He’s trying to lynch me. Fuck that.

I’m 37 and I still find myself sitting there going yeah, they were right.

I don’t know if you’re a parent but if you’re not, wait until you become one because you start to see things in a totally different light.

I have no intention of becoming one but I can totally understand that. All of my friends who have become parents have gone through that. They see themselves and go “oh no, I’ve turned into my mom or I’ve turned into my dad.” You guys released a number of albums and some of them were pretty much about how you grew up and I guess as you guys went on, some of them seemed to become a little more politically motivated. Like State Of The World Address.

Yeah, I think it’s really weird. Well, it’s not weird actually. It makes a lot of sense how we were just four kids from Brooklyn who knew what we knew. We swore that New York City or Brooklyn was the epicenter of the world and everybody evolved around us. Then all of a sudden we made a record and we expressed ourselves there. We toured a little bit and then made another record called Urban Discipline which is when we started to realize “wow, shit’s not just fucked up in New York.” It’s fucked up in urban life everywhere. Then touring around a lot on that record, we started to see more different cultures and more different people and more of the world. Hence, State Of The World Address. From then on, we started to grow and see things and look at things from a bird’s eye point of view. We went on and on and it came back to where we were more looking at the world through our records and settled into what really we deal with. Pretty much our lives through our eyes whether it’s about something in my life or something about the world around me and how it affects me or how it affects the people around me rather than a politician. A politician you know better than I do I‘m sure that they’re liars. An honest person is one who expresses themselves how they feel and politicians are more like “what can I say to make a person like me?” which is something I’m totally not into.

The majority of politicians are very wealthy people and all they want is more money and more power. They try to shape people’s views of the world by telling them this, that, and the other so that “maybe they’ll embrace this war that I want to start or whatever and I’ll just tell them they’re fighting for this, that, and the other.” When you look at the bottom of the war, you weren’t really fighting for that at all. It was more about someone’s financial assets or something. I think it’s scary that people like that can have such an influence on regular every day people.

It’s the regular every day people that make up the world. I think that when the powers that be keep us busy with this and that, whether it’s pay rent or shit, how am I going to afford this nice new car because I had to get it because the neighbor has his nice new car. All that bullshit. You get busy with all the little smaller things in life and to be honest, people just want whatever it is. When say, they come home from work and they have the things that they like to do or they come home to their kids or they want to raise their kids or they just want to hang out with their buddies at the bar. People have their routines that they dig and they like. Nobody wants that fucked up whether that routine is in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, or Afghanistan. Routine is routine. People have the same likes and dislikes and they want to keep their shit straight. When all the people that can capitalize I think on many different manipulations, they can use that to "let's fuck with their normal way of living", and they'll go along with the plan. Meanwhile, while they're busy with their mundane lives as they call it, they can go out behind our backs and do what they need to do. Politics is politics. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Absolutely. If you look down deep at the bottom of every war that's been fought, it's always a combination of power and money and who benefited from that.

Which some say, they're one in the same. History repeats itself no matter what.

It really does. You guys came out with a new album called Means To An End. I was listening to it and I was really impressed by the sound quality and the stuff you guys were talking about. I was looking at the CD cover and that's pretty stark.

This record, there's a lot of things that happened during the making of this record. Our last record, Kill Or Be Killed, came out and it was a direct tie-in to how we felt about what was going on September 11th and obviously it affected everybody. September 11th was the day our record we had called Uncivilization came out. From that point on, we were working on a record called Kill Or Be Killed which was our last record. The whole situation since Uncivilization, we watched the world. Things are constantly turning backwards as far as we think we're moving forward, regression versus progression. Things are constantly getting worse. It was something that Danny and I and we were all talking about, kicking around title ideas. It seemed to fit. We've watched our city change, our world change, as we all have. The way it affects us as musicians and artists comes out of the music. Means To An End is the first time I think that we summed up exactly how we feel artistically, musically, creatively as Biohazard. I think that we hit the nail on the head with what we've wanted to achieve for the past several records.

Yeah, that was a scary time because if you didn't embrace the thought of running over to the Middle East and killing people, you were considered a bad person. That was the first time that I really saw the dark side of a lot of people and it was frightening. It wasn't just the attack itself that was frightening, it was also the government's reaction to it. The whole experience was frightening.

I think we live in a frightening world. It's just shocking the things that happen daily. It's not like every once in a while there's something horrible that goes on in the world. I think horrible things happen everyday. It used to be every once in a while it would get out to the public. But now, it's all over the Web and news channels. ABC, CNN, or Al Jazeera. Horrible things happen everyday and it's getting stronger and stronger and closer to home to people figuratively and literally. It's a sign that things are not so far off to the end. That's mythic. It's not an optimistic world for me.

It sure isn't the way things are going. Who designed your CD cover and what were you guys thinking about when you came up with the design for it?

The funny thing of it is, I wanted to have something, obviously it had to do with Means To An End, but something that showed some kind of major change. September 11 was a huge change and a turning point in everyone's lives. Also in history. It changed the world. I don't think there's ever been anything that drastic that has changed the world as much. I mean Pearl Harbor in the U.S. was horrible but it didn't change the world as we know it. September 11 and that attack changed everything. Politically for the Patriot Act to setting dominoes into motion that things are falling around all over the place. To me the artwork fit into the title well and it painted a picture of the end to me. This is it. A means to an end. There is nothing more to say. I've been screaming and screaming at the top of my lungs about how fucked up things are. Some people, you could call them paranoid, but I think they are true. People have these delusions of grandeur where they think that everybody is out to get them. They have subscribed to all these conspiracy theories. Truth of the matter is, call somebody a fucking lunatic for thinking that the government is Big Brother and they're watching every move we make. You know what? Just the fact that it's possible is the fact that should raise enough concern as it is.

They came up with that Total Information Awareness system where they wanted to have some big computer database that has everybody's information in it. I think they succeeded in getting that going. If that isn't Big Brother spying on everyone, what is? Or when Ashcroft came up with that Operation TIPs where he basically wanted people to spy on their fucking neighbors. That reminds me of Nazi Germany.

It's all a sign. It's all there. It's right out in front of us. Maybe I'll fly away to Brazil and live in some corner of the Amazon.

I want to go live in a cave some place.

It's funny Angela. Ignorance is bliss. I've toured all around the world and spent a lot of time in different cultures. Ignorance is bliss. The farmer in Brazil who cultivates his land doesn't know the monetary value of money because he lives in a barter system. He doesn't know the president of his country or his governor for that matter. He's happy. He doesn't know anything different. He knows the sun's up. Great. Our plants are going to grow. It's raining. Oh well, let's stay inside. That's it. He's not stressing over "oh my God, I need a Prozac because there's 500 channels on TV from my satellite dish and I don't know which one to watch. Oh my God, you better invent something to where I can watch the program I want and tape the program that's airing at the same time because I don't want to miss Survivor." Like I said before, in the name of progress we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Wow, what a great thing. Meanwhile, how much further are we moving forward?

Like with all these reality shows. I can't believe this. This is the big thing on network TV. Pretty soon we'll be watching live executions. Death Row: The New Reality Show. Are these people crazy?

On that subject, I'm a huge fan. We've been training and teaching martial arts for years and we love the ultimate fight channel but that's what that is. It's the Roman era. Two guys in a round cage fighting. The only difference is, instead of Caesar putting his thumb up or down, the ref just stops it. It's one step away from the Gladiators. I'm a huge fan of that stuff so we all get suckered into whether we like that or that other show where people have to eat bugs and all that crap.

Fear Factor.

Yeah. There's a big difference between that and Ed Sullivan. What's really fucked up, this is the thing. The youth of today which will be the leaders of tomorrow are growing up with that. You mix that with the ability that my three year old daughter can go on the computer and with my supervision, she knows how to use the mouse and she can surf around and use the computer. I didn't have that when I was a kid and neither did you. You mix those two things. It's like a Molotov cocktail. What’s going to happen? That’s where we’re putting our values into our future and getting steroids into children’s brains by giving them the ability to learn and have all this access to all this knowledge. Meanwhile still feeding them stuff like Fear Factor or USC which I like both actually. My point is that I’m an adult. I can choose and I know that’s entertainment. Children don’t know that. I don’t think we take enough caution and pay enough respect and responsibility into the future of our children.

People tend to let the TV baby sit the kids because they don’t want to be bothered by the kid. Now you have to have more of a human element in that.

I wish there was a license that you need to have in order to have offspring. The freedom issue is a whole other thing. I know that’s taking away someone’s freedom. Freedom is something that I think you’re born with. Something that you can be given. As far as offspring, that’s a whole issue. It’s a big problem because people have children and offspring without really giving it much thought. Obviously after the fact, they don’t give it any thought. But I’m getting a little bit away from the record. I think with this record, with Biohazard‘s Means To An End, for the first time, I think it captures what I wanted to capture as an artist.

Who did the most of the lyrical writing? Is it a combination of everyone?

It has been. On this record, it’s all Danny and I. My drummer and I. With the records, it’s always been split. It wasn’t like there’s one writer for each record or overall for the whole career. The lyrics on Means To An End are all Danny and I.

When you were sitting down writing the record, what was going through your minds?

Pretty much everything that goes through our heads we write down. The songs deal with issues that are prominent in our lives at the moment. That’s where our inspiration comes from. I don’t read a book and become inspired to write a song about the book which a lot of artists can and do and I respect that. That’s cool. It’s just for me, I’ve never been inspired by anything other than my life. It’s my experiences that inspire me to express those feelings. Sometimes word for word I describe my experience and sometimes within the lyrics are my experiences. Particularly we didn’t really sit down and say “okay, let’s write a song about this.” We’ve never really done that. The way the lyrics have always been with Biohazard, I would come into the studio and I’d have this song. I’d have a set of words, music, lyrics, and whatever. It becomes my vision. The band’s always respected the fact that that’s my vision and I never wanted things to be watered down. I don’t think compromises should be involved in art. It’s one or the other. It’s not extreme if there are compromises somewhere in the middle which is crap to me. I like to have my vision always come to fruition. If I have something in my head, I want to see that end result. I want to see that giant picture on the wall that I had. I want to see it painted and I want to see it hanging there first. We’ve always had that respect for each other and it’s worked. A lot of the times, I get that picture hung on the wall and then I look at it from afar and maybe my drummer will say “what about this?” At least I got to see that picture. Sometimes as a band, we jam a song and things grow a little bit along the way. With Means To An End, I painted all the pictures and have everything hanging on the wall and I looked at it and the experience was fucking dreadful. It was horrible. It was the worst experience of making a Biohazard record ever. Then it came time to mix the record. We lost the whole fucking record. Everything is done digitally. It’s all on computers these days and we lost everything. Not just the ideas. Not just the drum tracks. All the lyrical changes, chorus changes, riff changes, spur of the moment ideas. Wow, let’s try this. We’d do it. There. When it came time to mix, we lost everything. There were no copies. Since the past four or five years, I made it a standard that anytime I burn a copy of a song in the studio, I listen to it and make my decision of what I like. If I like it, cool. If I don’t like it, I make notes of what I want to change and the next day I go back in the studio but I threw that CD out. I throw that copy out so that way nothing’s lost. A CD may pop up somewhere with a different lyric to it or a different song or whatever. Some people are freaks when they collect all that shit and that’s cool too but for me, it’s not how I chose to live and as an artist to be. I have no copies of anything. We lost everything. All these spontaneous ideas. What happened was, it was a horrible situation. I was depressed. I didn’t know what to fucking do. Eight months of fucking hard work. All that blood, sweat, and tears that went into making that record. As horrible as the experience was, so what we did was after a little bit, we realized fuck it. What are you going to do? I’ve had more dreadful things happen in my life, picked myself up by the boot straps, and moved forward. That’s it. I had to turn a really negative situation into a positive one. We used all that negative energy that was destroying us and used that to juice the band forward. We were able to go back in and that’s when we made the best fucking Biohazard record we could. Before that, it wasn’t there. A lot was missing. When we had a chance to go back in and actually make the real recording of the record, it ended up being as a great situation. For something that was devastating and horrible, it became a positive thing for us. It turned out to be the best thing.

Maybe that was a good thing then.

It definitely was. There’s no maybe about it. It was. In retrospect, looking back, I’m glad it happened and I wouldn’t have had it happen any other way. It’s the only way I could proudly sit here and talk to you about the record. To me, success is when you can sit back and look at your art and be like “yeah, that’s what I wanted to do and I did it.” There’s always your vision as an artist, what you envision you’re going to make. You have that picture in your head. Then there’s always the factual piece of art that you make whether it’s a painting or a song or a record. In the future, there’s always the result of “you know what? I wish I would have done this. I wish I would have done that. I would have changed this. I would have changed that.” We had a chance to stop time and go back and make sure what we envisioned and what we did were one in the same. I haven’t gotten to a point where I’m like “I wish I would have done this. I wish I would have done that.” That’s something that’s cool. That’s the first time it’s happened in my whole career.

That’s awesome. Are there any particular tracks on the album that you’d like to discuss?

I think that’s going to be the most common question which I totally respect and understand. Angela, if you take one song off the record it’s like cutting my arm off. I’m so close to everything. Because I am where I am, as an artist and what Biohazard is as a band, I want to try to talk more about the music and more about the songs. There are things that stick out and there are things that stick out for different reasons. The first thing that popped in my head when you asked that was a song called “Kings Never Die”. That song to me summarizes my approach and I think a great approach for people to live their lives like there’s no tomorrow. How you walk your path and the people you touch along the way, good and bad, is what remains forever. My name is something that I’m proud of. That is what’s going to live on when I’m gone. To have the path that I’ve already walked and the path that I’m walking as clearly set as it was and as unclear as it was, I’ve walked it and I’m proud of everything I’ve ever done. Kings never die, they live forever. I’m a king because I chose my path and I chose to raise my sword how I wanted to raise my sword whether it was a guitar or a microphone. I said what I wanted to say and I’ll continue saying what I want to say in music and art. Words are the way I choose to express myself. It’s a great thing that I chose. I think that’s something I got pride in that I’ll take to my grave and my tattoos. That’ll be it. The money and a car and a house and whatever, that stuff will go. Termites and lawyers and blah, blah, blah. Pride and everything that I’ve created along the way will make my name last forever.

You should make the most of each day you live and enjoy it as much as you can because you never know what’s coming across the horizon tomorrow.

I’ve lost too many friends to not agree with that.

One of the songs I liked on here was called “To The Grave”. Can you tell me a little about that one?

That was about my work ethic in a sense that no matter what, I’m real, I’m honest, and another part of my pride that I carry around. Everything I do, I do it and I’ll take it to the grave. I’m the way I am and I’ll be the same way to my dying day. To the grave with all I do. To everything. Give it your all. Too many bands are out there that are afraid and artists that are afraid to fuck with the system and they don’t want to rock the boat. They’re trying to get on a record label and they’re trying to play it safe and maybe they can get on the radio if they write about this or if they don’t write about this. This type of music is popular. Let’s do rap and rock. No, no, let’s do melody, screaming, and then have some melody because that’s really popular. Be true, be real. You’ll go a lot more further in life and have a lot more pride that you’ll carry with you when you’re honest.

There was a time when music was used to shake up the establishment a little bit. To kind of scream out against authority. Now it seems like everyone is too busy trying to make sure that they’re maintaining the status quo. A lot of these younger bands I interview tell me they don’t drink, smoke, eat meat, and they don’t want naked girls on the bus and blah, blah, blah. These kids are getting boring.

The age of the rock and roll stars are well gone. As horrible as the event was, Dimebag was a rock and roll star. A rock and roll guitar hero. He was one of my best friends and a fucking great guy. The young bands that come up, I’ve done it all. We’ve done everything. I had drug problems, heroin problems, coke problems, speed, all that crap growing up as a kid. I remember a guy taking angel dust. Everything. Early Biohazard. People are like “what? That never happened.” Because we had to clean up our shit. We realized that the paths we were on, like I said earlier, were going to fucking destroy us. We didn’t sit down and say “let’s clean up our act or we’ll never get anywhere.” We would find ourselves being drawn away from the street corners. We were getting higher making music together. I went from that side, pardon the pun, to living the road where we were straight. We had one guy in the band that had a huge drinking problem so we stopped drinking just out of respect for him. So we lived straight for a long time. To each his own. It was never about this or that. I think a lot of bands, you make a choice in life and you live the path that you choose to live on. That’s cool. That’s true freedom. It’s your choice. Don’t degrade other people or don’t push it on other people. Let people make their own choices in life. Even when people say and I hear all this crap from these bands, “I’m straight, I don’t eat red meat, I don’t do blah, blah, blah.” Cool. The fact that you’re saying that and putting that message out. People look up to you and it’s a positive message. I think it’s better for people to say I live this positive life than I got a fucking needle hanging out of my arm and this is the way to be. In the same respect, you’re still guiding people to make the choice. You’re manipulating them to your way. Biohazard was always like freedom of choice. Live your life how you want to live. We were never a straight edge band. We had to make a choice to live our lives straighter because we couldn’t live continuing to do the things that we were doing that were destroying us. Everything comes full circle. It all came back and then the DB’s started happening with the partying and the drinking and the drugs and all that stuff. Everything is one thing and I think when you stand strong one way or another, you have to be a little bit flexible. Anything that stands too rigid will break so you have to be flexible there in life.

You guys made those changes in your lives for the betterment of yourselves and that’s a big difference from someone who promotes that as an image. You should do what you feel. If you don’t want to eat meat or smoke or drink, you should be doing that for your benefit instead of bragging to the world “well, I don’t do this and that.” To me it’s an image you want to promote more so than you’re doing it for all the right reasons.

Exactly. I totally agree. I think it did become such a trend. Like I said, it’s better that being a trend than having kids running around saying “you know what, it’s cool to be a neo-Nazi.” That’s another kind of trend that I think will do a lot more harm a lot quicker than anything else. But you’re right. I’ve seen it happen through the past years. Bands come up and say they’re straight edge and then they turn around and you see them five years later and they’re not straight anymore. They’re completely opposite from what they were and like I said, live your life how you want to live it. Be a little flexible. Don’t be so rigid on your views because something’s going to come along and change it. If you’re not pliable, you’re going to break.

Are you guys involved in any kind of touring for this record right now? What are your plans?

Who knows what holds tomorrow. Right now there are no plans to do anything. The band is kind of a little up in the air right now. Evan is the bass player and other singer and he’s involved in porno and his porn stuff. I don’t know if you know that history but I’ve been doing all these bands and projects on the side. I have a new band called Suicide City which is fucking phenomenal and I love it.

I’ve heard about that.

That’s what I put my effort and energy into. To have that as an offshoot of coming off a great Biohazard record is a great blend. I feel really good about the Biohazard record now. My new thing is Suicide City and I’m fucking super psyched about it.

Evan’s married to a porn star! I remember reading about that. He also was in that program Oz wasn’t he?

Yeah, he was with I think three seasons of that.

That was a really cool show.

I liked it too.

You do a column called “Tales From The Hard Side”.

I’m a collector of stories. Then I share my most good, bad, happy, angry, pissed off and I’ve collected stories and written a lot of them down. Some of them, not a lot.

Are they personal experiences that you’ve had?

Yeah, of course. They’re pretty entertaining.

That’s pretty cool to do all of these different things instead of just sticking to one thing.

To me it’s all self-expression. It’s how I share my life and my thoughts. I love to write down what I have inside. All of it is just a mirror of my soul. As rewarding as it may seem, it’s also equally as hurtful. You put yourself out there. You see things and people ask questions and poke at things. To me in art there is no right or wrong. To me it’s successful if I feel satisfied with something being a proper representation of how I feel inside. When critics write things, in the past it used to be really difficult for me. I also had a tough time sharing my words with Evan, the other singer of Biohazard. I never liked him singing my lyrics. It never felt comfortable with me and it was like “these are my words. This is how I feel. This is what’s inside of me.” Unless I really felt like it was something he could relate to, it never really gelled with me. How can someone else express how an experience affected me better than me and I always thought it was difficult to deal with. There was a certain quality to the way Evan portrayed certain lyrics and it was different from how I would portray them so that became a Biohazard style and it works well. Once I got over that little personal bullshit of dealing with him singing my lyrics, it did work as a band.

It just felt weird.

Yeah, a little bit. That’s funny though. When I sat down with the singer of Suicide City, Carl, I told him I had a song and these are the lyrics. He said the same thing to me that I said to you. I stopped and said “dude, cool man. Don’t say anymore. I totally understand where you’re coming from.” He was respectfully trying to tell me that he only felt comfortable singing his own lyrics. He’s going to sing his lyrics with a hell of a lot more emotion than he’s going to sing my lyrics. I backed off. All right, no problem.

It makes sense though.

Yeah, it’s like me writing this interview.

And then you saying “yeah, this is my interview.”

Yeah, what did you need me for. That’s like bios and all that stuff. This is a bio. You’re speaking to a bio. Anything you want to know is all right here. I never understood the purpose. I would read bios and to me as an artist, when you write, it’s creative writing. You come up with new angles and new things. I would read reviews or write ups about Biohazard, but then this paragraph was right out of a fucking bio that the record company wrote. The journalist would copy and plagiarize what somebody else already wrote. Which really isn’t plagiarism but still, the better the conversation, the better the interview or the review. Like where did the album cover come from? Nobody’s asked me that question yet. That was an awesome question. I was like wow, that’s cool. Somebody picked up on something. It’s not just the music. The art. It’s all involved in one thing and coming from, I think you said you were 37, you know as well as I do what it was like to hold an album cover back in the day when an album cover had the whole giant artwork. When you had a foldout, it was like an extra treat. You could sit there and look at album covers time and time again. You listen to the record and you look at the artwork. Nowadays with CD’s, people are gypped out of that experience. They don’t have that. They got a little tiny artwork and as an artist, I’ll tell you, it changes how you look at things. You can’t be like “okay, let me look inside a 4X4 piece of plastic and this is everything I want to say visually in that confines.” You can’t. You have to come up with that concept and let it be shrunk down to that but let the concept be the concept. Let that vision be the vision and don’t be worried that it’s not going to be marketable because the name or the title of the record isn’t big enough. Who gives a fuck? That’s not what it’s about.

That’s one of the things I miss about LPs. You don’t have all that artwork and when you get CDs you really are getting gypped. A CD cover is something that’s going to catch my attention and this did. It sure would be cool to see what this would like on an LP. There would be even more detail.

We’re making a limited autographed lithograph of the record that’s going to be available on the website. The artist who helped me with the whole concept, his name is Ioannis. So that will be available on the website soon. It’s the full life size actual creation of the record cover. It’s the first time we ever did it. I love how it came across and how it fits together with everything. It’s something that you can look forward to.

The CD cover struck me because there’s this fiery sky over the city and you have this huge graveyard. There’s this American flag next to this grave and there’s a little kid standing there. It got to me because that’s how I view all this war shit that’s going on. That little kid is going to be the next victim of it because as soon as he’s old enough to enlist, he’s going to be over there.

Exactly. He’s the next victim or the next ruler or the next person to pull the trigger or press the button depending on how you look at it.

That’s how I saw that cover. It’s a very moving album cover.

There are three album covers that stuck out in my memory from Biohazard a lot. Urban Discipline, State Of The World Address, and then this record cover. We used a lot of the useful icons. That’s where the key to the future is. In our youth. My daughter and as much as everybody has their place in society and it’s all one giant machine that needs to work and every gear needs to be working and well oiled and well nurtured in order to make the giant machine work but, when you treat that nurturing with respect then that machine will eventually work more efficiently and better. When you don’t nurture and treat the youth with respect and you just blindly raise them, then you’re not investing in the future properly. You’re just shooting yourself in the foot.

Any other thoughts or comments?