Filter’s Richard Patrick finds ‘Trouble with Angels’

	Richard Patrick

August 17, 2010

A clean and sober Richard Patrick is also a productive Richard Patrick. After relaunching Filter a couple years ago with Anthems for the Damned, he’s back with his band’s fifth album, The Trouble with Angels. Much of the 10-song collection is a return to the industrial-flavored sound of early Filter but enhanced by Patrick’s greater proficiency as both a songwriter and singer. Patrick, never at a loss for words during an interview, recently called in to discuss the new album with Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki.

Live-Metal.net: I’ve been a fan of yours for a while, and I’ve enjoyed the last few things that you’ve done, like the last Filter album and Army of Anyone before that. But listening to this new album, it really kind of took me back to the Filter that I first became a fan of 15 years ago. I guess I was wondering if that was your intention, a goal for this album to kind of bring back more of that older sound.

Richard Patrick: It was. My record company, Warner Brothers, gave me advice a long time ago. They were like, “Dude, listen. Don’t make it hard for the fans. Just give them what they want. Give them the same songs 10 times. Make sure they’re all really great. Always look the same, do everything the same and be the same guy.” I’m like, “You know what? Sure.” And then a month later, I handed in “Take a Picture,” and I was like, “See? How cool is that?” They got “Hey Man Nice Shot” and then they got “Take a Picture,” and they were just like, “You’re confusing everybody.” And I’m like, “I think my audience is eclectic enough to be able to accept that this is also a direction I want to go.” I went on a literally 10-year odyssey of pushing the envelope of how far my audience can—like singing for Damning Well, then Army of Anyone. The last Filter record was a tribute to the Iraqi war soldiers that I knew that got killed.

This is what they told me a long time ago. They said, “Give the fans what they want.” And so, 10 years after hearing them say that, I’m doing just that. This is a fans’ record. I made this for my audience. I made this for the people that fell in love with Filter in the first place and made us great. I am all about that. I wanted to make sure that my old-school fans got the record that they have been waiting for all these years.

What I like about it—another way that it kind of reminds me of the older stuff—is that it’s very—I don’t if concise is the right word, but 10 songs and the music, to me, sounds really confident. Do you feel that way about it?

I had a blast. I worked with this guy Bob Marlette, and I worked with Mitch Marlow, and I worked with a bunch of great musicians—Mika Fineo played drums. I had a blast. It was the first record where I just truly—We had these basic ideas, and literally me and Mitch were like, with “No Love,” for instance, we were like, “How do we get from this verse to this riff?” And we were like, literally, banging our heads against the wall. Then I met Bob, and Bob’s like, “You just need to write two or three more parts.” He wrote this amazing chorus, and then he wrote this B chorus and then like a tag. I just sat there and watched him do it. “He’s like, “Yeah! What do you think of that?”

Bob is the ultimate finisher. He comes in and puts these finishing touches on songwriting, as well as just being an amazing producer, engineer. He’s like a super, all-in-one talent. So I actually enjoyed this process. It was actually really fun. Bob, on songs like “No Re-Entry,” he just told me, “Sing this high. Sing this an octave higher than you’re singing it.” I was like, “Goddamn.” He challenged me and really, really made me excel. This is the missing ingredient. This puts it into, hopefully the audience will hear this as great. Instead of good, this puts it into great.

[Call dropped;, Richard calls back.]

Sorry about that. So where were we?

You were talking about working with Bob, which was gonna be my next question anyway. What was it like to work with him, and also, he’s got such a great resume of bands he’s worked with. Did you sit down and pick his brain for stories and his experiences?

Literally, with Bob, it was just like, “Tell me what I need to do, man. Just tell me what I need to do. Don’t make it a mystery. Just tell me what I need to do.” And he was just like, “Here you go.” He goes, “This is the destination. Here is the bar. We have raised the bar this much. We’re going to hit these songs this hard.” He left me alone when I needed to be left alone. He gave me plenty of time to work on things, but I didn’t need a lot. There were several doors opened lyrically by him. He was like, “I need you to start talking about the shit. I need you to start talking about your problems. ‘Cause your fans don’t give a shit about the Iraq war. They do care, but they want to know what made you drink. They want to know why you are the person you are.” He was very openly guiding, and I loved it. I thought that it was appropriate. He pushes.

An obvious question: The album title, obviously there’s a song called “The Trouble with Angels.” Why did you decide to make that also the title of the album?

Religion is fine if they feel like they’re comforted and they have this thing and they feel better. That’s great. But as soon as you start blowing up abortion clinics or imprisoning scientists such as Galileo for basically saying, “Hey, I don’t think everything revolves around the Earth. I think that the Earth is this little rock that goes around the sun, and the sun is just another star in a huge galaxy of stars, and we’re far from the center of the universe. I think we’re actually just this little thing in a not-so-amazing place in a galaxy in a not-so-amazing place.” And he’s imprisoned for that.

I think there’s danger in the sociological impact of religion. I’m just putting it out there. There’s trouble with angels. There’s issues. There’s trouble with angels. Galileo was imprisoned, he was sent to the Inquisition because he invented the telescope and pointed it at Jupiter and discovered Jupiter and Saturn and looked at their orbits and realized, “Hey, they’re not orbiting us. They’re orbiting the sun.” He joined Copernicus with heliocentrism and decided—He jumped onboard that bandwagon and said, “Yeah, we revolve around the sun, not the other way around,” and it’s heresy. That’s heresy against the church, so they imprisoned him.

I think there’s trouble with angels. And I think that it constantly keeps rearing its ugly head. There is a slight meaning. I’m trying to make it a little more overt. The cover isn’t a helmet on a gun. Like Anthems, I beat you over the head with it. This is a little bit more subtle. The artwork on our record is absolutely amazing. If you’re a fan, you have to buy the CD because the artwork is just incredible. Deborah Norcross did all the graphics and everything, and Brian Porizek came up with the pop-up. Rocket Science let us do this amazing package where you open it up and it pops up, and you have this feeling of either evading science or being swallowed or drowning in scientific notation, and it happens to be a close copy of Galileo’s scientific notation. I like to put little numerology. Deborah and I have always done numbers on the two records that she did, the three records now; this is her fourth record cover for us.

What has it been like working with Rocket Science? A lot of bands and artists have gone to them in the last year or two.

It’s really great. They’re willing to take the risks that I think a lot of labels are not into doing. I think there’s something to be said about having balls. We made a video where a lady is beating the shit out of someone. She’s the drug, andhe keeps coming back for more. “The Inevitable Relapse” is like this first single that we’re doing, but there’s so much more to the record. We’re going to release more singles. It’s just nice that they’re into it.

All of these songs, I’m sure, are your babies. You’ve mentioned a couple of them, but are there any have any special meaning to you, that are really close to you?

“Drug Boy,” it was the first song that we worked on. I go, “Bob, let’s do this song that I’ve been working on called ‘Drug Boy.’” Bob just rewrote this pre-chorus. We were having trouble getting to the chorus. He loved the chorus, he loved the verse, and it was the first real collaboration. He wrote this big pre-chorus and then he wrote this middle part that was just insane, and he wrote this melody. He goes, “I just hear this word ‘sunlight’ in there somewhere.” He doesn’t write lyrics. He doesn’t like writing lyrics. I just sat there and I was like, “Man, when we were on drugs, the drugs were gods. Drugs told us everything we needed to know. Tonight these chemicals are gods. Tonight these chemicals are sunlight, golden sunlight.” And I know that a lot of the fans are reading my lyrics and they’re like, “Jam!” They just really are getting off on it. It was just this connection where I was just like, “That’s probably the coolest A part I’ve ever written.” And he was just like, “Yeah.” There were so many moments like that on this record, where like, “Fuck! That’s so cool. Let’s go to Quiznos. Let’s break for lunch and come back and perform it.” That big, huge scream during the pre-chorus, he told me to go down at the very end of it, and I went up. His eyes bugged out of his head—him and the engineer, John Spiker, his eyes just popped up, like, “Damn, you went up!” Moments like that, where I showed him what I can do. I showed him, “Oh shit, I’m gonna take this up. I’m gonna take this higher.” And his eyes just leaped out of his head. Amazing moments, just goofing off, having fun, being talented and just kind of encouraging each other to rest on those talents and enjoy it. Making records can be a fuckin’ scary thing sometimes. But we just had a good time. It was just like goofing off.

What are the touring plans on this album? You’ve played a few shows recently, but where are you going from here?

Right now, we’re just doing promo stuff, and we’re going to different parts of the country that we like. We’re just kind of getting the ball rolling. This is a long haul for us, so we’re just trying to get the right kind of situation. But you know, we’re just kind of messing around, screwing around. I’ve got kids.

Yeah, that must make it harder to go out and tour, I guess, right?

Well, you tell your managers that this had better be something really cool. Filter is the kind of band, we like to be around people we like. We were hanging out with Vinnie Paul and Chad from HellYeah. It’s selective, and we like to keep everything kind of precious. We don’t just go on these tours and woohoo! We like to hang out with people that are cool. We like to hang out with people that we’ve known for a while.

Is your live band the same band from the last album?

Not at all. We have all new guys, except for Mika, our drummer. I need more singers. You have to be a badass on your instrument. It’s Phil Buckman on bass, and it’s Rob Patterson on guitar. But honestly, Rob and Phil are here because of their voices. Sometimes people are like, “What ever happened to some of those other guys you used?” Honestly, I liked those guys. The reality is I need background singers, and Geno (Lenardo) and Frank (Cavanaugh) weren’t necessarily into singing as much. As the records continued to grow, there’s a bunch of background vocals that have to be sung. I started doing harmonies on everything. Literally, every line on this whole new record, more than likely there’s a two-part harmony on it. That’s part of our sound, these background vocals. So I had to get more background singers. Phil and Rob are in this not only because they’re awesome badasses on guitar. Shit, Rob was in Korn for a while. He’s an amazing guitar player, but he had to bring it as a singer, too.

Now that you’ve been doing Filter for 15 years and had a lot of success, how does it feel to be in a position where you’re a veteran in this business and you were able to put out a greatest hits album last year?

Where has the time gone? I feel like I’ve really spent a lot of time on stuff, and it’s just like, “You know what? Why does it have to be so exhausting?” During the ‘90s, I was a pretty massive drug addict and alcoholic, and the records took so long to make, and I’d disappear for four or five years. I just don’t want to do that anymore. I feel like I really need to constantly just keep releasing music. That’s why I was so bummed—I released Anthems and I was like, “You know this is just a tribute record and I did it quickly, and I want to come back real quick with a new record.” People, they put so much meaning behind stuff. With the greatest hits record, people were like,”Is that it? You’re done?” I’m like, “No, I’m just giving you the greatest hits.” There are a lot of versions of songs that aren’t available. “(Can’t You) Trip Like I Do” wasn’t released. It was only on that one little soundtrack. Now it’s on a greatest hits, so you can get that. You can get a shorter version of “Welcome to the Fold” that we actually play live for the most part. I want to release a lot of stuff all the time, and especially this new record, I really wanted to bring the guns. I really wanted to bring super-quality stuff.

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