2004 03 MARCH RAG - RAG Magazine

Interview: Juliett Rowe
It’s a nice spring afternoon in Los Angeles,
and Raymond Herrera has
been home for eight days. As the
drummer and a founding member of
Fear Factory, Herrera has a lot of
things to do, and the in the next few
weeks that he is home, he has to rehearse
for the band’s upcoming jaunt
on this year’s edition of the
Jagermeister Music Tour, finish the
new album’s artwork, and do a
shitload of interviews. But there is not
much else that he would rather be
doing after Fear Factory temporarily
called it quits last year. Herrera wants
everyone to know that the band is back
together, rejuvenated, and ready to roll.
The new album Archetype drops on
April 20 th on Minneapolis indie label
Liquid 8 Records, which also has Midnight
Oil, and Hall and Oates on their
roster. The members of Fear Factory,
vocalist Burton C. Bell, new bassist
Byron Stroud (from hardcore metal
band Strapping Young Lad), Christian
Wolbers who has switched to guitar,
and Herrera see the new album as a
redemption of sorts–the ultimate payback
from a band that has lost a
founding member (former guitarist
Dino Cazares), and has spent much
of the last year legally wrestling with
former label Roadrunner Records.
Raymond Herrera has a lot to say, and
he talks to Rag Magazine about the
new album, the old label, and the
band’s newfound freedom.
Rag: How do you feel about new album?
First new material in a couple
of years right?
Raymond: Well every album has pretty much been about three years between every
album. That’s not going to happen anymore though. [We’re] definitely going to start
working on new material probably when this tour starts.
Rag: When did you start writing material for this album?
Raymond: There was a lot of off and on, because there was a lot of legal stuff we had
to deal with. It took about a year to get it all done. We had a lot of parts, maybe 2001,
we had a lot of material already. But we didn’t have any songs finished. So we just
kind of sat down and decided to finish the record. Pretty much a year from that point–
even that was probably too long.
Rag: How do you typically write?
Raymond: Burton does all the lyrics, and Christian and I pretty much wrote the entire
record. The way we worked on this one was, me and Christian would come up with
like a blueprint, or an idea for a song. Like a bunch of different parts that don’t really
mesh together, but we can work on it. So we give that to Burt, and depending on what
he would sing over, is what we would or wouldn’t keep. We would continue from
there, and as we got the song together more, we’d give it to Burt again, and he would
have more ideas for it. We just kind of went back and forth, which was very different
for us. Usually we would give Burt a finished song and say, “Here, put lyrics on it.”
Now it was more of a collaboration. He didn’t sit down with us and write the music,
but what he would do to the song would depend on what we would keep and not
keep, so in a sense he was writing the songs. We just kind of went from there and
that’s what we did the entire record. The vocals were just good. All the verses were
catchy, the choruses were catchy, there’s just a lot of hooks. That’s pretty much the
way we did this record.
Rag: Have you guys ever made a conscious effort not to repeat yourself?
Raymond: No, not really. We don’t necessarily not do certain things because it’s like
the same thing that we have done before. You have to do what you’ve done before–
that’s why you have your fans. Fear Factory fans don’t want to buy Fear Factory
records if it doesn’t sound like Fear Factory. There’s nothing wrong with taking what
you do and if you’re good at it, and not duplicate it, but doing the same type of style.
Because of that, we’re going to keep writing songs that sound like Fear Factory.
There are certain things that we’ve done, like when we were writing the new record,
and something sounds like an older song, we’d have to change it, because obviously
it sounds a little too close. You don’t want to do the exact same thing. We’ve
got our niche, we’ve got our style, and of course we’re going to stick to that. From
time to time we may wander off and do something a little bit different, like add an
extra instrument, or take a different approach to a song, but most of the time we want
to try to keep the Fear Factory nature–the sound and the style.
34 • RAG MAGAZINE • MARCH 2004