Chad Bowar: How did Charred Walls Of The Damned get started?
Richard Christy: Steve I've known for about 12 or 13 years now. When I was playing in Death he flew out to Orlando once or twice to jam with us. He didn't end up playing on the Death album, but he played on the Control Denied album that we did. He's always been one of my favorite bass players since the days of the old Sadus stuff. I've been a fan of his for a long time. He played in Iced Earth with me also. I've been wanting to jam with him again and we're really good friends. As soon as I started putting this band together, he was the first bass player I thought of. He was really into it and up for doing some recording.
Tim and I were in Iced Earth. We did a tour together and we had a lot of fun. He's a cool guy and fun to hang out with. He's also one of my all-time favorite singers. He was my first choice for a singer. I was thinking of him as I was writing this music, and luckily he was able to work his schedule to be able to do it. It was a lot of fun. When I put this project together, the main thing is I wanted to make some killer music and have a lot of fun in the studio.
Jason is a really fun guy to work with. Jason and Steve already knew each other, and Jason was a big fan of Tim's but hadn't met him before. He was excited about working with him. We ended up having a total blast in the studio. There's a special edition DVD that's coming out with the CD, and it has a documentary on the making of the album. It shows how much fun we had making the album, and brings back some cool memories.
When you went into the studio, were the songs already finished, or did you do some writing once you got there?
Everything was pretty much written and ready to go. We even had the vocals demoed. I would send the songs to Tim with vocal ideas I had, and he would sing on that. We had pretty much everything demoed, but I went into the studio with the idea that the demos would change quite a bit. Jason is an amazing songwriter and producer, and is brilliant when it comes to vocal melodies. We did a few days of pre-production where Jason went through the songs and tightened them up. The album on the demos is about 12 minutes longer, so we really tightened it up during the actual recording. Our time was very limited in the studio because of our schedules. It was great to have these demos, because everybody came in really prepared.
Drummers generally aren't the main songwriters in most bands. How did you enjoy writing most of the music for this project?
It was a lot of fun. I've always loved writing music, and in some of the bands I've been in I've had more say than in others with writing music. I've been fine with that. I love creating drum parts and was always happy just concentrating on making killer drum parts for the albums I played on. This was something totally different. It was fun, but very challenging. This was the first chance I had at creating the songs from the ground up, starting with the guitar riffs. It was different thinking about the songs as a whole, instead of just the drum parts. It was a very different way for me to think of things in the studio. It was exciting hearing everything come together.
Did you write most of the lyrics, too?
I wrote all of the lyrics. I had written lyrics before for my band Burning Inside in Florida, and a lot of those lyrics came from a horror movie type perspective. For this, when I first sat down about a year ago to write the lyrics for the album, it was so challenging because I didn't know what direction I wanted to go. Writing lyrics that sound cool and original and fit with the music is a hard thing to do. I just started writing about personal things and things that meant a lot to me, and it started flowing once I started doing that. One song, “Fear In The Sky,” is about my fear of flying. “Blood On Wood” is about my love for drumming and how much of an influence that's had on my life. All the lyrics are very personal to me. “Manifestations” is about my fear of dying. Now when I listen to the songs they mean so much to me because they are so personal, and other people can relate to them.
On the Japanese edition of the CD you do “Nice Dreams,” originally done by Powermad. How did you decide to cover that song?
I've been a big Powermad fan since the album Absolute Power came out. I first saw the video for “Nice Dreams” on Headbanger's Ball back in the '80s. I was blown away by how melodic the song was, and that opening riff is so cool and catchy. I loved everything about that band and thought they should have had more recognition than they did. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do this song, because not a lot of people have heard it. Maybe some people will go back and rediscover Powermad. The other night I was checking the Charred Walls Of The Damned MySpace page, and Joel Dubay, the singer/guitarist for Powermad had written me and said he couldn't wait to hear the song. That was an honor to get an email from him. I hope he thinks we did it justice. I think it turned out really cool.
