“Focusing just on Crowbar and parting ways with Down was such a relief,” admits Kirk Windstein. “A lot of people don’t understand how that could be a relief? It was my life, it was my fault. I take all the blame; I just took on too much with being full-time in Down, trying to do Crowbar full-time, and then being in a full-time family was just too much. So for me, it was essential to leave (Down) to be able to sit back and just concentrate 100% on Crowbar, and the new album (Symmetry In Black) shows the dedication to every detail.”

It was back in September 2013 that Kirk announced he was quitting Down; a revelation that shocked the metal community as Windstein, alongside vocalist Phil Anselmo (Pantera), guitarist Pepper Keenan (Corrosion Of Conformity), and drummer Jimmy Bower (Eyehategod) created a true masterpiece with their 1995 debut album NOLA, and had been forging onward ever since. However prior to achieving global success in Down, Kirk issued a pair of albums with his own band Crowbar – a group he never lost sight of. Admittedly they weren’t blowing up the Billboard Chart or selling out Madison Square Garden, but over the past 25 years Crowbar weathered a plethora of lineup changes while continuing to release high quality doomy, sludge-laden music that resulted in their dedicated fanbase growing ever larger. Not that anyone’s counting, but aside from the current lineup: four bass players, five drummers, and five guitarists have their names etched in Crowbar history.

In an ironic twist of fate, bassist Pat Bruders was the latest Crowbar casualty, leaving to focus entirely on Down. Taking his place is Jeff Golden (Six Feet Under, Thy Will Be Done, Goatwhore). “Yeah, Jeff was kind of known as a fill-in guy,” comments Kirk. “When we started doing our so-called try-outs for the band, my wife and I got on the Crowbar page and said, ‘send in your videos.’ Jeff sent in three or four a day! This dude really wanted it! He wrote a really cool thing saying, ‘Crowbar’s my favourite band. I’ll do anything.’ And he wasn’t kidding. I spoke to him on the phone a few times, literally he came in early on a Monday ‘cause we were going to rehearse on Tuesday. My wife cooked, there was Monday Night Football, he came by and hung out, we got acquainted and he just fit right in. Me, Jeff and Matt (Brunson, guitarist) sat down and ate, watched football, talked music. I basically told him, you’re pretty much already in the band. I’ve seen the videos, your track record speaks for itself. We hit it off immediately. He was supposed to come down for four or five days; well he never left. He moved in with Matt; in fact they just upgraded their living quarters to a proper two bedroom apartment. Jeff was living on the couch for a while, so he’s happy he’s got his own bedroom now. But Jeff’s positive attitude is really what we needed. He was showing us pictures of when he met us wearing his Crowbar Heavyweight Support Fan Club stuff; I don’t remember meeting him way back when, but he wasn’t lying. He knew everything about the band and he’s such a nice guy.”

The new Crowbar album is called Symmetry In Black, yet track two is Symmetry In White. “Well, ‘Symmetry In White’ was written first,” recalls Kirk. “The last album (cover) had a really cool graphic; it was bright, colourful and different – a new logo, the whole nine yards. We needed that at the time. This is our tenth album and we’ve never had a black album cover, so let’s do something simple. I happened to be flipping through lyrics, looking at lines and song titles for a name for the record. Obviously there was nothing with black in it, but when I saw ‘Symmetry In White’, I said, why not Symmetry In Black? One of those reasons being, everybody’s going to ask, ‘why did you do that?’ So that was a perfect name for the record.”

Simple and striking, the Symmetry In Black cover art is effective. That being said, it draws unavoidable comparisons to Crowbar’s 2005 album, Lifesblood For The Downtrodden; that jacket also featured a fleur-de-lis as its central image. “Right, but the thing with that was… it was actually an 11th hour emergency cover. We were working on something else that just wasn’t… that’s when we were with Candlelight Records. The guy whipped that up over the weekend. Considering the little amount of time he had, he did a really good job with it. In the early days, believe me; we had nothing to do with the album covers. They were what they were. We had no control over it. But now that we do, we wanted Sever The Wicked Hand and Symmetry In Black to be completely different looking because they’re different records at different points in our career and our lives.”

Delving into the songs that comprise Symmetry In Black, track ten, “A Wealth Of Empathy” seems pretty personal and rather revealing for Kirk. Specifically the line, ‘my faith will pull me through.’ Has religion found the bald and bearded one? “I wouldn’t say religion, but being spiritual. I grew up Catholic, and I don’t believe in organized religion; I don’t follow it. Then again, I don’t preach. I fully support whatever your religion is; if you want to be Satanic, be Satanic. I support gay and lesbian rights – anything. Whatever helps each individual person be a happy, better person counts. But for me, the older I get, the more I’m drawn to being a spiritual person. Believing in God, believing in Jesus, but not a church going Bible thumper – nothing like that. I’m me. I’m the same guy you met many, many years ago; just older. The same thing with my wife, the more we are together, the closer we get and the spiritual side of things really helps us with day to day stress and life. We’ve got a full day, every single day; but we’re blessed and happy man so that’s what counts.”

If Symmetry In Black were a vinyl record, as opposed to a CD or digital download, “Amaranthine” would separate side A from side B. “Which is how I thought,” confirms Kirk. That song invokes memories of Pantera doing “Planet Caravan” by Black Sabbath. “I’ll take that as a compliment. I’ve been writing a lot of that acoustic stuff and the vibe I was looking for is dark but eerie. I didn’t want fucking ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ (by Poison) for god’s sakes. Nothing against it, hey, it sold quite a few records and is on classic rock radio every day. I wanted Crowbar’s version, or my version, of what would be an acoustic song. Every time I sat out to do – the song ‘Odd Fellows Rest’ (from the 1998 Crowbar album Odd Fellows Rest) was the first real attempt. It was going to be this little instrumental thing, then it was just going to be acoustic, then there was electric guitar in there, then there’s a solo.”

Amaranthine is not a word that’s part of most people’s daily vocabulary; and it’s not actually included in the song’s lyrics. Yet it means never fading, which is a phrase that is sung in the song. “Trust me, I’d never heard of the word in my life,” confesses Kirk. “I’d be lying if I said I did. But I wanted a one-word title that meant undying or never going away. That word struck me and it seemed right.” Kirk actually dedicated that song to his wife Robin. “That’s correct. That was the first batch of lyrics I wrote too. I wrote them in about five minutes. I already had the acoustic thing – I call it a two-piece song. The first part I had written a couple years ago. Then when I got in the studio, it needed a key change. So I went from proper drop D to A, which is the second half of the song. I really felt that helped the song come alive.”

Robin plays a larger part in Crowbar than most musicians allow their wives to. She’s on the road with the band, working the merch booth; in fact, she even wrote some of the lyrics that are heard on Symmetry In Black. “Yeah, ‘Symmetry In White’ for instance. First and foremost, she does the merch on tour. She’s basically our whole manager and she’s really great at it. She bartended, managed bars and was an event co-ordinator for the last 25 years. She was like, ‘Do you think I can do this?’ Absolutely! You’ve been dealing with money and drunks for 25 years; you’ll be fine selling merch. In America, she’s the tour manager, which for Crowbar is not a whole big bite to chew off; we’re a pretty settled band. But she does play an important role with all the business. And with the lyric thing, what happened was, I was kind of getting nervous. It was getting to crunch time… I was working on my lyrics and I fell asleep on the couch, she says ‘go to bed honey.’ She’s on the computer; I have no idea what she’s doing. I wake up and there’s a notebook laying on the coffee table and the lyrics to ‘Symmetry In White’ are written. Wow! I read it and it was perfect. A couple we kind of collaborated on a bit. ‘Symmetry In White’ and ‘Ageless Decay’ are all her lyrics; I might have changed a word here or there just to make it fit. On the other ones that she’s credited on (‘Shaman Of Belief’ and ‘Reflection Of Deceit’), we worked together. I knew she was talented in the real aspect of life, but I didn’t know she had lyrical talent as well. And it really helped out.”

“This is our tenth record, we have over 100 songs now. I don’t need outside writers like Aerosmith or whatever, but Matt Brunson (guitarist) has become a more important part of the writing with the riffs. All the same, with Robin helping out on some of the lyrics, it took some of the pressure off me. There’s been some records where a song would be from a woman’s point of view, trying to make it more melodic. Anybody who’s an Accept fan, you’d see all songs by Accept and Deaffy – that’s a woman (named Gaby Hauke) who managed the band from the inception. They didn’t speak English much at all, so she wrote all the lyrics. A lot of people had a misconception that Accept were gay or something, because she wrote the lyrics from a female perspective; it gave a different vibe to it. Accept’s one of my favourite bands you know. I wanted to take a different approach on vocals with songs like ‘Symmetry In White’, ‘The Foreboding’, and ‘Amaranthine’. I wanted to showcase a little more that I can actually sing. I think it was perfect the way all of it worked out.”

There’s one song without lyrics, the last track “The Piety Of Self-Loathing”. Was that always intended to be an instrumental? “No, I tried to put the lyrics to ‘Reflection Of Deceit’ to the opening riff of ‘The Piety Of Self-Loathing’, which is one of Matt’s riffs. It was such an odd chord-change pattern that I spent hours trying to get the first two lines to work. I said, fuck this! It’s good like it is, there’s going to be an instrumental. We don’t have a proper instrumental. We have segue-way pieces, but we don’t have a heavy instrumental. As a fadeout song for the record, it was perfect as is.”

Thus far, Crowbar has released one video from Symmetry In Black, for the song “Walk With Knowledge Wisely”, which can be seen below. Kirk reveals, “We did two videos; one for ‘Walk With Knowledge Wisely’, which is pretty much a straight-forward performance video. At first we toyed around with the idea of having a plot to it. But when the record label chose ‘Symmetry In White’ as the second video – at first it was going to be ‘The Taste Of Dying’, which is one of my favourite songs. But they chose ‘Symmetry In White’, and with the lyrical content and the vibe of the song, let’s make that the concept video. So that one we’re really looking forward to. We did the green screen thing; basically our options are limitless to what we can do with that one. It’s going to have a storyline to it, where ‘Walk With Knowledge Wisely’ is just a performance video, nothing fancy, meat and potatoes, straight to the point.”

Fans searching for material beyond the 12 tunes found on Symmetry In Black will be disappointed. Bucking the trend, Crowbar did not record a Japanese bonus track, iTunes exlusive, or Best Buy only song; Kirk explains why. “Things have changed so much. Think about it. Back in the day, there were great albums that had eight songs, half hour long.” Like Slayer’s early stuff. “Exactly; Reign In Blood is not even 30 minutes long. But when they came out with the CD format, you could use 70 minutes or something. People were putting 15 or 16 songs on a record. Let’s be honest, it’s very difficult in one sitting to write 16 or 17 killer tracks; so you had some filler stuff in there. But it was a new format, and people were going to cram as much music as possible on there. I think people have gotten away from that; that was the thinking with Down when I was still in Down. You see what they’re doing now with the EP thing – instead of trying to write an entire fucking record that’s an hour long, let’s just settle down and trim the fat so to speak. For us (in Crowbar), we had an option of doing 10 or 11 songs, but we wanted to do 12. We weren’t approached about doing a bonus track. If we do a bonus track, it’ll probably end up being a cover of something obscure that we completely rewrite, like ‘No Quarter’ (by Led Zeppelin) or something like that.”