Mark Holmes from Metal Discovery spoke with bassist Alex Webster from Florida-based death metal legends CANNIBAL CORPSE recently. A few of excerpts from the chat follow below:

MD: So you have the ‘Global Evisceration’ DVD just come out a couple of weeks ago – how much involvement and input did the band have in what footage was and wasn’t included on there?

Webster: "You know, really, what it ended up being was mostly Denise Korycki. She’s the filmmaker and she pretty much does all the editing herself. I think she had a friend who did assist her in Brooklyn when she got home from touring with all the footage and everything. The vast majority of what you see there is her and her hard work. She was the one who cobbled it together and the story that it winds up telling; creatively it’s all her. Obviously, the footage is us and just us being ourselves, playing on stage and doing what we normally do but the way that it’s put together is her. We had nothing to do with the editing. She would send us a rough draft and if there was something we didn’t like we’d ask her to change it but there was very little of that. I guess it was our idea in the first place to do something like this and have a sort of travelogue/live DVD, which is something which we really hadn’t done before but the creative part, and the reason that it is so good, is because of her hard work and her ability to tell a story on the DVD, instead of it being really dry. By the time you get to the end you’ve travelled with us."

MD: Your popularity’s soaring these days! You're still on the up!

Webster: "This is true, you just never know. There are certain bands that have little periods throughout their career where, all of a sudden, they’re bigger than they were for a little while. I think even bands that have been very consistent still have those little peaks and valleys like IRON MAIDEN or SLAYER, whatever bands we look up to for having consistent careers. You know, they’ve also had areas where they’ve surged in popularity a little bit too. We’re experiencing one of those and we’re also prepared for it to go away. We’ll take the good with the bad but, right now, things are good."

MD: How are the writing sessions going for that at the moment?

Webster: "Very good. We’re trying to…what I’ve been trying to do, on the last album I ended up writing seven songs and I was a little concerned that maybe having to work so hard learning the material that I wrote, it kept Pat and Rob from doing a whole lot of writing. They were busy practicing the material that I gave them. What I’ve done is I’ve been trying to lay off the writing for Cannibal just a little bit. You know, I’m holding back just a little bit as far as the amount I’m writing and letting Pat…you know, what’s cool about Pat doing the Slayer thing is he already has a pretty good head start. He’s almost finished with his third song that he wrote by himself whereas on the last album he only did two entirely. So he’s already ahead. What we’d like it to be is probably three to five songs a piece. Most likely we’ll try and make it four – Rob writes four, I write four, and Pat writes four. Paul does lyrics for Pat’s songs and Rob will do lyrics for his own. That’s the plan right now. Whether or not it turns out to be exactly divided that way is hard to say, but I’d like it to be that way. As much as I’m happy with my own songwriting, and I am willing to shoulder the burden of writing the last share of it if necessary, I would rather have it divided up more evenly amongst the band members. It just makes for more variety. As much as I try to inject variety into my songs, there’s nothing that’s going to create more variety than having other songwriters.

MD: The final thing I wanted to ask, there’s been so many things written about Cannibal over the years, but what would you want the band to be best remembered for in, say, fifty years time? Kind of long after you’ve finished playing death metal. Unless you’re still going, of course, with grey hair and…

Webster: "Yeah, exactly, I’ve got a couple of pretty good grey streaks on each side of my head! [laughs] But, I think, for us we’d like to be remembered as a band that stayed true, and stayed consistent, and was always good to the fans. Consistent in attitude, and consistent artistically, and consistent as workers. Consistency is something that I hope people remember us for, that we never quit and have always been very steady with touring, and that we’ve always stayed true to the style that we started out with. I mean, we’ve had progression here and there but, really, we can play songs from ‘Eaten Back To Life’ right next to songs from ‘Evisceration Plague’ and they don’t sound like they’re written by a different band. There’s still a thread that ties all our material together. So yeah, consistency, that’s what I’d like us to be remembered for if anything."

Read the entire interview Metal-discovery.com.