Special report by Aaron Small

Death metal veterans SIX FEET UNDER are in the midst of a 12-day stay at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, FL working on their tenth – as yet untitled – studio album. Vocalist Chris Barnes (pictured) took time out from the recording sessions to chat exclusively with BW&BK.; “We started May 7th. We’re going through all the tracking until the 19th. Then we take a week and a half off and I start vocals at The Hit Factory in Miami from the first of June ‘til the fourth. We’ll probably have 12 songs recorded.”

Although Barnes won’t commence vocals until next month, his lyrics were completed quite some time ago. “Yeah. I’ve got all my stuff done. We wrote this one over the past three and a half months. We attacked this – as far as the writing goes – a little bit differently than the last couple, which we wrote completely in the studio over a short period of time. For this one, we went back to how we used to do it. We let it flow; we did rehearsals and jam sessions. We wrote the same way, it’s just that we didn’t condense the schedule into two weeks, we spread it out a bit.”

When asked about his lyrical inspiration this time around, Barnes pauses for a brief moment. “Hmmm… just the sheer enjoyment of writing this. I was so ready to start writing. It’d been a year and half since we worked on Commandment. It was time. I was so excited when I got the first song. I just sat down and started writing. It was fun. I was having a good time with it. I think my inspiration is derived from the same perspective as always – really delving into my own imagination. I just really listened to what these guys put together and let it lead me into a certain frame of mind. There’s some really good stuff on here as far as the music goes. Steve (Swanson, guitarist) has always been a riff master but he’s put together some great stuff. Greg (Gall)’s got some excellent drumming going on. It’s a good sounding set of songs. There’s a lot of leads and the songs are a lot longer. 90% of the songs are four minutes and higher. There’s a couple five minute songs, which is a little different for us. We’re usually in the three-minute range. There’s some good music on here. Everything we do is a little different from the last record. We really don’t tend to stay at one speed. We’re always in our zone, but each record has a different flavour.”

Chris has produced the last few Six Feet Under CDs, yet he’s currently unsure if he will resume that role this time around. “I don’t really know? It’s kind of all over the place. I’m trying not to do too much of that; it’s more of a band effort on this. I’ve got to hand it to those guys ‘cause they’ve really done a lot of this work early on, so I’m letting them ride out that whole vibe. I’ve got things positioned on how I want this done. I’ve got Chris Carroll laying down the tracks on this one, as opposed to the last record we did with (Erik) Rutan at his studio. We feel a whole bunch more comfortable back here at Morrisound with Chris. He’s been our engineer for a decade basically and our live engineer for just as long almost. We’re in a more comfortable position than we were on the last one as far as tracking. We’ve got Bill Metoyer helping out with the drum tones. He did Warpath with us. Greg’s always wanted Bill to come back down and lend a hand on the drum tracking, so we got him down for that. We’re going to have Toby Wright (SLAYER, METALLICA, ALICE IN CHAINS) mix the record. We’re going to change it up a bit and let some other people give their perspective on our music. Hopefully we’ll have some exciting sounds coming out of this thing. Toby’s an awesome engineer. He’s a cool guy too. He’s psyched so I think it’s all going to work out well. We want this to be as flavourful as possible and as dynamic as possible, as heavy as we can do it. There’s some vicious stuff on here. The last couple songs I’ve written have been pretty crazy as far as some of the subject matter goes, but it’s good stuff.”

Expect the new Six Feet Under album to be released in October or November on Metal Blade.