Chris Barnes has had a few writing partners in Six Feet Under over the years, from original guitarist Steve Swanson and Chimaira’s Rob Arnold to Phil Hall of Municipal Waste and even Barnes’ former Cannibal Corpse bandmate Jack Owen (who’s still in the band). In a new interview with Chris Garza, Barnes talked about all the different ways he’s approached writing vocals over the years, including not having to very much on Six Feet Under’s latest record Killing For Revenge.
Oh, and there’s already a new Six Feet Under record ready to go despite Killing For Revenge not being a full year old. How, you might ask? Because Owen is a fucking behemoth when it comes to writing.
“It was interesting doing that one because it was the first album I’ve ever done where I didn’t write the lyrics. What happened was I said ‘you know Jack, why don’t you let me know in each song where you want vocals.’ Because as a vocalist, I’ll sometimes put vocals where the guitarist or the writer wouldn’t expect them to. I remember (former Six Feet Under guitarist Steve Swanson) telling me ‘I didn’t expect you to put vocals in that part.’
“And then I’ve had guys that I’ve written with like Rob Arnold that he would road map it out for me. You know, he’d put the time like ‘1 minute to 1 minute 30 vocal part blah blah blah ‘ and do that for each song. So that was interesting to me, that was a new way to write for me.
“So I asked Jack I’m like just you know, tell me where you want vocals because I know I’ll write it somewhere different that you might not like it. I was like, even if you put a scratch track of like gibberish like and show me where you want the (vocals). That’s what I did on Crypt Of The Devil. Phil Hall mapped it out like that. He just did a bunch of gibberish and did a track of it and then I wrote from that, which was way different to make lyrics from gibberish.
“For this album, I said (how I’ve worked with other songwriters in the past) to Jack. All of a sudden Jack sends me a song demoed out with vocals, full lyrics that he just wrote. It’s like ‘wow, well geez this kind of takes makes it easy for me you know?’ I was like, ‘maybe leave me one song that I can write lyrics for.’ But I went back and edited and rewrote some stuff to make the story lines kind of come together.
“Right after he got done with (Killing For Revenge), then he sent me a whole new album with lyrics and everything already done. I mean, we could have came out with another album five minutes later because it’s already done. It’s just sitting there. He’s really prolific. He’s a great writer, great lyricist. You know, even back to (Cannibal Corpse’s 1990 record) Eaten Back To Life, he wrote the first part of ‘Shredded Humans’ and said ‘okay finish it off.'”
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