KoRn are back with their eighth studio release and the band has gone… untitled.
“I think it was where we were at. It [felt] like we were starting over, kind of like the first KoRn album when we put it out,” Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu explained to andPOP.
“It’s like a new beginning for us.”
A new beginning, indeed.
The last two years have seen some big changes to the original KoRn lineup. For 13 years, the band from Bakersfield, California, consisted of Jonathan Davis on vocals, Fieldy on bass, James “Munky” Shaffer and Brian “Head” Welch on guitar and David Silveria on drums.
But in February 2005, Head left the band to raise his daughter and to devote his musical career to Jesus. Last month, a few short weeks before the new KoRn album came out, his autobiographical book, “Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story” was released.
His transformation garnered media attention, even a special on CNN, but Fieldy underwent a similar change, without having to resort to leaving the band.
“I think that maybe a lot of people think that it’s a big party out here, because it was at one point. It took me a long time to figure out that it ruined my life, it ruined my family. I mean I’d overeat before I went to bed. I’d rip people apart with words. As soon as I got drunk or high, I would be lusting over whoever women, cheating and lying. People maybe don’t realize that I’ve flipped my life around and I’m living the other side of life, a positive life. I wake up every morning and I pray and I read my bible,” Fieldy said from his tour bus outside of the Molson Amphitheater in Toronto before his band took the stage to headline their Family Values Tour.
“If I look back on it, yeah it was a slow change, I mean 20 years of my life, seven days a week, doing the same thing over and over, partying until you get old enough to where you can’t keep your hands still because they’re shaking, you’re dry heaving, you’re depressed, you’re lonely. [Until] a point it’s like, ‘what am I doing to myself?’ At the end of the day we’re trying to be that black sheep or the one per cent. I find that living this other life, I am. Before, I was just the majority of everybody.”
The second lineup change occurred in 2006, when drummer Silveria went on “hiatus,” taking a break from recording the new record and the current tour. Down to only three founding members, KoRn brought in keyboardist Zac Baird, who also toured with the band in support of “See You on the Other Side,” and Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison, who is filling in for Silveria.
“We’re still doing this when everybody thought that we’d be failing because David left, but it hasn’t changed anything. We’re still moving on and still doing what we’re doing. We’re still bummed, but at the same time it just happened to be that just a drumbeat left. Now when you got us left and we’re not ready to stop, then it’s inspiring.”
The new album was for the most part produced by KoRn and Atticus Ross, who has worked with Nine Inch Nails, Bad Religion and Rancid, aside from a couple tracks done by The Matrix. It hasn’t been fairing all that well amongst critics, but the first single, “Evolution,” has successfully made its way onto mainstream media outlets.
Fieldy is proudest about the track “Starting Over.”
“It’s so different. At the end of the song Jon sings this vocal melody that’s probably one of my favourite’s on the whole entire KoRn album. Actually, favourite thing he’s ever done,” Fieldy said.
“And lyrically he’s talking about when he almost died in the hospital. I’ve never almost died, but for it to be emotional [means it] is a pretty powerful song, where it touches me and almost makes me get, like, watery eyes. It’s pretty cool to hear an experience of someone almost dying.”
Last summer, in the middle the European leg of the “See You on the Other Side” tour, Davis was hospitalized with Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (a fancy word for having low blood platelets). He had a high risk of hemorrhaging, which could have easily happened during one of their concerts. The chorus to “Starting Over” has lyrics like “My time is over/God is gonna take me out.”
Back to the future, Fieldy doesn’t quite want to attain world domination with this record, but close enough. “Really I’d like to see KoRn become one of the biggest, most powerful bands in the world because at one point it would be really cool to get a bunch of bands involved and do some major project for the world. My passion’s for little starving kids, because they can’t really help themselves. So the bigger we become, the more powerful, the more we can influence other bands. I was watching the other day a lot of bands do it. I forget what they’re doing it for, some other disease or something, but it’s so cool that you can get almost like a bunch of family together, a bunch of bands together, and say like ‘hey man, let’s make this big change and do something.’ I think the bigger we get the bigger change we can make.”
