Fight to the Def

Journey and Def Leppard battle for relevance in the new millennium.

Comments (0) Thursday, Nov 2 2006

Outtakes: Where does the band's ongoing interest in technology come from?

Raymond Herrera: We're all big sci-fi fans and pretty much up-to-date with all the latest technology too. It made a lot of sense with the sound of the band to sound futuristic. I really enjoy the cinematic sound of movies, the epic-ness of orchestral music and keyboards. We wanted to add that.

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What was your first profound response to a film that you can remember?

Probably Blade Runner. That's definitely one of the earliest movies that we can think of that we all unanimously thought "we could do the soundtrack to that." That was way before Fear Factory. We were all kids at that time.

When Fear Factory came out, you guys were reaching more into fantasy. But things have changed rapidly. For example, the Internet wasn't even a phenomenon back then. How much have the lyrics taken on new perspective for you?

Burt [C. Bell, vocalist and lyricist] might have been onto some stuff. He wanted to write about a really negative aspect of the future because that seemed to make more sense with our sound. Some of it actually has taken form to a certain extent.

You guys have contributed songs to several films, but how much have you thought about taking a crack at an actual score?

We've done scoring for video games before. I do a lot of that on my own too, with my production company [Prevolution Productions]. But as far as a movie, it would obviously have to be more of an action, sci-fi type of movie. Like a love story, we probably wouldn't do very good at that. [Laughs.] Although maybe we could.

Unless it's two droids in love.

Exactly.

In a film, there's a lot of breathing room. You have to be more subtle. Especially with Fear Factory's ambient keyboard stuff, one has to wonder what you would do if you could space things out a little more.

It would be a very cool challenge. — Saby Reyes-Kulkarni