AF: The big thing in this record is your collaborations with Jonathan Davis, Perry Farrell and the Doors. Is this something that you’ve wanted to do for a long time, collaborate with other artists? And what was their contribution?
Eisen: We can start with the Doors. It was the Doors track that Warner Brothers requested us to remix. They did a remix CD for many Doors tracks, and basically we got approved to use it in our album – The Riders on the Storm. We got original channels from the Doors which was really exciting to get all these cool recordings, which sounded pretty good I must say. This was the easiest one because it was pre-recorded so we didn’t really collaborate.
With Jonathan Davis from Korn, in the beginning we asked him which song he wanted to sing. He chose Killing Time in the beginning. He came to the studio and we said, ‘do you mind trying Smashing the Opponent because we think it fits more to your style’. And he said ‘sure’. He didn’t practice it, but we just printed the lyrics, he gave it a shot, and I think not more than one hour recording and it was done, the vocals.
AF: So basically, the lyrics and the melody lines were written and he just performed them?
Eisen: Yeah. Everything was written before. He just came and performed the vocals. Same for Jane’s Addiction singer, Perry Farrell. We asked him if he minds doing Killing Time, and he liked it. With him we did two different sessions. We bothered him twice. Actually, he’s known us for a long time. He has Classical Mushroom EP and The Gathering, which was very weird for us. Like, why do you have these albums? It was pretty fun.
Our move to Los Angeles was the move to make collaborations with people. In Israel we were pretty limited to Israeli artists, which I have nothing against. But it’s limited to Hebrew mainly. We had dreams, as kids, you want to work with big artists, and you never believe that you will be able to do, so we said let’s try. We almost got Dave Ghan from Depeche Mode singing, but at the end it didn’t happen. Hopefully, it will happen with Dave in the next album.
AF: Last question about your lyrics from (the track) The Legend of the Black Shawarma, they are very positive and they are almost sending a message but maybe with a little bit of a warning. I am assuming these are not totally random lyrics, is this something that you’ve realized with time and now you wish to share with your listeners?
Eisen: When we started doing lyrics, we said we will write about everything except about love. Because, it’s not that we have anything against love, but every song is about love. So we said everything but love, which was not so hard. And slowly it became the Duvdev road, most of the lyrics. He came into the studio with almost all of the lyrics and maybe I didn’t like one or two words. Duvdev is a pretty crazy guy. He has lots of weird ideas. Lots of them we cannot even write about. We try to write stuff with less meaning, that will open people to think about stuff. Or we write very un-serious lyrics that it’s just private jokes between us and our friends. So please don’t take our lyrics seriously.
AF: So you mean that actually you don’t want to convert vegetarians for real?
Eisen: Why not? No, I’m just kidding… Everything is just funny, don’t take it too seriously. Converting vegetarians, if there is a meaning it’s mostly meaning: convert yourself from listening to regular music and be open to listen to other kinds of music.
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