Patrick, along with the DeLeo brothers (formerly of Stone Temple Pilots) and Ray Luzier, are now known as Army of Anyone, a sort of hybrid band comprised of notes of Filer and STP. Patrick met Dean and Robert DeLeo in Boston at a local radio festival. “We played a few shows together and we were both big fans of each other’s music,” Patrick said. “We were just friends, and about two years ago, I was working on Filter material. I had written a bunch of songs and figured I needed help. I was about thirty songs in and I was getting a little tired. I called them up and they came over to my house and we wrote a song called “A Better Place,” which is the fourth song on the record and that’s pretty much it. That’s how we got together.”
Patrick was already prolific in his writing, having over thirty songs already before beginning his collaboration with the DeLeos. But even so, he seems to be in awe of what Dean and Richard are putting out together. “I’m kind of slower than they are. I mean, I take my time when we write. They are pretty fast. They have fifty songs on tap and they have like one hundred micro cassettes of stuff they were working on for years. But most of the stuff we have [for Army of Anyone] was written on the spot right there.” Patrick and the DeLeos managed to write so much material that all of Patrick’s earlier work was scrapped, and the best new songs were chosen for the album. “The thirty songs I had for the Filter album I put aside and then we wrote thirty songs together. Then we cut it down to about twenty-six and then cut it down from twenty-six to eleven and that’s what’s on the record.”
Even though the original intent of the collaboration was to write new music for Patrick’s band Filter, something about what was created made them want to begin a whole new project. “The thing is,” Patrick said, “once they started playing, it is so identifiably them that, you know, it’s the kind of thing where wow, it really doesn’t sound like Filter anymore. It’s great. It’s a beautiful song, but it doesn’t sound like Filter anymore. And at the same time, you know, remember I’m a tenor, so it doesn’t sound like STP either, so we called it something brand new. [We] called it Army of Anyone, and we made it a totally new band.”
After writing all of the songs for their new self-titled album, Patrick and the DeLeos recruited Ray Luzier (former drummer for David Lee Roth) to complete the package. Although he didn’t have too much creative input, Luzier was a very important piece of the puzzle. “You know, the chords and stuff…the music and melodies, tend to mostly come from us. We actually did all the demos for the songs without Ray and then we added Ray to the recordings. We worked stuff around his drumming and he worked his drumming around us. You know, he definitely was an integral part of the sound of this record, that’s for sure.”
So far, Army of Anyone has appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with Conan O’Brien, and they’ve had a few live performances, their first one in Philadelphia. Each performance, Patrick feels, has gotten better. “The funny thing is, we started off doing Leno. We went straight for the mics, and it was fun, and we did, you know, get into it a little bit, but for us that was our first live performance, as far as electric. We’ve done all these acoustic things but this is the first time [I was] onstage with these guys.” In Patrick’s life, as in the life of any musician, playing live really makes the band gel together. “At this day and age, you can record all this stuff as a band and you don’t play live together until you’re … releasing a record. That’s what I did with Filter,” Patrick said, “and it has its drawbacks. You really need some time on the road.”
Besides already releasing an album, preparing for a tour, and being aired by major television networks, Army of Anyone is making waves in the CD industry. As many know, the recent rise of Internet music is putting a serious strain on CD profits. Army of Anyone has a groundbreaking new deal with EMI that will allow them to take about fifty percent of the profits that they pull in. “What the reality is, is that we’re signed to a management to put out CD’s as well. The CD industry, to put it in a few words, is reacting to the Internet by essentially folding, and just crumbling and withering and dying. The music industry is flourishing. Kids are finding bands online. They’re not necessarily buying as many CD’s as they used to, and we’re all trying to figure out how we’re going to structure getting paid. But I’ll tell you what: our management is our biggest proponent now as opposed to our CD manufacturers. We’re thinking of new ways to get people to buy our CDs. We’re working with our managers, we’re working with EMI, but the main thing is, we’re not signed to a record label. We’re signed to a music label. And because of our standing in the music industry, we knew we were going to sell some records. We cut a deal with our management and, as opposed to taking ninety percent of our royalties, they’re taking fifty. We’re fifty/fifty partners with our managers.”
This new payment structure means huge things for musicians, both famous and as of yet undiscovered ones. “When we go gold,” Patrick said, “that actually means something. It means holy shit, we got a lot of money, so we can do another record. Whereas, if we were over in the CD industry…[we’d] have to sell double platinum to maybe do another record.” Patrick feels that this new pro-musician payment structure is “totally the wave of the future.”
Richard Patrick is celebrating four years of sobriety and is looking forward to a clean and clear tour. “[Alcoholism] was a gigantic huge thorn in my side for a long time and … the way I’m singing now and the way I could have sung ten years ago having not been such a crazy alcoholic would have been a gigantic change in my life.” In order to change his life, Patrick changed everything. “I moved to Los Angeles. I got a new manager. And I was really just…weighing my options on everything.” The only things that remained in Patrick’s life after September 28th, 2002, the date of his sobriety, are his cats, and Tina, the woman he recently married.
For all the fans that want to know what’s happening to Filter, Patrick says that he isn’t yet ready to give it up. “[I] can’t say that I wanna totally destroy Filter, you know what I mean? I have all those songs and I just - we live in a crazy world, and there’s a lot of things that can happen. And I can’t just put a fork into Filter right now. I can’t see myself doing it. It was my baby for so long, but having said that, this is the priority. This band is my priority. It’s something I love doing and I love working with Robert and Dean and as long as we keep clicking the way we are, I think we’re going to keep making music for a long time, as long as there’s an audience for it.”
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walta
Written by Guest on 2007-02-25 21:38:59
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