Bad Religion recently spoke to Billboard about their freshly released new album, New Maps of Hell. Guitarist, songwriter and co-founder Brett Gurewitz explains that the track “New Dark Ages” was “inspired by the pervasive anti-intellectualism in the U.S., which I guess is personified by the kind of macho religious-ity of George Bush.”
He goes on to explain:
If anything, it’s given a touch of sadness and a touch of resignation to our reflectiveness as a band. I think maybe now, while we’re moving toward the end of Bush’s term — and having all the wreckage that he’s created to deal with in his aftermath — it’s made us more sad than angry.
Don’t forget, we did a split 7-inch with [activist] Noam Chomsky protesting the first Gulf War, and now we find ourselves back in war,” he adds. “It really almost makes you feel hopeless, like that nothing ever changes — or that things change, but only for the worse.
Brett also revealed that he hoped the record would be a double-disc album, saying:
I had this sort of grand plan for a really interesting record where we would use different kinds of recording techniques,” he says. That included “going back to our old style, and actually doing some real garage-y, eight-track stuff like we did in the old days and then mixing that in with modern recording techniques, and having — dare I say — a punk-rock ‘White Album’ kind of thing — a sonically inconsistent record.
Source Bad Religion recently spoke to Billboard about their freshly released new album, New Maps of Hell. Guitarist, songwriter and co-founder Brett Gurewitz explains that the track “New Dark Ages” was “inspired by the pervasive anti-intellectualism in the U.S., which I guess is personified by the kind of macho religious-ity of George Bush.”
He goes on to explain:
If anything, it’s given a touch of sadness and a touch of resignation to our reflectiveness as a band. I think maybe now, while we’re moving toward the end of Bush’s term — and having all the wreckage that he’s created to deal with in his aftermath — it’s made us more sad than angry.
Don’t forget, we did a split 7-inch with [activist] Noam Chomsky protesting the first Gulf War, and now we find ourselves back in war,” he adds. “It really almost makes you feel hopeless, like that nothing ever changes — or that things change, but only for the worse.
Brett also revealed that he hoped the record would be a double-disc album, saying:
I had this sort of grand plan for a really interesting record where we would use different kinds of recording techniques,” he says. That included “going back to our old style, and actually doing some real garage-y, eight-track stuff like we did in the old days and then mixing that in with modern recording techniques, and having — dare I say — a punk-rock ‘White Album’ kind of thing — a sonically inconsistent record.