SAINT VITUS Guitarist Discusses Making Of 'Lillie: F-65'

Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of Metal Assault recently conducted an interview with guitarist Dave Chandler of doom metal legends SAINT VITUS. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Assault: Your new album ["Lillie: F-65"] is your first studio release after a 17-year gap. That's a really long time. First of all, it must be a great feeling to have this album ready for release now.

Chandler: Yeah, it's really cool. It has been a long time, but we are excited about it and we like the way it came out. We're real happy with it, so we hope the fans like it too. It seems to be a pretty cool record.

Metal Assault: You did some shows in the last couple of years leading up to the release of this album. So, that must have made it easier for you guys to get back into the groove and write this album.

Chandler: Yeah, because we actually wrote the song "Blessed Night" on the road, and when we started playing it, people started asking us if it was a song from a new album, which actually gave us the idea to try to put out a new album. It was purely because the fans were asking for it.

Metal Assault: Well, this album is 33 minutes long, and honestly, leaves me hungry for more. So do you think it could have been longer, or did you want it to be as long as it is?

Chandler: It actually worked itself out to that time, because it's sort of like a weird concept thing. I thought about may be trying to rush a song, but then I was like, no, because it's going to sound rushed and it's not going to sound the way the rest of the songs did, as they were all written at the same time and they all flowed together. So when I started checking time, I saw that it's actually the same length as all of our albums. I think there are only two releases we have, "C.O.D." and "Die Healing", that are longer. All the other ones are right around the same length of time. So for this new album I was like, "That's a regular VITUS album!"

Metal Assault: I was checking out another interview that you did a short while ago and you said, whether or not you make the next album will depend on how this one is received. It has been received really well so far. Will that inspire you to write more material now?

Chandler: Well, you know, once we get going out on the road and start doing the shows and stuff, it'll get our creative juices flowing, so to speak. We'll see. We want to take things one step at a time, and we don't want to jump the gun and say we're doing to this and do that, and then not do it for some reason. The record's still on a tentative release date over here in the U.S., which is going to be in a couple of weeks. So we want to see how the people take it and see how they react to the new songs when we play them live, and we'll see what happens. If everybody's into it, we'll probably do something because we'll be thinking of it.

Read the entire interview from Metal Assault.