Corrosion of Conformity singer/guitarist Pepper Keenan said it felt like it had been a while since the heavy metal veterans played Pittsburgh.
A slot last year opening for the Alice Cooper/Judas Priest tour that hit “sheds” all summer/fall — including an Oct. 1 show at the Pavilion at Star Lake — apparently didn’t count.
“I didn’t get into town and get a damn sandwich or anything like that, let’s put it that way,” Keenan said.
With a new album out earlier this month, Corrosion of Conformity will be back in Pittsburgh (well, technically, Millvale but close enough) on May 9 at Mr. Smalls Theatre.
Their first new album in eight years, “Good God / Baad Man” is actually an ambitious double album plotted by Keenan and founding guitarist Woody Weatherman.
“This album was cool because we literally just did it the way we wanted to. Woody and I didn’t have to answer to anybody,” Keenan said with a laugh. “We brought in the best people we could find, and we had a blast doing it. We didn’t do it in a fancy expensive studio. We did this very low-fi and in a cool way that gave us more freedom and time than like per se going to a studio for two weeks and riding a taxi back to the hotel every night. We were not in that environment.”
In a recent phone conversation from Mississippi, Keenan spoke with TribLive about the new album, their 1991 song “Vote With a Bullet,” the band’s new drummer and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
Your new album came out April 3, so did you have a vision in mind for it when you first started to work on it?
Oh, yeah. We don’t put records out that often, but this one is solid. We’re stoked on this thing. We worked on it for just about two years straight. There’s a lot of information on this guy. It’s standing pretty tall right now but we’re stoked.
Did the songs start to dictate the direction that you wanted to take it or did you know that you wanted to go with a double album? Did it just come together that way?
It was all by design, man, everything. The whole thing was exactly the way that we wanted to do it. It was just a lot of information, and we had to make decisions on how to get our across on something this broad. A lot of work went into this whole concept and trying to make it cohesive with as expansive as it is.
How much does your environment affect the writing and everything?
Oh, it’s everything. When you sleep in the same place you’re recording, you’re engrossed in it for months at a time. You’re not clocking into work. You’re there, you’re living it, you’re breathing it, and every day and night, you get an opportunity just to surround yourself with it. It’s kind of weird sometimes. You can get way deep (laughs) and start to lose focus on the outside world, but that’s part of the drill.
Why was now the right time for a double album? Was it just there was that much material?
It wasn’t about the material. It was about the difference of material, because we needed to bifurcate our brains on this because some of the stuff was going one direction, some was going the other. The challenge was how to make it cohesive as one thing. There’s many different types of music.
How did you wind up divvying up the songs for the two halves of the album?
It was a lot of work.
People probably don’t think about the track listing or the work that goes into it, but it sounds like you really had to.
I’ll tell you something I think is interesting, which a lot of people don’t realize. Some artists finish a record, and then they decide what order they’re going to put it in or what song is going to go where. After the fact, after they’ve recorded, say, 12 songs, and then they decide, this one’s going to go here, this one’s going to go there. And to me, that always kind of freaks me out when people think like that, because the way I envision it is it would be like, as if somebody was writing a novel. You don’t just switch chapters around. This thing was mapped out before we even started tracking the record. We had already spent so much time organizing this thing that we knew how it was going to flow before we got too deep into the recording process already, so it was all by design.
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So it sounds like this album might be better off listened to as an album versus on shuffle. Would that be disheartening to hear the shuffle?
It would be. Well, I’ll tell you something that’s bizarre, because it’s two albums, and when you actually buy the vinyl, it’s two. There’s a limited edition one, it’s actually two separate records. If you lose one, you’re screwed. It’s not a gatefold – there’s two albums packaged together. The other day, I played the second album first, I switched it around, and it still works. Each album has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s not a series of songs strung together.
It had been eight years in between albums, so was new music sort of on the back burner at the time?
I mean, eight years minus (expletive) covid, right? (laughs) We were touring for five of those years. Really, we started working on this record about two and a half years ago.
With the album title of “Good God / Baad Man,” what does that mean to you?
It’s just a since the dawn of time kind of thing, the origins of man, we’ve been fighting with each other since a monkey picked up a stick. It’s just a broad generalization of the state of the human condition.
In the song “Good God?/Final Dawn,” there’s the lyric of “A different path, another way, regrets are none on judgment day.” Do you look back on any moments in the band’s career as regrets?
No, it’s just sometimes it’s important to look backwards and make sure that you made wise decisions or even as you’re moving forward in your future, make sure you’re making wise decisions so you don’t look back on mistakes or regrets that you have.
With the headline tour starting in a few weeks, have you figured out which songs from the new album you’ll be adding to the live set?
We’ve been debating all that right now. It’s a lot of information. There’s a lot of songs that we like playing. We’ll see. We got so many damn songs at this point in our career, like lots of bands who have this kind of longevity, but we’re looking at some deep tracks. It’s going to be all over the place, man. We really haven’t gotten there yet. We might be switching it every day.
After listening to the album, it seemed like “Run For Your Life” would be a good set closer before the encore.
That’s a good one, yeah. It’s nine minutes long, but it’s a good one.
With “Vote With a Bullet,” do you think that song holds a little bit more relevance now with all the frustration people have with the current political system?
That song comes in and out of fashion every four years, bud, you know what I mean? It’s a constant, even in a global range when we play it in different countries. It’s interesting.
You have a new drummer, Nick Shabatura, so how’s that adjustment been going so far?
He’s awesome. We’re super stoked to have him. We’ve been through a lot with drummers in the past, with Reed (Mullin, who died in 2020) and everything, and I think we’ve finally come around to full closure. Stanton (Moore), who played on the record, has been a fantastic help getting our point across. Nick is a great guy. He was suggested by Charlie Benante from Anthrax, which was awesome. So if someone like Charlie suggests a drummer (laughs), you better listen, and we did. And he said, this is your guy, and I’d never heard of Nick or anything. I tracked him down, and I was like, fucking Charlie’s right. (laughs) That was awesome of him to think of us.
If you go
Who: Corrosion of Conformity, Whores, Crobot
When: 7:30 p.m. May 9
Where: Mr. Smalls Theatre, Millvale
Tickets: Starting at $41.16, ticketweb.com