If you think about history, it isn’t really the past always, but sometimes it’s the present. History is a living thing. It happens every second. What we just started the conversation with is history. So you can’t always look at things on a very linear calendar or watch, whatever element of time keeping, especially when you’re in sort of a ''Twilight Zone'', 24/7 confusion of losing track of what day it is. It’s very difficult to remember what day it is and let someone tell you, or if you have a calendar, but in some ways I kind of found that freeing, even though that this record was completed far before any of this happened to the world. We finished in January. And [the song] “WE ARE CHAOS” was written at least a year and a half ago, initially lyrically. It was more me thinking about how I can relate to the rest of the world, emotionally and mentally, and not dwelling on politics or religion so much, although there are political and religious references in there. But I suppose they’re more loose to interpretation because I wanted the record to be a book.

I wanted it to be like any movie or any great book or any painting or any poem that it becomes part of the listener’s experience, not just mine. And it just reminds me of what I got out of my favorite records growing up, whether it be [David Bowie’s] ''Diamond Dogs'' or <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Alice Cooper]]’s<nowiki>]</nowiki> ''Welcome to My Nightmare'' or [Pink Floyd’s] ''The Wall'' or something where you feel like you’re a part of something bigger that you can insert yourself into. And I think escapism is an important thing to have now. I wasn’t necessarily anticipating being in lockdown when I wrote the record, but it happens to be a good escape for me to have done it and to listen to it now, and to see what people will think when it comes out. Hopefully, it will give them a way to interpret it in a way that maybe I didn’t even realize.

I think when Shooter and I first met, it must’ve been four or five years ago, it’s when I was doing ''Sons of Anarchy''. We originally were asked to do a song together for the show, but we ended up not wanting to do that because we didn’t really like the constraints that we were given at the time — but we wanted to work together. And then I ended up being on ''Sons of Anarchy'' as an actor. We didn’t work together until I sang on his “[[Cat People (Putting Out Fire)|Cat People]]” cover on his album. And then our relationship developed that’s when we started talking about other influences and sharing different ones. And he would share with me like old Kinks songs and T. Rex, and we talked about a lot of the things that we really were fascinated with.

I mentioned to him, I said, “Have you ever heard the 12-string acoustic guitars in Love and Rockets songs?” because I really liked the way that they sound. And that, of course, has an element of Bowie in it, and of course, has an element of glam rock. We sat down and we were listening to a lot of songs in the world of Echo & The Bunnymen to Joy Division to Bauhaus and ''Scary Monsters'' by Bowie — it’s a tough call to say what’s my favorite record of Bowie’s but Scary Monsters was the first one, so it nostalgically always rings true. But ''Diamond Dogs'' is emotionally the one that I attached myself to more, but it’s a tough call.

And I think ''Ziggy Stardust'' was the one that really had an influence on the earlier part of my career with ''[[Antichrist Superstar]]''. Although the songs did not sound glam rock, in a sense, it was just the general idea of making a story that you really could just asking yourself, “Well, who is he? What is this about?” And it has a loneliness to it.

[Shooter and I] did notice together, bonding over music, that there was a period of songs that we found ourselves most attached to — the whole new wave era had this element of distance and sort of bleakness. It wasn’t sad, it was just almost dreary, but it was alluring in a way. it was almost emotionless, but it had a lot of feeling behind it. And that’s probably what drove me to “[[Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)|Sweet Dreams]]” and things like that early on in life, too.

 

And now we’ve sort of painted ourselves into the end of the world as human beings, but I think there is a hope in it. And there’s always a hope in art, or you wouldn’t make art. You can’t be a nihilist and an artist at the same time, it’s not possible, but that song and the video will be something quite different than [the song “WE ARE CHAOS”]. And I think that it would’ve been easy to release [“DON’T CHASE THE DEAD”] first, but I think that choosing “WE ARE CHAOS” was something that I had decided with Shooter that was a much more unusual approach to the way we introduced the album because people won’t expect the way it sounds. And in the same sense, it’s what I did with “[[The Dope Show]]”. I suppose that there’ll be a comparison of something sounding so drastically different than what you expected from ''[[Antichrist Superstar]]'' to ''[[Mechanical Animals]]''.