By: Dr. Matt Warnock
Richie Cavalera seems to have been destined to be a metal singer. Having grown up in a family with ex-Sepultura members Max and Igor Cavalera, as well as having a mother who has managed metal bands since 1983, Richie’s career choice seems to have been laid out for him at a young age. After apprenticing in Max’s current band Soulfly, Richie would often join the band on stage to sing during their concerts, the energetic singer has stepped out on his own as a front man with the band Incite.
Mixing elements of thrash, death-metal and their own unique approach to the genre, Incite is building off of the momentum they gained from their self-produced E.P. with the release of their first full-length album, 2009’s The Slaughter. Produced by Logan Mader, the album is as heavy as it gets, with the band translating their energetic live shows directly down onto their debut disc. The band recently returned from a fifty-seven date tour of Europe and is gearing up for an upcoming tour of the U.S. before heading back across the pond to tackle the European metal scene early in the new year.
With a strong debut record, a slew of live shows under their belts and a front man who comes from one of metal’s most iconoclastic families, Incite seems destined to be one of the genres rising stars in years to come. Incite’s lead singer Richie Cavalera recently sat down with Guitar International Magazine to talk about the bands early successes, growing up in a musical family and how he sees the metal scene today.
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Matt Warnock: Incite self-produced your first E.P. and were able to tour the world because of it. For your first full-length release, The Slaughter, you worked with I Scream records, instead of doing it on your own. What were some of the differences you noticed between self-producing your first album and working with a label on your second?
Richie Cavalera: The one thing is there is definitely a lot less money to be made. Laughs. Everyone is taking their chunk, it’s kind of wild. But, on the other hand I love it. It was a goal that the band set, to be signed to a label, and I Scream is a great label to work with.
We’re dealing with the owner all the time, so it feels kind of like the same vibe as before, when we were doing it on our own. And, we are still doing a lot of the stuff on our own, like contacting other bands to try and get out on tours, promoting our material wherever we go, things are running in the same way they always have
Matt: Have you been able to maintain your artistic freedom with the new label? Did you have to make any concessions with the music in order to sign with I Scream?
Richie: We had a hundred percent say on everything. It was weird, because I Scream has never really had a metal band on their roster before. But with Gloria being our manager, who’s so experienced in the business, it made things run smoothly. She was instrumental in building Roadrunner Records, so she had a lot of great ideas to bring to the table in how to set the marketing up, and how to set our future up.
If we have an idea we just call the owner of I Scream and let him know, and so far he’s been cool with everything, he really puts his faith in the bands he signs. He lets us pick the songs we want to record, the producer we wanted to work with and the tours we want to do. I know that if we had signed with a bigger label they wouldn’t be as flexible and understanding. They’d be asking us to do certain things and to change things, but with I Scream it’s totally cool.
Matt: You worked with produce Logan Mader on The Slaughter, what was it like working with a producer as experienced as Logan?
Richie: He’s the producer we wanted from the get go and we were so happy when it all worked out. Working with him was amazing, he really put himself into every song, and was really a big part of the album. I think he’s one of the best out there right now. I’ve known him for about twelve years or so, which was great since we’re friends and we could have a good time while working on the album.
Matt: How important is it to you to work with a producer, or a manger, that you’ve known for a long time? Do you prefer to have that familiarity in your team, rather than working with someone new?
Richie: That’s big for me, friendship and family are things that I hold dear. Losing family members has really shaped the way I deal with people, and really made those bonds important to me. To have friends and family involved whenever I can is a huge benefit.
I know it’s going to be done the best way, with everyone’s best interest at heart, rather than with a stranger who isn’t as close to the project as friends and family are. Besides, it’s easier to argue with friends and family and still be working together at the end of the day. Laughs.
- Max and Richie Cavalera
Matt: One of the things that you guys have done very well is use the internet, especially MySpace and YouTube, to get word out about the band. Even when you only had the E.P. out, you were still getting hundreds of thousands of views on those sites, augmenting the word of mouth that was being spread at and after your live shows. Did you set out to use the internet as an effective marketing tool for the band right from the start, or did you fall into it as the technology become more popular in general?
Richie: I think we saw the early potential of these things. When Incite first started a buddy of mine showed me MySpace one day, before it was really anything big, and we put a little profile on it and let it go from there. It really grew into a big thing for the band after that. We’re really big on hanging with the fans and making time for them at our shows as much as possible. When we’re on tour we sell our own merch, and I’ll even go on the road with other bands to sell merch, just to spend time with the people, and to get that face time with the fans.
We want to be accessible as much as possible, it’s really important, I think music has lost that connection between the fans and the artists lately. Back in the ’80s bands were out flyering for every show, and really getting out and meeting the fans to press their music. That type of connection with the fans was something we felt right from the get go, and it’s developed even further with sites like MySpace and YouTube. It’s cool to get to take to people in Indonesia, Europe, South America, just all around the world. It’s something that bands didn’t really have the chance to do on a regular basis until a few years ago.
Matt: Incite has become known for your energetic live shows and big stage presence. How difficult was it to translate that energy onto your first full-length record?
Richie: I hate to record. I hate the studio. Being trapped in a little vocal both, not being able to grab the mic, and not being able to really let my aggression get into it physically made it tough to do a whole album like that. But, having Logan there, having him see our live shows, really helped him get as much of that energy out of us in the studio as possible. He was really able to capture our live energy and transfer it onto the record. CD’s will never be as intense as a live concert, but I think we were able to get pretty close on the album.
Matt: When you’re writing new material do you like to write the music first and add lyrics later, or vice-versa?
Richie: We like to get the music done first. We’ll come together in our rehearsal room, though lately it’s been on the road in our dressing room. Our guitarist Dis will bring a riff in, he’ll mess around on a riff or two and then when we get something that catches our attention the drums will jump in with a beat, then the bass and finally the vocals.
I like to write the vocals at the end. I have a lot of lines and subjects in my mind and on paper, so when I get the musical material I can pick and choose the lyrics and lines that I think best fits the music. It’s cool, because all four of us really get involved in the music, everybody has a say. We don’t want to put something out on an album that everyone in the band isn’t happy with. We really clicked right off the bat with writing, it comes very easy for us, and we’ve even begun to write material for the next album.
Matt: The vocal parts to your songs are very intense, and sound like they require a lot from your voice, especially in live shows. With the amount of touring that you guys do, how do you avoid burning your voice out before the tour ends?
Richie: Most of it’s technique and then a bunch of trial by error. I’ve been singing with Soulfly live for about ten years, doing songs here and there with the band. So I was able to learn on my own how to sing, I’ve never been trained. I did those first few Incite tours and I would lose my voice in the first few days, which wasn’t fun or cool at all. But after doing it for a while I’ve learned how to do things properly and my voice is good for a whole tour now.
We just did fifty-seven days straight in Europe and my voice was strong the entire time, it was strong for the entire recording session as well. So just having that experience, and using good technique, really helps. Oh, and a lot of hot tea is always good. Laughs.
Matt: In the early ’90s Grunge and later Alternative Rock seemed to kill the metal scene that was such a strong force in the late ’80s. Lately though, it seems like “old is new” and people are getting back into metal. Have you seen a resurgence in the metal scene lately?
Richie: I would say in Europe one-hundred percent. I think they’ve always had the mindset of loving all kinds of music. We’ll go to a festival there and hear Metal, Pop, Rock and Rap all on the same stage, so it’s very cool. I think with countries like Poland being more opened up now it’s become one of the biggest emerging metal markets in the world.
I was watching a show the other day on CNN about metal in Iran and Iraq, where kids were driving like five-hundred miles just to play a death-metal show for twenty people. It’s so killer to see metal spreading like that. I think people are coming to terms with metal more these days and bands are getting out and doing more of it.
America is still a little more into the mainstream pop stuff, but I think more and more they’re opening up to metal. With Sirius satellite radio having a metal channel, and kids growing up now playing Guitar Hero, I think that the scene’s growing, and that’s cool with me.
Matt: One of the critiques that heavier music always gets is that all of the songs sound the same. How do you react to that kind of comment when you hear it being said or see it in print?
Richie: It’s funny to me, because every other music, let’s take Hip-Hop for example, they use beats that have been used by tons of other artists. Kanye West is one of the biggest names in music today, but he’s still writing songs that take influence, and beats, from bands that have come before him. I think every metal band is different because we’re all saying different things.
If you listen to rock radio today all of the bands are writing about the same thing, and a lot of them sound the same. It’s all about losing some girl and falling in love and stuff. I think everyone is different, everybody has a different reason for writing their music. Nobody wakes up and says “let’s write the riff from Slayer’s Raining Blood and it’ll be cool,” it doesn’t work that way, at least not with the bands I like. Besides, Black Sabbath wrote every great riff there is years ago, and we’re all just copying them now anyway. Laughs.
Matt: You come from an extremely musical family and were exposed to a lot of music from an early age. Do you think you ever had a choice to become anything but a musician, or were you pretty much destined from an early age to do what you do because of your family’s strong musical background?
Richie: It was really my goal, to be a musician, since I can remember. When I was three years old I was asking for a microphone to sing through, and was singing tunes at Christmas with the family. When I was about ten years old Max came into my life and it just amplified it to a whole new level, where I started to think that it could really be a possibility. I would have done it either way, but my family helped me be smart about things and taught me to do things the right way.
My mom’s also been involved in music forever. Going back to the early ’80s she was managing bands. When I was young there would be thirty band members crashed out on our couches, it was always there around me. I’ve always loved to listen to music and see bands perform, so I’ve been lucky to do be able to do it for my career.
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