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Yeah we started in 1990 out of Orange County, California. I started the band and we've been going ever since, about sixteen years now.

When we first started, we really didn't even know what the hell we were doing. We just started writing music and we had a friend that knew one of the guys at Relapse, and at that time Relapse was still doing stuff out of their basement and they'd never even released a CD. At that time, the grindcore scene was kind of up-and-coming, it was growing but it was still way more underground than how the scene is now and they just said "Hey, let's do a full length CD" and we didn't have enough material and we were like, uhhhh, we didn't know what the hell to do. So we said Ok, we're going to go in the studio and do some demo recordings, four or five new songs, and we ended up doing that with Raymond Herrera of Fear Factory and we sent that to them and they liked it. We already had a seven inch previously in 91, so they kinda put that together and that was our first CD with them. It was a mixture of that first seven inch and those new tracks we had but we didn't actually put our first full length record out until 1997. We've just always had problems and things always came up in the band. That's why we had a few seven inches before we put out an album. Drummer problems, or maybe something else. We've kind of been through a lot.

The current lineup right now is Brian Fajardo (of Noisear) playing drums and he's done the Phobia / Rotten Sound tour with us. He's toured with us before and there's a comfortable vibe there. Leon (Del Muerte of Exhumed, Impaled and Intronaut) has been a friend of ours for a long time and he's coming in, doing the bass duties. I can't really tell what's going to happen after this tour or three months down the line. Me and Steve Burda are pretty much the originals, we've been around since 1990. I think we just accumulate so many friends and people that we feel comfortable with that I don't think we'll ever have the problem of not being able to do a tour because of drummers. Danny Walker who played on the new record, he's going to be in Europe with his other band, so Brian came and did this tour. It all just really fell into place really easily. We all connect really well (the lineup) is really sturdy.

We all have jobs. We all work. I have kids, Steve works, Leon works, Brian works. We're domesticated people, but we still enjoy playing music. I play bass in Final Conflict. Anything from going to shows, record shopping, pretty much anything anybody else does. We're pretty much normal.

This tour has actually been like "Man, I'm old." This tour has actually been harder. Hard trying to move my ass on stage. I always consume a lot of alcohol, which isn't healthy, but I'm not drinking as much. It's actually been really good. I mean it's actually been a less sickly tour, I would say. Less partying, a little more mature in a way.

I think to tell you the truth this tour has actually limited our crowd. It's got a higher door price. If we did our own tour, we'd make a lot more money and the shows would actually be a lot bigger on our own. But since you have a package tour, more bands means you have to have a bigger guarantee. We do our own tours and a lot of kids come out. Other tours it's been less, but we still get a lot of politically charged kids that still come to the shows and realize that it's a package and that they have to pay a little bit more. Some kids don't want to deal with that, they want to be all like "fuck that," but its been alright. I think package tours are good because you have bands like us and Disfear that are more on the punk side where Misery Index may have some punk ideals but they're more metal. It does bring people together and I think package tours like this are important when it comes to that.

Oh yeah. For a lot of kids, it's their first record by Phobia. Definitely. And the production's way better than we've ever had. We actually had a producer, which I don't mind. Producers are so much more a part of the bands these days, as opposed to the punk scene where it's more lyrical and really raw sounding. Punk kids don't necessarily care about production as much. Whereas in the metal scene, with Willowtip, it caters more to that Relapse kind of crowd. It's a totally different vibe. I don't really dig all of it, but there are positives to it.

Most of the kids I know that are the really traditional Phobia fans love the new record because it's still punk influenced, it's still grind as fuck, it's still our old vibe. It's just got a heavier, bigger sound. You can't complain about that. You can't. I don't give a shit. I don't want to buy a record and have it sound like crap. I think that it's a progression in the band definitely, and I'm actually really excited about having a record I know sounds good.

In a lot of our interviews people say that our sounds hasn't really changed, that we're still into the punk roots with a little bit of metal. We haven't really changed much. I still like to write with the same formula and I think that's what Phobia's all about. It isn't something that it's all we do. Neurosis has been a working band for so many years and touring for so many years and every band's got the right to be creative and want to change. You can lose fans because of that. You'll always have kids who say "Well, I like their older shit." I don't care. People don't really say that about Phobia because we kind of keep our same formula and actually, the formula of our songs…we have a lot of pop structure to our songs. We've got verses, pre-choruses and the choruses and the way we write our songs is very commercial in a sense. A lot of sing-alongs. If you listen to the new record, you've got songs like "Let's Get Pissed" that are very Oi influenced, stuff that I grew up on. So there's a lot of that influence on the record and that's why I'm really proud. Our style hasn't changed much. The production's changed, but I think the songwriting can be just as good and just as appealing.

I was always really into song structures like that. Really pounding the main point into someone's head. Like "So Full Of Hate," you just go so full of hate, so full of hate, you're just pounding, you go to the verse and keep pounding, you'll wake up singing it. That song has a lot of…I'll tell you what it is about this album, is that song is actually so hard to project live vocally. It's like "ugh." That's where the old part comes back. I feel like I need a respirator up there or something.

I think that there's definitely positives to it. It goes back to the fact that we've been around so long. We used to lick stamps and we used to write. We'd write to a band and that's how we'd network back in the day. We tape-traded, all my early demos, I would lick stamps. I liked that and I'm proud to be a part of that because it's very personal, very intimate in a way when you write to somebody, but you can't escape that now we all deal with computers and it makes it a lot easier. A lot of people don't even flyer any more, they just post everything. It does make it a lot easier, but it has to do with the evolution of everything. Things are harder then and they're easier now. It still affects third world countries. We still have a P.O. Box. We still get letters from Malaysia, Indonesia, from people that don't have a computer. So we're still putting the pen to the paper, we're still licking stamps and doing that. A lot of bands won't deal with that, but we won't discredit our fans anywhere in the world. We're a DIY band pretty much. We've always done it that way, we always will do it that way. It doesn't matter if we go on tour with a huge ass metal band. We still have our ideals. We just like to do different things and try different things. We have the right to do that as a band, to try and progress and gain new fans.

Well, a lot of times we do our own tours and kinda stick to our own guns but you understand when you do, let's say, a metal tour, you've got a bunch of metallers that are not socially conscious, that really don't care what's going on. You have to deal with a lot of people that give you the finger, they just want to see the metal band. They're not as, I don't want to say open-minded, because that's kind of like, I don't want to point any person out, but it seems like it's like that.

Very much less actively conscious, but maybe by listening to us, a grindcore band, and reading the lyrics, maybe it makes sense. I don't know. I'd like to hope that it would somehow make a change, you know what I'm saying? Do something positive, because a lot of kids have a one track mind. That's how it is and I feel sad for those people.

I think that writing Cruel was a very stressful album in the making. It was one of those things that was really hard, we were dealing with scheduling problems. The thing I like about Cruel is that I actually go back to my old roots. "Scientific Fraud." Singing against anti-vivisection. I haven't done that in years. It was kind of re-evaluating your beliefs. Putting that on paper, was kind of like delivering "still down," it's been so long, we're still doing this. "Cruel" is about birth/death, living in society, things haven't changed, life is still cruel. It's nothing that's so far off anything we've done before. It's like Get Up And Kill, it's very angry, there's a lot of built up anger, and music, to me, is like therapy. That's what I want to do. I want to lay it out there. I don't want to preach to the choir all the time. I sing songs about my kids. I sing songs about personal experiences. I could be fucking hanging out with my friends and playing fucking fooseball. I don't like to consider us to be this really politically charged band. We have a political opinion, we have a political agenda, but you could ask any person on the street "What do you think of George Bush?" and he's going to have an opinion. That doesn't make him a political person. We're a punk band. We sing about what we want. We do what we want to do, and the current of this band has always been kind of politically charged and that's important, especially in the times that we're in and the situations that we're in. It's just more of a personal album for me. It's really a lot of my thoughts. The song "Numb" is about my son, things I've been through, my relationship with him. It's really personal. You can tell there's basic Phobia, there are politics involved, social awareness, re-evaluating my vegetarianism. It's an important album for me, definitely.

Definitely not. You would think so sometimes, but you don't understand that you have to live life to write a record. Any band that's a D-beat band can write bombs dropping, children crying. Whatever, that's fine. I was influenced by Discharge, but I've grown as a person. I've lived my life. I'm thirty-five now. My first grindcore band was in '88. I used to emulate a lot of bands. You don't emulate your influences so much, but you still have them in your style of writing. You have to live life. I've been through a lot of things in sixteen years so every album is a part of my life. So I would say I definitely still have my same influences, but I've grown in my songwriting and not tried to emulate so much what everybody else does. I think every band has that. I think every band has their point of progression, of not trying to emulate people so much.

Yeah, I've though about that. I thought about that, but I take pride in the things we've done and we weren't always skilled in the arts of production and we never really cared and we'd go do it for free or we'd do this and that, but I definitely think, now, that we can't go backwards. That our next release has gotta be as good. We don't wanna go back. We did that. We're not ashamed of anything we've done. It's not gonna be accessible. People talk shit on production all the time, but what can you do? Look at it this way: I think it's gonna be ok. We want to plan an EP, we've got a split with Pig Destroyer coming out and I'm going to have Scott Hull produce that stuff. He knows what he's doing. He knows the history of the band. We've been friends with him for a long time so I trust his whole input completely.

I think working with him was really good, we've known him for a long time and it was really easy. We pretty much recorded the record in Orange County, California. Everything got sent over in files to him, in his studio in MP3s, he'd say "Change this" or "Change that." There was a lot of positives to it, but I also like to be there for the mixing. But with a budget and everything that you're working with, it's probably just better this way. He's not that expensive, he knows what he's doing and I trust him. It wasn't like "I don't know this guy," or "what's this guy going to do to our record" or "will he make us not be us?" You think about things like that. I think with the production and everything it was actually kind of hard for us to grasp onto. It doesn't really sound like us. It kind of grew on us.

[At this point, we took a short break and the Real TV incident came up in conversation. Despite Shane's reluctance to talk about it yet again, I felt that I'd be remiss if we didn't cover that at least briefly here so when we began again, I started with that.]

NO!

OK. Our translator on tour was a guy named Kevin and he was actually teaching English in Kobei and, uh, it's a really akward thing because Japanese people are actually very shy people and very respectful people. Very non-violent people. This guy must have been a bad seed or something because our translator came up to us and said "Hey, you guys. This guy is out of wack. He always starts shit at shows. He just got out of jail for beating his wife up." And we were just backstage drinking with this guy and we were just talking and we start getting all heated up, all fiery. Pre-show, he actually got into a fight with one of my friends, one of the guys from Corrupted, which was the band we were touring with at that time. He broke my friend's eye open and we were all fired up, but we decided to leave it along and let it go, so that was the first strike. So we hit the stage. I was hanging with this guy, so there wasn't really a bad vibe, but I had been warned about him and he had just busted my friend's eye open and I ain't taking shit from nobody. So I just get on stage and during the fourth song, he starts grabbing the mic. Kids always grab the mic, I don't care about that, but he was grabbing my arm and this and that, he got up on stage with his little cane- he had a little cane. So I pushed him and we started fighting and they threw him out of the club. He was out of the club and we started regrouping and got on stage again and he comes running through the door. They don't have security really there. He jumps on stage and he had a key on him or something and we thought it was a knife, so we fucking hit him again and he goes down and they took him out of the club again. Third time, he comes running back and we were like "Oh, Shit!" so the dude gets up there and that's when Bruce hit him with the bass and he passed out on the stage. Bruce cracked his head open. We were like "Fuck this, let's pack this shit up," so we go backstage, which is upstairs. He gets up after like ten minutes, grabs a bottle, breaks down our door backstage, jumps on Bruce and we're fighting again. Finally, he just kinda gets up and walks out and we were in Tokyo like four days later and he called and apologized. He was just a mess. He was an angry man, and that's odd in Japan because Japanese people are very shy, very respectful people. We were fine. We only got to play four songs and that's not what you want to happen on tour. You just want to rock. So that was the situation.

Canada won't let me in, dude. I have a record, so…you can't have any record in Canada, even drunk driving. The Canadian border is really hard to get in. It's like they don't like Americans or something. Americans in general are very aggressive people. It's a very aggressive society. Europeans, it's a totally different culture. They're more mellow, I think. You come to America and there's always violent shows, it's always violent. I never see any fights at European shows. I'm sure they do happen, but it's just different, totally different from touring here. Europeans show their appreciation for bands differently than Americans do. Like I said, Americans are a little more hostile, they're stagediving or a little more out of control, where Europeans do a little more headbanging.

[At this point, some random kid with an afro walks up and disrupts the interview. We were puzzled.]

Kid: Are you in one of the bands?

Yeah, I sing in Phobia.

Kid: I thought so. What's going on?

We're just doing an interview right now, so…

Kid: Sorry if I scared you, I'm trying to look for a job this summer and I play bass, so I'm like, why don't I just play in a douche-y wedding band!

You play in a wedding band? What are you, the wedding singer, man?

Kid: Yeah, I might do that. So I just called this guy and decided to scare the shit out of him. Which is why I was yelling.

[We hadn't heard any yelling. The kid didn't leave, but he did stop talking. The interview continued.]

I believe it, man, because Americans are fat. The thing about my friends from Europe, they come over and say "Americans, you're all fat." It's because we have twenty-four hour anything you want, we have convenience everything. You go to Europe and you get hungry at two in the morning, they don't got no Denny's. No Taco Bell. I'll go get drunk tonight and go eat my ass off until six in the morning. We have a lot more health problems too in America.

Marco, Dino, Raymond, another Raymond, Danny Walker, Brian Fajardo, Freeway, um…that's all I know. Oh! Phil Martinez, John Haddad and uh, that's it.

[He answered in eighteen seconds, but forgot Matt Mills.]