After 19 years, the world finally got another taste of Failure yesterday when The Heart is a Monster was unleashed upon the populace. Despite the two decade intermission between their latest album and their previous, the alt-rock touchstone Fantastic Planet, the band sounds as strong as ever. It’s not always easy to achieve greatness on a comeback album; fans have had years to covet new material, creating an expectation that, for many bands, would be impossible to live up to. But Failure is not just any band. They not only lived up to the expectation, they exceeded what we thought was even possible: Living up to the beauty and the glory of Fantastic Planet.
It’s been a long road to The Heart is a Monster. Band members Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards hadn’t spoken in years. After their reconnection, the two put their toes into the water with a reunion show in Los Angeles early last year, just to gauge the temperature. To their surprise, the fires of Failure hadn’t diminished in the slightest in their absence—in fact, they were burning hotter than ever. The show sold out in what can be measured in seconds, and eventually led to a return to touring with an opening slot on last year’s Tool tour, as well as festival appearances.
This all culminated into the album that was gifted to us yesterday. I had the chance to catch up with Greg Edwards to discuss the return of Failure and how their legacy has continued to grow over the years, as well as some of the deeper meanings behind The Heart is a Monster.
The Heart is a Monster is available now, check out our review here!
James Roberts: I’ve been giving The Heart is a Monster a good listen for the last couple of days, and the first thing I noticed was that it begins with “Segue 4,” continuing where you left off on Fantastic Planet. Is there a relationship between these records at all?
Greg Edwards: The first relationship is just that we’re aware of what Fantastic Planet is and represents and what it sounds like. I think that we just didn’t want to make another Fantastic Planet. I think that would probably make me vomit in my mouth to try to do that. That never even came up. We weren’t trying to recapture anything from that record. It was very important to us that we keep something that’s essential about Failure. There’s some thread or spine that’s essential about Failure, at least to me, that I can hear running through Comfort, Magnified, and Fantastic Planet. We wanted to keep that fundamental, essential kind of soul going. But we want to be dressed in a very different costume.
So there’s no thematic relationship or this can’t be viewed as like a sequel or anything?
There [are] some lyrical touchbacks, and even musical motifs that sort of reference back to it. I guess there’s this quote, something I said, “we went from outer space [on Fantastic Planet] to inner space [on The Heart is a Monster].” That’s kind of a cute soundbite, but Fantastic Planet really used space as a metaphor for detachment from your life, or maybe the self that you thought you were, and from the people around you and from being able to make meaningful connections and the struggle to find love. It’s looking back at your life, which seems distant to you. This one, you’re right in the midst of your life and maybe there’s great upheaval and changes going on, where you try to locate yourself in the midst of all that. What do you find? Because everybody goes through life, and goes through all these changes, but is there something enduring about each one of us? Is there a stamp to each of our personalities as we move through existence? Or is that really just an idea that we like to have, and the reality is that there really is nothing like a self? Where Fantastic Planet used space—if you have to say that Fantastic Planet used something as a metaphor, it’s space—this record is using dreams and sleep as a metaphor almost for death. It’s not even a metaphor, it’s a very real fact that every time we go to sleep we essentially lose ourselves completely. In deep sleep, not even dreams, we almost cease to exist. It’s like the same as it was before we were born. We aren’t even there. In dreams, you basically can become anyone or anything. So that was kind of the idea that came up around the concept of “A.M. amnesia.” Every morning we have to kind of reconstruct our personalities before we get out of bed and pretend that we have personalities to begin with.
That’s interesting. I’m wondering if there’s kind of a metaphor for the band in there. To carry the metaphor, in a sense Failure has been kind of hibernating all these years, asleep, and now you’re waking up. Do you think that there’s a connection there or am I reaching?
You know, I like that a lot. I actually never thought about that, but that has a nice symmetry with the whole idea and that kind of works. Even that “Segue 4” when I was coming up with those sounds and recording that, what I liked about it is it sounded like some sort of being or machine or consciousness sort of slowly bubbling towards awareness or towards some sort of form. I was definitely thinking about the amount of time that had passed in between, but I never thought of what you thought of. I should have. That’s a good way of looking at it.
So after that long absence, I know that you and Ken [Andrews] reconnected on a personal level before you started getting to work, but once you got down to business, was it difficult to get back into that Failure mindset?
No, not at all. The way that Ken and I complement each other collaboratively, we’re so different as people, it just works. It works the way that it always works. Which is there’s enough common ground for us to both know and understand what we’re trying to do, but generally we’re different enough in our skills and talents that if one person reaches a tough spot the other person usually has the ability to solve that quickly. That keeps it from ever getting stagnant. We always seem to be quickly solving songs, finishing out arrangements, getting the lyrics done. It rolls right along because of the dynamic we have.
In regards to the return of Failure, you started out like so many bands and just announced a single show, which later expanded into a tour, but that first show sold out basically in seconds. Was that a shock to you?
That was definitely a shock. I didn’t expect anything like that. And then people came from all over the U.S. for that show! I think we knew that we had a little cultish following of people and maybe a few people along the way had discovered us over the years, but I really was skeptical. Maybe I was the most skeptical about the interest. It was a nice surprise.
How did it feel to get back to that and to be playing those old songs again?
It felt great because even if the songs were from a long time ago or you’ve heard the songs a lot, to actually take them out into the live setting and then play them for people who are so familiar with these songs and, in most cases, have never heard them live. That was like a revelation to get all that energy back from the audience. That was the thing that I was not prepared for, just how large a component of the show the audience was. They were giving so much back, having become so involved in the music and having waited so long for something that most of them probably thought would never happen.
Did you notice a shift in audience dynamic? For example, when Fantastic Planet first came out, I was only 14 and was little bit too entrenched in my punk rock phase. I really didn’t discover Failure until A Perfect Circle covered “Nurse Who Loved Me.” So you had that cover and then Paramore covered “Stuck on You.” I’m wondering if you noticed a change in the type of fan you’re getting thanks to these covers.
Everything expands. We’ve heard quite a few accounts of parents turning their kids onto Failure. Failure really was not around for that long as a live touring act, and a lot of the touring that we did was associated with Tool. Especially that first real tour we did for Magnified. We pick up a lot of fans through Tool. One thing about Tool, especially back then, is that it is predominantly male and that seemed to stick with us through Fantastic Planet. We noticed that we really had very few females in the audience. I think that aside from it being nice to see females in the audience [these days] it’s nice to know that the band has a wider appeal then what it sort of seemed like before we broke up. It sort of felt like “how are we going to get out of that?” We were just so associated with this group of fans that had seen us when we were opening for Tool. Now when I look out at the audience it’s surprisingly young, that’s what I’m really surprised at. I always expect to look out and see a bunch of people that liked the band back in the 90’s [on] a nostalgia reflex, they just want to have their little nostalgia fix. But it really is not that. That’s incredibly encouraging to me. That would be kind of a drag.
It seems to me that it would be kind of humbling to have that experience, especially with the worry that you’re just going to be another nostalgia act.
Yeah that’s my fear. That was always a fight, like if we’re going to do this we wanted to make sure that we were really doing something relevant and that we were not just coming back together and going out and playing songs that had already been written. We wanted to make sure that we were going to create something new and that it was going to be something with as much value as the last record. It is really humbling [when] people really like something that you created. Especially in this situation.
Was seeing the audience and seeing how the dynamics have changed, was that invigorating to the writing process as you were working on the new record?
When you know that you have people that are really excited and love the music and love the band, and the band means something to them, and it’s been this long, yeah the idea of making another record is exciting. It’s also terrifying though because it’s a big responsibility. Even if we made something that we think is really good and of value, you have to accept that a lot of people—people that love the band—are probably going to be disappointed with it, simply because you’ve actually met the requirements that you set for yourself, being that we didn’t want to just make another Fantastic Planet, and I think I can’t really blame them, but [they] probably just want to hear Fantastic Planet continued. They might be put off by certain things on the record at first, but hopefully there’s something there that’ll keep them coming back and listening and they’ll see what we’re doing, and how it is really the logical follow up.
So from that first reunion show onward, was it always a goal to get back to writing a record or was it more of a play it by ear and see how it goes kind of thing?
It was always play it by ear and see how it goes, because we thought “okay maybe we can do an EP, maaaybe we can do a full length record,” but the main thing was if we don’t have the quality or we don’t have the momentum or the capacity, if we don’t have whatever that thing is to fill out a record with all the songs that are necessary, then let’s not do a record. That was always a possibility, that we just would leave it at the reunion. After we had finished the tour, I think there was so much enthusiasm from the audience that we really felt an obligation to make a full record. That’s what we wanted to do but there was a lot of pressure to not fuck it up and make a complete piece of shit. I’m pretty certain we didn’t do that. I’m pleased to see how the fans react when they have a complete record.
One of the things that always crosses my mind whenever an old band announces a new record, especially with a band like Failure who is so massively influential, is how the legacy plays into the writing process. Is there any concern or fear or whatever about living up to the expectations of your legacy or do you have to just push that out of your mind?
As far as when in the process, luckily I just don’t even have that problem. I can’t even have that problem because I’m not capable of just writing something in the mold of another song that I’ve already written. I mean the whole thing that I like about music and being in a band and creating things is that I never know what the fuck is going to happen. Every time I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing and nothing is going to happen and I just go in and try. I think that’s sort of the high of it, the thing that keeps me coming back, is that if I try enough sooner or later something really exciting happens. And then I pursue that and it’s just hurdle after hurdle, but I couldn’t just be part of something that was purely contrived. Not to bring up the Rolling Stones in this light, but the Rolling Stones play a brand of music, and they do that one thing perfectly. It’s a perfect, pure thing that, at least back in the day, in the heyday of the Rolling Stones. I think that’s wonderful. But I always like bands that really develop and change from record to record. Like the Beatles, or even Led Zeppelin. They cover a lot of ground and there’s not really any restraint on what they’ll do, or what style of music they’ll pull from. They’re constantly surprising.
