July 2004 with Volume.at in English

Interview: July, 2004 - Volume.at

Question: You could expect Rammstein to make a song with the content like Mein Teil, right? It was practically served up to you...

Paul: Yeah, it was begging us to do it! We've made three albums and we're slowly running out of subjects. Kids. Sex with kids. Sex with kids between themselves. Dead father. Dead mother. Murdered brother. At some point, you’ve pretty much "eaten through" the subject, and so we're glad when life keeps handing us topics. We'd be dumb to not take it... The cannibal Armin is a star everywhere. He's even called in the USA the "crazy German" who ate the other [guy]. I don't think there had ever been anything quite like that before. He's a kind of negative celebrity, like Hitler except everyone in the world knows of him right now. Like Bin Laden.

Question: Who is the voice in the intro?

Paul: The intro was made by our bassist Olli coming from some fooling around in the rehearsal room. It's the original advert Armin made online, "Searching for a fit 20-30 year old to slaughter, the master butcher." And we wanted to do that so people would know what this song is about.

Question: In what ways does the new Reise, Reise album differ from Mutter?

Paul: I think the difference is it'll sell more. (laughs) No seriously - there's a stronger move toward things being played by hand, and away from sequencers and machines without becoming "farmer rock". I hope... Besides that, we always have basic concepts for our albums and this time it was "everything for the vocals." So we did anything that helped the vocals, even if it sounded stupid on its own. If we had a song we basically thought was shit, but Till sang something good over it, we kept it.. We also gave every song a chance. Before, if we weren't all happy with one - bam, out it goes. This time we kept working on it. That's why there are a few oddballs on the album that otherwise wouldn't have made it in.

Question: The album is finished now. When you hand it over to the record company, are you completely satisfied with the result? Or is it simply the best you could achieve in the time available?

Paul: We're happy with most of the songs. The thing is, at some point you have to simply stop working on them. When you write music it's like this: the chorus of this song is weak still, the verse of that song is idiotic, this other one is missing a melody, this one drags on. Every song is like a child. And every child has to be treated differently. One needs to see a doctor. The second one needs its teeth pulled. The third one needs a good beating. The fourth needs to be sent to a home, or something. And the fifth, we shove down a storm drain. And if you have enough luck, they'll all grow up into pretty children during the production process...

Question: There will be a video for Mein Teil. What will that look like?

Paul: We came up with this: each of us would go into a room alone and do something for an hour. They'll stand there and do something for an hour they think fits well to the song. There's one that squirms, another one cries... they filmed all of that and chopped it together. I'm the wrong person to ask if it turned out well. It's not bad, but whether it turned out to be a milestone music video, we'll see...

Question: What did you do during your one hour of filming?

Paul: I thought to myself "What can I do that looks good?" Nothing... I went to the director and said I could imitate a seizure, run into a wall, tear my hair out, suffer, then puke. I'd just have to eat some lentils, and then I could really puke straight into the camera. He said "Good, let's do that." But we had enough footage, so that's why I left the whole lentil thing alone...

Question: Do you ever find yourselves strange because of your music and the way you present yourselves?

Paul: Not really. If I saw us as an outsider, I would find us strange. But since I'm not an outsider, we seem completely normal to me. Like a Chinese pot-bellied pig family at the zoo standing knee deep in shit - they think that's entirely normal. Of course I am not implying we're a family of Chinese pot-bellied pigs. Even the noble lion family in the desert thinks it's normal to nibble away on a rotting carcass...