Spend time talking to Mark Morton about his creative process and two themes emerge. One, he loves to write. The Lamb of God guitarist says, “I’m a musician, I’m a songwriter, I’m a guitar player, and I’m a lyricist.” Two, Morton is inspired by a wide swath of musical genres.
For his new project Anesthetic, Morton didn’t sit down this year and say I want to write a solo album. Instead, he’s actually been writing some of this debut for years. “This album wasn’t a concerted effort to start something outside Lamb of God,” he explains. “Music is always in my head, and until I write and record it, it’s stuck there. But once I record it, it’s out. It’s a catharsis, more for my own sanity.”
Morton is always creating: even when he isn’t writing lyrics, he’s thinking about writing lyrics. He writes on tour and he writes at home. Whenever something hits him, he jots it down: the notes section on his phone is jammed with song ideas and lyrics. Every time he hears or reads a turn of phrase, he takes out his phone. And it would be a mistake to pigeonhole Morton’s music taste as strictly metal. He’s always been inspired by all kinds of music, but his biggest inspiration comes from music “with a groove and undeniable head bounce that elevates your heart rate and gets you excited.” That’s why Morton cites not just Slayer and Metallica but Biggie Smalls and Public Enemy as influences.
Looking back, perhaps Morton’s fondest memory of Anesthetic is the song “Cross Off,” his collaboration with the late Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington. The song features Bennington on vocals, Morton on guitar, Paulo Gregoletto on bass, and Alex Bent on drums (Gregoletto and Bent are the rhythm section of Trivium). “Chester was one of the world’s most amazing vocalists and an incredibly creative force. I just hope that ‘Cross Off’ celebrates that fact,” says Morton.
“Cross Off” was the first time Morton and Bennington had worked together. It was also the first time they had ever met, but you’d never know it from the immediate bond between the two. “We spent the first two hours in the studio talking about things not even related to the project, things like our kids, family, stuff like that. Making music is very personal, so there must be a degree of trust between the artists,” says Morton. The time the two spent together before recording “Cross Off” cemented that trust and made the process almost effortless. Honest feedback was easy-and surprisingly easy, stresses Morton, considering they had just met. They spent the studio time testing out new ideas on each other. “It was an open creative process. There were no bad ideas. That’s what I hold on to. There was no ego to Chester. And I know for a fact that he loved this song,” Morton remembers.
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“Cross Off”
Cross off the days gone by.
Wasting away, a self-inflicted, slow decay,
What should’ve been, what never was,
became the end for both of us,
Heavy is the hand that points the finger,
Heavy is the heart that’s filled with anger,
so lay them all to waste,
Years you decided to erase,
And cross off the days.
So black out and hide behind the lines,
keep staring down the sun and hope
the light will finally blind your eyes from seeing.
Cross off the days gone by.
Cutting free, The phantom limb was part of me,
You have lived, you have lost,
the separation’s worth the cost
Heavy are the words that go unspoken,
Heavy are the promises now broken.
Will you learn to love the taste
of the destruction in your wake?
Cross off the days.
Making my way back from the madness,
shifting my thoughts from the blackness,
and the sadness but the fact is,
I’m swinging through life like a clinched fist,
Fuck sanity, I want to bleed,
can’t kill the pain, its everything,
its all I feel, its what I breathe,
Turn the hate I breed into what I need
Heavy is the hand that points the finger.
Heavy is the heart that’s filled with anger.
Did you survey everything you laid to waste
and cross off the days?
