Eric "A.K." Knutson writes lyrics that either side of an argument can take home, and he says that is a deliberate act of self-preservation.
Asked by Jorge Botas of Portugal's Metal Global about politics in music, the FLOTSAM AND JETSAM singer was direct about his own approach. "There's pluses and minuses to writing your opinion on something. I try not to do that. I try to just tell a story and let everybody make up their own mind whether they wanna go this way or that way."
The instinct, he said, is generational. "From the generation that I'm in, that our whole band is in, we grew up with the old verbiage that you don't talk religion or politics with people, because you're gonna lose someone. You're gonna lose a friend or a fan or a something if you talk politics and religion. It's so divided, and always has been since the history of man, that you just can't take a side. You will lose half of someone. Lose half of a crowd every time. So I try to write stuff that either side can take ahold of and make it their own."
When Botas raised how routinely political disagreement now ends friendships and splits families, Knutson answered with a story about his father, who spent his career in public service.
"He had a guy that would meet him at our house, one of his buddies, meet him at our house every day for lunch. And they'd sit there, and they'd either play a game of chess or play some cards or something and have some lunch, and they would argue and scream at each other because they were on the opposite ends of almost every issue. But they still had lunch every day," he said. "That same guy would be back the next day for lunch, and the same argument and the same game of chess."
That, in his reading, is the model. "You can have your opinion. I'll have my opinion. Maybe you'll change each other's minds on one thing or another... But as long as you have the conversation and you keep in mind that that person is a friend — I don't care that his views are completely different from mine; if I need him in an emergency, he's gonna be there." He blamed the collapse of that arrangement on younger generations having been raised too softly.
He summed up his position on the whole business in a sentence. "I have this theory that everyone gets my respect until they do something to lose it. And I don't care if they have a different opinion; that's not gonna lose my respect."
FLOTSAM AND JETSAM released "Rats In The Temple" on August 28 through Napalm Records. The album lands forty years after "Doomsday For The Deceiver", one of the only records ever to take a 6K rating from Kerrang!, and the lineup behind Knutson is co-founder Michael Gilbert and Steve Conley on guitars, Ken Mary (ALICE COOPER, ACCEPT) on drums and Bill Bodily on bass.