“I woke up hallucinating. It felt like a really bad acid trip. I tried to talk about that in the song”: Failure’s Ken Andrews is one of alt-rock's most influential tonesmiths. He talks teaming up with Hayley Williams and his return from near-death
After a scary hospital experience, the guitarist lost his mojo for a while – but he’s back with Location Lost, an album that features new twists and turns, along with classic attitude
During early sessions for Failure’s recently-released seventh album, Location Lost, frontman and guitarist Ken Andrews was creatively unmoored and all but absent.
In 2021, he’d convened with multi-instrumentalist Greg Edwards and drummer Kellii Scott to improvise new music for Wild Type Droid – tracked to Pro Tools, and then developed into songs – with some of those snapshots ending up in the album’s final mix.
This time, though, virtually none of Andrews’ work on their first stab at Location Lost made the cut. Still in a mental haze following a near-death experience after back surgery, he didn’t fully return to himself until it was time to assemble the ideas into songs.
“The best stuff from those sessions came from what Kellii and Greg were doing,” Andrews says. “They came up with some interesting tones and beats that I took back to my studio. I turned them into song arrangements and started writing vocals on top of them.”
Failure’s music has always stretched the bounds of reality. On Location Lost, they launch toward new horizons, incorporating acoustic guitars in a bigger way than in the past on Hayley Williams collab The Rising Skyline.
But longtime fans of classics like 1996’s Fantastic Planet will appreciate that the band’s foundational elements – crystalline guitars arpeggiating over detuned riffs projecting onto a galactic tapestry – are still in abundance.
The callback chord progression and triads on songs like Crash Test Delayed are big parts of the Failure sound. How do you and Greg bring in those signature elements?
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A lot of times when we're jamming, whoever’s playing guitar will come up with an arpeggiating triad that doesn't really sound complete. It’s more like asking a question: ‘What could go on top of this to make it make sense?’ Whoever’s playing bass, or sometimes rhythm guitar, can find some notes that give the guitar context.
We’ll have one progression on bass for, say, a verse, and the guitar is staying the same, then on the chorus the bass makes a big change. You get the effect of a significant chord change and a new progression. But if you take the bass away, you don’t hear the song – you just hear this triad floating by itself. It only comes together when they’re combined.
How often do alternate tunings come into play?
There’s quite a number on this album. The Rising Skyline is probably the weirdest one. We’re usually in E flat for most of our material, but Greg had all the chords for the song in a very weird tuning – kind of like an open G tuning, but with several exceptions. And the bass is in drop D natural, which we hardly ever use.
We’re bringing an extra guitar and an extra bass just to be able to play that song live. We tried playing it a half-step down, and for some reason it doesn’t sound like the song. Sometimes you can get away with transposing keys, and other times it just loses too much.
The rhythm pattern on The Air’s On Fire ended up influencing your lyrics. Can you explain?
That song turned out to be one of the hardest to play of anything we’ve done. I recorded it in layers, one at a time, and I didn’t realize how syncopated it really is. The riff starts at the end of the “one.”
There's a certain level of unsettlingness when you hear rhythms like that for an extended period of time. It doesn’t allow you to lock into the familiar, four-over-four feeling of rock. I realized, like, this could be a good song to write lyrics about my experience in the hospital after my surgery.
I woke up hallucinating – it felt like I was on a really bad acid trip – and I tried to talk about that in the song.
The choice of sonics plays a huge role in the mystique of Failure’s space rock vibe. Where did you go to create the tones on Location Lost?
I’ve kept most of my pedals from the ‘90s – I probably have over 50. It’s just that implementing them live becomes a problem
We've been on the Fractal Axe-FX platform for like 10 years; that’s my playground when it comes to creating guitar sounds and effects. I have eight or so amps that I gravitate towards.
A few I had in the ‘90s – a Marshall, a Vox AC 30, a Fender Twin Reverb, a Roland Jazz Chorus – and then I layer those in different ways, like using a Jazz Chorus for a very compressed, crystal-clean tone layered with more of an Eddie Van Halen “brown sound” Marshall to get riffs and chords to cut better.
But there’s everything from a clean Fender Twin by itself to sounds that have four pedals in front of the heads and then some rack effects after the heads, and then delays and reverbs after the speaker cabinets.
When I’m moving the songs to a live setting, I trim down the amount of heads and try to keep it more consistent, so the sound guy isn’t fighting completely different tones for every song.
Using the Fractal makes sense; but you must have accumulated an envious stash of stompboxes over the years.
There’s pedals, like the Rainbow Machine by Earthquaker Devices, that I haven’t figured out how to recreate in the Fractal. The Mood Pedal by Chase Bliss, we used that a lot on this record and the last record; there isn't really a corollary for that in the Fractal.
I’ve kept most of my pedals from the ‘90s – I probably have over 50. It’s just that implementing them live becomes a problem.
What guitars made it on this record?
For humbucker sounds I’m really into this 2019 Explorer that Gibson gave me. The pickups sound good clean, dirty, and in between. It’s become my favorite humbucker guitar for studio and live. It’s all over the record.
For single-coil stuff I gravitate towards my ‘67 Jazzmaster. It has a really strong, bell-like sound that just always seems to work for clean tones. The Rising Skyline was the first time we used my friend Justin Meldal-Johnsen’s signature Fender Mustang bass, which is a short-scale bass with flat wounds. We'll be taking that out on tour.
The ‘76 Les Paul that we've had for ages made a lot of appearances. That guitar has such a distinctive sound on the neck pickup. It’s on Skyline for the fingerpicking and some rhythm stuff.
Speaking of The Rising Skyline, having a prominent acoustic guitar is rare in the Failure catalog.
When we’ve used acoustics before, it’s been a part of a whole onslaught of various sounds. On this one it’s featured throughout
We’ve been using acoustics since the second record [1994’s Magnified]. But on that song in particular, there’s not a lot of other instrumentation; and when we’ve used acoustics before, it’s been a part of a whole onslaught of various sounds – like, a flavor in those songs.
But on Skyline it’s featured throughout. It’s one of the sparsest recordings I think we’ve ever made. It’s my Guild acoustic on the left side for the whole song, and the ‘76 Les Paul with a Twin on the right side, basically doubling the acoustic, but they change up a little bit here and there.
The Twin and the rhythm pickup on that guitar – there’s a sweetness to that tone that you can’t really get with any other guitars.
- Location Lost is on sale now.
Jim Beaugez has written about music for Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Guitar World, Guitar Player and many other publications. He created My Life in Five Riffs, a multimedia documentary series for Guitar Player that traces contemporary artists back to their sources of inspiration, and previously spent a decade in the musical instruments industry.
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