Guitarist Tripp Eisen Says “There’s a Lot of My Material” on the New Static-X Album
One person I bet you didn’t think would have any involvement with the new Static-X album, Project Regeneration: guitarist Tripp Eisen (né Tod Rex Salvadore).
Eisen, who is also known for his work with bands like Dope and the Murderdolls, replaced original Static-X guitarist Koichi Fukuda in 2000, and ultimately contributed to two of the band’s album’s: Shadow Zone (2003) and Start a War (2005). He was fired in 2005, understandably, for what was only the first of ultimately three arrests and eventual convictions related to sex crimes committed against minors, including charges of allegedly having had sex with an underage girl, kidnapping and assaulting a fourteen-year-old, and attempting “to Lure or Entice a Child.” Eisen spent multiple years in prison, and upon his release in 2016, tried to launch a new band called Roughhouse. A year later, he called his crimes the result of “really bad judgment, terrible mistakes that I made, and I paid a price for ’em.”
Now Tripp is launching a new new band, Face Without Fear, and while promoting said band in a new interview with Totally Driven Radio, the guitarist revealed that has, in fact, made substantial contributions to Project Regeneration. “[T]here’s a lot of my material in this project — some of the old songs I wrote with Wayne, going back to that, and even a new song,” Eisen claimed, going on to say that he and the other surviving members of Static-X have been “working together” on the album “for a couple of years”:
“I was in the mix working on the stuff, so it definitely has my input in it. It goes back, so it’s very emotional and it’s very personal, because it’s stuff that me and Wayne wrote together. Like the first three songs that you hear that were exposed to the world — ‘Road to Hell’, ‘Something of My Own’ and ‘Hollow’ — those are all three songs I co-wrote with Wayne. Actually, ‘Road to Hell’ is a brand new song, so I was involved enough to work on some new music too with these guys.”
With this cat out of the bag, the question now becomes whether Eisen’s involvement will be met by fans with a positive, negative, or neutral reaction. Unfortunately, age has only made me more cynical, so I’m inclined to think it won’t matter one way or the other; there are people who are obviously very excited about this reunion and this album and it could have songs written by Idi Amin and they wouldn’t care. Still, I can’t imagine Static-X being thrilled to have this news out there.
Project Regeneration still doesn’t have a release date, but you can get all of Static-X’s upcoming tour dates here.
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