Yeah, sci-fi is definitely a big influence on Fear Factory. I've had people tell me we always sing about the same thing but it's like well, if we were a black metal band we'd sing about Satan, you know? What if we were a Christian metal band? All the songs would be about how much we loved Jesus.
Well obviously, when you're in a band you have to diplomatic about things. Everybody wants to put in their two cents and while sometimes it works, often times it also doesn't, and a lot of times it leads to arguments, like when there's too many cooks in the kitchen.
Most fans probably wouldn't understand that because they're not in bands, but when there's too many cooks in the kitchen it can really ruin things, it can destroy a band. So for me and Burt to approach it as just two guys it makes things a lot easier. This may sound selfish but it was less people we had to share our ideas with so there was less interference.
You sing about the things you're influenced by. So we've been big into sci-fi since we were kids, things like Star Trek etc. Then came movies like Terminator and Dune. Burton is also a really big reader and loves sci-fi novels which helps him write. It's also really cool he does that because it's through the perspective of how we see things going or possibly going.
When we first started Fear factory, we asked ourselves what Fear Factory means, it was a cool name, but what did it mean? We obviously embraced the technological side of a factory, as a factory can be anything from something that insights fear, like a government machine, to something of futuristic technology, or it could be religion. So we embraced the technological side of it back in the early days.
