Six Feet Under Take More Covers to the Grave

"Do you really think we care about sacred songs?" laughs Six Feet Under frontman Chris Barnes. He's responding to a question about how the best-selling death metal band short-listed the cover songs for 'Graveyard Classics III.'

"Actually," he reconsiders, "I can't remember what song it is now, but there was a song someone said to me recently, 'Man, you should try this.' And I said, 'I would not want to do that. That would f--- that song up for me.'"

There weren't even songs SFU vetoed because they had been done to death. "We really had it all figured out before we experimented with anything," says Barnes. "I think there was one or two songs on 'Graveyard I' that we did try to mess around with, and they jut didn't take."

On 2000's 'Graveyard Classics,' Six Feet Under covered songs by Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and more, and on 2004's 'Graveyard Classics 2' chose only AC/DC's 1980 album, 'Black in Black.' For 'Graveyard Classics III,' Barnes says he simply took note of songs that sprang to mind, or he'd hear one way or another, and he marked them down for the album -- including Mercyful Fate's 'A Dangerous Meeting,' Van Halen's 'On Fire' and Anvil's 'Metal on Metal.'

He said, "It was more like spur of the moment s---. The Ramones song ['Pyschotherapy'] was like that. The Prong song ['Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck'] was like that, but the Slayer song ['At Dawn They Sleep'], me and Terry [Butler, bassist] had the same vibe on which album to pick and brainstormed on that one."

For the most part, Barnes didn't have to study the songs and wasn't surprised by any of the lyrics, because he already knew them. "Seven of the 10 songs were my picks, and they were songs that were really strong, important emotional songs to me. As the singer, that's really my thing: the vocal, and then the rhythm and the heaviness. It doesn't have to be guitar crunchy heavy to me. I'm just saying heavy, like, 'Whoa, that's f---in' heavy '"