Review Fix Exclusive: FleischKrieg’s Richard Cranor Talks Goals And More

August 29, 2021 Patrick Hickey Jr. Music 0

Review Fix chats with FleischKrieg’s Richard Cranor, who discusses the band’s origin, goals, creative process and much more.

Review Fix: How did the project start? 

Richard Cranor: I had written two songs after debating what to do with my life. I had been working in the film industry for years and despite some success, I felt like something was really lacking. Films take so much money and time, whereas a song can write itself in minutes with no money at all. Plus, there’s the live performance part of it. It’s a much more visceral experience than slogging through difficult film shoots.

Shortly after, I met Thomas [Crawford], who was a solo musician with similar tastes.  I shared a couple of my first demos with him to put guitars to.  FleischKrieg started to grow legs from that point.

Review Fix: What’s your creative process like? 

Cranor: Personally I like to just open up a synth VST and start pushing buttons, tweaking knobs till I hear something interesting. Then I start laying down drums, and unintelligible vocalizations to try and capture the primal energy of how things are sounding. I like feeling the raw power.

I’ll then kick the raw draft over to Thomas to lay down guitars and we’ll finalize the composition before putting the final vocals.  After all that, we’ll send it to our producer to polish.

What’s your standout song? How was it written? I really like Bloody Prophets. I was being terrorized by alien abduction nightmares so badly I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night out of sheer fear of what would happen if I went to sleep again that a really great song was born. I think that’s a great way to deal with adversity.

Review Fix: What are your goals for 2021? 

Cranor: We’d love to play more live shows. I also really want to get a bunch of new songs out the door.

Review Fix: How do you want your music to affect people? 

Cranor: I want them to feel inspired. Even if they’ve been through some real ugliness, they should be proud of it. They survived it, right? That says a lot about someone’s character. I want FleischKrieg music to make people unafraid of the dark. If anything, I want the dark to be afraid of FleischKreig and its fans.

Review Fix: What’s next? 

Cranor: A haircut and a Starbucks run. Oh you mean the band? A few live shows hopefully, a European tour in the near future.

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About Patrick Hickey Jr. 13858 Articles
Patrick Hickey Jr. is a full-time Assistant Professor of Communication & Performing Arts and Director of the Journalism program at Kingsborough Community College and is the chairman of the City University of New York Journalism Council. He is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of ReviewFix.com. He's also a former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and National Video Games Writer at Examiner.com where his work was mentioned in National Ad campaigns by Disney, Nintendo and EA Sports. Hickey was also the Editor-In-Chief of two College Newspapers before he received his BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College. Hickey's work has been published in The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Complex, The Hockey Writers, Yahoo!, Broadway World, Examiner, NYSportScene Magazine, ProHockeyNews.com, GothamBaseball.com, The Syracuse Post-Standard, Scout.com and the official sites of the Brooklyn Aces and New York Islanders. His first book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult And Classic Video Game Developers was released in April 2018 and is chock full of interviews with legendary developers. His second book in the series, The Minds Behind Adventures Games, was released in December 2019. His third book, The Minds Behind Sports Games, was released in September 2020. His fourth book, The Minds Behind Shooter Games, was released in March 2021. The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games and The Minds Behind PlayStation Games were released in 2022 and The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 was published in January 2023. Hickey is also a contracted comic book writer, currently penning his original series, "Condrey," as well as "The Job," "Brooklyn Bleeds" "Dem Gulls" and "KROOM" for Legacy Comix, where he serves as founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief. Hickey Jr. is also a voice actor, having starred in the 2018 indie hit and 2019 Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release, The Padre (also serving as English language Story Editor), from Shotgun With Glitters. The sequel, The Padre: One Shell Straight to Hell was released in February 2021- Hickey also served as a Story Editor and Lead Voiceover performer. He has also done narration and trailers for several other titles including The Kaiju Offensive, Relentless Rex and Roniu’s Tale. Hickey is also the lead voiceover performer on Mega Cat Studios’ upcoming title WrestleQuest, responsible for nearly 90 characters in the game, as well as Skybound's Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, where he voices both Dracula and Renfield, as well as several other characters. He also stars in Ziggurat Interactive’s World Championship Boxing Manager 2, where he performs the VO of nearly every male character in the game. He also worked on the Atari VCS’s BPM Boy.

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