The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste for the album. Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly instead attributed the album's sound to the band's interest in technology. For pre-production, Rieflin said he and Barker watched films for a month, sampling anything that caught their interest. Instead of writing music, they all improvised individually, rarely collaborating with each other. Connelly compared it to exquisite corpse, a Surrealist technique in which an artistic work is created collaboratively without any of the participants having knowledge of the others' contribution. Rieflin cited "So What" as the only track to feature two musicians in the studio at the same time. After playing with
War Is the Answer it a lot in interviews. In fact, somebody just said to me: "If war is the answer, then what is the question?", and I guess the answer to that is "life"! Basically, you're fighting against something or other right from the start – fighting for survival with pretty much everything against you, and there are occasions when the only really appropriate response is to punch someone in the mouth! It's a pretty involved subject once you really start to think about it, and this record covers it all – the deeper meaning and of course the more shallow one too!