For most bands, losing a nearly completed album would be a nightmare scenario. For CKY and frontman Deron Miller, it was very real and it nearly derailed the 2005 release of An Answer Can Be Found. In a new recollection of the incident to The Garza Podcast, Miller paints a chaotic and surreal picture of how the band’s work was seemingly erased overnight and then salvaged piece by piece like a forensic jigsaw puzzle.
"I guess you're supposed to [back up the hard drives] every day that you record," Miller said, as transcribed by Metal Injection. "You're supposed to, like, back it up onto a drive or something. I don't know, but something happened. Basically… I don't know if this is figuratively speaking or not, but apparently it melted. I don't know if literally it melted. I think maybe that might have been just the way they explained it to me, but the drive or whatever held way too much information and just broke or something — and the whole album was gone."
Miller recalls the moment the disaster was delivered to him while he was in bed, with his wife, watching old sitcoms: "And when I got that phone call, I'll never forget it. It was me and my wife, we were in bed watching All in the Family on DVD at 4:00 a.m. [guitarist and vocalist Chad I Ginsburg] calls me and says, 'Dude, our album's gone.' And I was like [doing a nervous laugh] because we had just worked so hard on it, and I thought it was some kind of prank. And he said, 'No, I'm not kidding.'"
"I went, 'I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean erased?' Because we did half two-inch tape, half ProTools. We did it on two-inch tape, then downloaded it into ProTools. And I don't want to say his name, but I want to so bad. I shouldn't say his name, but I want to so bad—the guy that did it. But Chad said, 'I'm going to the studio right now to kill him.' And I get up out of bed and I put my clothes on, and I head over to [4th Street Recording where the album was recorded] to prevent a murder, because he really was going to kill the guy."
"All we could do was, 'okay, we have this huge problem. How do we fix it?' So, we ended up hiring… [a data retriever that specializes in emails and texts], like FBI shit. I was just told certain things. I don't know what's true or not. But this was a data recovery company that I think at one point worked with the FBI to recover data that was erased or whatever. We hired them, and we ended up getting the album back in pieces. Like a puzzle."
CKY kept the bad news from their label Island, and instead opted to head down to Sony Studios and quietly piece the record back together: "We went to Sony Studios without telling the label. We flew to Sony Studios and they helped. They sat there and pieced it back together again. And every time I listen to that album, that's all I hear. Some stuff had to be re-recorded. Some of the parts that we got back together were bad takes that we had to use. It was a nightmare. It was bad. It was one — it's… it caused one of the gray hairs on my head."
Despite the chaos, engineer Pablo Arraya emerged as the unsung hero who put helped reconstruct the shattered sessions. But not everyone involved showed the same level of professionalism.
"The engineer who erased the album actually called us while we were at Sony Studios – asking if he could get paid for his time. Can you believe that? The balls it takes to call and ask to get paid after erasing a $100,000 record. I can't even come up with a proper analogy. It's like if I babysat your kid, smacked them around, got arrested for it, and then called you from jail to ask, 'Yo, can I get paid for babysitting?' It just doesn't make sense."
