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Deicide and guitarist Jack Owen split after nearly 20 years together in 2016. Owen rejoined his former Cannibal Corpse bandmate Chris Barnes in Six Feet Under in 2017, and they’ve been cranking out death metal riffs ever since.
But what happened between Owen and Deicide? Why the split after all that time? According to Owen in an interview with RichardMetalFan, there was an argument about writing credits between himself and Deicide drummer-slash-songwriter Steve Asheim. Owen alleges that Asheim changed a few notes to gain credits, and when Owen complained, Deicide vocalist Glen Benton sided with Asheim.
“Oh, it was a problem with new stuff I was writing. I walked into practice and Steve had re-recorded it and changed notes here and there for three or four songs that I had. It was stupid at the time. But he’s, like, ‘Hey, I changed the notes so I get writing credit.’ And I’m, like, ‘That’s not how the songs go, though.’ And Glen‘s, like, ‘It is now.’ So I literally walked out and ghosted them. [Laughs] Later on, it was like, ‘Hey, dude, you’re out.'”
Despite the rift between Owen and the two aforementioned Deicide members, Owen only had nice things to say about Deicide guitarist Kevin Quirion.
“Kevin‘s awesome. He is a guy that would do anything for you. And he is so motivated as far as writing and contributing and helping out on the road with anything… But, yeah, Kevin is awesome. He wrote killer stuff on there — very thrashy, but me and him worked well together. There’s a lot of co-writing on there between me and him.”
Blabbermouth notes that Asheim had a slightly different story about the split in a 2017 interview with Metal Wani.
“We were just kind of writing the record, and we were going over the songs,” said Asheim at the time. “Me and Glen, we were, like, ‘We wanna redo the songs.’ It’s like we had completed them — about nine or twelve, whatever how many songs. They were all right, but we weren’t really psyched about them. So we decided to rewrite them. And Jack didn’t really like it. And he kind of left one day and just never came back. So that was that.”
