Alex Lopez, drummer with Suicide Silence, is in a dark place. It’s hardly surprising. The band put their all into a record that spectacularly busted out of the deathcore mould only to find themselves lambasted with a vehemence that is surely out of all proportion. At the outset of the interview Alex appears defensive, offering lengthy and convoluted answers to questions, possibly as a means of deflecting any latent criticism that may become apparent in our line of questioning. As it happens, we at SonicAbuse particularly enjoyed the record and are keen to find out more about its troubled gestation, detail that Alex is keen to share when he realises that we’re not out with the pitchforks. With the show barely 90 minutes away, Alex proves a courteous host, sharing insight with us over the course of an interview that goes well beyond the allotted twenty minutes.
Clearly stung by the criticism, he goes into considerable detail over the thought process that led to the record’s creation and the nature of art itself, providing a degree of insight that may lead some to re-evaluate their initial visceral reaction to a record that deserves commendation for its bravery, not condemnation for refusing to play it safe. From Alex’s perspective, this is a record the band needed to make, a bold statement that leaves behind self-imposed boundaries and opens up new horizons, and as he talks we realise just how deeply affecting the whole process has been on the band. What happens next for Suicide Silence is clearly uncertain, but what is clear is that the band have stuck to their guns against all commercial sense, baring their souls in a manner that is quite unprecedented for a major label act.
To get some context on the record, since Eddie joined the band you recorded ‘You can’t stop me’, which was in a familiar Suicide Silence vein, and then you wrote the new album which shifts style to quite an extent. At the time that you wrote ‘you can’t stop me’, were you already considering a change?
‘You can’t stop me’ was written before Eddie was even in the band, so therefore Eddie’s input was purely that of putting out a record and following through with it and not stopping. Obviously, we’ve always been a band that listens to every person in it, we’re not a biased band where one person writes everything on the computer and treats everyone else like shit, and makes them quit and join other bands. We believe that everyone has a voice because that’s what gives us our identity and, yeah, we’re the same band that listens to each other and all that, but now we have a new person whose input is there and this is the first record where Eddie has written and thought of all the vocal placement throughout the whole, entire album.
I’ve always recorded all the pre-production for all our records that I’ve been on, which is since ‘the cleansing’, I was the only dude who knew how to do it, that’s pretty much why they brought me in… I always worked with Mitch on vocals, it was always my thing to be involved like “Dude, this is cool, keep your style…” That’s why a lot of the songs are really vocal and drum driven and we would spend hours and think of really cool shit. He would think of everything, but I would give like an assist, like with Basketball players. So, it’d be like, “Oh, I’m doing pauses, but on these pauses it’d be a cool thing for you to keep going…” so you put a dominant word on every hit and that makes it a hook – song-writing 101!
So, Musical direction, yeah! Anyone that knows us and knows how we are…. We’re not… we’re into all kinds of music and when we started writing music, and when we wrote the cleansing, you know we didn’t have a lot of fans back then. Whatever Myspace was, we had like a thousand fans around the world when we wrote ‘the cleansing’… maybe up to 5000 fans – people who knew who we were – so when we wrote those records, we weren’t thinking about ‘the fans’, we were thinking about putting something out that was cool… maybe not cool then, and people that listened to ‘real’ death metal and shit were like “well this is fucking lame…” We didn’t care, we just wanted to be us.
As time went on we had a fan base and we pleased our fan base, but that album is ten years old and some people say it’s the best record we’ve ever done, but as a musician, a writer and an artist most importantly, art is a shedding of your skin. It’s like a snake. The snake is the art, its skin is just something that’s shed when it comes to a certain point.
[Abruptly shifts away from the analogy] It depends… “to each his own”, that’s what we believe in. It’s always been about the art and having Eddie in the band is cool because now we can go places that we’ve never been before. We’re new at it, and this is just one record. It’s like we’re going to do another one right after and another one… We might even just do a purely fucking heavy-ass record, just to be like “oh yeah!”
We want to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I don’t think the Beatles cared about where their music was going during their recordings – it was just like “fuck it, we’re jamming!” When you listen to the Beatles it’s John, Paul, George and Ringo. It’s them. It’s not what you heard in the sixties, it’s just an evolution of music.
And now, of course, the public have multiplied so a lot of music has lost its quality, it’s lost its art and there are people who can’t understand anything that’s not on click or programmed or clean drums. They get angry, they get agitated like “why would you do that? Oh my god!” and for us, it’s like “dude, it’s art! To each his own! Different strokes for different folks! Some people like Pepsi, some people like Coke!”
We’re not saying it’s THE way, it’s just the way we chose to do it this time, it’s where our brains are at as artists. Maybe we’ll put out a fucking EP a year from now and it’ll be some of the most brutal… [Alex pauses to consider a moment] …and even on this record, there’s a lot of brutal shit, there’s just a lot of other different stuff too… we just wanted to throw people off so the true fans of art appreciation…
[Alex stops here and then changes tack]
Because art is appreciated not depreciated…. You don’t watch the preview of a movie and go “no, I’m not…. I hate it!” You don’t do that and I find it that way with the attention span with a lot of unfortunate people. It’s not their fault they’re that way, and I don’t blame them. We’re just saying “Hey, look! You’re gonna remember this record and when you need it, it’s going to be there for you. We’re not going to turn away!”
I Don’t want to listen to blast beats the whole time. So that was the thing when they were asking “How much of the record is screaming?” and we told them that 70% was not screaming, and people were furious. But it’s like the equivalent of me saying 30% of the record is blast beats and the rest of the record is drumming… there’s still aggressive stuff. We’re just not throwing our full weight at all times… it’s just using it when it’s necessary.
I didn’t know with whom I’d be speaking but I’m glad it’s you because one of the things I really liked about the record are the way the drumming is so different on the record – as a drummer, what were the challenges to develop the sounds on this record?
The sounds were done completely organically. Everything you hear, aside from one song called ‘run’, where we sampled my floor tom, got it on tape, and literally slowed it down.
One thing about tape is that it’s magnetic. This is a whole thing and it’s a good topic because I did my drumming completely the opposite of what every fucking deathcore drummer does.
Completely the opposite.
No click track, straight to tape.
You’ve seen the ‘Sound City’ Documentary with Dave Grohl? That documentary was about the Neve console. This Neve board is what was used for lots of great records from the 70s and 80s. What it comes down to is all the preamps. Every board has a preamp, it goes from the drums to the microphone, straight into a preamp which is how you get the tone, then that preamp goes into, usually a computer, which is fine. If you do it that way, most people just mic it and put a digital preamp on that and that’s bullshit. I wanted to go and, we were recording with Ross Robinson, and Ross has his fucking preamps and all the way he does his shit… he uses some of the rarest, oldest shit that no one even knows anymore, that was used on albums by artists like Zeppelin and Queen and stuff… but anyways, I used Neve Preamps on my drums so each drum, which is not even many, we recorded the drums, we took the bottom heads out and put the mics inside just as they did it in the 70s. I wanted to try something that was more organic, so what we did was from the drums, into the preamps into a tape machine and this is where things were different. My drums were done on a 24 track tape which is a 2” inch tape. Metallica did it, and every great record, I believe.
And once it was on there… those tape machines were built during a transitional period – we were able to record it but then, when you rerun the tape it goes digitally on the computer and it fills in, you push play and it’s what you recorded. Which is how, if you made a movie on film and then developed it and scanned it on digital, you push play, you’re just getting a representation of what you did organically, so what it comes down to is that it’s all about performance.
So yeah, we did it to no click, and, yeah, we did it using all vintage preamps into a tape machine and tape is not a bunch of ones and zeros, it’s like an oil and that’s what the drum sound on the record… you can pump it up and listen to it on vinyl, it’s intended to be heard on record but on a proper record player. I’m a big fan of that shit… It’s a fucking vinyl album! It’s all nerd shit, I did it for this reason. The drum tone is what it is, it’s the art… it’s the sound I wanted, I wanted to do it purely that way. Obviously, there’s mixing involved, but very little.
But the sound you got, I could have sworn some of those tracks were processed…
Well, what it comes down to is the way we tracked the album, that’s the main thing. We didn’t do it all in separate places, we did it all together in a room not much bigger than this trailer. And I’m sitting behind my kit, Garza was ahead on his guitar, everyone’s on their instrument, Eddie’s behind the mic, and we’re all on headphones and Ross is right there inside my headphones.
Ross does this thing where he puts mics in the room and then talks to our engineer, who’s in the other room, running the tape machine and doing all the preamps and getting everything ready, but in that room is a drum performance. You can hear it on the early Slipknot records and a lot of other records. At the drive in is a big one that he did as well and I feel like the drum room is the action for this type of record.
So, all the clinking and the clanking, the tension… he got into our heads. You know, late at night, maybe you’ve had some drinks and you’re talking and everything just kind of becomes clear – he gets us to that point with the song. I found out what the songs are about, and I was like “this is fucked up Ed!” and then we just went and did it and nailed it and I’m seeing Eddie fucking bawling and thinking he’s not good enough and that he’s a piece of shit and not… just being anti what he thinks he is and looking in and not thinking, turning the brain off and coming straight from the heart.
And it’s the same thing with myself, I’m sitting there and just trying to do justice to what the song is and we played the song like five or six times straight, all on tape, and then we found the best parts of songs and we did some… if there was something, then we checked it just like in the fucking 70s, so it’s still raw performance. There’s no sampling, changing, separation, or any of that. Mistakes are good mistakes and that’s how the tracks were done.
One of the things that’s really cool about the vocals is that they seem to fly in the face of convention in that they don’t seem to be double tracked, as so many vocals are, so they’re much more raw and brutal – is that the case?
Yeah, see, like I said, we were jamming and Ross had some weird mics and on the mics, he had weird effects on them. So, in the room, I’d hit a cymbal but it might sound distorted and he would do that with the vocals as well. So, you kind of feed off of it. It’s like a guitar player with a pedal and you feed off it and it starts to become the vibe.
Eddie did the vocals after as well, but it’s pretty raw. He used this little Telefunken mic that was like… Nick Cave used and just raw stuff. He didn’t really do too much of like “can I have a couple of goes it and we’ll take one phrase at a time…” It was more like he’d sit and talk to Ross and then he’d think of stuff and just go through the whole thing a couple of times. He had to know the song.
Before human beings recorded music, we were performers and then someone had a bright idea and said “Hey, let’s record this!” and we thought about it that way. And these songs, we’re still adapting to them, even like half a year later. You hear the record and you hear it live and you’ll realise these songs are way better live – that’s almost an art in itself. I don’t know if that answered the question…
You keep mentioning art and one of the songs that really drew me in was ‘silence’ because it sounds like the guitarists were both trying to do something completely outside of what they’d done before. As musicians, was there a challenge for you all to change the way that you’re used to playing and how you approached the writing of the record?
Basically, what we did is… like I said, we’re all influenced by different styles and playing deathcore is… I don’t want to be a shitty cartoon version of ourselves for ten years playing the same stuff. I want to evolve and the best way to do that in life and in general is to take risks, change the game, give someone something to feel and that’s what we did with a lot of the new record.
When we did it and we were writing that record, our mentality, which was a crazy mentality, and the only way I can express it is two things really. It’s… if you want to give and teach someone how to paint, you don’t give them an iPad and a stylus, you give them a paintbrush and paper and it was basically the same thing with us. Also, writing feels good. I guess we’re going to sound the way we sound, no matter what. The music is our voice and now we’re just trying to figure out our dynamic and when we were writing the record… in our brains, we were going to throw it away at the end. We convinced ourselves that we’d just not think about what was happening after but rather we’d think about now and what sounded cool and what we did.
So, it was like hypnotising, or training our brains. Someone saying like “you’ve already made four albums, you’ve been in bands you’re whole fucking life, we’ve already dealt with a death, we’ve dealt with…” [Brief pause]
I grew up with cell phones and from the time I got one I was in high school and it was before the internet, and just technology in general and how I’ve seen it just fuck up and ruin music… in general. Back in the day, you didn’t have a phone, so what did you do, you went to a show, and you made friends and you saw whatever bands and really, who cared what? It was the time to meet people and talk to people. I played drums and I could meet dudes who played as well. Back then you were just glad to be there and now everything’s so accessible that it’s lost its sacredness…
Like I was saying, we convinced ourselves that we’d throw it in the ocean after we were done – that was the ongoing joke of the album. The process was like, we couldn’t wait to be done, we were going to get the hard drive and throw it as hard as possible at a shark… for no reason! The best way to describe it is if somebody said you could do a painting and you’re a good painter, you already know how to paint, and you can go into a room, you get as long as you want and you can have all the paint that you want and you have to do the best painting you can. It doesn’t have to be the craziest but it has to be the best true-hearted painting that you’ve ever done. You can use every colour or no colour but you have to make something you’re very proud of… and then, at the end, you have to light it on fire and burn it and no one ever gets to see it and you watch it burn and then leave the room and that’s it. No one’s ever going to see it. We treated the record like that.
We were completely not worried about what people would think because, in reality the artist puts his heart and soul in to something and then it’s crazy because we showed a lot of bands this record and they just thought we were crazy.
But, whether people know it or not, this is the album that’s going to inspire another band to do something similar and that album’s going to be way bigger than this one and everyone else will put out a record on that same plain where people are doing less generic shit.
Right now, we’re getting compared to Korn and Deftones and Tool and Rage Against the Machine, and those are all California-based bands. We are a California band. We are a West Coast band. I’m from LA, the fucking dudes are from Riverside, San Francisco – if we had come from Norway we’d sound like Norwegian metal! We have a fucking West Coast California sound.
I’m not saying we’re only going to sound like that, but, if you look up deathcore, one of the first bands is like Job For A cowboy, they were one of the first bands to ever do that… [Adopts somewhat geeky voice] “According to Wikipedia, I believe Despised Icon or, like Skinless, is the original deathcore band…” [Returns to the plot] – just straight up fucking chugged out riffs and slow… When I was starting, we were just doing what they were doing but we couldn’t play shows because they were bigger than us!
But now we want our roots to come out and, yeah, it’s crazy how many bands are from all over the US playing deathcore and whatever and, you know, I’m not hating on anyone, but they all work with the same five producers. They’re my friends, and I know all of them, but I just felt… A lot of the records I really love a lot and I only listen to them because someone produced it and I know that they do good shit and, at the same time, it’s becoming like a filter where it has to be like that.
So, you have a band from two different parts of the US and they sound like they’re from the same city, the same eyes, the same ears, and they might as well be the same band and the only difference is the singer and maybe like… I don’t know what else – it’s all the same programs and I’m not hating on any of that, we just didn’t want to go down that route and we went completely the opposite.
I was the first one to track and it’s not like it was edited after or made fancier, that was it, so yeah, there were effects in there, but there was a mic in the room with weird effects, so a lot of the stuff on there is really cool. It’s a lot of pedals, so very little post production. These mics that he had in there, and we’re talking 10, 20, 30,000 dollar microphones that are like the real deal and I learned so much from that recording process.
Even at Evetts [Steve Evetts – producer of the ‘Black Crown’], Evetts was a little different and I loved Evetts as well and I think Ross and Evetts to me are equal. They’re both two different dudes, but I understand Evetts and I understand Ross and if I were to ever become a producer I’d literally do the middle which is like, with Evetts I had 28 drum mics and everything was strategic, I tuned and after every song I changed the heads and we were nailing parts and everything was like…. I had that for ‘the black crown’ and ‘you can’t stop me’ and I did a record with Eyes set to Kill with him, but I worked with Evetts three times and it was an awesome experience, but Ross is more about freedom, it’s more like, it’s the film camera versus the “we’ll just fix it later” approach.
That’s one of the interesting thing about the record – it’s not filtered so that everything’s perfect, instead it flows and there’s dynamic and it seems to buck the trend of mastering everything super loud and ‘dying in a red room’ particularly works really well – it’s super sinister and then you turn it up and, like seeing it live, it hits a lot harder…
That’s one of my favourites, that song was just a weird riff idea and we weren’t sure if we’d use it but then, when we sat in that room on that day, on that morning, we were talking about the riff and… not even the riff, I don’t think Eddie had any vocals for it at that point, maybe just some little things, but that song flowed out right away. We were in there jamming it and it literally took an hour to record it, but that’s because it took a year to mentally prepare and figure out and write a little bit of this here, and that there. We needed to know where to put things. The way the transitions work, for example from ‘listen’ to ‘dying…’ and from ‘hold me up…’ and that’s like the heaviest song on the record – it’s pure screaming and people are always asking why we didn’t make that song first but if we would have done that it would totally have been against the art – who knows what it would have been? People would, maybe, have liked that song, but hated the rest of the album anyway.
So, we’ve weeded out… I know kids that came to the CD release show in California, Texas and Arizona and even here and there are a lot of Suicide Silence that get bullied by other people – you know these ‘cool’ dudes with hot girlfriends who go to shows and give the scene a bad rep – and I talk to a lot of dudes who are misfits, they’re not cool, they’re nerds – they wear makeup and shit like that, or masks to shows, and they’re interesting kids and they love this album because it made the really bad fans turn their back, especially after hearing only two songs. So, it’s weeding out the people who do not need to be here and probably don’t deserve this. It’s not like we’re turning our back on them, if anything, the kids who really love the band relate to this album a lot more personally and they know that these songs mesh so well with all the other songs. It just doesn’t matter.
We didn’t want to put out another record that would just be another record and it’s so stupid because we’ve been doing music for over ten years, and we don’t know if people listen to what we’re capable of. We could have cheated our fans and spent a thousand dollars to write this record and have a dope-ass producer help us out and make it the most brutal…. I could have not played drums [Laughs] I could not have played drums and no one would have fucking cared!!! They would have been just screaming… and I can pull some bullshit off live, that’s no problem… but we did it. We spent all of our budget and like $50,000 or $100,000 more than we could – we’re in debt because of this record because of timing and how everything happened. This thing is meant to be out there and it’s a grower. It’s an album, just like… I don’t like comparing our shit to other bands but the same thing happened with Metallica. Metallica was a big band and then everyone was screaming how they’d sold out and it was a big thing back then, but that was just the way it was. People could only see things on TV and whatever the record store was like and whatever… if you have an image of big – people will think your big and Zeppelin getting an airplane with a Zeppelin logo on the side – people were like “you got a fucking airplane?” they got this and that and yeah, they were a huge band but times have changed, but there’s a lot of quantity music and there’s a lot of quantity right now and not a lot of quality.
And I don’t put any of our friend’s bands down – they know who they are, they know why bands are dropping numbers like flies and people are starting to quit bands and they’re not caring because it’s all about making money. Which is cool… and understandable, I totally get it, you’ve got mouths to feed and all that. But it’s taking the art and it’s making it something else… It’s crazy, for a lot of the deathcore bands and whatever, and they’re all my friends, but it’s like kicking a dead horse of art and but it’s not kicking a dead horse financially and you can do tours, design a merch-mall, make the name as cool as you want… there are cool bands that are pushing the envelope of what it is, and it’s albums like this that’s going to let people understand. Even Chelsea Grin and Pablo – those are good friends of mine and Pablo sings in the band and they came up from what we and Chapel started doing or Cowboy and all them… but that band is going to start making to some real cool shit and that band listen to each other and that’s always the thing man. That’s why I think that bands are successful and down for the right reasons…
When you were recording, did you have a sequence in mind for the album, or is that something that you worked on after and how much of a challenge was it to sequence it so that it was the record you wanted it to be?
The drummer goes first, I choose the order of everything. We had fourteen songs written and we recorded thirteen, so there are songs that aren’t even on the record that are pretty next level. They’re fucking… I did a song where it’s literally a piano (I play piano as well) and the album’s very stark, it’s very goth, there’s some shit in there that’s pretty much on that ground. I’m a massive explorer of doing the opposite, and it was recorded backwards to what the track list is, literally. So, the last song of the records were songs we already had dialled in, especially ‘hold me up…’ So, we started recording from the end, so the first songs we did were the last on the record.
Some that aren’t even on the record because we were trying to figure it out. But by the time we got the heavy shit out of the way with ‘hold me up…’ we’d kind of developed a tone that we were already…. It’s like this is what’s cool and that’s how we were able to drop into… for example ‘silence’ is like death metal blues, that was its original working title and that’s what Pantera is as well. We did it in song order and ‘Doris’ is the last song we wrote and it’s the first song on the record, we had one last day and we just decided to write the song and we had this collection of riffs, we had the experience already of recording the whole record, so I know what beats I can do and what I have done… I already knew…
So, ‘Doris’, we said “yeah we wrote it a couple of hours!” and people said we were idiots and “tee-hee” and all that, but no, you’re an artist and you’re painting a bunch of fucking paintings and you’ve done all your paintings or whatever and at the end you do one last one and your hands are wet, you know where you’re at and you decide to do something next level and it becomes part of the big puzzle and you know it didn’t take you just that time, it took you all those previous paintings or, in our case, it took the whole album to train us so that’s the story with that…
I was working on the track listing a lot as a drummer. Everyone had their own idea of a track listing, and I made a track list, talked about drum feeling and the vibe and I made a track list and ‘silence’ was going to be first and ‘zero’ second… there was a lot of speculation, but I came up with a track list and all the guys agreed with it and I think Garza switched ‘listen’ and ‘silence’ – now they were switched and ‘listen’ flows into ‘dying in a red room’ and he also switched ‘run’ and ‘zero’, which is cool because ‘Run’ prepares you for ‘zero’ and it’s like, when you hear it, it makes sense because of the flow. And then it goes into ‘conformity’ and by then you’ve seen the different sides of Eddie and what he’s capable of and, at the same time, that was the second song we wrote as a band when we were writing for this.
We wanted to do like a total, ‘Stairway to heaven’ / ‘nothing else matters’ song – a ballad. But he didn’t want to do a safe song, it was an ongoing thing where we came up with a chorus and then it was like “no, that’s too safe, let’s do something where we make the person feel,” We wanted them to wonder what had just happened, and it’s like, if you listen again to, say, ‘Doris’, it’s just a falsetto…. Thom Yorke does that shit all the time and a lot of bands do that, but not a lot of bands in our genre, and the flow of everything, the track listing was very crucial, because I wanted to do… it kind of worked out because the vinyl’s a double LP and each side is so good on its own, like it’s literally the first two songs and then, when you flip it, it’s ‘Listen’ into ‘dying…’ and those two songs alone feel so good together, and then ‘hold me up’ is on another side and so if you put a side on, you’ll get two or three songs that really work together, because they’re very long songs and that’s something we wanted to do, we wanted to… like ‘…and justice for all’ put some length in it and make it a meal, like four course meal songs.
But there was one song – it was going to be ten tracks, and I always liked records that are like forty-five minutes tops and we wanted to make it forty-three minutes exactly and we did it and we rounded up to ten songs, but we were kind of iffy on the tenth song. It was an interesting song. Then it came out that the album was forty-eight minutes, so we kinda cut it back. Nine-tracks sounds short, but the flow was crucial. I was sat there with the song tracks and fixing them together. Spacing was crucial too and whether songs had to interconnect or stop. A lot of the songs, you can hear them shift and a lot of them flow into each other, which is cool. I wanted that. I’m a big fan of records where you hear a song and it’s like a jukebox and it ends and you can hear the next song because you’re so used to hearing the album and this album has a lot of that, people will be so used to hearing the song after and that intro that it sticks in the brain.
Yeah man, and you probably got the idea that we like the record, and one of the reasons is the way it flows…
I’m very proud of the record, it’s a fearless record, it’s brave and it’s a true form of bravery which is personal. Reading negative comments and I do read them and it’s a bummer, but at the same time, those people that…. Like I said I’ve been in this shit since it started, especially the scene and I remember that we didn’t have fans. Ten years ago we were playing shows like this to the same amount of people and I watched a hundred people turn into a thousand and a thousand turn into ten thousand and all of that stuff, so the people who come to these shows are true fans of the craft and appreciate it as an art. These people here, in a couple of years it’ll double and like I said, we’re going to start pulling out real fans, not just people who are here for not the right reasons. It’s an exchange, but that’s the whole thing.
The importance of art is that it should provoke…
Yeah, good or bad, you should feel something and that’s what we did. It’s all about feelings and doing what was necessary for us to do. It wasn’t even trying to… we just know that we believed in ourselves and pumped each other up and having Ross there too, he’s done a lot of great records and he’s a total spiritual dude, he’s like the coolest dude ever. I think a lot of our producers… Our first producer, John Travis, was really cool too. We’ve had the privilege to make friends with a lot of people, so it’s crazy how many producers talk about… certain producers don’t work with certain bands because of their drummers or whatever. It makes sense, though, you have to be the right dude – everyone has to be.
Even before Eddie, for example, was in the band, you know, we did so many tours with All shall perish and he was hanging with us, he’d live on our bus and he was best friends with all of us and musically, before the band, I was saying “Dude, we’ve got to do something!” He’s a big Mike Patton fan, you know Faith no more, and a lot of people are saying that Eddie’s trying to sound like Jon Davis or whatever and it’s like have you not heard Mike? And it’s not like Eddie’s ripping him off, but it’s an influence. He’s just who he is. If he wants to sing or scream… he’s used to being the conformist and he can do brutal all day, he can do the whole album in one day, he’s a fucking beast, but to do something that’s not your go-to style, that’s the real beast. That’s what having fire is. It’s appreciated and it’s beautiful, but fire can also kill you and it burns and if you’re the one giving it, you have to hurt yourself so that you’re giving what other people see and they’ll see that fire, that you’re lighting yourself on fire…. Weird analogies, very next level, probably not the interview you’d normally get form a thirty-one year-old drummer, but we’re all about that shit. We’re a very unique band, we’re all very down for it as long as it’s ready and it feels good…
And with that Alex courteously thanks us for our time and escorts us from the bus in time for the show.
