I'm talking to Jericho baby, talking to Jericho. I'm talking to Jericho mama, talking to me. One of the things with the pandemic is you forget like how long it's been since you've seen certain people and it's like dude I haven't seen you in person in like almost four years. That makes me sad. That's horrible. The last time I saw you I think it was that iron made and when we played with made in LA. Oh, that was fun though.
Yeah, well yeah, it was fun but it's like time just went by like that, you know. I know, but that was a great show that that was fun. That was very cool. I think the world has drastically changed, right? It's like the things we used to do and now it's getting back more than normal but we had like a four year lapse there where absolutely sounds crazy but we didn't see a lot of each other of anyone.
Well yeah, and that's the thing too and obviously there's so much to discuss with you and with the new record and all that other stuff too but dude like post seeing you, you guys were supposed to go out on the big tour and you hurt your throat. Yeah. And I know at one point you wanted to talk about that here and that was before the new record. I mean there's so much to discuss but let's talk about that.
Like there was a point in time where you were told that you might never be able to sing again. So, you know, I went into it a very like the very light version of it on Eddie Trunk recently where I kind of gave the overview but yeah, I mean basically I went through a lot of vocal attrition damage and I couldn't really pinpoint why or when it had to just be like something that gathered steam over time.
I know that the Metallica tour was extremely hard to get through even though they were shorter sets it was like full octane on ten every song we played no ballads, you know, like sort of that, you know, you've got one hour to go out there and do what you can and I think that took a huge toll on my voice and I think what started happening now that I'm like now that I'm like really working through what the problems were and what the deficiencies are and like where the bad habits were coming in.
I think what started happening is I started singing from a lighter spot like a more head voicey place and not keeping the bottom which is the foundation, right? You got to have that foundation and eventually you start like singing for people that don't really understand vocal chords a more frontal place like something more in the front more out of the mouth. Naazily.
Naazily but just kind of like when you really want to have the depth and have it on your chord not too far either way but that you want you want to sing from from your stomach and sing from your diaphragm up. Yes. And I think I started singing from the top down. Wow. To make sure I could sing all the high notes in like something like the stage which is like starts on F sharp and just goes up into like Bb flat C the whole time, right?
And so you're sitting there going, okay, we're starting with this song. I don't really have time to let the voice kind of settle no matter what you're doing in the back. It's tough and never night going for it. So to make a long story kind of a little shorter, I think I started having this sort of singing from the front out of the mouth a little more to get through the shows. And I think what happened was the chords pretty much stopped working in the F sharp bridge area, right?
Like the F sharp G where you really need to connect the lower voice and the upper voice. And if you don't have that, you're done. And so that got to a point where we went into in Europe and the chord was not vibrating at all. Like I would go up to that note and it would just stop. And then I could start singing again like four notes higher and I can go up. But there was nothing that was going to connect it which started really, really bad habits. Right? So now I'm jumping around.
I'm almost like playing hopscotch with the voice. Like I'm going to skip the middle. I'm going to sing below in the high. And so I had no chance. So I get out of that tour and then I get like this viral infection on the chords. I go to look at the chords and there's this huge haul up on there. And it's not like a vocal polyp. It's more like a blood blister. So they say, you know, be quiet for a while and let that go down. So I do that.
And then I'm like, okay, well, if I take off long enough, I'm going to just going to be able to go back and sing again. Right? Like just let it settle. So I wait, I wait for like three, four months. Nothing feels great. I go back to sing and it's the exact same problem. Which for a singer is just like heart attack. Right? Like, are you kidding me? What? I can't do it. I go down the path of working through it with my vocal coach at the time, people saying, oh, it's just tension there.
It's this and that. And I'm like, man, I'm just telling you, this feels different than ever before. I don't know what it is. I can't, I can't push my way through it. I can't soften my way through it. I can't make the chord work there. So finally, I go to Dr. Burke at UCLA and he just says, hey, your vocal cords, your vocal folds aren't vibrating. They just aren't vibrating there. It's just stiffing up to the point to where you have overworked it so much that now it's like a big scab.
And like, well, is it a scar? And he's like, well, it's not a scar, but it's a scab. It's like working out a lot, you know, and you have like toughness to the chord. A callus. Like a callus, but like it's not something you can just take off and you can't do surgery on it. There's nothing to do surgery on. It's just the chord is tough. So what I did was I worked another eight months trying to soften it. That didn't work. And so then it was like, okay, now we need to go like find someone else.
Right? Like there's no answers here. So the first thing I did was I flew out to Chicago to see who's considered like the number two doctor in the country. Yeah. Number one doctor is a doctor's like well up in Boston and he's tough to get in with. He works with a lot of cancer patients. This MO isn't like fixing us even though he does. Right? Like his MO is like, I want to get people that can't walk because of surgeries or because of cancer and get them new vocal folds, whatever.
And so I go to this doctor bastion in Chicago and he goes, you know what? There's nothing to vibrate left on your vocal folds. Oh my gosh. There's nothing there to work with. Right? And he's like, so my suggestion is either you live with this or we do like an exploratory surgery where we take the back of the vocal fold that doesn't get touched, cut the front, move the back to the front. And then you have to learn how to sing on that.
Oh my God. I'm like, well, what are the chances of that working? And he's like, not good. He's like, but you don't really have many options. Before you continue, Matt, what are you thinking right now? Because let me just say this, obviously we've played shows together before and been around each other a lot. And you are very cognizant about your voice. You warm up before. Yeah. Warm up afterwards. And then you get a guy that like at the show would be like, I can't talk. I got to sing later.
Like you like you're that guy. Yeah. I'm not that guy. I'm singing tonight and I'm can talk and I'm like, that's crazy. I know. So what are you thinking when they're telling you you might never sing again or sing like M. Shahzagan? How are you feeling right there at this point in time with this doctor in Chicago says that to you? I probably, maybe it was like a defense mechanism, but I just stayed calm and just kind of like, okay, I'm going to work through this.
Nothing anyone ever told me made me think time to give it up, right? Yeah. Because I was thinking, okay, I just need more time than I thought. And I can know like, I'm like, I'm going to keep hammering this thing every day and hammering not is not the right term when you're talking about softening something up. But I'm going to keep going like, and I'm going to bring it higher and higher until I can work something into this. In my mind, it's like, okay, like I don't give up.
And like I could also say that even if I was secretly doing it or if I told everyone okay, fans done for now, blah, I would still secretly be in the shower every night trying to get this thing going, right? You can't teach that just who I am. You know, like what else am I going to do? That's right. Am I going to just say, okay, well, time to pack it in, go for my senior golf tour dreams. So I'm just sitting there taking it in and going, okay, okay, I'm listening.
I'm getting more, but I am gathering more information at that point, right? Like, okay, this is what's going on. We decided we were going to go beg doctors, I tell us to see us like, hey, listen, we got to come in. He books me out like for a month later. He says, okay, I'll see Matt, because he had done my previous surgery in 2003 with waking the fallen, like, you know, when I had a blood vessels. So I fly out there and he literally like looks at me for like two seconds.
I get in there and like, all right, we're the problem. I go, you cracks, you know, and he's like, okay. Yeah, singing is way less about the anatomy that's going on or the autonomy that's going on him. He's like, it's much more in your mind. He's like, so what we're going to do is we're going to go in there and we're going to clean up the cords because there's blood vessels in there and stuff. We're going to clean them up and we're going to get a bunch of saline.
We're going to pump it through here. We're just going to make them work a little bit, right? We're just going to get them as big as we can without hurting them and then like, think them down and throw more saline into them and just pump them up and just see if we can kind of stretch out some of this stiffness. So like my wood also has to lose, right? This is the best guy in the world.
So I go in and I do that surgery and I come out and I notice I have the same problem as before, but I notice I have a little more wiggle room, right? I'm like, okay, like, it almost feels like you're singing but like in mud. And so like I start like really just kind of sitting in the note, noticing now that I'm singing more on front because I can't get back there and now slowly inching it back further and further to that weightiness that I kind of really needed.
And so after about a year of vocal training after the surgery, I felt like I was really ready to go. You know, I hit him up on a text message. I'm like, dude, his ability to kind of not take it too seriously, not like this is you're done or you're this or that just kind of like, yeah, just mentally you need to be, you're fine. We're going to get you the tools and you're going to be able to figure it out. You're going to be able to work it out.
Let me just go in there and like touch it up a little bit and see what we can do. And this is a surgery and I would rather not, you know, name names is not fair to those people. But this is a surgery he does on many, many, many rock singers. They go in there and they need this sort of like, hey, let's stretch it out a little and get it going again. So I felt confident with them.
After the surgery was done to be honest, the hardest thing was all the bad habits I had gotten before the surgery trying to work around the problem. Yeah, yeah, realizing I needed to just like dig in to where the problem was and now trust it and put my weight on it and it was going to be okay. Right. It's probably like when someone tears their Achilles or they're, you know, and they're trying to like not, they're trying to favor that leg, right? Or they're trying to not and it makes it worse.
So it was crazy. I'm grateful for him and grateful for the work ethic I was born with, like my parents, my genetics, whatever it is, I was going to let me go and do this in my family for sitting there and listening to me singing four to five hours a day. But it was super scary in some senses. It was kind of freeing in other senses that you didn't need to define yourself by your voice. It can go at any time. It was also a crazy learning experience.
And I feel like I can listen to anybody's voice right now and tell them what's going on with you know, like, I'm going to go through so many things to get to this point now, which I feel like I feel like I'm better person for it. You know, it's crazy because I had a bruised larynx. I got closed mind in the throat first time in 30 years or whatever. And I went through almost the same thing that you did into where I couldn't sing at all.
You'd almost felt like a Disney movie when the evil witch takes away the songbirds throat and just I had nothing. I remember the first person I went to see because I was doing masks singer at the time. And I was able to do one more song. It was like a lower level run, root off run, like a motorhead version. So that was fine. But I had no high range whatsoever. Like my axle rose, Paul Stanley gone. And so I started going to the doctors and the laryngeologist was saying like, it just takes time.
It's you break your arm. It's four to six weeks. You bruise your larynx. It could be six months. It could be a year. Here's some things you can start doing. And then another thing is I went to a speech pathologist and she took some scans of my vocal chords. Now what people don't know, I literally thought vocal chords were like chords like guitar strings or something. What you don't know is it looks like it kind of looks like a vagina, but it looks like a really weird alien giant creepy thing.
But you can see my one vocal chord was brown like a bruise banana. And it wasn't vibrating is what you were just talking about. So slowly over time it started to come out right now. I'm probably about 95%. It's finally starting to get there. But it's a scary scary feeling, man. You know, what do you do? There's nothing you can do. You can do. You can do it. You actually look at the what the vocal fold feels like. It's like it's almost like jellyfish membrane matter.
It's like a it's almost like snot. Yeah. Yeah. When you look at it going and like as we doctors, I tell us I was able to break it down. I really look at what was going on with all the tools they have. And he's like it really is like a jellyfish. Like it's like you would think it would dissipate, but it's so fragile. Right. And if you get any stiffness, then you're completely screwed.
Yeah. Every bit of feel that you have is based off of this thing working correctly, you know, and when it doesn't work correctly, you're just you start trying to compensate and you start trying to jump around and doing other things. And it becomes very stressful. Right. Big time. And what I learned too is like you don't have to sing every part of every song. Like we have four guys in the band that sing. And it's like death leopard does that all the time.
Like it's okay to lay out with like PJ our bass players got a great high range. If there's a couple of those that are still a little bit too high, you don't have to sing every note because there's other guys that can do that, you know, I'm going to actually, you know, settle into that a little more than I ever have. I always felt like, Oh, I've got to sing every word on after life. And it's like, it's like knock, knock, knock the back.
And it's like those are the moments that throw you out because you know, you might be balanced and everything's good, but eventually it's going to wear you down. There's a couple of moments where yeah, just have them sing one line or have the audience sing it for one line and then get back. And those little breaks and you know this and I know this from being on stage, those little breaks for one sentence, just the whole voice opens up again. Right.
Absolutely. Yeah. But if you keep it going, it just starts like, Oh, I'm falling off the edge here and then all of a sudden you're you're pushing and your Larry comes up and you're, you know, you do something out of sorts and all of a sudden you're like, Oh, there it goes. Yeah. It's so funny talking to you about this because this is literally the exact same thing, exact same thing. I could think of parts in the songs that we're playing right now for the first time ever.
I take a line out or do the crowd singing. You know, it's not just everyone. Was there any notes like when the mentally when you first came back in because like you mentioned, the doctor said that singing is very mental. And there's some notes. I'm like, Okay, I'm going to hit this one. I'm scared. I'm scared. That puts them down in your head.
Yeah. Because of my injury was in the middle of the range, it's very interesting because if you don't hit it full on, then you're already, you've already lost up to F F sharp. That's mostly chest voice. It has to be firm, right? It has to be very solid, but you have to be able to take that bridge through the G and up and then you can, you got to always have that anchor in there. So there was never a problem with high range, high range never went away for me.
Now I just have more of an anchor in the high range. I can go up, but it's like, I just needed that. It's so weird having an injury in the middle of your, I mean, it's obviously you would get one there because it's where you're hammering it all the time. It's where the bridge happens, right? Where that kind of transition into the high and lows, but it is weird explaining it to people.
They're like, well, why can you sing sweet child of mine up there, but you can't sing the low part or you can't sing happy birthday? Why can't you sing happy birthday? And it's like, well, happy birthday is a hard song because you got it. You kind of barely go in there for a second, but that's where the injury is at.
And so then all of a sudden you have a disconnected, really awful, sort of mental gymnastics you're trying to jump through to kind of piece it together and you don't want that, right? I almost rather have work. I think it's interesting. Whenever you're injured, you're always like, I don't rather have anything injured. Other than that, no. But so who knows?
But yeah, no, it's a weird spot to have a problem because you go out to dinner or you see like your family and they can sing notes that you have no chance on. And they're like, they're not singers, but just the normal voice and sing those things that I was injured on for so long. And that was really, that was more of like a mental toll than anything. Just looking at people that don't sing, be able to sing notes and I can't sing right now. And you're the professional singer, right?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I remember you told me too, at some point in time, you couldn't even speak. You had to speak in the same tone. Like, hello, my name is Matt. How are you? Got it? Is that telling me about that a bit? Yeah. So I think, I think one thing that I learned from all this is a lot of the information I had, if I had to do it all over, I would have done it a lot differently. I was speaking softly and I was speaking a little higher.
And now that I now that I understand how the vocal folds work a lot more, as you can hear now, I'm like, I'm letting, I'm putting air, I'm using my diaphragm to speak, right? I'm letting the voice like sit back and sing. And I'm letting the voice naturally sit somewhere where I'm not like, being, I'm just trying to save my voice right now and when you do that, it actually, it actually is more damaging to the chord because you know what that was doing?
That was promoting the frontal sort of lighter thing that was getting me in trouble in the first place, right? You think you go out there and you're like, okay, I got to get through this set. So I'm in the crowd, I see the stage and you know, you're, no, that's actually going to be worse. Wow. And I'm noting this sort of no anchor, no weight, no sort of, you got to like have the voice to sit in the spot.
And so if I was to do it all over, I wouldn't have gone on really a voice rest for more than a couple weeks. And then I would have started talking and using the breath properly and letting the voice sink back to where it's natural. There's lots of cool stuff to talk about. One of them is obviously the new record. Life is but a dream. And you sing great on it. The first time I heard nothing, I heard a little bit of a different slight twinge that you can tell you've been to war on back.
But I mean, first of all, the record is a masterpiece in my opinion. It's completely wacky and insane in the best possible way. Let's talk about making this record. Not only are you coming back from a vocal injury, it's also in the middle of the pandemic. It's also been, you know, you guys are a multi-million dollar band that gets shut down because of your injuries and because of the lockdown.
Talk about all that and how you're able to kind of create such a masterpiece and why you came at it in such a different way this time. Even though I was injured, we were always under the assumption. We didn't know how serious it was. Right? So we were under the assumption when we started writing that we're going to be able to just kind of do this in a normal timeframe. You know, a normal vocal injury would last a couple of months, Max, you know, even with a surgery.
And this lasted a couple of years, right? So we started writing and we got really far. So there's four elements here. We got very far writing it. And then in the middle of all that, I think I talked to you about this. Me and Brian did this sort of deep dive into psychedelics. And it wasn't necessarily about music. It was more about life and about purpose or sort of philosophy of what exploring, right? Let's call it exploration.
And when we came out of that experience, we wanted to go bolder and more dynamic and more off the grid. One thing we agreed was that life is short. And if we're going to make music, we want it to be bold. We want it to be in the name of art. We don't want it to be some thing where we're worried about stats. So we're worried about building.
We just saw it all as let's make something that truly makes us laugh, that makes us happy, that we feel is going to put something into this world that's left turns and something that's like remarkable in a way that's just different and gives people a feeling, whether it's uncomfortable or happy, just a feeling, right? Just something. So then we had that. So then we kept writing. And then we got when we were finally ready to go in the studio and we felt like we can pull this off.
We love everything. We started trying to record and then Black Lives Matter and COVID happened. And if you remember, they were kind of on the same time, right? Yeah. So there was lockdowns, but then there was a bunch of discussion about, well, why are people allowed to go protest? But what was happening in LA, there's not many drum rooms left.
And one of the main things we wanted to do is make sure we use multiple drum kits on songs to make sure our art philosophy, which is, we record real stuff and we're not sampling anything. And we want to make sure that we get what we want. So using Henson Studios in LA, we finally get in there. And then it's like, well, you can't get in. There's protests throughout the streets. So we push it. Then we come in and they're like, well, there's more rules now.
You can't have the producer in there with the band more than two people and you got to have the mascot. And if you're going to say, so it became this thing where it just got longer and longer and longer. So finally, we get out of Henson. It's been like three, four months when really we booked like a month worth of time. Then we get out of there and we start trying to try and just, it basically took another six months of recording and then we just shut it down. Matt's not ready vocally.
We can't do the strings. We can't do X, Y and Z. So we shut it down for another year and we just sat on record the drums being recorded with a couple of tracks. So then when we picked it back up and we knew we could, you know, the vocals were going to be fine and we are going to be able to do everything. You know, we had other problems with like getting Sony studios to let us have 78 people for an orchestra and they all of this part.
And we're like, we can't do that because the intonation is out. So we had three groups of people, of 78 people that had to get tested the day of and if someone got COVID, they didn't get replaced. So again, not to bore people with the details, but just got crazy. So we finally get back in the studio to finish it up and we didn't realize we probably had another eight months worth of work. Now we had been living with it and we wanted to change things, right?
We had things we wanted to kind of like make cooler and do different things. So then out on top of that, we wanted to use Andy Wallace. We go out to the East Coast. He works two weeks at a time. He's going on vacations in between and at that point, because of the self reflection and the stuff we were doing earlier, we were just totally cool with it. We were like, okay, we're not going to get worried about all these things that we used to probably would have gone crazy about.
Like we would have probably lost our minds if we couldn't get this out quicker. But now we're in a place where we were just like, just make sure it's done right. Make sure everybody's happy that's working on it. Just get it done correctly over now, now, now. And because we weren't really in a rush, it had already been six years, what's seven years or whatever it is, you know, five years, what's six? You know, so we were in that kind of mindset.
And then we got the record done and we still waited a year to put it out because we wanted to make sure the music video was right. We wanted to make sure production was right. We wanted to make sure we can go on tour. So it just took a long time, but really I think it came from a much healthier mindset of what's important and just getting it done on our time schedule.
We had the same thing with our boom box record, where it was done in the can for a year before we released it because it's like, we want to be able to promote it, want to go in tour, you want to go to the radio station and it just wasn't time because there's like, you know, like ACDC releases power up in the middle of a pandemic. They still haven't toured on it. That's ACDC, but other bands were putting on these records that just came and went because you couldn't do anything with them.
It was almost a waste of time. Yeah, you know, we were watching that too. And we were getting a lot of heat from some of our fans too. Like this band's put out two things and they're there for us. When you guys aren't, it's like, man, we got to be there for ourselves first. Yeah, we're not healthy. We're not right. Right? We were mentally very healthy, but you're talking about a voice, you're talking about getting the record done.
And I think, you know, listen, at the end of the day, people are going to hear this record and it sounds like a band. You can tell that the strings and all the extra stuff we put in is all real. And I think that if we phone that in and just programmed it or just said, well, whatever, we can't use Henson. So let's just have Brooks playing Joe's studio and then we'll replace the drums with whatever tone we want. Like I just think, I think you would just hear that and feel it.
And it would just wouldn't be the same thing. And I think when you look back on time in a larger scale, you want to put out pieces of art, like your music, how often do we all put out records? It's not that often, right? And you're not going to put out many in your lifetime. Like make sure what you put out is right. You know, when you veer on that side, you still are going to take crap from the other side. But they should be happy that there's people that take it seriously, in my opinion.
A record lasts forever. You want to make it right. Let's talk about, I mean, obviously there's a theme to the record. I'm going to say it's a concept album. It's funny because the stage dealt a lot with AI, which we can discuss in a bit. This is more about absurdism. And when you told me about this, I actually googled absurdism and Google the philosopher that you build a lot of these lyrics around and learned something. You might have been listening Iron Maiden in high school.
I'm learning things by listening to Ben Sevenfold. So yeah, and talk about the whole theme of the record. Yeah, well, the theme, because of that sort of existential crisis I went through for 68 months, which was really hard. And what triggered that was this sort of psychedelic experience, right? And I think we talked about it a little bit the night of Iron Maiden. We talked about it. So sometimes you see things that you can't unsee.
And they're so apparent to you, but they completely rattle your foundation to the core. And for me, someone that's a type A personality, ego plays a large role in why we've had success. But then it makes, but then you question, well, what is success and what is, what is the top of the mountain? And then why is there always another top of the mountain? And are those people that are always chasing happy? What I saw was that it was, it was never ending.
And your ego, who you call Matt, your ego is actually hurting you, not by the metrics that society likes to put up, but by the metrics of happiness being present with your family, being a good dad. All these things that you think are important are not important. These other things are important. And you come back from an experience like that and your ego gets put back on like a shell, right? There's a spiral that you can go down.
And there's a toggling of light and dark and right and wrong and meaninglessness and purpose. Everyone has to go down their own path and their own journey. But what I found was that there was no inherent purpose other than a purpose that you would assign yourself. To me, I found that very freeing. There's no rule book. I want to be a good person to my kids and my friends and my family and I want to put out really fun art. And there's realities of the world that will try to bash you down.
But I want to ignore what the outside says is success or failure and just base it off of my own heart and what I feel is correct. So by assigning your own purpose, it would ultimately mean that there's no overarching purpose to this whole thing, right? Like everyone that knows I'm an atheist, I don't believe in a higher thing.
I don't, but I do believe that if you give somebody a rule book and they have to live by it, you might hate yourself for certain things that you shouldn't hate yourself about or there might be certain things that you can't live up to certain expectations, but they are all put there by someone else anyways.
And so when I looked at the world like that, I became very obsessed with this literature of like Albert Kammu and this absurdism and this sort of existentialism, but I didn't take it in a negative way. I took it in an extremely enlightening, positive way where if there is no rules and you write your own rules, then that's the most freeing thing anyone can tell you. I can judge myself based on my own sort of set of morals or my own set of, you know, judgments on what's right and wrong.
I think sometimes what people get really scared of with that sort of thought is like, well, what if someone just wants to go kill a bunch of people or someone wants to go be a bad person, right? I don't believe the humans innately are that. I believe humans want to be good. They want to have camaraderie with each other. We love our tribes. We love our families. And a lot of times these misunderstandings come from lack of empathy or lack of putting ourselves in other people's shoes.
And I think with traveling in the world, I've seen that things that I used to think about other people when now that I've traveled and been around them, I know that that's not true, that people just want nice things in life. They want to be treated with respect. They want, they love, they want to, they want to raise their families and like a lot of things that you would see on the news or hear from family members that just aren't necessarily true about the rest of the world, right?
And so for me, this sort of aha moment was something that I wanted to write about, but also something that I feel gets, people get stuck in and it's very uncomfortable to talk about because it shatters sometimes these purposes that people have been given, whether
it could be a religion or it could be parents that want you to live up to certain standards or telling you your job that tells you you have to do X, Y, and Z or you're a failure or you're not good at this or you don't have this inside you. And I feel like when you bring up those sorts of topics and you speak about them, truthfully, they create sort of an uncomfortable underbelly. And this record has that little bit of an uncomfortable, I'm free-floating and I don't really have a place to go.
So anyways, that's a long, you know, version of what this record is about in a way. Let's put some of the tracks. Like I said, the reason why I think it is a masterpiece of yours is it's hard to believe that this is the same band that did hail to the king, but yet it is the same band that did hail the king, you can totally hear that too, but in these arrangements, the tempo change is just the stylings of music. I mean, it really does go to a lot of places that you've never gone to before.
And we spoke about this too, the great bands do that. That's why the Beatles are one of the best in Zeppelin and you too and even Guns and Roses when they started getting to the Usual Lusion phase. There's a lot of stuff on here that I think is going to throw your longtime fans off, but in a good way. You obviously had no worries about boundaries of even styles of music that you put on life as a dream. It's the last thing on our mind what people are going to think of it.
I'm a firm believer that if you put something out or you create something, whether it's a movie or a piece of art, and you can 100% get behind it and be emotionally attached to it, there will be other humans out there that are going to feel the same thing. Now with the world we live in, the way bands go, right? Fans of Avenged 7 Fold that have been following us are going to be the first ones to hear this. But it doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the record that they want to hear.
But I do think that there's people out there that maybe don't like Avenged 7 Fold that will hear this and go, oh, I like that, right? I get that. Now you just have to be strong enough to weather that storm while it happens, right? Because the first people that are going to hear this are people that are waiting for another version of whatever you did before, right? You have to take the long view on things when it comes to that sort of thing.
Now, when we're making the music, it's not even a thought in our mind. Now that it's done, we're going to be talking about this. Like, yeah, this is going to come out in a bunch of people that liked X, Y, and Z are going to go, what the hell are you giving me? I think it's fun though, but I always go by the philosophy. I think it was Steve Jobs at the audience or the customer. And I wouldn't call our audience a customer, but I would call it relating to this point.
They don't know what they want until you give it to them. If everyone just sat in the mud and never pushed genres forward or pushed technology forward or pushed things forward, you know, first of all, we wouldn't even have a cell phone, but we would have a flip phone, right? And then the iPhone comes out and then they change the buttons and we all get mad because we don't like how they change their neck. And then we all get used to it. We can't believe we used to do it the other way.
Right, right. People with music, you've got to keep pushing people or you become this nostalgia act, then you get really stuck. Because then it's like, now it's like a total job. You don't have room to be an artist anymore because we want you to play these songs and this is what you are and this is, and we're not going to support you if it's not this and this and this. And I just want to reject that as strongly as we can every step of the way.
We know that there may be upset fans or there may be lower ticket sales or you're going to sell less records or you're not. But that to us is like, you can't worry about that stuff as an artist. If you worry about that stuff, then you might as well just go into the label, say, give me the information, give me the algorithm and we're going to keep writing songs just based on whatever the ambulance. Let us chase it. And I just think that you can't be an artist and do that.
I think this is going to be the opposite though. I think this is going to make a venture and fold even bigger because it is completely opposite. No, let me just phrase that. It's not completely opposite. It starts out with, you know, game overs. It's just a thrash song that comes right out of the gate and Mattel right after it. I think we love you is probably my favorite because it's just like this dirge that just goes into your head more, more, more. Yeah, yeah. It's not called more.
It's called we love you. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, but what I'm talking about is there's stuff on here like, for example, the title track, Life is But a Dream is a four and a half minute piano piece. Yeah. But I kept waiting to get the intro is going to end. The song is going to begin. It's just, nope. That's it. I was your first question. You're like, so why did you do that? I was curious. In an artistic way, why in the less you know, why did you do that?
Because of the existential sort of dread that this record kind of brings up in this sort of, um, it starts off and it sounds so flippant when I say it, but it starts off with a guy living a mundane life and then he ends up killing himself right off the bat and game over. It's more of a play on free will, you know, if you'll notice I say, I never had the will anyways.
And it goes into genetics and it goes into this guy just doesn't know how to get out of the rut, but he doesn't even have the ability to get out of the rut because of just the cards he was dealt and he ends up killing himself. And then you go down this whole record of these sort of different phases of life.
And at all of these points, you kind of, and you and I both know, or we're middle age guys at this point, one day you wake up and you just blink and you look back on your whole life and go, where the hell did it go? And can you really pinpoint any moment? Did you live in the moment in any of these things? You know, did you, did you get everything out of every moment that you could?
Even if you did, it's hard to sit there in the moment now and be satisfied with everything right because time moves in such a weird way. And I feel that, you know, if we live long enough to get to our 80s or our 90s and we get some sort of terminal disease, we'll be the same people in those eyes now afraid of the, of death that's just waiting for us, which we know is waiting for us, right?
The kind of torture of being a human is knowing that we're going to die when most, everything else doesn't know, right? Animals don't know. They don't, they, they just live their life and then something happens. So the record takes you through this sort of really deep and uncomfortable situation. And at the end and on death, another thing like that happens.
This kid just puts his pillow away, you know, puts his, washes his face, puts his stuff away, then he goes and he, and to feel free, he jumps off a building. And to me, the most epic way to end a dream was to have this piano piece playing out, which was done in this sort of like classical sort of way, which is just like we don't need any embellishments. We don't need anything else.
We just want to hear the foot on the piano and a couple noises coming from the creaking of the thing and just a bear piano end of life sort of, hmm, this is taking you out. And we all felt that that was a really impactful way to say something more as a whole, and to try to have another song at the end. It's great. And did you say that Brian that Gates took like years to learn how to play this piece? Yeah. So we originally wrote it on MIDI and we loved it.
And I thought, you know, I lived with it for a couple of years and I said, we got to put this on the record. It's incredible. You know, he actually wrote it for my son when he was born River. When I convinced everyone that it should be on the record and kind of explained what I thought that over arc should be, you know, we're like going to hire somebody to play it.
And again, going back to the beginning of this conversation, we had so many times where there was a year's in between this record getting done that at some point during COVID, Joe breezy went to Brian and said, well, hey, what if you learn how to play this? And at first it was like, there's no freaking way, right? I actually thought there was no way.
And Brian took it on and he basically spent a couple hours every morning when he'd wake up with a coffee and just started learning part by part by part. And by the time we got to the end, he was able to knock it out himself. What a feat. Incredible. You must be proud of him. We were listening to the album on the bus last night on the Fuzzy Bus. And we were agreeing that Gates is probably the best guitar player of his generation.
There's a couple of the guys here and there, but his playing on this record is so great. It's next level, even for him. I agree. And I think unless you live with the guy and know him, you know him. For him, it's he's like LeBron James in the way that he doesn't need to score all the points, right? He wants to distribute the ball. What I mean by that is he is so focused on moving the instrument forward and trying to things.
He is completely comfortable on his skin and actually more excited to play a riff like nobody. And that's all it is. And he's so caught up in arrangements and doing creating this sort of soundscape that could have guitar or could have flute or could have a beach boy sort of thing or could have this or that. And he's more focused on that than the scoreboard of guitar playing. That's why I'm so proud of him because he doesn't live in that world where he cares about that.
He lives in the world of I want to be the Beatles. I want to be Bowie. I don't want to be a shredder, right? I don't care about that. Yeah, I can shred, but and I'm going to learn all my techniques and do Django and then practice all day. But I could be practicing guitar. I'm practicing piano because I want to do this myself. And so I have so much respect for that because he doesn't care about any of that stuff. He cares about those artists that I just mentioned that inspired him.
He wants to know why they arranged things like that. He wants to song right. He wants to create, right? And so I think that's cool. No, Bowie is a perfect example. I should have mentioned that earlier of just somebody who was never afraid to change his sound, but still always contained the boy philosophy. But let's talk about the final four mentioned life has been a dream.
Prior to that, this kind of almost it's not a Abby Road medley, but it's you were mentioning that we're so used to hearing these epic songs at the end of events record save me and a little piece of heaven and all this sort of stuff. You went the opposite on this and there's four shorter pieces and they're all completely opposite from the others for his sound.
Yeah, so that's going to be where everybody goes like, oh, this record's crazy and then they hear that and they're going to, okay, get off their minds, right? Because at some point, I think it's around easier. You're like, okay, this is going off somewhere. And then by the time you get to GOD and then life is put a dream, you're like, wait, so they're never going to go back to that thing that they do. That's right. Yeah. So Abby Road's a great example.
I think we are very much influenced by Travis Scott with sickle mode where there's like three songs in one. But we want to do it in our own way, right? We thought he does three hip-hop songs that are vastly different, but we wanted to do three full on vibe changes. And I think the nut that we cracked on this record or the kind of thing we figured out is like, it's okay to try really crazy things, but you don't want them to overstay their welcome sometimes, right? Like it becomes novelty.
If D was like seven minutes long, I think it would become a novelty. I think even like, oh, if you do that for too long. And so what we did was we really tried to like, the editing for us was like, okay, no more than two choruses for these little snippets. Let's call them like pieces of candy. Like it's like ear candy. Like we're going to grab them.
We're going to stick them together in really creative ways, but we're going to keep you jumping around, but we're never going to settle for too long. And that was kind of like our aha moment of like, we think Kanye did that really well with, he did a really religious record when he went all Jesus. I forget what it's called, but the songs were like two minutes and everyone was like, oh, they feel unfinished. And I was like, I don't like that.
I kind of like that unfinished feel where you kind of put things together as long as you can like create the greater whole makes sense. So those three songs or four songs to me, that approach where it was something completely different than we'd ever done. Because as you know, what we've been known to go do an 11 minute ending or a 15 minute ending or like really big our heels and on seven minutes of a certain idea. And we really wanted to try.
Well, what if we have seven crazy ideas, but we make them all in two minutes? Yeah. And so it's just a different approach, right? Like looking at everything that you do and not really settling on any sort of rules and just saying, well, let's try this and see what happens. I love it. It's the Gazappa song and then a daft punk song and then a somatura song. Yeah. It's that's less field man.
When I tell people that's like, I'm like, oh, it's kind of like Ramstein meets Diane or meets Daft punk meets Kanye meets and they're less like what? No. And then they hear it and they're like, oh, you're right. That's kind of crazy. How are you feeling about getting back in the road, getting back on tour? Obviously announced some huge dates. You get the tour with Fallen Reverse. Have you done 90 minutes of singing yet in your rehearsals or anything on those lines?
Well, we have been a little bit, I've been doing hours of singing by myself, but as you know, that's different. And plus you got to be a front man too, which is a whole different world as well. I know. I know. Yeah. If I could sit in my shower and sing the set, we'd be golden. But we're actually getting into it more this week, start tomorrow a little bit more. We got like three more weeks of rehearsals every day and then we've got a couple things. We got those festivals.
But then again, it's like a one off and then we've got like a couple weeks and we got a one off and then we got a couple weeks and I want to. So there's a lot of time to kind of really, if the first couple shows aren't great, which there's potential to that, we've haven't played in years. And you and I both know there's no replicating walking out there. Yeah. I'm just not worried about it, right?
Because if it doesn't go well, I know we have time to kind of come back to the drawing board and work on things. So the shows, these initial shows are just going to be kind of getting our feet, getting the toes wet. This time with somebody speaking of the festivals coming up. And I don't know the whole story I wanted to ask you about it. You guys are playing Welcome to Rockville and under the festival.
And there was a message that went out a month ago, whatever of you saying that you couldn't make the shows. And we found out that it was not you. It was AI. Is this, tell me the story of this. Yeah. So I have a choice to make right now. Do I, do I mess up to this or do I just plan it up? Okay. So no, no, it's good. So what we did was a, we didn't ARG for the fans building up to the single release and ARG for people that don't know as an augmented reality game.
What the overall arching point was, we had chat GPT for Dolly too and some other AI voice systems that basically were able to fool the fans into thinking it was us. We programmed AI to have me cancel the show on our podcast, which if you listen back, you can tell it wasn't really me, but it was my voice. Then we had this website that people found and it was all chat GPT written of reviews of us and how they're mad at us and yada yada yada.
But it was actually this rabbit hole that people fell down and they started finding clues which unlocked eventually after two weeks, unlocked the single. The overall arching thing here though was that AI is coming. You're not going to know the difference as it gets better. And so we need to start figuring out what the game plan is, right? What is real, if I can see it, a video of you, cancelling shows or telling someone to f off or this or that, but it's not even really you.
And at what point do we have to kind of come to terms with what the future is going to look like? It's kind of like just like any other technological advancements. It's one of those things where once the cat's out of the bag, you can't do much about it. I mean, just look back at Napster, right? You got to adapt. That's right. Yeah. World changes. And the thing that I'm telling you is that AI will make music.
They will be able to do things that are interesting and the people that are anti it, that's okay. But the people that are really going to flourish in this new age are then be the people that know how to use it correctly, prompt it correctly and actually use it to their advantage. And I think that could have anything to do with writing essays, writing books, writing code, writing music, having AI help you show you five court changes you may have never thought of.
And then taking that and utilizing it in some way or give me seven vocal melodies over these court changes and then taking things you like it. I think it's, I think a very interesting world is going to emerge from this. I just, I'm very interested to see where it goes. But this sort of ARG was just kind of the set the bar of like it tricked you all. You all thought that was real. You were all mad. You're all freaking out.
And all we had to do was prompt this thing to say one thing and anyone could have done that, right? Anyone could have hacked our Instagram or our podcast and done the same thing. And what's real and what's not? It's so crazy because you start hearing about this. It's like, this is a total sky net shit, man. It's going to be terminator two before we know it. Well, there's a lot of things, right? Like, because then it, then it comes down to, well, does it have consciousness, right?
At what point does it start trying to figure out things without being prompted? Right. And at what point does it, if this happens, what point does it have its own needs and does it suffer? There's a lot of merging right now. There's a convergence on a lot of things. And I think it will come down to if we figure out what human consciousness is, if we figure out the sweet sauce, right? What is it that exactly makes consciousness? Can we replicate that?
And are we already replicating it without even knowing it? And those are even deeper things on top of the, how do humans react to just straight-up AI doing everything? Yeah. A lot of layers there. Like you said, it wants to catch out of the bag now. We have to figure out how to drive it. Yes. Because you're seeing real quick, you're seeing people call for a stop to it.
And it's like, well, never once in human history, especially recent history, has something been invented or has something started. And we just said, oh, yeah, that sounds like a bad idea. And we just squashed it. No, we just, they're going to be in some island and the Cayman Islands building it. Or they'll be doing it somewhere where there's no law because they get paid off. And it's like, it's coming. So what are we going to do about it? Last few things, you guys are really involved in NFTs.
I've been involved in as well. I'm getting ready to release a graphic novel as an NFT for one of my characters. Another thing that a lot of people don't understand, but those that do understand it, live and die by NFTs. And I think probably in five years, Max NFTs will have taken over streaming and music and all that sort of stuff. So it's good to kind of get involved in it now. What prompted you to want to base so much of Venge 7 folds present and future into the NFT world?
Well, I see a much cohesive and organized relationship between the fans and the band. I also see when technology is happening and it's emerging, you want artists involved because when artists are involved, they're going to make it better for other artists down the line. If you let VCs and you let all these sort of bigger players dictate where the technology goes.
And what becomes the standard, then I think you get the kind of world we have right now with the way record deals are or you get like streaming now that is cut off a portion of their stock to the labels and return for their catalogs. But we don't really see any of that money. But we still have our old content. You get a lot of convolution, right? For me with NFTs, what's very important for people to understand is that I'm a believer in the blockchain technology.
And what that means is that when you are distributing data, it could be a picture, it could be a comic, it could be your D-deer house, it could be a bus ticket, it could be a concert ticket, it could be a proof of attendance. That is called an NFT because it's a non-fungible token. All NFTs are not created equal. There's going to be a lot of crap, there's going to be a lot of junk. There is a mini casino that goes on right now with people just trying to flip NFTs.
There's almost like trying to flip concert tickets, but there's no artist to actually play the show ever. That's what NFTs are right now. People hear that and they think it's all trash. What they don't understand is there's an underlying technology that can be used in a ton of different ways, whether it's finance, which is decentralized finance, or whether it's how you deal with your bank or whether it's how we do fan clubs.
We've chosen the fan club route where we can allow our biggest fans to get tickets first with integration through ticket master, where we throw parties, where we allow, we do give aways, and it's all done on the blockchain in a way that we don't need to have 50 different companies dealing with this for us. It's all done in one sort of centralized location.
Now, decentralization and decentralization seem like they're at odds there, but there are centralized ways to use NFTs, and there's decentralized ways to use NFTs. I think they're both fascinating. I think what's been good about AI actually is that AI has taken the attention off of NFTs for a little bit, and everyone's over-dealing with the AI thing, how we hate AI, and AI's needs to be stopped all along.
It allows people like us over here to build out use cases and what the blockchain's going to look like in five, ten years or whatever that means. This is just something that it makes people mad, but I just think about people when streaming came out, I'll never do that. I always want to support the artists. I want to buy this. I want to buy that. Yeah, right. We're in that app.
I mean, I look at my mom and she doesn't want to upgrade to the new phone because she likes the old one that she's gotten, even though it could help her immensely if she just took a minute to figure it out. What I kind of talk about it as is it's kind of like being pissed off that your neighbor's getting food delivered to their house, but you won't download postmates. I'm not really the techist crap. Why the hell do those people have food being delivered to their house?
It's like, well, give me five minutes. Credit card on them. These are all things that we will work through as a human race. I don't want to get stuck in the mud worrying about a bunch of people shooting arrows in my back because we're doing blockchain stuff. When I can see that this is going to be kind of a pathway, I feel, to a better future for not only the artists, but the fans. Absolutely.
I would have told you, if you gave me your city of evil CD in 2005, I would have said, hey, Matt, 10 years, some of these things are going to be completely obsolete. Here's my DVD, obsolete, obsolete. You've been going, Jericho's crazy. He thinks it's all going to be on your phone. He's nuts. That's what the people are saying now about NFTs way into the five years. If it takes that long, and it's just going to be another thing that we all live with and do commerce with every single day. I agree.
Yeah. It's kind of like me saying, I don't care if it changes. I'm still going to buy your DVD. And it's like, is he not going to have anywhere to play it? You know, like the world changes. Some of it sent me a blue rating at the day. I was like, what was this to do with this? I don't even have a blue rate player. I know, right? I got it. Where do you even buy that stuff now? You go to Best Buy? It's like a nostalgia thing.
Crazy. But I mean, another thing is like people are always like, well, I understand how it works. It's like, I have a Wayne Greskey rookie card that I bought in 1979 when I was eight years old. I had this thing for 30 years now. I can't fucking find the thing. Whatever it's worth, it doesn't matter. It is a mint Wayne Greskey rookie card. And I don't know where it is. If it was five years from now, your Greskey rookie card as an NFT in the blockchain, you can never lose it. It's still worth it.
It's still your card. You know, you want to print it out and put it on your wall you can or you want to have it in your blockchain. You will never lose things like that ever again. Yeah, but it's also that's a leap, right? Like it's a leap that our kids will understand and my kids understand. And the best way to best example of that is video games. Because in video games, say that you can't all buy the same skin. There's only a thousand of them.
And when you're in Fortnite, you have a certain gun, you have a certain look. But the only way to get it is to buy it off someone else because it's authenticated on the blockchain. There's a scarcity to it. The same way a Wayne Greskey card on the blockchain, if there's five of them, you know which ones are real. Now, people, the older generation that don't get it go like, well, I'll just right click and save that. It goes, well, I can also take a picture of the Mona Lisa, put up my house.
Doesn't mean it's the Mona Lisa. It's a jump. Right? There's a jump there with technology. And you got to think most of these people, including us, we didn't grow up with the internet. It did not exist. The internet's a new thing. And so digital ownership is a new concept to people our age and older. As you think about, you know, the younger generation, it is not a new concept. They are growing up in a world where everything's digital.
And so NFTs are going to be much more easily explained and they'll go over a lot differently with people like my kids who have a MetaMask wallet. They collect things. They know what it means. They buy skins in Fortnite. They would much rather own them. Right? And so when you see Web 3 gaming come out, and when you see these all these sorts of things, all NFTs are not created equal. They're all different things. They're all for everything, anything in life. It could be anything, right?
It doesn't need to be the one thing you don't understand, which is baseball cards or hockey cards or paintings, right? It can be other things in your life that you're just going to need them for. Basketball things, man, are you excited to get back out in the road? You've got some big shows, Madison Square Garden. I don't know if you guys have ever played that before because you've been home with your family. You guys are traveling a lot with the kids and I see that.
How do you feel about getting back on the road again? I'm excited to see how it goes. I'm really happy with the headspace everyone's in. I'm 50-50 excited about it for me, but I'm also maybe even more excited about for the fans. I went to a couple of shows that I really enjoyed in the last few years and I realized instead of being completely jaded about shows because we all play so many of them, I don't know how much of a celebration shows were and how it wasn't even really about the show.
It was about being around people that understood that particular artist, right? When you walk around in everyday life, you don't see a bunch of long hair, metalheads, or you don't see a bunch of people that are into X, Y, and Z, whatever the artist is. You go to those shows and it's like everybody's who are people. It's like one of those things where my mind kind of changed from, oh, I'm here to see this, I'm here to enjoy the experience.
I think it will be a really fun experience for our fans, especially after being away for so long. I'm excited about that. The community, yeah. It's one of those things. As soon as I heard the game over, I missed a bench, 7-fold. Take the personal friendship that we have as you know, I started as a fan of your band before we met. I missed these guys. It's like when you hear a new maiden or a new Metallica, it's like old friends back together again. I'm excited about that. 100%.
I get that same feeling too, where you just, you don't think about something for a long time because it's not front and center, especially the way the world works. Very time economy, stressful, lots of input, you know, Netflix now, and TikTok, and every single thing you can think of is just hammering you for your attention. So you don't necessarily sit there and think of the bands that aren't hammering you with attention. And so it is interesting to kind of come out.
And we're going to have a whole new record and it's going to be a little bit of our time now, like our time to annoy you with, you know, you know, some attention. It's always hard to say, but what is your favorite song on life is about a dream today? Today, it's Cosmic. I really enjoy Cosmic because it reminds me of like Old Elton John, but with a very modern twist with the vocoder and the places it takes you.
And I, it's one of Brian's, one of my favorite solos that Brian did, it's ultra melodic, but it reminds me kind of, um, do you know for a friend the way that's put together with lots of musical interludes and it's very raw. So right now that song to me is kind of this thing that may get overlooked at first, but I think we'll add a lot of gravity and depth to the record. We love you as my favorite. It's the one for me for right now.
Yeah, we love you the day the day that I was put together and we were all done with it. I was like, okay, this is officially not a song. This is like, I don't know. It's a chance. Like we went as many as many as many as left turns as we could and like we just stuck it together and like, okay, that just feels cool. Yeah. Last question for you. What do you think of what did you think of the Halloween self titled reunion of Kiske and Andy Derris? Would you think of it?
I thought it sounded incredible. Yeah. I thought what a cool way to do it, right? Yeah. I think everyone, it's cool, man. It's legendary, you know, and I think as being Halloween super fans, we probably appreciate it. Especially being American, right? Like they're not as big over here, but it's like, what a cool thing to do and respectful and it just seems like the right move and it never sounds awesome. It works. So I love Skyfall. They actually had all three guys singing. Skyfall set.
It works. It's like, oh, it's such genius. Another reason why Halloween's still one of the all-time best. They actually use three singers and it blends. I actually think it keeps my attention more because there's three singers. You keep like going like, okay, well, it's like a new color, right? Every time something like that. I think it's an interesting thing.
It's interesting also something that we could take, right, as people who write in our own bands, like using the color of our own voices, constantly changing in a song. It's like a keeps your attention and it's kind of a cool, cool thing. So I mean, they did it the OG way by having actual different singers, but it's a little notes, I think of, you know, like that was cool. How could we do something like that? You know, well, dude, it's been great talking to you, man.
And I'm excited about this new record and I'm excited to see again down the road soon, very soon. Congratulations on what I think, like I said, as a masterpiece record for a Venge 7 Fold. Thank you so much, man. Have a great show tonight. I'm sure we'll see each other a lot soon. Yeah, absolutely, man. We have to rub our Halloween tattoos together. That's right. Big glow. Yeah. All right, dude, thanks, man. Perfect, man. Yeah.