I love to play guitar. I've been writing my own songs on the axe since I was nine years old. I suck at leads.
The lead guitar work is a bit repetitious, but when a song is under two minutes long, I don't have much room anyway. Thank goodness. But I've always contributed guitar parts to every band I've ever been in, so I'll always play the axe.
Honestly, I got the best of both worlds: groove of New Orleans meets the intensity of Texas. That's the best education I could have, the best experiences I could have.
I think Pantera is a type of band that has been documented very, very well over the years. With the past re-releases, we were fortunate enough to have old demos and stuff that never really saw the light of day. But Pantera was not the type of band to waste many riffs or many parts or songs.
You have certain expressions when you write music, a lot of different emotions, a lot of different feelings.
Creating any type of art is all about mood. I've been making extreme music in one fashion or another for decades. And truthfully, Down has a big enough fan base to where I could remain content to do only that, but music is a vast territory and I am an explorer. And I'm a lover of all things considered extreme in music.
I'm glowing in the dark with my studio tan. I've been in a cave of music for months and months and months.
I guess I've never been introduced properly to Pink Floyd. I know they're great, don't get me wrong. Excellent, excellent musicians; great band; awesome harmony; great song writers; I just don't know anything besides, I guess, the popular songs on the radio.
At least in my life, I cannot hold onto grudges. It's a waste of energy, a waste of time.
With Pantera, we lived through so many trend-of-the-day situations - when grunge was huge, we were still a heavy metal band; when hip-hop started getting incorporated into metal, we stuck to our guns and remained a heavy metal band very purposefully.
Singing and playing have always gone hand-in-hand with me. I love 'em both equally.
I went from being a kid-kid, listen to everything from The Beatles through Kiss, Peter Frampton, Jethro Tull classic rock, classic stuff into immediately, it seemed like, Iron Maiden and stuff like that. The first Iron Maiden record and then, obviously, the first Metallica record.
I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.
Tastes are varied, man, so much in this music world. Look, I adore the bands that I adore. On the flipside, as much as you love a 100 different genres of bands, there are another 100 I can easily say I dislike, too.
I think anyone who suffers from chronic pain can agree with this - you feel this great significance. What I wanted to capture was that significance, and as a matter of fact I think that's one of the lyrics on 'Conflict,' on the split. I touch on the significance, and really it's a selfish thing, in an offbeat way.
To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me one way or another.
Pantera revolutionized the sound and the approach to heavy metal. It's been regurgitated. Once you up the production on a product and not just the playing but the actual production, then it's going to up the ante.
It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... there's too much of it out there.
There's always something going on, but thank goodness these days it's with a clear head, which helps me massively.
I think music is a big, big wide world, and I am voyager on this particular ship in this sea of wild music, and I'm gonna dive in and find as many fish as I can and catch them all. I love music.
