Ever since 'Hail to the King,' we've been more cognizant of our chord progressions, our key changes, drama in songs, a lot of dynamics - we've really added a lot of that in there.
It's important to know the ins and outs of the music business, but you can also dive too deeply into it and forget that you're really here to make music.
I'm glad that we can add something new to the fold that Metallica's not going to bring to the table, and they're going to do what they do.
If I was to play any song for anybody asking, 'What is metal about?' I'd just play 'Master of Puppets.' The progressions and the bridge are brilliant.
Music and space collide for me, as I find them incredibly stimulating.
As we develop, I just see us following our heart on this musical journey.
When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.
We do a lot of things that kind of annoy people and our fan base. We try not to get overloaded on it. For us, that means we don't do social media stuff - we have an Avenged Sevenfold social media, but none of the band members have Facebooks or any sort of Twitter.
Every once in a while, we can touch somebody's life in a way just by writing a melody or writing some music, which is always really special.
If people respect us as artists, they know we'll give them something different every time; they know we're pushing ourselves.
I've always been a really open person around my friends.
I was talking to my dad about the stuff he grew up listening to, and 'Operation: Mindcrime' is a record that he had always talked about around the house. He always talked about it as the 'greatest concept album of all time.' One day, I started listening to it, and it just hit me. I was like, 'These songs are all hits. They're all huge songs.'
I got an email saying we were nominated for a Grammy, and I instantly thought it was a joke. So I started Googling the nominees, and there we were!
People want things now. People in the rock world seem to not want to give it to them - they want to keep doing things the old way - and one thing that has always bummed me out is when we get a single three months out, and then you have to keep getting fed with bread crumbs.
When I'm by myself asking the questions that many of us do at some point in our lives, I look to the stars knowing that the answers are somewhere out there waiting to be discovered.
I was a fan of 'Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,' and I got into 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops,' which was my favorite 'Call Of Duty' game of all time.
I feel like our whole discography up through 'Hail to the King' was young, fun, and exciting. It was aggressively driven. 'The Stage' was the first step in the band becoming a more mature musical entity.
The Brexit thing to me just looks like a difference of opinion. I know things were lied about, but that should be a wake-up call to get all the information before you vote about something. Educate yourself.
The 'Black Album' was my real first introduction to Metallica. I was, like, 12 or 13 at the time. We were just getting into music, and I liked that album a lot, but it didn't necessarily change my life. But when I started picking up all the other Metallica records, 'Master of Puppets' was the one to me that stuck out with its songwriting.
Someone sent me an article on AI that was written by Tim Urban on the website Wait but Why - that was kind of where I stuck my toes in the puddle, and I said, 'OK, I've gotta learn about this!' I felt like this is one of those things that our generation is going to have to answer for, eventually, and I just wanted to educate myself on it.
