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.
I'm glowing in the dark with my studio tan. I've been in a cave of music for months and months and months.
You're always going to have detractors, and you're always going to have people who love you, and that's how it's perfectly balanced and the world spins on.
Everyone's gonna have their opinion, everyone's gonna have their favorite bands. The best way I can describe it is music is like food, either you love it, hate it, or are indifferent about it. Or you grow up and acquire a taste for it.
There's always something going on, but thank goodness these days it's with a clear head, which helps me massively.
I am the type that cannot stay put in living in the past and solely in the past. It's not healthy and it doesn't feel right.
There has got to be a lot of unreleased video out there, live footage and whatnot. There's always going to be something extra for the Pantera fan.
I'm a bad pessimist. I don't think about how successful any record I've ever done is going to do before it came out.
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.
I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.
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.
Knowing what you're up against is part of the strength of writing something that is even, I guess, considered halfway original, knowing what's out there to begin with.
The success that Pantera had, I could have never, ever forecasted or predicted, and I always felt a responsibility to try to pay even a bit of it forward.
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.
At least in my life, I cannot hold onto grudges. It's a waste of energy, a waste of time.
I wake up, and I'll just start reading and trying to brace myself for the rest of the day, and all the while I'm doing that, I'm kicking myself mentally.
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.
I had the question asked of me before, 'What do you like better: singing or playing guitar?' If I'm gonna be totally truthful, if that microphone's in my hand, I'm loving it. When the guitar's in my hand, I'm a little nervous, but I'm still loving it.
And it seems to be today, image is a real important thing once again.
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.
