I've never felt that way. I've never felt like a looser. You can't get what you want if you feel like it's you against the world. You'll never get anywhere with negativity. I make my own opportunities I don't feel like everything is against me.
There was a time when metal ruled the world and I don't see any reason why it should be different now.
The best part of being in a band and being successful is you get to have hot girls lace up your shoes.
Fans and friends are considered family. Being an A7X fan isn’t always easy because it means you’re not only gonna laugh with us, but cry with us and defend us on occasion. If you’re part of the family it’s for life.
I like to start by wiggling my fingers on top of guitar strings.
We have been harnessing every aspect of what makes Avenged truly unrelenting and building off of that.
I think people have the right to love whoever they want, and I think that women have the right to do whatever they wish to their bodies given the circumstances.
When we were recording, sometimes I wondered if what we were doing would even be possible to play live.
Everyone likes to have fun. But when I look back on my life, I'm not going to say, 'Oh, we're the crazy party animals.' I'll look back and say, 'Wow, we did take this seriously.' We had fun while we were out doing it, but it's just the only thing you read about: 'They're a bunch of party animals.' To be honest, that's not true.
We've never tried to write radio hits. If I hear our song on the radio, it's cool, and I'm proud, but it's never a goal.
I remember what it felt like when I was young, and I looked up to someone, and they would pay me just an ounce of attention. And some of the bands I listened to when I was young probably never even sold any albums, but it didn't matter to me. If I'd go up and say, 'Great show,' it would be amazing that they even would acknowledge me.
There's people that have never heard our album. The most they've seen is either our video on 'TRL' or our picture on the cover of magazines.
For us to dial back a little bit and have a little more straightforward, singalong appeal was a challenge. In order to do that, we had to throw away a lot of stuff.
We had to take full advantage of the fact that we wanted to be one of the most creative bands out there that's getting backed by one of the biggest companies.
We didn't say, 'Hey, we're gonna pick a bunch of cover songs,' or, 'We're gonna write an original song that has to sound like this, because we're a metal band, so we're gonna cover some metal songs.' We did the opposite. We just said, 'We're gonna have fun with these songs, and we're gonna try different things.'
We wanted to write songs that we really like that incorporate everything. It seems a lot of bands want to stick with one thing. We didn't want to be scared to do anything that we wanted to do. We didn't want anything to hold us back. We wanted no boundaries.
Basically, we're just a bunch of kids who got together and try to use what we have and try to learn from each other.
Only a world spinning out of control could inspire the music and vision we have now.
We go out there every night, and we fight the battle. We don't care about people who don't think we're true metal. We hope to change their minds. I have total faith.
I worked a lot on our album cover, and I didn't just want to post it on our website one day and move on. We wound up breaking it into 18 pieces and hiding them on fan sites all over the Internet and then posting clues, so fans could put together the puzzle.
