Strapping Young Lad is a vehicle for me to be wild and extroverted and ridiculous. It gives me the chance to say, 'Look at me. I'm a heavy metal guy. I'm Rob Halford or Bruce Dickinson or whoever.'
First and foremost, just to work alongside an icon like Rob Halford, the Metal God, was absolutely surreal.
Always been a big heavy metal fan. I remember being 15 saying, Dude I'm going to love heavy metal forever. Heavy metal til I'm 60. I'm 35 now. I think I'm going to give it one more year.
A collaboration with Rob Halford, the 'Metal God,' has always been my dream. I never imagined that dream would come true!
Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly!
At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year
I wasn't that wild about that. I told them basically if they were really going to want to bring back heavy metal to a program on MTV, then they are really going to have to get in touch with what real heavy metal is.
That's certainly the roots of heavy metal. That whole sense of revolution and wanting to be powerful is definetly a puberty thing. Fans don't have to be offended by that. Everybody goes through it. That's why heavy metal is so powerful.
I just want to be considered a heavy metal band, because metal has always been around and will always be around. We're just a heavier version of metal. Heavy metal will never go away. It's like a cockroach. It's the best title, because we play metal that's heavy.
I've always seen this overlap between medieval warfare and heavy metal. You see heavy metal singers and they'll have like a brace around their arm and they'll be singing about Orcs. So let's just make a world where that all happens. That all gets put together, the heavy metal, and the rock, and the battling, actually does happen. Let's not flirt around with this let's just do it.
I really want a Christmas in New York one year, when it's snowing. Like, it's Christmas morning, and you have a fight with someone, and you run down the street, and it's snowing, and you can't find them.
Heavy metal is the enemy. Everybody but me keeps going back and forth between metal and punk, but I'm narrow-minded and a purist. I'd never mess with it.
Rob Halford is the person that I called a lot of the time when I was in recovery.
I just like heavy music in general - from heavy rock and heavy metal and heavy rap and heavy everything. I've always been attracted to it.
Christmas and the New Year are actually two holidays, so there is a plural, which in the English language necessitates the use of the letter "S." Now, I suppose you could say "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" but you probably have sh*t to do.
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 hardly follow the Finnish metal scene at all at the moment. I'm more interested in traditional '80s heavy metal, and I'm still a little scared of black metal and death metal and their provocative imagery.