If I'm going to make music and put my heart and soul into this and dedicate my whole life to it, I want to be making something that 15, 20, 30 years from now, somebody is listening to and that is a staple of the time it came out.
I took music theory in high school and dropped out halfway through the semester because it was ruining music for me.
I think metal draws dumb people. It's not exactly a thinking man's genre.
I know plenty of hyper-intelligent metal people, but at the same time, there's this dumbass, hardheaded, macho attitude associated with it. For younger people, it's like a succubus.
It's easy to gravitate toward something negative as opposed to something positive, especially if you're an outsider.
Being an evil dude: You create this false identity of who you really are and hide behind that as a means to deal with your peers and to hide behind your social awkwardness and inabilities and inadequacies.
I'm not going to hide the fact that I am a happy person.
I think it's safe to say that 50% of the record buying metal community is people between the ages of 16 and 25 - people still in their teenage-angsty, early young-adult years.
As convenient as that would be to make it easier to communicate with more prolific musicians, I don't want to think of music like a math equation.
Some people are really into being music-minded and knowing all their scales and how to read music and speak the language.
My deepest apologies to all of our friends, fans and people who have worked on and supported us being a part of this festival, we are sorry for these awful circumstances and you can be certain this will not defeat us.
I don't think in time signatures, and when I do, what I write is generally 3/4 or 4/4, the most basic, straightforward stuff. I think that comes from just not being a super-schooled musician.
It's been nice to have a band and people I'm close to that I can get that understanding from and help me realize what I want to do in my life as a musician.
My priorities now a a musician are so different now than they were as a kid. Everyone wants to be a rock star, and I wanted that too; I wanted to be on magazines and be running around the world and having all the fun.
When you're not putting a bunch of chemicals into everbody, people tend not to fly off the handle.
I got really tired of metal music. How do you pick what's good to sell when you're not totally into what you're listening to and marketing?
The band has always been such a huge part of my life and it kept me very busy. That, in combination with something like running a record label, just means my whole life revolves completely around metal music and I can't do that anymore.
You can have the coolest job in the world, but it only seems cool until you get sick of it.
I like just having that separation between my music life and my personal life.
Hate walks hand in hand with hate, and black metal especially is a genre that is full of white power bands.
We live with the things that we do to ourselves and others in doing what we've done to ourselves.
