During an appearance on Artist Friendly with Joel Madden, M. Shadows said he’s no longer a closed-off redneck.
“We’re given messages about countries that are just not true and then you go you play there and you’re like, ‘Oh I could f*cking live here.’ People are great. Not that I would want to live anywhere than where I live but you start to see people are people everywhere you go. We’re all the same,” Madden initially said.
The singer replied by saying, “I was prone to be a little bit of a closed-off redneck when I was first coming up. Then, I traveled the world and I was like, ‘Whoa, everybody’s the same and everyone’s good. They all want the same thing.'”
“So traveling is what broke me out of that and now my kids are getting raised different than… My parents weren’t nothing like that but when you live in one place for your whole life and you hear everything you hear, it’s easy to get caught up in that,” M. Shadows added.
Avenged Sevenfold’s latest album, ‘Life Is But a Dream…’ arrived in 2023 and M. Shadows wants to take some time off before entering the studio for the new record. He recently told Bradley Hall, “If you’re always in front of Pro Tools, and you’re always consumed by media, and you’re always playing video games, and you’ve always got a podcast in when you’re on a walk, you’re not really living a life where something can come and push you off your balance.”
The rocker continued, “The next process would really be taking long walks, go on a bike ride, and play some sports. Do some things where your mind is not being consumed by this attention economy that we live in. And then once those ideas start coming, you can jot them down.”
“Because I think it’s really hard for most people to go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna write from 2 – 6,’ and then you just go and sit down and stare at a computer, or you stare at your guitar. The best guitar riffs sometimes happen when you’re walking down the street and you hear a noise, or you have an idea… We need to live a little bit of life before we go into this next thing, and see where it takes us,” he further noted.
Avenged Sevenfold will tour Europe this summer and play stadium shows with System of a Down. Their tour begins on June 7 in Greece.
