Discover what M. Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold does to be enthusiastic creating his art

Frontman M. Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold is featured in the most recent episode of Fire With Fire, a brand-new video series in which Ryan J. Downey has in-depth, wide-ranging discussions with heavy music artists about the value of freedom of expression. Gus Black is the director of the Downey-created series, which is produced in collaboration with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The singer was questioned about the inspiration for his and his bandmates’ “refuse to be boring” and their ongoing artistic challenges to their listeners and supporters.

I don’t know where it comes from. It’s just something that you can’t really tap in to. I just know that when I wake up in the morning, I wanna be excited. I wanna get up and work on something that I wanna work on, and then I wanna show the world. I think ‘The Stage’ was, we were talking about themes that literally weren’t even relevant till now. We were talking about A.I., nanotechnology, we were talking about the Big Bang and Fermi paradox and exploration. We were talking about all these things that literally just went [over people’s heads] when it came out. And now everyone’s, like, ‘Oh my God. You guys were…’ But I think that comes down to us being kind of on the cutting edge of what we felt was happening, a groundswell, and it inspired us to write about it. And then it just takes some time. The same way that I think when we do a VR concert in 2023, or whatever it is, and it might be till 2030 that everyone’s doing these, but ours will still be there to go back to. These things aren’t going away and they’re extremely compelling and they’re new mediums to really explore. I was explaining this to somebody the other day, like, the way we’ve thought about music is so westernized… Think about The Beatles sitting there, and they had these two stereo speakers, and everyone started messing around with drums over here, and Paul’s gonna be over here and then Lennon’s gonna come over and then we’re gonna put the vocals all over here. And they’re messing with two speakers. Now we’ve got Atmos, we’ve got VR, we’ve got Surround Sound, we’ve got all these things. And we were talking about this at the VR thing — what gets written? How does music overlay itself into all these new technologies? ‘Cause we’re not sitting there staring at two speakers anymore. And as that changes, the art is gonna change. The art changed with The Beatles because of stereo, because there was now an option to do wacky things, right? And then we’ve just lived with that for 40, 50 years, and that’s what we do. But things are gonna change. Spotify’s not gonna be here forever. There’ll be something different. Technology’s moving so fast right now that things, before they can even mature, they’re already over, because the next thing’s happening. The exponential growth that we were talking about in paradigm is just happening at an alarming rate. And so we just like kind of keeping our eyes on the edge. When something just gets our bodies going, ‘Yeah, that’s fucking rad,’ then we go do it. And we do it and we put it out and we don’t worry about it. Now we’re on to the next thing. ‘Cause while you’re digesting that and worrying about what ‘Life Is But A Dream…’ is, we’re completely somewhere else at this point. My brain right now is just somewhere way far away from that record. But there’s still people coming into that record right now and going, ‘I get it now. I get it.’