“We have a great production team and we were able to take it to another level” – Johnny Christ of Avenged Sevenfold shares insight on stage production for the current tour

Avenged Sevenfold bassist Johnny Christ talked with James Wilson-Taylor of Rock Sound magazine this past weekend at the UK’s Download festival about the band’s current world tour in support of their most recent album, “Life Is But A Dream.” It was produced by Joe Barresi and Avenged Sevenfold in Los Angeles, and mixed by Andy Wallace in the Poconos, Pennsylvania, during the course of four years of writing and recording. Regarding the current run of Avenged Sevenfold’s stage presentation, Johnny stated:

I don’t think it’s too dissimilar to what we do on every album cycle. We like to bring the new album with its imagery and kind of bring somewhat of an immersive experience to the fan, to kind of bring him into more than just the music, the artwork that we put into it. We take time on everything that we do. And maybe that’s why we take so long to release albums, but we take a lot of time, we take a lot of pride in it. And the visuals go hand in hand with it. We want it to be an event where you’re feeling songs like ‘Mattel’ — we want you to come into the Barbie world with us. And this one, we have a great production team and we were able to take it to another level, do some stuff differently. We’ve done a lot of different productions over the years, and we always try to outdo ourselves in ways and just make it different and more exciting in ways as well. I’m very proud of this cycle and what we’ve done with our production and being able to bring that life, that light to ‘Life Is But A Dream…’ And it’s been really cool. We use a lot of the artwork from the album, a lot of artwork that we had because we worked with Wes Lang, an amazing artist. That was just a match that you never expect to happen, and then it does, and you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is just too good, too good.’ So shoutout to Wes on that. But, yeah, a lot of that imagery, bringing in those songs… We’re gonna be playing quite a few of ’em [at Download]. We’re leaning heavy on it, man. We’re very happy with our album [that’s] out right now. It’s different. And we like that. We’ve always tried to — not ‘tried to be’; we’ve always been the different band out here. And I think this is just the new installment of that. And I’m really excited for everyone here at a festival setting to get that, ’cause you don’t always get that in a festival. Everyone comes out and does the big party, which we’ve done too. We love the big party — nothing against it — but there’s a different imagery that we have going right now. And [we’re] taking a piece of that here and then hopefully, in the next time, we’ll be back in the arenas to give the real immersive experience.

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