First off, can I get a brief history of how Avenged Sevenfold got started?
Um, yeah, we were pretty much all best friends in high school and came together from different bands that we played in, in high school and we brought the bands together when were like 17, 18 years old.
How was it getting started in Huntington Beach, CA – was it hard to find places to play?
Yeah, I mean for a while it was really hard to find, you know, any kind of place, we just pretty much asked anywhere we went we just gave them demo CDs and asked them to play and asked any bands that came around to play with them, and for the first three years it was all local, just trying to get out there.
Worldwide – where are your favorite places to play?
I like playing in Germany a lot because its really cool to go around there, home is always fun to play because local sound and get to sleep in my own bed and shit, but other then that I guess Europe is a lot of fun, Canada is always a good time, I think there is a great place to play everywhere, but I like Vegas a lot too.
You’ve got the reputation of having every album you release is a significant progression of the previous, how do you go about doing this? Is it mainly having the mindset to be better than before?
Yeah that’s basically it, and also we never want to make the same record twice, you know you go in there and you just get boring and not exciting any fans if we keep releasing the same record, [progressing] is just something we growing as a band have wanted to do.
Any plans for a new album?
We just released this record a little over 6 months ago, so we’re still going to be touring this once for a while, then get back in another year.
What bands or artists would you credit as being a big influence on your music?
Metallica, Guns n Roses, Pantera
You‘ve earned the title “Warped Tour Veterans” I’ve been seeing you at Warped Tour since 2002 and every year the music progresses and so does the fan base, how has that been for you watching everything unfold like that year by year?
You guys are known to be the band that is enjoying it all, the songs featured in video games, the music videos cycled on FUSE and basically partying your asses off, does everyone in the band party hard?
Yeah we all party, I don’t know what you’d consider party hard, a lot of people would think that we’re pussies because we’re not fucking shooting up heroine but we like to have fun, we drink, we’re all best friends and we’ve all grown up together so naturally when we get together on the road to go to different cities every night, we’re gonna drink every night, we’re gonna hang out and we’re gonna do what we do.
In your Bat Country video, being a spin-off of ‘fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ did you guys choose to do that because that movie was amazing, or was it a tribute to Hunter s Thompson?
It became a tribute afterwards, actually when we originally wrote the song we were just big fans of hunter Thompson, and we really related to the ideals of fear and loathing and it reminded us of ourselves and we live four hours away from Vegas, a good drive we can make it there in three if we wanted to, and we’re all just best friends and go out there every once in a while, like I said and we have a good time, sometimes we find ourselves not really knowing what’s going on because we’re having such a good time, we kinda relate to that.
In a recent interview, Fletcher from Pennywise was saying that myspace.com is filled with bands strictly concerned with fame and not concerned at all about the love of music. What are your thoughts on myspace and the many bands that are just getting started on there?
Can you tell me a little about the “Cities of Evil tour”?
Yeah, well it’s basically our tour for this record, this is now going to be out second leg, we’re gonna leave here in a couple weeks for the second leg of it, and just a tour playing mostly our new songs and quite a few old ones too, just trying to bring the most entertaining show me can to the smaller clubs.