ANTHRAX Vocalist BELLADONNA Says He Wasn't Apprehensive About Rejoining Band

George Dionne of Rock-Is-Life.com recently conducted an interview with ANTHRAX vocalist Joey Belladonna. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock Is Life: Were you apprehensive about it at first? In the past you and the band have not always been in agreement?

Joey Belladonna: "I wasn't apprehensive."

Rock Is Life: Let me put it another way, they have taken some jabs at you in the past.

Joey Belladonna: "You know what? I don't worry about that shit because that's just an opinion. What are you going to do with that kind of stuff? You can only do what you can do, and hope for the best. You try to be conscious and do the best you can, and hopefully it's good enough for other people. Again, you can't please everybody. I was totally into playing. I wasn't into that stuff. It didn't even enter my mind. I suppose if something was really bad before, like I got into fistfights with people, or I did something dishonest to someone else, everybody's going to be looking at me going, 'I don't know about this guy,' that would be a little more of a problem. If someone did something to me, then that would be a little harder coming in I suppose. Nothing really happened in that context with me. It's more of a, 'Let's get someone new in here and do something different,' for whatever reason."

Rock Is Life: Has the band discussed and new song or record?

Joey Belladonna: "There hasn't been any discussions about any new songs or recording. In passing you hear talk of possibilities of that stuff, but that's just kind of up in the air. To be specific, no one has sat around a table and said 'We want to do it for sure.' As it gets closer, as time goes on, it's a possibility. There's really nothing definite. It still takes time to do it, and if you're going to do it and do it right and you've got everything to do it right, you know when everyone's feeling good about doing it. It doesn't just get handed to you. You have to get in and start thinking about it."

Rock Is Life: Maybe the band can do a John Bush [-era] cover album and call it "The Lesser of Two Evils"?

Joey Belladonna: "'The Lesser of Two Evils'? Yeah, that would be very interesting. That would be something. I would not be looking forward to it. For some reason I think it was cool that they did some of the old stuff [with John]. There are some really great songs there. I don't know why, and at the same time, I guess I shouldn't say I wouldn't do anything, but I would much rather do a brand new record, instead of covering the stuff they had done with John. It's kind of hard for each of us to cop each other with that kind of shit. That's how it ends up being sometimes. I don't know how people end up looking at it you know."

Rock Is Life: What are the touring plans after the JUDAS PRIEST tour?

Joey Belladonna: "We‘ve got a couple of months off coming up now, and it looks like we have a couple of gigs coming in January. I don't know when it starts and I don't know when they end. We have one or two bands, and us headlining. At that point we need to take a little time and figure what we should do, and that is a little too far for me to speculate. We definitely have some ideas, but nothing is on the table yet."

Rock Is Life: Are there any newer or hard rock bands that have made an impact on you musically?

Joey Belladonna: "I like quite a bit of the new stuff that's come out. I mean, new is like old to you guys cause I've been out for a while. I like SEVENDUST, DARK NEW DAY, and the FOO FIGHTERS. There are quite a few new bands that are cool, that I dig. I like a lot of old shit too. I'm still picking up a lot of old back catalog albums that I need CDs of, old LPs that I need. I can play them on our turntables and burn them to the system and make a CD of the album so it sounds pretty cool."

Read the entire interview at Rock-Is-Life.com.