BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE Frontman Talks AXEWOUND In New Interview

ARTISTdirect.com editor-in-chief Rick Florino recently conducted an interview with BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE frontman and AXEWOUND guitarist Matt Tuck. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ARTISTdirect.com: What's your take on [AXEWOUND's debut album] "Vultures" as a whole?

Matt: From the top of the story, I had wanted to do something like this for a long time. I'd spoken Jason [Bowld, drums] about doing something with him at some point in the future. This was back at the beginning of 2011. When the opportunity arose and I had a couple of months of from BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I called him and asked if he was ready to do this. He said, "Yeah." We just went at it from there. We could only fit in eleven days to do it so we didn't have time to think about a flow, direction, or vibe. It was like, "Let's just go into the studio and write and record one song per day. We've got eleven days. Let's do eleven tracks". That's what we did. The way the album flows is a natural thing. We literally didn't have time to mess about. The window to do this was very small. Even the drum tracks are live drums. We didn't fuck around, chop them up, or edit them at all really. It was basically two takes. If there was one dodgy bit, we replaced it with the other. We didn't bother editing it. Jason's a phenomenal drummer so we didn't have to anyways. That made the process quick and doable. We didn't have to fuck around with drum edits.

ARTISTdirect.com: Did you and Liam [Cormier, vocals] share writing lyrics?

Matt: We wrote six of the songs together. I write "Cold" myself. That was the first-ever AXEWOUND song. Jason and I had demoed that earlier. We did two songs — "Cold" and "Blood Money Lies". We never had any vocals, though. Liam wrote three or four.

ARTISTdirect.com: Where were you coming from lyrically on "Cold"?

Matt: I was kind of pissed off and angry. It's a regular day in the office in the metal world. [laughs] I wanted to put it across in a way, which people could relate to. There are situations in life where you come across people you genuinely don't like for whatever reason. I thought "Cold" was a good way to get that feeling across. There's that saying, "People leave you cold." They give you nothing. That was what I wanted to do in the song. It's simple and aggressive. A lot of people can relate to that chorus.

ARTISTdirect.com: Is it important for you to tell stories and paint pictures in your lyrics?

Matt: For me, that's what makes the lyrics entertaining. There are certain things you write about. I don't typically write about super personal stuff a lot of the time. It does happen now and again. The majority of the time, it will be from an idea. Then, I'll take it completely out of control and make it colorful so people can visualize what I'm yelling about. At the same time, it's not really autobiographical because nothing in my life is super bad or weird. I never had a bad upbringing. I'm not a political person. I wrote songs that way because that's who I am.

ARTISTdirect.com: What else influences you when you write?

Matt: The only thing that inspires me is the actual music for the song I've written it for. I don't actually do any pre-writing at all. That's just the way I do things. I know a lot of songwriters who are constantly writing in notebooks. Liam is one of them. He has a book and he just writes down ideas and lines here and there every day. I don't do that. I want to have a soundtrack to write to. I don't get inspired unless I hear a piece of music. Then, automatically, something I want to say will come out because I'm influenced by the guitar riff and tempo of the song. I'm really focused when I'm writing lyrics. I can't hear a melody unless there's a soundtrack underneath it for me.

Read the entire interview from ARTISTdirect.com.

"Cold" video: