CHAD GRAY: 'There Was A Kind Of Growing Pain Of HELLYEAH Trying To Figure Out Our Identity'

During a brand new interview with Cryptic Rock, HELLYEAH and MUDVAYNE singer Chad Gray spoke about what past 20 years have been like while he established himself as the most distinctive vocalists in metal.

"I do not know if I agree with all that," he laughed. "I know I have been around and I know I have seen success, but I have also seen starting over; it is tough. If you have seen success and then you just kind of change gears, I think you almost expect that because you were successful at something else that you are automatically to be successful at the other. It is just not that way. It has been a grind."

"HELLYEAH has been going for seven years. It has been crazy to look back on this ride. MUDVAYNE happened so much faster. Granted, we took our lumps, we played the local scene, and all that. We had kind of an understanding between all of us and we said, 'You know what?! Fuck it!' We were gonna go full-tilt boogie. We were going to go in the hole to write good songs. We did not care about playing out, and we put our energy in the right place.

"We had never seen any success in MUDVAYNE; we just did what we were supposed to be doing. MUDVAYNE got signed, we toured with SLIPKNOT, and just kind of blew up and there it was, so we rode that out. We dealt with all the turmoil, learned the business, and being green and having people take advantage of us. It is a corrupt business and people prey on you.

"There are a lot people out there that literally do not care. They will fucking tell you exactly what you want to hear and you do not know what you are supposed to be hearing. They are just making it up as they go along and you are so overwhelmed with everything that is going on and they prey on that. The next thing you know, you have signed everything away because you want to be a fucking musician, you want to do it, it is your dream. You could be anything, and you have been working your whole life for it, and someone said, 'If you sell your soul to the devil right now, we will make your dream come true.' You have been working your whole life for it. What do you do? You would sign, right? That is what you do. There are all these devils that are out there literally saying, 'If you want it, it is right here. If it looks like shit and it smells like shit, it is not fake, it is shit, and you see it later down the road. It really destroys the band from the inside out and it is horrible. Although we are all cool now and we are in a good faith."

He continued: "HELLYEAH, we have worked our asses off. We have put so much into it, and when we started the band, we wanted it to be different from everything else. I wanted to see if I could fucking write different songs. I wanted to see if I could write rock songs and try and do things that would not fly in MUDVAYNE. Tom [Maxwell, guitar] wanted to try doing things that would not fly with NOTHINGFACE. When Vinnie [Paul Abbott] came on board, he wanted to try things that would not have flied in PANTERA; the same with Greg [Tribbett, guitar]. That is what we wanted for the band, and I think that people were just really confused by what we were doing. I do not know if it was really put out that way. I do not think that we really put it out and said, 'Hey, guys, by the way, we are all from these bands and going to put this out and it is going to be completely the other side of anything we had ever done.' How do you prepare somebody for that? I think we started looking around and realizing how special it was for each of us. I think there was a kind of growing pain of HELLYEAH trying to figure out our identity. I think that I put MUDVAYNE in one box and HELLYEAH in another box and I was missing the whole point.

"I wanted to be an artist. I just wanted to fully give everything I had to it. Doing that whole 'I am going to put my HELLYEAH hat on one day and then I'm going to put my MUDVAYNE hat on another day' did not work for me.

"It was around the time of [HELLYEAH's] 'Band Of Brothers' [album; 2012] when it started coming around and I said, 'We are all heavy metal dudes. That is what we should be doing.'

"I love 'Band Of Brothers'. That record is a little more dissonant and it is a little more dark. It started to get us back to our metal roots. The new record, 'Blood For Blood', I feel, has even brought us closer back to that and god knows what is to come.

"I think the leap from 'Stampede' [2010] to 'Band of Brothers' was out of this world. I think the leap from 'Band Of Brothers' to 'Blood For Blood' was a pretty big jump as well."

Gray added: "You always hope that people respect you for what you did. It was a little bit of a slap in the face to me from people coming up to me and saying, 'You saved my life,' or, 'You helped me,' and I believed that. I totally believed that, and I always shake their hand or give them a hug like those people telling them, 'The world is better with you in it.' I would tell them, 'You fought the good fight and you're still here. You have to face the fire to get through it and grow as a human being.'

"I felt like there was a little bit of disrespect when some people said, 'Well, if Chad is not in MUDVAYNE, I do not give a fuck what he is doing.' It kind of hurt me a little bit. You toe the line and you did your thing, though.

"I am not selling anything; I am not selling out. I took all the hats off, threw them in the fire, and then I walked through that motherfucker. I faced the fire for the millionth time in my life and said, 'Am I going to do this?' Fucking right, I am going to do it. I took all those hats off and said, 'This is Chad Gray. This is not Chad from MUDVAYNE, this is not Chad from HELLYEAH, this is just Chad Gray.'

"I wrote 'Blood For Blood' absolutely with no suit, no uniform, no armor; this is my soul. When I wrote all the MUDVAYNE records before HELLYEAH even got into the mix, that is all I ever knew how to do. When I started writing the HELLYEAH records, people could not wrap their heads around it.

"I do not want anybody to have a misconception that Chad was writing with his MUDVAYNE hat on for HELLYEAH; that is not the case. The case is I took all the uniforms and the bullshit off. I am just writing how I write, period, and that is the bottom line."

"Blood For Blood" was HELLYEAH's first album since parting ways with guitarist Greg Tribbett and bassist Bob "Zilla" Kahaha in February 2014.

The new members of HELLYEAH are bassist Kyle Sanders and touring guitarist Christian Brady.

"Blood For Blood" sold around 17,000 copies in its first week of release to land at No. 18 on the Billboard chart.