KILLSWITCH ENGAGE Guitarist Comments On Singer Switch

Julia Neuman of Metal Assault conducted an interview with guitarist Joel Stroetzel of Massachusetts metallers KILLSWITCH ENGAGE on March 6, 2010 at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, California. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Assault: Howard [Jones, vocals] dropped out of the tour, and he has been temporarily replaced by Phil [Labonte from ALL THAT REMAINS]. So it's "Philswitch" now! Tell me a little bit about how things are going with Phil.

Joel: Things have been going great. Initially, we just had Phil come out with the thought that we had three shows we had to get through, then we'd postpone the tour and come back and do it with Howard in a few months. But it went so well with Phil the first few shows that everybody was so stoked. We have a lot of the same fans, I think, so a lot of people were psyched to see him. If it was Joe Schmoe, it wouldn't work, but since it's Phil, it works. And like I said, the shows were so much fun and Phil was willing to do the whole tour.

Metal Assault: Did you have a lot of rehearsals with him or did he kind of just get thrown in there?

Joel: No, he was thrown, thrown to the wolves. We called him, I think, at three in the morning and we were like, "Hey, can you fly to Florida in about five hours?" He was like, "Yeah, I'll be there!" So we did like a quick soundcheck with him, went through the songs that he wasn't familiar with, and we played that night. That was pretty much it. So, yeah, obviously after a couple of shows he started to get more comfortable.

Metal Assault: You guys cancelled your show in Tucson. What exactly made you decide to do that?

Joel: Well, for one thing, I think Phil really needed a break because I'm not sure if ALL THAT REMAINS usually does this many shows in a week. We were doing like six shows a week, and there were hardly any days off. It's a longer set than he's used to. So it just got to the point where we were like hey, we're gonna have to bail on one of these shows and see if we can get through 'em all. Finally, the night after Vegas he was like, "Yeah, I don't know if I can do tomorrow." So we just let him rest, because we had the Phoenix and L.A. shows right after that, which are kind of bigger shows for us. We had to make sure he was in good shape. Sorry, Tucson! We'll be back soon.

Metal Assault: The band just released the song "My Obsession" on the soundtrack to the "God of War III" videogame. How does it feel to be a part of that?

Joel: It was awesome. We didn't really have to do much, because we had three or four extra songs that we didn't have room for on the new record but they weren't quite finished. I guess they contacted our management and asked if we wanted to be a part of this game. We had really good luck being part of "Guitar Hero" and it's always a good opportunity for a band like us to be in a game that sells like five million copies or something. So hell yeah!

Read the entire interview at Metal Assault.