KING'S X Guitarist TY TABOR Opens Up About His Traumatic Brain Injury: 'It Has Taken Years To Get Back' To Being Creative

In a new interview with Ed Hackimer of This Day In Metal, Ty Tabor, the American guitarist, songwriter and co-vocalist best known as a member of KING'S X, was asked if he has been working on any solo music as of late. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, man, there's a no quick answer to this question, because I have to talk about a brain injury and a car accident and some traumatic stuff that happened and everything.

"When I released 'Shades', my last solo album, when I released that [in 2022], I went directly back into the studio, and I wanted to have another follow-up pretty quick, 'cause I had so many songs that were coming that I still wanted to finish. So I quickly put together another eight or nine songs, and they were all, I'd say, about 80% finished. The only thing left on most of it was just to do vocals and then mix it. But I sort of mix as I'm going along when I make stuff, so it's already even mostly mixed, other than vocals. So, I went straight back into recording, and, like I said, had the large majority of an album finished, with all intention of putting it out quick. 'Cause 'Shades' got some good chart positions and got really good press, and I was just feeling some momentum. I was, like, 'I wanna keep this going.' So, I went to the studio one night, my normal thing, and I'm driving home from the studio and I stop at a red light on a parkway that has three lanes on the side I was on. And I was on the far right lane with two wide open lanes to the left of me at a red light, when somebody came flying down the parkway speeding. [They] must have been drunk, 'cause they slammed right into me with all that open laneage. They just slammed directly into me, which hit the back corner of my car so that it just caught the frame perfectly and just hurtled me out into the intersection. My head slammed against the steering wheel hard enough to split my whole head open. And it caused a traumatic brain injury."

Tabor continued: "It took me months to realize how bad it was and how long of a road of recovery I was gonna have. So I didn't, at first, even realize that I had problems real bad. The first month or so, I was just laying around healing and trying to get over my head hurting so bad and just feeling completely out of it and just cloudy and stuff. I knew I had a concussion, but I figured it would go away and I'd be fine. And all of a sudden I started noticing I was having trouble speaking correctly, like the wrong word would come out but it would rhyme with the correct word. And I would hear it and know I said the wrong word, but there was nothing I could do about pulling the right word out. And it would have the wrong meaning because of that. And I would just get all frustrated and angry that I couldn't control what was coming out, even though in my head I could think it and hear it in my head correctly. And I realized, 'Wow, I've got an injury that I'm gonna have to heal from.' So another couple of months go by, and I'm starting to feel good enough physically that I go, 'I'm just gonna run back into the studio and start working on finishing this album.' So, I got to the studio, and I just sat in front of the monitors and everything, pulled up a couple of songs, and I realized something was really bad wrong. I couldn't come up with any new ideas to finish the record. And I just sat there and sat there and sat there, and so I drove back home. And I tried that a few times over the next month or two till I realized that where the impact had been had directly affected my musical creativity, like shut it off. It was just taken out of my brain, and writing new music was gone. And it was horrifying, 'cause that's all I've ever done my whole adult life, and as a young person, is write music. That's always been my thing. And all of a sudden, the music writing was gone. And this was just right after 'Shades' had been released. And like I said, I already had all this other music I was working on and everything, but that was the end of it at, at that point, at least at that time."

Reflecting on his road to recovery, Tabor said: "I had doctors tell me I'm gonna have to regrow some connections and 'there's just some healing gonna have to go on' and 'we don't really know how long that's gonna be or take'. So, one thing that I was encouraged to do was, if I do feel anything I can be creative with, whether it be photography or something else other than songwriting, then do it and exercise those creative brain muscles or whatever to try to recreate some connections. And so I got real heavy into some other things, like photography, and I started feeling it start to come back and to where here in the last few months in particular, I really do feel like I'm way more close back to normal. And I'm able to come up with new ideas and stuff again and ready to get back at it. But it has taken years to get back to that. And I never knew if it was gonna happen or when… It was frustrating and scary and depressing and dark and all of those things, 'cause when it's your lifeline, it's what gives you life that you've been doing as long as you can remember, and it's just gone, it gave me a lot of appreciation to things happening to other people where that's the case too. 'Cause I had never been through anything like that, and I hope I never go through anything like that again. It's a terrible thing to go through."

KING'S X released its 13th studio album, "Three Sides Of One", in September 2022. The LP was recorded during 2019 at Black Sound Studio in Pasadena, California with Emmy Award-winning producer Michael Parnin.

KING'S X was sidelined by several other health scares in recent years, including frontman Doug Pinnick's two hernia operations and two near-fatal heart attacks suffered by drummer Jerry Gaskill.

In October 2019, KING'S X canceled all of its previously announced tour dates for the year so that Gaskill could undergo undisclosed heart "procedures."

2008's "XV" was KING'S X's highest-charting album since 1996's "Ear Candy".

In 2005, VH1 included KING'S X in its list of "100 Greatest Artists In Hard Rock.