MUDVAYNE Singer Talks Touring, Upcoming Album

Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net recently interviewed HELLYEAH/MUDVAYNE vocalist Chad Gray. Excerpts follow.

Live-Metal.net: It's almost over now, but how has this [HELLYEAH] headlining run been?

Chad Gray: It's cool. It's the same shit, fuckin' day in and day out. What might be new to you ain't that new to us. We do it every fuckin' day. We try to bring it just as hard every day. Even on days when you don't think you can, something about the music, it's the fuckin' wind in your sails. You can just fuckin' drag your ass up to that stage and it's like, "Fuck." You get on it and the music starts going and it's loud and the crowd's there, it's like fuckin' flipping a switch. It's been cool, though. Like I said, I'm fuckin' burnt. I'm burnt out. I haven't toured this hard probably since 2001, since the early days of MUDVAYNE when did 300-some shows in a year. We toured for "L.D. 50" for 22 months. This is pretty equal to that lifestyle of touring. There's a lot of people on this bus and it's just been going and going and going. This tour that we're on now — by the time I get off of it Dec. 17, I will have not been home for three months. To me, that's a long time because the last time I was not home for three months I was fuckin' 26 years old, 27 years old. This is fuckin' eight years later. It's a little different now. It's harder touring. People have fuckin' families now and you feel more established. No matter how established MUDVAYNE is, this has been very much a starting over process and you would've maybe never thought that. You put these players together, you would think that it's just gonna go BOOM! and everything's gonna be fuckin' limos and fuckin' catering. It's been like, "OK, here's your fuckin' $10 buyout. Go to fuckin' Burger King." It reminds me of 2001. It really does. It reminds me of fuckin' years ago.

Live-Metal.net: After this tour is over, is that gonna be it for HELLYEAH for a while?

Chad Gray: We're gonna go back out. We're working on it. We haven't confirmed anything yet, so I can't even say the bands that we're talking about. We're maybe slated to go out like late January through February.

Live-Metal.net: Headlining or supporting?

Chad Gray: Headlining.

Live-Metal.net: Switching to MUDVAYNE, where did the whole idea come for the new "By the People, For the People" album?

Chad Gray: We had so much shit on hard drives and discs and live versions of stuff, acoustic versions and different shit we had laying around. It was kind of like we need to put this out there. Like, "This is fuckin' stupid. We've got something here that we can put out and I think people would really dig it." We're not putting this out to sell millions. We don't give a fuck, although it did 27,000 the first week, which I was really overwhelmed by. It's just demos and live versions and shit. It's not new stuff. "Dull Boy" is the only new fuckin' song on it. We were just like, "We should do this." I'm like, "Well, fuck it. If we've got all this stockpile of shit, this music sitting around or whatever, we should use the stockpile of artwork that we have sitting around from fans to do the artwork with." Because one of the biggest fuckin' headaches of doing a record is putting together the artwork. It's a nightmare. It's a zillion emails back and forth. I'm like, "Fuck it. Let's collage it, put it together." And then we were like, "Fuck it. If we're doing a contest, there's not one song that somebody could pick that we don't have some version of. So fuck it. Let's let them pick the tracks and then we'll determine what version they get." If somebody wants "Forget to Remember", we've got a live version of it, we've got a demo version of it and we've got a fuckin' acoustic version of it. OK, fuck it. Let's give them the acoustic version 'cause it's something different and it's something we can put out there and whatever. So it's cool, man. There are a couple things, obviously, that people wouldn't have known we had, like the cover of "King of Pain".

Live-Metal.net: Is the new MUDVAYNE album done?

Chad Gray: Yeah, it's done.

Live-Metal.net: Any idea when it will be out?

Chad Gray: We haven't decided what we're doing yet. We talked about writing more. We talked about writing another record. We talked about doing all kinds of shit. I think now we're really trying to figure everything out in the sense of timelining and scheduling and how we want to see things going down 'cause we do have something else now. We're excited about HELLYEAH, but we are very, very much still very passionate about MUDVAYNE and I think we're gonna try to get the most bang for our buck. Give as much to the MUDVAYNE people as we can without wasting a lot of our lives and our time. So maybe we'll do something like — we thought about putting out two records in a year. We put out two records in a year, then that opens up another two years where we would be touring and supporting those two separate records. If you put one out and you tour for 18 months, then you put the other one out and you tour for 18 months, there's a lot of fuckin' time gone there. When you can just write 'em, put one out, start touring, put the next one out while you're touring, finish up touring, support both records at the same time, come off, be done, go back, write a HELLYEAH record, go out, tour, come back, write a MUDVAYNE record — you know what I mean? Let's start hustling. Let's start moving and shaking. Not hustling people, hustling our time, really lassoing our time and fuckin' corralling it and going, OK, this is what the fuck we want to do with our time. We don't want to waste it anymore by going out and touring for 18 fuckin' months and doing fuckin' five runs through the States and two runs in Australia and two runs in Japan and fuckin' two runs through Europe. Essentially, you're doing the same shit anyway. The cool thing is with doing a couple different records in one year is that if you are gonna roll through the States five times, you're gonna go to Australia twice, you're gonna go to Japan twice and you're gonna go to Europe twice, you can schedule everything so that when you do go back to Australia for that second time, you're playing some new new material; go back to Japan the second time, you're playing new new material; you go back through the States for the third time, you're playing new new material; you go back to Europe the second time, you're playing new new material. And the first time you went there, you're playing new new material, too. So it's cool. It gives the fans more, too. They're not seeing the same show.

Read the entire interview at Live-Metal.net.