NEVERMORE Frontman Discusses His Health, Band's New Album And Re-Signing With CENTURY MEDIA

Abrasive Rock recently conducted an interview with NEVERMORE vocalist Warrel Dane. Several excerpts from the chat follow:

Abrasive Rock: About a year ago you had a little bit of a health scare. How's your health now?

Warrel Dane: "I've never been this healthy since my fucking twenties, so I feel really fucking good. Unfortunately I'm diabetic, but I don't have to shoot up, I just have to take a pill every day. That's not so bad. When you have to give up alcohol, and sugar, at the same time, guess what happens? You lose a lot of weight! I'm pretty fucking god damn skinny. I'm trying to gain weight back, but my metabolism went through this fucking incredible shift. I can fucking eat so much, it's not even funny. Every girl I know hates me. I can fucking stuff myself with carbs and I'm not ever going to have to really worry about going on the Atkins diet. Let's leave it at that."

Abrasive Rock: I eat a rice cake and gain ten pounds, so I hate you, too. [both laugh]

Warrel Dane: "A rice cake, sure! And I exercise a lot now, too, so that's probably got something to do with it. I have to do something to fill up my former drinking time. Reading and exercising have pretty much taken care of that."

Abrasive Rock: There's tons of rumors about what the health scare was caused by. Are you able to go into that and crush some rumors?

Warrel Dane: "Well, I basically was drinking too much, and at the same time going through the onset of type 2 diabetes and didn't know it. Basically my pancreas tried to digest itself, is what the doctors told me. And I almost didn't make it."

Abrasive Rock: Having your pancreas eat itself, that doesn't sound too pleasant.

Warrel Dane: "Well, it didn't feel too pleasant, either. It felt like somebody was taking a javelin and shoving it in my stomach repeatedly, over and over, until they drugged me up so much I passed out. I lost about two weeks. When I came to they were like, 'Do you know what day it is?' I said something like the date after I had gone into the hospital, and they're like, 'Nope. You've been gone for a while, dude.' Wow."

Abrasive Rock: You guys had like an extremely heated issues with your label [Century Media] about a year and a half ago, and obviously things are better, because they're giving you guys a really big push for this album it seems, at least from my end, but have things have been put into this contract now that will insure that those problems won't happen again at the end of this contract?

Warrel Dane: "Absolutely."

Abrasive Rock: Cool.

Warrel Dane: "It'd be impossible for what happened to 'Enemies' to happen to our other records. We made sure of that. And it doesn't hurt when part of your management team used to work for your record label and knows every little fucking trick in their contracts. Which is kind of funny, because it definitely worked out to our benefit."

Abrasive Rock: How much control did you give [the "This Godless Endeavor" cover artist Hugh Syme], and who came up with the concept?

Warrel Dane: "It was actually an existing piece of his. When I first saw it in it's original form, I was like, 'oh my god, that looks like the cover of 'Into the Mirror Black' [SANCTUARY, Warrel's pre-NEVERMORE band]. How bizarre.' I was like, 'I wonder if he'd let us use this?' And maybe just change it a little. And he was willing to take suggestions and fuck around with it, and make it more towards what we needed it to be. And it turned out fucking killer. I'm just ecstatic about it, actually.

Abrasive Rock: Like I said, it is one of my favorite, definitely a favorite NEVERMORE album cover. It is one of those albums that you can stare at for quite a while.

Warrel Dane: "The funniest thing I get asked about that is if that is me when I was a little kid on the cover. No, it's a chick!"

Abrasive Rock: I was going to say, it's a little girl!

Warrel Dane: "Yeah, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say who it is, but it's Hugh Syme's daughter."

Abrasive Rock: It's Hugh's daughter?

Warrel Dane: "Yeah. I don't know if I'm supposed to be telling that to people, though. He actually called her up and asked if her if it was okay to use it for a metal record cover. I think she's in her thirties now. It's got to be weird for her to see this now. It makes her look like she's killed a shitload of people and put their heads on spikes."

Read Warrel Dane's entire interview with Abrasive Rock at this location.