SHADOWS FALL Bassist Talks About METALLICA Comparisons, Upcoming Album

Live 4 Metal recently conducted an interview with SHADOWS FALL bassist Paul Romanko. A couple of excerpts from the conversation follow:

Live 4 Metal: I've read several comments in magazines and whatnot calling you guys the "next METALLICA." What's your reaction to that?

Paul Romanko: "That goes in one ear and out the other."

Live 4 Metal: So there's no overpaid band psychiatrists on the road?

Paul Romanko: "No, no, no. No movies of us yelling at each other and shit, that ain‘t gonna happen. [laughter]. Yeah, it's cool to hear someone say that, but those are guys who have proven themselves over decades. To hear that, you gotta take everything with a grain of salt. People like to sell magazines and to do that you gotta bolster up the story a little bit. Yeah it's a great compliment, but is it a truthful compliment? At this point in the game I gotta say no. Five to eight years from now and things are doing well, maybe somebody knew more than we did. But as far as we see it now, it's just a phrase in a magazine."

Live 4 Metal: Do you feel the same way about people calling you, along with bands like LAMB OF GOD, CHIMAIRA, etc. The New Wave of American Heavy Metal?

Paul Romanko: "That's a cool thing that people are calling it that. Personally I've always hated that whole segregated…. I mean good music is good music. It doesn't matter what it is. The thing that bugged me about it most was that it was so uncreative. Let's take that British word out and put another word in; a third grader could have done that. I dunno, it's cool, don't get me wrong. We've worked hard. Matt [Bachand, guitar], John [Donais, guitar] and I have been doing this for, next year it'll be 10 years. So we don't take shit for granted. We've worked hard to get where we're at. To have these little accolades and all this shit thrown at us, we just kind of laugh at it. It's cool that they're writing about us and we don't disrespect that at all. But sometimes shit gets blown out of proportion. So the New Wave of American Heavy Metal...OK, if that's what you wanna call it. But I don't think we're breaking any new ground; we're three bands ripping off bands that did it before. [laughter]."

Live 4 Metal: So do have any new material in the works for the next CD?

Paul Romanko: "We haven't really done too much writing, we've been touring too much. We've been pretty low-key. We have a couple ideas started but nothing to the point of completion. Maybe a half a dozen songs started with like two or three parts, still in the primitive stages."

Live 4 Metal: Are you feeling that pressure to live up to the success of "The War Within"?

Paul Romanko: "No, we're just gonna write another album that we wanna hear and if it doesn't live up to it then, fuck everybody [laughs]. No matter what you do, when we put out 'Of One Blood' we got mixed reviews. Then we put out 'The Art of Balance' and the reviews said, this isn't 'Of One Blood' and it got great reviews. Then with the new one it was like, this is a great album but it isn't 'The Art of Balance'. You're always gonna have someone that doesn't like it."

Live 4 Metal: So you do it for yourself.

Paul Romanko: "The way I look at it is if you're really honest with yourself and you write music that comes from the heart then most people are gonna get it and there's gonna be something there. If you're trying to write what people wanna hear then it's gonna be contrived at it's not gonna last. Especially in a band like us that doesn't rely on things like radio singles and shit like that. It's not like we're writing one song to make our album sell."

Read Paul Romanko's entire interview with Live 4 Metal at this location.